When Doubt Became Sacrilege
Or how Thomas became a badass
At some point society, deep within key institutions, government and military, the academy and media, decided that doubt is a security threat. Especially when it questions policies that have been sanctified.
Aug 26, 2021
Trusted sources are proffered, which we should take as lore. These are the flagship corporate information brands owned by the investors whose foundations make government policy. The news platforms quote the top academics and the universities advertise in return.
Lest the reader draw wrong conclusions, thought leaders show up to guide us. They are suggested by the search engines of the social media corporations that are controlled by the investors who own the foundations who endow academia and advise the governments who appoint the regulators of trusted sources.
To make you pay attention there's a test, just like at school. Give the right answers and you get a check mark that grants you access to that most precious of commodities for anyone seeking social status: followers.
When did doubt become a security risk? This is the assessment of Britain’s Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen Sir Nick Carter: [1]
"There is a growing academic consensus that that the idea of ‘political warfare’ has returned. This is a strategy that is designed to undermine cohesion, erode economic, political and social resilience, and challenge our strategic position in key regions of the world."
The BBC presenter and political correspondent Andrew Marr wrote this month:
"Public understanding of science has become a security issue. Without it, there will be no public support for the hard decisions on transport, heating and land use."
Fear of doubt
It's not just the state broadcasters and the military. Popular culture reflects this mooning insecurity. Christian works about the apostle Thomas still make up a good half of book titles on doubt but they are joined by more febrile works answering to our vulnerability. Shelves are full of books for doubt deniers!
You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life
The Doubting Disease: Help for Scrupulosity and Religious Compulsions
Stop Doubting Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Start Living.
Through the Walls: Without Any Doubting or Quiddit
A Practical Guide to Stop Doubting Yourself and Build Unshakeable Confidence
Build Lit Social Skills, Discover How To Stop Doubting Yourself, Tackle Social Anxiety
(And the one that is written to me:) How to Complete Your Creative Project Even if You're a Lazy, Self-Doubting Procrastinator Like Me
How did doubt become a closeted shame? And shouldn’t doubt come out?
The American Scientist, magazine of the research honor society Sigma Xi, published Reasonable Versus Unreasonable Doubt (2018) in which three specialists felt driven to defend the case for doubt as a crucial step in producing robust research. [2]
Everyone knows that doubt is reasonable. So how do we end up banning people for asking questions?
When doubt get corrupted, is their answer. The scientists who defended the big tobacco companies exploited reasonable doubt to protect cigarette manufacturers: 'maybe something else caused the cancer.'
People see how skepticism is misused and they tar everyone with the same brush.
We end up condemning all those who question — at least, that's the interpretation of the American Scientist authors.
TL;DR
Allison, Paleva and Oransky observe that doubt was critical to science long before the seventeenth century when the scientific method was codified. Yet today doubt is regarded by some as sin, being an obstacle to progress; and people who entertain doubt as sinners.
The arc from virtue to sin has four stages in the analysis of these writers:
reasonable doubt
its corruption and co-option by those who profit from uncertainty
condemnation of the illegitimate co-option of doubt
use of that condemnation to silence reasonable doubt
This is a rough parallel of the trajectory from trusted sources, approbation and bestowal of repute, celebration of that repute and its endorsement with check marks to accord status and from that pulpit to demonize anyone who disagrees as “misinformers”.
Allison, Paleva and Oransky begin with Socrates, put to death for his refusal to declare certainty, and the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman: "When we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it."
Excessive doubt can be dangerous according to Oreskes and Conway. They highlighted the "doubt mongering" of scientists who defended Big Tobacco. [3]
The third station of doubt on the road to perdition is the legitimate condemnation of the illegitimate co-option of doubt: exposing the paid shill or the person who profits from disrupting legitimate inquiry. The American Scientist authors celebrate what they view as the righteous castigation of climate “deniers”.
Yet this righteous act contains the risk of sin and cuts both ways, as they acknowledge. The argument is easily abused to "advance that all doubt is antithetical to scientific and social progress."
Right to doubt, wrong to deny
So they conclude excessive doubt can be dangerous, if we abuse it. How does one know? I wonder what they would have thought of Covid (their article was written in 2018)? They seem to think it is wrong to have any doubts about climate change.
One thinks of the archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars whose discovery of butchered horses and mammoths in the Yukon’s Bluefish Caves advanced our estimate of human habitation of the Americas by at least 24,000 years and demolished the consensus. Wrong or not, the consensus was in no mood to be demolished and they made Cinq-Mars' life a misery. He won the argument but he had to wait for his most stubborn opponents to begin to die off. [4]
Finally, doubt finally is equated with sin. The dissenter or revisionist becomes separatist, recusant or non-conformist and then an idolater, infidel or heretic and is ultimately burned at the stake or cast out into the wilderness as the godless forsaken.
Perhaps it would be better if lobbying, gangs and consensus played no part in science whatsoever. Sadly our authors don't see this because they feel duty-bound to cleave to shibboleths on such topics as vaccines and autism and the evidence they consider "multifaceted, reproducible, and consistent as it is for a subject such as climate change."
On person’s doubt is another person’s denial. It doesn’t get us very far. I think what’s going on here is that doubt, in some people’s minds, is close to fear.
Researchers seek ‘policy impact’
Ultimately the American Scientist authors do a service by revealing how deeply partisanship, ideology and money corrupts science.
"Even if nonscientific rhetorical devices lead to short-term gains in silencing the merchants of doubt, such advantages may be outweighed by the long-term disadvantages of normalizing ad hominem attacks and other tactics as part of the scientific discourse... There truly are people — some of them in positions of authority — who are promoting disingenuous and unreasonable expressions of doubt. However, if we slip and rely on nonscientific rhetorical devices to argue against them, then we invite others to use these rhetorical devices to dismiss cases in which scientific doubt is reasonable and even essential."
How depressing that it should need to be stated.
Researchers as activists is our crusty inheritance from Karl Marx: philosophers interpret; change is the point. In the rush to ensure their research has policy ‘impact’ scientists — and government bureaucrats and the foundations who guide them — take “simplistic, linear models of the policy process, according to which policy-makers are keen to ‘utilise’ expertise to produce more ‘effective’ policies.” [5]
The first step should be to test your analysis against the observable world. Much research fails this test. [6]
The theory approach is another problem (and another article, upcoming). Critical theory allows the reduction of every thing to power and motive. As in, he would say that, wouldn't he. It allows a prefabricated methodology so you can tear apart the work of others. And as an hegemonic tool in its own right it connects you to the ruling cohort in academe and thus an approving fan base.
Thirdly the dominance of mathematical modelling. Economics may have been the first academic field to be taken over wholesale by mathematics. Calculus, geometry and their quantum offshoots add tremendous insight but at the cost of observation. The tendency to argue from binary digits has led to the epithet, "computah sez". An older acronym is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
Governments and the tax-exempt foundations that mold their policy share the blame. Much research is linked to outcomes. Grants buy research that supports those outcomes.
Technology frees and empowers but it is morally neutral at best — technology can contain its own logic. It is our job to put it in service of something greater.
Shared suppositions
Thoughtcrime is discouraged. The BBC's political correspondent Andrew Marr recently courted controversy with his briefing paper (for it was too dense a read to be a regular news article for the general public) outlining the path ahead to functionaries of the middle class — in which he restated the key tenets and assumptions that underlie the current united policy response by those institutions seeking a new interdependent structure of governance. [7]
His article interestingly did not use the words trust, doubt, faith or, in the same context, belief. Rather he used words like commit, humility, interconnectedness, scientific measurement and learning. These are the shared suppositions of the retainer class that serves the investors, owners and controllers for they know on which side bread is buttered.
It is the masses who are asked to trust and believe. The Outer Party — what George Orwell called the 12 or 13 per cent who serve the elite — largely propagandizes itself. Institutions like the BBC (and less visibly, professional training and leadership coaching organizations like Common Purpose) provide the talking points, which is exactly what Andrew Marr does in the example quoted at the start of this article.
Wherever two… bits
Doubt is good and it's not only admirers of Doubting Thomas who know. So what about Thomas — does he make a good patron saint for scientists?
And those laboratory boffins who squirm at the mention of religion: could they still learn something from Thomas who wanted evidence of Christ's wounds before he would believe he had risen from the dead?
Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1976) in 2012 Tweeted: “If there’s evidence it isn’t faith. Doubting Thomas, patron saint of scientists, wanted evidence. Other disciples praised for not doing so.”
The most valuable insight comes not from Thomas, however. It is Christ who says: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” Is he praising blind faith or alerting us to the sheer scale of the unseen and the limits of our human senses?
What is this but a challenge: how do you know anything? The follow-up question is: how much evidence is enough? Even scientists confirm their hypotheses by sufficient proof. They should not demand of others, absolute.
Dr Thomas Dixon, a London University historian and author of Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, offers this conclusion:
"Returning to Caravaggio’s painting, we see Thomas, his hand being taken by Christ and placed in the wound in his side. Thomas’s eyes are dark, glazed, blank; he is gazing straight ahead, not at the wound. This is indeed a depiction of a blind man — a man being led by the hand towards something he cannot see. Caravaggio seems to say that the man who seeks to base all his knowledge on individual sense experience will see nothing."
[1] Gov UK, 2019: Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter's annual RUSI speech
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/chief-of-the-defence-staff-general-sir-nick-carters-annual-rusi-speech\
[2] American Scientist, 2018: Reasonable Versus Unreasonable Doubt
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/reasonable-versus-unreasonable-doubt
[3] Oreskes & Conway, 2010: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/
[4] Smithsonian, 2017: What Happens When an Archaeologist Challenges Mainstream Scientific Thinking?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/jacques-cinq-mars-bluefish-caves-scientific-progress-180962410/
[5] Boswell & Smith, 2017: Rethinking policy ‘impact’: four models of research-policy relations
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-017-0042-z
[6] Miyakawa, 2020: No raw data, no science: another possible source of the reproducibility crisis
https://molecularbrain.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13041-020-0552-2
[7] Marr, 2021: Treat people like grown-ups and they will fight climate change like Covid-19
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/comment/andrew-marr-great-turning-point-covid-changed-politics-britain-world-climate-change-1147966