What we have and haven’t learned from ‘Climategate’
when I was younger, I had a habit of joining secret societies. High off the strange fraternities of my summer camp, I searched out different groups, with greater claims to universality, and I was “initiated” into the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians. For a timid little teenager, with little access to the rituals of the complex courts of High School it allowed me the freedom to feel that despite my failure to navigate the social life of my ascribed peers, I was privy to a higher order of knowledge that justified my retreat from the difficulty of my current situation. Despite how ludicrous the claims of these “ancient societies” were, the value their claims for historical and scientific truths carried for my identity were concerns overiding my interest in thinking critcally about their arguments. It’s fascinating to see this folly replicated on such a large scale in America.The lesson we’ve learned from climategate is simple. It’s the same lesson taught by death panels, socialist government takeover, Sharia law, and Obama’s birth certificate. To understand it we must turn to agnotology, the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt. (Hat tip to an excellent recent post on this by John Quiggen.)
Beck, Palin, and the rest of Fox News and talk radio operate on the pretense that they are giving consumers access to a hidden “universe of reality,” to use Limbaugh’s term. It’s a reality being actively obscured the “lamestream media,” academics, scientists, and government officials. Affirming the tenets of that secret reality has become an act of tribal reinforcement, the equivalent of a secret handshake.
The modern right has created a closed epistemic loop containing millions of people. Within that loop, the implausibility or extremity of a claim itself counts as evidence. The more liberal elites reject it, the more it entrenches itself. Standards of evidence have nothing to do with it.
The notion that there is a global conspiracy by professional scientists to falsify results in order to get more research money is, to borrow Quiggen’s words about birtherism, “a shibboleth, that is, an affirmation that marks the speaker as a member of their community or tribe.” Once you have accepted that shibboleth, anything offered to you as evidence of its truth, no matter how ludicrous, will serve as affirmation. (Even a few context-free lines cherry-picked from thousands of private emails.)
(Source: azspot)
