Looking back years later at his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche gave himself credit for being the first modern thinker to tackle the problem of science itself, for presenting science for the first time as problematic and questionable. Dude! If the perverse German genius could only have known how far the problem of science would extend in our age, or to what ends his critique of Socratic reason would be twisted. He might be delighted or horrified in equal measure one thing you can say for Nietzsche is that his attitudes are never predictable to see how much we now live in a world he made, or at least made possible.
It may seem like a ridiculous leap to connect a scholarly work about ancient Greek culture published in 1872 with the contemporary rise of climate denialism and other forms of pimped-out skepticism, in which every aspect of science is treated by the media and the public as a matter of ideological debate and subjective interpretation. Im not suggesting that the leading climate skeptics, corporate shills and other professional mind-clouders seen in Robert Kenners new documentary Merchants of Doubt have read Nietzsche and based their P.R. playbook on what he would have termed an appeal to the Dionysian impulse, the primitive, violent and ecstatic forces that lie below the surface of civilization. (You can see two prime specimens at the top of the page: James Taylor of the libertarian-oriented Heartland Institute and longtime oil lobbyist William OKeefe, who now heads the George C. Marshall Institute, a climate-obsessed right-wing think tank.) They didnt have to. That impulse is baked into human culture at this point, and it can be exploited without entirely being recognized or understood.
Im not discounting the most obvious elements of the 21st-century assault on science, which are amply addressed in Kenners film and other recent works on the subject. There is certainly a heated cultural and political conflict over the issue of climate change, but there is no scientific debate, no matter how many times Fox News hosts repeat that phrase. Enormous financial interests are at stake, as oil companies and other big stakeholders in the fossil-fuel economy seek to fend off or delay a major social restructuring that could destroy their business. Ideological hangover from the Cold War and the 1960s, especially among a certain paranoid strain of the conservative movement, has turned the climate issue into a symbolic confrontation between American freedom and the sinister global forces of academia and environmentalism, often understood as the new faces of Communism. As former Republican congressman Bob Inglis a staunch conservative and former climate skeptic who was defeated by a Tea Party rebel in 2010 puts it, issues of tribal loyalty are at work here that trump rational questions about the validity of scientific evidence.
Inglis is the most interesting individual interviewee in Merchants of Doubt, partly because he stands apart from the competing ideological choruses on this issue and has taken on the thankless task of proselytizing his fellow Christian conservatives, one terrifying Deep South radio show at a time. His remarks about tribalism also nudge us toward the Nietzschean subtext of the climate fight, by which I mean not just the question of what political or corporate agendas are being served since thats pretty obvious but why the right-wing counterattack against a previously uncontroversial scientific consensus has been so effective with the general public.
In other words, we need to ask new versions of the questions Nietzsche himself asked: What does all science in general mean considered as a symptom of life? What is the point of all that science and, even more serious, where did it come from? Beneath the political, economic and tribal conflict over climate science lies a profound sense that what Nietzsche described as the Apollonian forces of social order, in this case being the book-learning of the professoriate and the rules and regulations of government, cannot contain or comprehend the chaotic and mysterious nature of reality. There is considerable truth in that, which was Nietzsches great insight how much truth and what kind of truth, and how these competing forces can best be managed, being precisely the important questions.
For the sanctimonious forces of liberalism, committed to a one-way human narrative from darkness into enlightenment, it is always tempting to blame such retrograde impulses on a uniquely American combination of ignorance, isolation and religiosity. Those factors have played their part in our nations history, but self-righteous rube-shaming is unlikely to lead to political victory, and does not address what appears to be a deep-seated species preference for passion over reason, sensuality over intellect, Dionysian excess over Apollonian discipline. To say that such a phenomenon exists and must be confronted is not to endorse it uncritically, a confusion that has often led to misreadings of Nietzsche. If those of us who would like to save the planet ignore or deny the dark allure of the Dionysian impulse, we have already conceded the high ground on the battlefield of human imagination, and are likely to lose everything.
Merchants of Doubt is primarily based on the influential 2010 book of the same name by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, which traces the strategy and tactics of climate denial back to the tobacco industrys 50-year propaganda war against clear-cut medical evidence and increased government regulation. Our product is doubt, as one infamous internal memo, found amid the reams of tobacco-industry documents pried free from the corporate vaults, put it. Advised by consultants at the P.R. firm Hill & Knowlton never to directly deny the mounting evidence that cigarettes were addictive and deadly, tobacco execs and their hired scientific hands insisted for decades that they simply werent sure. Maybe and maybe not! We need more research and more evidence! We dont personally believe these things are harmful just because smokers are many times more likely to die of lung cancer but who really knows?
In a devastating montage near the end of Kenners film, we see how leading Republican politicians, who appeared to accept the scientific consensus on climate change until a few years ago, have come to echo this rhetoric almost word for word. John McCain, Mitt Romney, John Boehner and even George W. Bush all used to agree that climate change was real and in large part caused by human activity; Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi once did a public-service announcement together urging bipartisan action on the issue. Those were the days, my friends. After the Tea Party uprising of 2010 and climate counterattacks by the Koch brothers Americans for Progress, the oil industry-funded blogger and pundit Marc Morano and numerous others, that all changed. Boehner, Gingrich, Romney and every other Republican candidate or official in the country was forced to flip to the Heck, Im no scientist school of mandatory agnosticism. (We should spare half a kind thought for McCain, who even in his diminished and compromised post-Sarah Palin condition retains a few shreds of integrity.)
Building on the work of numerous other scholars notably the Australian economist and ethicist Clive Hamilton, whose book Requiem for a Species goes somewhat deeper into the same issues Oreskes and Conway identify a tiny group of renegade right-wing scientists who have established themselves as professional contrarians and saboteurs, seeking to muddy the waters on a whole range of issues from tobacco to acid rain to pesticides and carbon emissions. This cabal has been led by the physicists Bill Nierenberg, Fred Seitz and Fred Singer, who were leading figures in Cold War weapons design but possess no academic expertise in any discipline relating to climate science. Their importance to the climate-denial movement lies in their possession of legitimate Ph.D.s, their ability to comb through scientific studies and cherry-pick confusing or contradictory data points, and most of all their eagerness to defend free-market capitalism against all efforts to restrain it or redirect it.
This handful of devoted obfuscators, buttressed by an army of industry-funded experts from recently invented right-wing think tanks Morano, OKeefe, Taylor and pretty much all the other dudes who show up on TV in that role possess no actual background in science has ingeniously capitalized on the mainstream medias fetish for balance and succeeded in sowing widespread confusion. Since Barack Obama took office in 2009 which coincided, not by accident, with the launch of a major climate-skeptic counterattack opinion polling has consistently reported that at least 40 percent of Americans believe that the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated. That level had never been reached in 12 years of previous surveys. Its bizarre and distressing that such transparently bogus tactics worked so well, but it could only have happened if the seeds fell on fertile ground. For a whole range of reasons, reflecting both Americas chronic political divisions and the deeper cultural forces at work beneath them, many people ached to believe that the scientific bad news simply wasnt true.
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Climate deniers and other pimped-out professional skeptics: The paranoid legacy of Nietzsches problem of science
