Since Trump’s election and the appointment of his anti-science MAHA cabinet, there’s a Carl Sagan quotation I’ve been seeing floating around the internet in meme format:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
This is from Sagan’s 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Sagan was writing in the middle of a specific New Age moment in the mid-1990s. His book reads like a tart episode-by-episode rebuttal of Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM from the same year – topics addressed and dispatched as pseudoscientific or “baloney” (to use Sagan’s word) include UFOs, witchcraft, extra-sensory perception, angels, channeling, and so-called “recovered memories” (which featured heavily in that decade’s Satanic Panic). The core of Sagan’s argument is fashioned into what he calls a “baloney-detection kit,” essentially a popularized Scientific Method that readers can use to distinguish real science from pseudoscience and woo, to use logic to defang superstition, and ultimately, to widen the small pool of light, cast by reason, against the oppressive, encroaching darkness of ignorance and delusion.
It sure does seem like we need Sagan’s baloney-detection kit more than ever now. I’ve written extensively about the MAHA cabinet on this newsletter, and about the issues they’re concerned with, like anti-fluoridation and raw milk, from a very debunk-ey perspective that jives with Sagan’s project. I definitely intend to continue – anybody interested in whatever the hell is really up with seed oils? But even as I’m doing this, I’m doubting myself. I’ve been on this tip since the early 2000s, when I was rattling off facts about thimerosal, the preservative in vaccines that the now-retracted cornerstone paper of the anti-vaccine movement spuriously linked to an increase in autism spectrum diagnoses, about the need for preservatives in multi-dose vaccine vials, about how vaccines themselves work, to anyone who would listen. What did all this accomplish? Not shit.
There’s something to be said here about organization and organizing. It could be that repeating the facts till you’re blue in the face doesn’t matter if you’re doing it outside of some kind of organizational apparatus for maintaining credibility and disseminating the information. Maybe. But this type of “scicomm” doesn’t really work in its institutionalized form, either; plenty of respected academics with institutional and organizational ties have been saying this stuff for a long time, too, and it hasn’t seemed to make much of a difference.
The thing is, and I think we have to be honest with ourselves about this, there actually is some “there” there with MAHA. The real difficulty with this movement is how it braids real and serious critiques of real and serious problems together with opportunistic woo-woo bullshit. We (as people educated in science to some extent) can disentangle those strands, and can tell people what we’ve found in disentangling them, and entreat people to trust us because we have a lot of expensive education that makes us good at strand-detangling. I think, though, that this ignores the deeper truths that MAHA is speaking to on an emotional and rhetorical level, even as they’re speaking falsehoods on a literal level, shilling fucking supplements and promoting raw milk.
For example, RFK Jr., who will now be running HHS (crosses self) is a serious anti-vaxxer. His post-appointment attempts to walk his more egregious statements back notwithstanding, he is a long-time and very visible figure in the anti-vax movement, and he’s completely wrong about vaccine science. What he recently told NPR, that the FDA process for approving vaccines has “huge deficits” in it, is also wrong. But there is a really uncomfortable truth at the heart of the falsehood. The FDA vaccine process is fine, but that’s not because the FDA is a good institution. The FDA is corrupt. Who can honestly be blamed for believing him that the process on vaccine approval is sus after the FDA literally colluded with Purdue Pharma to fraudulently approve and aggressively market opioid pain relievers to the population in what documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney called The Crime of the Century? How does “baloney detection” help us out here?
In a contemporaneous review of The Demon-Haunted World for the New York Review of Books, evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin took up an important strand of critique against Sagan. Lewontin makes some critiques of the book itself and how it’s structured that aren’t super important for our purposes here. What I’m really interested in is what they each, Lewontin and Sagain, say and believe about what science is, and about the social and public function of science to “empower” people. This passage will serve as a good-enough summary of the gist of Lewontin’s point:
Carl Sagan, like his Canadian counterpart David Suzuki, has devoted extraordinary energy to bringing science to a mass public. In doing so, he is faced with a contradiction for which there is no clear resolution. On the one hand science is urged on us as a model of rational deduction from publicly verifiable facts, freed from the tyranny of unreasoning authority. On the other hand, given the immense extent, inherent complexity, and counterintuitive nature of scientific knowledge, it is impossible for anyone, including non-specialist scientists, to retrace the intellectual paths that lead to scientific conclusions about nature. In the end we must trust the experts and they, in turn, exploit their authority as experts and their rhetorical skills to secure our attention and our belief in things that we do not really understand.
Here is how Lewontin concludes his review:
Conscientious and wholly admirable popularizers of science like Carl Sagan use both rhetoric and expertise to form the mind of masses because they believe, like the Evangelist John, that the truth shall make you free. But they are wrong. It is not the truth that makes you free. It is your possession of the power to discover the truth. Our dilemma is that we do not know how to provide that power.
I think and fear that MAHA does know how to provide that power. You may object that it’s not actually power, and I might agree with you – these people are not being “empowered” to think for themselves, they’re being ruthlessly recruited into MLM cults and various other wellness scams, and convincing each other that they don’t need to vaccinate their kids for pertussis. But let’s keep going with the supposition that there is some there there, some element of empowerment. In an article in the Atlantic (from almost exactly two years ago!), historian of white nationalism Kathleen Belew documents the “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline,” the term used to describe the radicalization and recruitment of alternative wellness enthusiasts into wackadoodle hard-right shit, embodied by the “QAnon Shaman” photographed storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021. She describes the overlap between far-left hippie “granola” type communities and the white power movement in the 1970s and ‘80s, paying attention to a couple of key elements that linked these seemingly disparate elements together. For one, the idea that an apocalypse looms is a golden thread connecting these outwardly distal ends of the political spectrum. For another, and this is critical, Belew emphasizes the importance and the role of women in both groups “sharing cultural knowledge through social networks” that knitted both groups together — and to each other.
I won’t do too much psychologizing here, but I do think there’s a clue here to the kinds of deeper emotional truths that the MAHA movement is working on. There is some popular and academic literature about the characteristics of conspiracy theories and of people they appeal to, and in what contexts; many of these elements are shared by the wellness left and the far right, which is only exacerbated by the digitally-mediated scrambling of political positionality through social media. One thing that both the wellness left and the far right share is feeling very, very frightened, very put-upon, very threatened, and crucially, very out of control. The pandemic, no surprise here, was massively destabilizing in every possible sense, which I think is pretty easy for people who work at computers to not really understand or reckon with.
In my last post, I quoted a bit from Stuart Hall on the defeat of the British left and the ascent of Thatcherism. Here is it again:
Now we are beginning ... to move into a "post-Fordist" society- what some theorists call disorganized capitalism, the era of "flexible specialisation." One way of reading present developments is that "privatization" is Thatcherism's way of harnessing and appropriating this underlying movement within a specific economic and political strategy and constructing it within the terms of a specific philosophy. It has succeeded, to some degree, in aligning its historical, political, cultural and sexual "logics" with some of the most powerful tendencies in the contemporary logics of capitalist development. And this, in part, is what gives it its supreme confidence, its air of ideological complacency: what makes it appear to "have history on its side," to be coterminous with the inevitable course of the future. The left, however, instead of rethinking its economic, political and cultural strategies in the light of this deeper, underlying "logic" of dispersal and diversification (which, after all, need not necessarily be an enemy of greater democratization), simply resists it. If Thatcherism can lay claim to it, then we must have nothing to do with it. Is there any more certain way of rendering yourself historically anachronistic?
In the context of that post, I was talking about the failure of “the left” (scare quotes because we really don’t have one), such as it is, to stand up to any of this stuff, to offer a viable political alternative, to offer a viable vision of what to do in a world wrecked by a pandemic, to offer meaning and meaningful participation of any kind – in short, about “left melancholy,” Walter Benjamin’s term for the failure to apprehend, participate, or seize the opportunities of the current moment as it is, preferring instead to lick our wounds and fawn over our superior, if irrelevant, analyses and positions. To use Stuart Hall’s thinking, might we understand “wellness” as a particularly flexible articulation of some of the major trends in US culture: a ghoulish health care system, a pandemic that blasted a smoldering hole in the social fabric, yawning wealth inequality, the cravenness of elites and experts who transparently serve the interests of other elites, global capitalism, and themselves, ever-eroding ontological security of life in the US, and the abject and existential terror it all engenders? Can we understand this iteration of “wellness” as something that the right wing has figured out how to articulate within their narrative and paradigm of how the world works? And, per Belew, figured out how to recruit with?
So, yeah, MAHA gives people “the power” to interpret “facts” in at least one important sense – it helped propel Trump and his MAHA associates to literal power, actual power in the sense of broad control of the federal government, the kind of power that the left can only dream of, scoffs at, dismisses, has given up on.
One of the psychological attributes associated with belief in conspiracy theories, according to a Psychology Today article, is “populist” beliefs about “money, power, and politics.” The frame of Lewontin’s review of The Demon-Haunted World is interesting here. Lewontin opens with an episode in 1964 when he and Sagan, together, traveled to Little Rock to take part in a public debate about the theory of evolution with a fundamentalist Christian professor of biology – Sagan and Lewontin obviously arguing together for the position that “the theory of Evolution is proved.” This episode was but the latest in “the struggle for possession of public consciousness between material and mystical explanations of the world,” a struggle which expresses “one aspect of the history of the confrontation between elite culture and popular culture.” Lewontin briefly surveys the history of American rural populism through this lens: “Sentiment was extremely strong against the banks and corporations that held the mortgages and sweated the labor of the rural poor, who felt their lives to be in the power of a distant eastern elite. The only spheres of control that seemed to remain to them were family life, a fundamentalist religion, and local education.” He continues:
This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. There was no serious public threat to their religious and family values until well after the Second World War. Evolution, for example, was not part of the regular biology curriculum when I was a student in 1946 in the New York City high schools, nor was it discussed in school textbooks. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. A group of biologists from elite universities together with science teachers from urban schools produced a new uniform set of biology textbooks, whose publication and dissemination were underwritten by the National Science Foundation. An extensive and successful public relations campaign was undertaken to have these books adopted, and suddenly Darwinian evolution was being taught to children everywhere. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children.
The result was a fundamentalist revolt, the invention of “Creation Science,” and successful popular pressure on local school boards and state textbook purchasing agencies to revise subversive curricula and boycott blasphemous textbooks. In their parochial hubris, intellectuals call the struggle between cultural relativists and traditionalists in the universities and small circulation journals “The Culture Wars.” The real war is between the traditional culture of those who think of themselves as powerless and the rationalizing materialism of the modern Leviathan.
This is not, per Sagan, really about a stubborn rejection of “facts.”
As a case in point, I’ll end with a a reflection on something I have firsthand experience with, the “controversy” over COVID in schools. There is a direct throughline from school closures to Moms 4 Liberty, which used the very understandable frustration, strain, loss of control and personal power, and growing sense of rage and rebellion against (at least perceived) domination by elite authority that school closures provoked to recruit a lot of otherwise unremarkable lib moms directly into virulent anti-trans politics. These moms were instrumental in getting arch-conservative Glenn Youngkin elected to the governorship of Virginia, where he proceeded to rescind school COVID measures and protections for trans students, among other things. A lot of these women also got recruited, through the upheavals of school politics around COVID, into the “mama bear” right-wing wellness space, and it seems that a fair number of them went on to vote for Trump. On yesterday’s episode of Conspirituality, about exactly this, I heard a clip of one such mama bear, explaining that while she historically leans Democratic, she voted for Trump specifically because of his alignment with RFK Jr., specifically because she’s Karen-level pissed that her daughter’s preschool gives the kids sugary fruit snacks during the day.
If you’re anything like me, the temptation is strong to think – if you voted for Trump because you’re mad about sugar snacks, you’re a fucking idiot. But thinking of it like that shuts us down to what is really going on here. (This is one of many areas where the right is a lot smarter than the left; we on the left tend to treat people’s political views as static, and to treat people themselves as radioactive untouchables if they ever come close to endorsing any political position that sucks. The right is a lot more ecumenical about this stuff, and understands the fluidity and context-specificity of people’s beliefs and grievances a lot better. We would do well to pay attention and learn from them.)
We – by which I mean, myself and other people aligned with me in the weakling “lefty” public health space in 2020-2022 – completely missed this whole tectonic shift happening right in front of our faces. We were judgmental and inattentive to what people’s real experiences were, speaking just from our interpretation of “the science” and not attending to the actual material conditions of people’s lives – of the frustration and desperation that many people really did feel as a result of school closures as they actually happened in the actually-existing United States, whatever the science of aerosol transmission or the ideals of public health say. We were right, we had the right information and the right values on our side, and I don’t know that I would have necessarily done anything differently. But at the same time, we were way too judgmental in the face of social conditions and forces that militated against our perfect-world solutions – we had no resources to offer people to deal with the closures, and in the face of abandonment by the American state, we ended up just exhorting people over and over again to believe and feel differently. Even though I didn’t feel like it, because I understood myself in my own context as a PhD student with no power, to most of these people, I was just another one of these fucking experts. It’s embarrassing for me to admit, because I bleat on so much about loving Lewontin (I can’t help it!), but in the end, we were acting from Sagan’s premises about what science is and what it’s for. It’s really no surprise that it didn’t work and that it alienated us further and further from what was really going on on the ground.