A Voice From the Past

Just a few days before he left office, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered a speech (text found here: http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html) that included warnings of several dangers he saw for the United States. One of those warnings got most of the attention in the following years: his concern about the “military-industrial complex.” That term continued to reverberate for most of the years when I was growing up (I was almost eleven years old when he made that speech, no, I do not remember hearing it; but I heard a lot about that one expression for years after).

For some reason I looked up that speech lately, and read the whole thing more than once. Looking back at the last half-century, I would say that “Ike” was rather prescient, but our society missed some important things he was saying back then. In spite of Vietnam, the two Iraq wars, and Afghanistan, the “military-industrial complex” does not have anywhere near the power it once had in American affairs. But I found he spent more time in that speech talking about a different danger: the domination of research and technology by Federal money. He spoke of “the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop” being replaced by “task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields.” He went on: “Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity....The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present....Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.”

This warning went right over people's heads, it would seem, judging by the results in recent years. A prime example has been the Global Warming debate of recent years: scientists in universities and government agencies in the US and Europe were pushing a set of policies, using government-funded research to back it up. I never was impressed by their arguments; as a lifelong student of history, I had known about the Medieval Warm Period, when wine grapes grew as far north as England, and the Little Ice Age, which ruined the Viking settlements in Greenland and nearly wiped out the Pilgrims at Plymouth, long before before the Warming controversy began. I am also old enough to remember all the articles and hoopla about the coming Ice Age we were supposed to be facing thirty years ago, in the same newspapers and magazines that later jumped on the Global Warming bandwagon! Not only was the Warming research funded by government grants, the East Anglia emails and other events have shown how these “scientists” were prepared to use rather unscientific and even unethical methods to doctor the evidence and silence dissent so they could keep the grants rolling in.

And now we face other problems, especially the financial collapse of recent years and the seemingly endless “Great Recession” and the budget deficits here and abroad. “Ike” said it well: “As we peer into society's future, we—you and I, and our government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.”

"Climategate"

One of the hot topics of the last week or so has been what's called "Climategate" or "Climaquiddick" after past scandals. People are arguing over the significance of the leaked material, but a cursory reading of the emails certainly does look like certain scientists have played fast and loose with both the data and with the historic ethics of modern science. And quite frankly, I was not all that surprised by the revelations now coming to light.

Those who have read a lot of my blogging, and people who have known me well over the years, are aware that I have had two favorite Christian authors for many years: C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. I have often said that I read Lewis for his understanding and expression of Christianity and Schaeffer for his understanding and expression of our culture. (In the last couple of years, as I acquired Schaeffer's "Complete Works" set and read the books I had not been able to access before I increased my appreciation of his more specifically Christian material, but that has cropped up in other posts and may again.)

If Schaeffer were still alive (he died in 1984) he would not be surprised by these recent events either. While he had serious criticisms about the way the environment had been treated by our society, and even by those who were supposed to be Christians, he was also one of the first to notice that the "environmental movement" had been taken over by leftists as a tool to gain influence in society and government. And if you look at the actions being promoted to combat "global warming" many of them are top-down, coercive, government-imposed answers that will increase the control of a few over many.

The second thing I was reminded of was Schaeffer's discussion of the likely direction of science, in his book "How Should We Then Live" from 1979. He brought up the writings of Alfred North Whitehead(1861-1947), who had written that modern science had arisen because of the teaching of Christianity that God was rational and created an orderly universe. This belief made it possible for the early scientists to work out the things that became the basis of modern science. And Whitehead was not a Christian writer; he was a mathematician and philosopher but not even known to be a Christian at all. Yet he admitted that modern science grew out of the Christian view of the world.

But later in the book Schaeffer made a prediction. He declared that as science got farther and farther from the Christian worldview that made it possible, it would decline and tend toward two things: a high level of technology, and sociological manipulation. We certainly have the high level of technology; the computer I am writing this on and the Internet that carries it to whoever may read it are proof of that. But there are more and more signs that we have the efforts to use science to manipulate society as well.

And that is what is at the root of "Climategate": an effort to make the "science" give the desired answer rather than searching the data and seeing what the data actually means. These emails talk about "tricks" and adjusting data to reflect the desired outcome, and about refusing to share the original data so that someone else can verify your results (one of the basic traditions of the hard sciences), and even trying to discredit and silence any critics or skeptics. And one of the latest revelations is that the original, unaltered "raw" data was thrown out and all that remains is the fudged "data", which was doctored to match the theory, where a real scientist would doctor the theory to match the data! These are not real scientists; they are political hacks.

This one "Climategate" incident is bad enough. But there have been plenty of lesser scandals in recent years. A few years ago someone was claiming to have achieved nuclear fusion-"cold fusion" in his lab; it was later label a hoax, because no one else could duplicate the experiment successfully. A South Korean researcher claimed to have cloned multiple animals; he is now facing fraud charges, from what I heard a couple of weeks ago. The continuing emphasis and grant money for embryonic stem cell research, in spite of the failures in that area and the successes in adult stem cell research, are another case of ideology controlling science.

This last point is my own thinking. I am not a scientist, but I went through a pretty decent science program in my schooling many years ago. There was one assumption that underpinned all the scientific advances, all the work of the last few hundred years: trust. Scientists must be able to trust each other to work objectively and honestly. That is the real basis for duplicating experiments and peer-reviews of results, to make sure no one violates the trust of his co-workers. (Those early scientists who started the whole enterprise had grown up with the Christian view that people are flawed and may not be totally trustworthy at all times, so they went for, in Ronald Reagan's words, "Trust, but verify.") And that "Trust" component is exactly what is at stake here. The "Climategate" emails seem to indicate that these " scientists" have doctored data to fit their theory, ignored data that did not fit, thrown away the original data so no one else can check their work, and abused the peer-review process to silence anyone who might call them to account. This is no longer a scientific problem; it is a morals problem.