the culture that forgot about science

Over the last few weeks, I’ve made a number of posts about scientific literacy in the U.S. and how blaming scientists for the lack of it is a case of blaming the victim for the sake of political expediency. And when we discuss what doesn’t contribute to the American public’s somewhat sketchy grasp of science and the scientific method, you may find yourself wondering what does. I’m sad to say that scientific illiteracy is a culture-wide problem because let’s face it, it takes something very drastic for tens of millions of people to ignore immense amounts of readily available popular science books, TV shows, magazines and informative blogs by scientists and science writers.

One could, ahem, write a whole book about this issue. However, since I’m currently co-authoring one about a rather different topic, I thought that instead, I would briefly outline the five groups which seem to be the most detrimental to American scientific literacy and how they undermine scientific education and thought.

1. Politicians. They cut funding for scientific grants and colleges without the slightest concern for what it could do to the quality of education and the economy of the territory they represent. Using the grants as examples of pointless government waste, they effectively scapegoat scientists for problems caused by pork barrel spending, wasteful riders and sweetheart no-bid contracts to their donors and friends. And as if that wasn’t enough, they also pander to the anti-science crowd, often helping to suppress science education in the process to score easy political points with people who were going to vote for them anyway.

2. Religious fundamentalists. It’s not true that fundamentalists hate science in general. They’re a-ok with any scientific development as long as it doesn’t go against their delicate sensibilities or infringe on their sense of morality. When scientists agree on something that displeases them, the fundamentalists put pressure on politicians, organize factions hell bent on diluting education and spread religious misinformation aimed precisely at vilifying scientists and comparing them to the dictators and tyrants they hate most. Thanks to the status they’ve been given by society, their invocation of the supernatural gives them enough credence in the media’s eyes to be put on the expert pedestal right along scientists.

3. Schools. It’s not that schools themselves are promoting scientific illiteracy or that teachers don’t try to enlighten their pupils. But they’re up against administrators who are not as much educators as they are overly cautious bureaucrats who often insist that schools teach whatever standardized test short-sighted lawmakers adopted in their rush to put their names on a law with the word “education” or “child” in the title. On top of that, administrators tend to worry much more about control and meeting benchmarks than they do about letting students discover and experiment in ways that would help them find their interests and treat science as an exploration rather than another class where they memorize what the teacher writes on the chalkboard to spit it back out on a test. To make matters even worse, the administrators sometimes pander to religious zealots who try to manipulate school boards for their anti-scientific goals.

4. Media and pop culture. We’ve pretty much abandoned the idea of science as something important and embrace celebrities as the people to model. Scientists have become punch lines in entertainment, either book smart, street stupid bumblers who need the help of “real people” to get out of trouble, or brilliant experts who seem to be afflicted with autism and can’t relate to non-scientists no matter how hard they try. Until we start to respect the fact that scientists and the knowledge they accumulate is what makes our modern world work and the more knowledgeable we are, the more we can advance and stimulate our economies, we’ll never start paying attention science, studying hard and giving scientists the tools they need to do their research.

5. Wall Street culture. Sure, markets are vital to the function of a complex economy. However, in the U.S., the markets can often carry with them a culture of impatience and ridiculously short time horizons. It’s a culture which says that unless it can be packaged and sold to John Q. Public in a year or two, it’s worthless and needs to be abandoned in favor of something “more productive.” This creates a negative view of scientists doing complex and intricate research which doesn’t seem to have immediate monetary value and since most of the nation’s workforce is employed by companies which abide by this culture, they come to view science in the same light. To them, the efforts of scientists are simply useless unless there’s a dollar amount to be pinned on them. Oh and it better be fast because if it takes years for the ideas to fully ferment, the fiscal year will be long over without any benefit to the stock price.

You may note that while there’s one group which tries to promote outright pseudoscience, the rest do it indirectly, as a side-effect of a flawed process or as the outcome of overly short term thinking and impatience. Of course this is a rather broad summary that could be broken down even further and given much more detail. But as I said, one could write an entire book on the subject, exploring how the many different shifts in our culture ended up jeopardizing the public’s knowledge of science…