"These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had access to so much knowledge, and yet been so resistant to learning anything."
— Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise
In his 2017 book, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols, a specialist in national security matters, launched a scathing attack on what he called “a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance.” Anti-intellectualism has always been a vibrant part of the American character, a case historian Richard Hofstadter made in his seminal work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963). Nichols sees something beyond “a rejection of existing knowledge… It is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, which are the foundations of modern civilization.” This rejection is apparent in the public’s reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic: Some Americans consider it to be a hoax and eschew public health measures such as wearing a mask or socially distancing. The anti-vaccine crowd who have been with us for years have found a new target in the Covid vaccines. Irrational skepticism even reaches the media: Earlier this week, Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Senator and a host of the TV show The View, unhappy that she, “a famous person”, had not yet been vaccinated, called for replacing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, with “someone who better understood the science”.
Perhaps there is a widespread misconception about how science works leading to unrealistic expectations about what science might accomplish. Such expectations might not be surprising in an age when technology allows us to ask Alexa who played the female lead in The Shining. We have lost touch with the reality that science and technology are about the laborious process of examination and testing. It often requires many trials and many errors to move closer to a “correct” answer. Experimentation is a core principle of scientific inquiry- make a reasonable guess - a hypothesis- and test it. Rinse, repeat.
At the outset of the pandemic, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) did not recommend the wearing of masks by the general public. As the virus spread and more data accumulated, it became clear to researchers that facial coverings would help mitigate the spread, and CDC guidelines were changed. Deniers pointed to this as proof that the scientists had no idea what they were talking about and that Covid-19 was no worse than the seasonal flu. After all, an elderly relative told me, who knows better what is good for a person than the person themself. I pointed out that, not being an epidemiologist, I prefer to take the advice of people whose profession it was to study such things.
In the pall cast over society by the pandemic, science needs to regain public trust by showing that the dogged work of observation and experimentation could discover a way to tame the virus. It would be logical to assume the rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines by pharmaceutical companies be seen as such a signal accomplishment, especially in light of the fact the shortest development cycle in the past was 4 years for the mumps vaccine. Yet it was the very rapidity of the development of several vaccines that contributed to the cynicism about their efficacy among segments of the population. A recent poll found that “15 percent of survey respondents said they will “definitely” not get a coronavirus vaccine”, with an additional 17 percent saying they would “probably not” get the inoculation.”
“I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” -Thomas Edison
Could it be that the glorification of success leads easily to the denigration of failure? It is natural to be disappointed when our expectations aren’t realized. Or is that, since we live in the digital age, the age of binary decisions we have come to view everything as black-or-white, on-or-off, win-or-lose? In short, do we adopt a zero-sum perspective that is absent of nuance to the world around us? In education, as an example, there is increasing use of pass-fail grading systems rather than the tradtional letter grades, effectively eliminating gradations from measures of academic achievement.
The reality of human activity is that failure, as the actor Mickey Rooney quipped, “is what you pass on your way to success”. Earlier in my life, I worked for a successful salesman. In explaining to us fledging salespeople that we would face more rejection than successful sales, he brought up Ted Williams, the great baseball player. “Ted Williams”, he told us, “batted .400 once.” Over a 19-year career, Williams failed to hit safely more than six out of ten times he went to bat, yet he is regarded as one of the game’s all-time great hitters.
Perseverance
There has been an American space program since I was in junior high school. I remember the shock at the Soviet Union launching Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, the stumbling start to US efforts to get ahead in the “space race”, and President John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon. I watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969 on a small television with a black-and-white screen. In the ensuing years, I paid less attention to the space program, confining my interest to news articles, noting the successes and failures (the Challenger and Columbia tragedies being the most prominent).
I did not watch the rover landing on Mars on February 18, but I have since devoured a few hours of video and came away amazed at the scale of the engineering and science that went into this mission. This 3-minute animation illustrates the complexities of landing the rover in an exact spot 140 million miles away:
This is the most advanced mission to Mars NASA has undertaken since it began unmanned exploration of the Red Planet 25 years ago. Its success reverberates beyond the domains of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). It is indicative of that part of human nature that is curious and wishes to learn without fear of failure. It is that part of us that seeks the light and is not frightened by the darkness.
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