Americans have come to believe that expertise is not meaningful. This is not a by-product of COVID but been going on for years. Here’s a letter to the editor of Newsweek regarding an article on how the energy sector used “experts” to muddy the waters on climate change.Sharon Begley\u2019s article about \u201cThe Denial Machine,\u201d [Aug 14, 2007] as frightening as it was, misses a crucial aspect of the problem. It is not just that well-heeled corporations are buying up politicians or promoting science-as-they-want-it-to-be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt is that our society is more than happy to accept spin and cant because we have come to believe that all expertise is bias, that all knowledge is opinion, that every judgment is relative. I see this daily in my university classroom. Many of even my best students seem to have lost the ability to think critically about the world. They do not believe in the transformative power of knowledge because they do not believe in knowledge itself. Begley decries the tactic of making the scientists appear divided, but the corporations didn\u2019t have to invent this tactic. It is built into our carefully balanced political \u201cdebates,\u201d into our news shows with equal time given to pundits from each side and into the \u201cfairness\u201d we try to teach in our schools. We need not be surprised that people have become consumers who demand the right to choose as they wish between the two equally questionable sides of every story. Neither global warming nor any other serious problem can be addressed by a society that equates willful ignorance with freedom of thought.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
- Bernard Dov Cooperman College Park, Md.<\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Americans have come to believe that expertise is not meaningful. This is not a by-product of COVID but been going on for years. Here’s a letter to the editor of Newsweek regarding an article on how the energy sector used … Continue reading