MayerBlog: The Web Log of
|
|
|
Merchants of Fear
In “The Fear Merchants,” a memorable episode of the classic 1960s British TV series The Avengers, John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) battled a villain who disposed of his victims – driving them insane or frightening them to death – by exploiting their greatest fears. Like the villain in this show, many modern-day merchants of fear similarly advance their agendas by manipulating the fears or phobias of the general public. They have various occupations – academics, entertainers, politicians, political activists and lobbyists, lawyers, journalists, pundits – but today’s real-life “fear merchants” all tend to be members of the self-conscious intellectual elites, who exercise their influence by trying to shape public opinion. They also hold varying political ideologies: most are left-liberal reactionaries, who want to continue or even to expand the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state (see my previous entry, “Reactionary `Progressives,’” March 16); but, as discussed below, fear merchants can also be conservative or even libertarian.
The Global Warming Myth
One modern-day “fear merchant,” former vice president Al Gore, has written a second book about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, to be published this month by Rodale Books and soon to be released as a “documentary” film. (Like Michael Moore’s films, it’s more propaganda than documentary.) Gore’s 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, was remarkable for its outrageous assertions, such as his claim that the internal-combustion engine (in other words, the automobile) was man’s greatest killer, or even his overall thesis, that “[m]odern industrial civilization, as presently organized, is colliding violently with our planet’s ecological system” and that a series of “ecological catastrophes” will be “repeatedly proffered [sic] to us.” Indeed, Gore’s fear-mongering claims were so outrageous that many people noted the parallel between his rhetoric and that of the radical environmentalist and terrorist Ted Kaczynski, better known as the “Unabomber.” A popular quiz, still found at various places on the Internet -- usually known as the “Gore quiz” – asks readers to identify the author of a series of quotations, as either Al Gore (from his Earth in the Balance book) or the Unabomber (from Kaczynski’s rambling manifesto); the difficulty of doing so merely underscores how alarmist (and fantastic) Gore’s rhetoric was in 1992. He hasn’t improved with age (or with bitter political defeats); his new book shows he’s still just as much a fear-monger as ever. In contrast to Gore’s hysteria, Michael Crichton’s splendid recent book, State of Fear (New York: HarperCollins, 2004, now available in paperback), gives discerning readers the facts about climate change – and exposes radical environmentalists for the fanatics that they are. Although a novel, State of Fear – as is typical of Crichton’s books – has more facts in its pages of science fiction than do the supposedly “non-fiction” of books by the AlGores of the world. (Indeed, the appendices to the book contain an excellent essay, “Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous,” as well as an annotated bibliography which is a useful guide for anyone interested in doing serious research on environmental issues.) The story told in State of Fear involves a global conspiracy by a radical environmentalist group that uses violence, or sabotage, to terrify the world about the dangers of climate change. One of the central characters is Peter Evans, a young lawyer whose naïve idealism about his environmentalist clients is constantly challenged by reality. In one scene, for example, as Peter flies in a prop plane to an Antarctic research base, he’s confronted with the facts of a scientific study that showed that Antarctica was actually cooling – not melting, as proponents of global warming theory taught him to believe. His simplistic response, when faced with facts inconsistent with his beliefs? “These studies are probably financed by the coal industry.” His patient colleague, Kenner, then starts questioning Peter’s premises, pointing out some realities about the environmental clients for whom Peter works at his law firm and who pay most of his salary: “Then would it be fair to say the opinions you hold are because you work for environmentalists?” “Of course not –“ “You mean you’re not a paid flunky for the environmental movement?” “No. The fact is –“ “You’re not an environmental stooge? A mouthpiece for a great fund-raising and media machine – a multi-billion-dollar industry in its own right – with its own private agenda that’s not necessarily in the public interest?” “God damn it—“ “Is this pissing you off?” Kenner said. “You’re damn right it is!” “Good,” Kenner said. “Now you know how legitimate scientists feel when their integrity is impugned by slimy characterizations such as the one you just made. [We] gave you a careful, peer-reviewed interpretation of data. Made by several groups of scientists from several different countries. And your response was first to ignore it, and then to make an ad hominem attack. You didn’t answer the data. You didn’t provide counter evidence. You just smeared with innuendo.” “Oh, fuck you,” Evans said. “You think you have an answer for everything. But there’s only one problem: Nobody agrees with you. Nobody in the world thinks that Antarctica is getting colder.” “These scientists do,” Kenner said. “They published the data.” Evans threw up his hands. “The hell with it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
(State of Fear, pp. 19-96.) In telling this compelling story, Michael Crichton also informs his readers about scientific facts, dispelling many of the myths about global warming. This is an unusual novel, for its footnotes are not fiction, but facts: real scientific studies, with citations to the sources, that counter many of the naïve beliefs that characters like Peter Evans – and many of Crichton’s readers – hold, thanks to the media hype generated by the radical environmentalist movement. Among the evidence that Crichton reveals in the book, besides the studies disputing the claim that the Antarctic is melting, which question some of the naïve beliefs of environmentalists: n “At least one study suggests that half of the observed temperature change comes from land use along. If that’s true, then global warming in the past century is less than three tenths of a degree. Not exactly a crisis.” (p. 384) n Deforestation is not a modern, post-Industrial Revolution, phenomenon; the forests have been cut for thousands of years by human beings, including Native Americans. “The forests that the first Europeans saw were hardly primeval. They were cultivated. And it’s not surprising that one hundred fifty years ago, there was less old-growth forest than there is today. The Indians were realists”; they were human, too, and so they manipulated their environment, setting fires, making sure the forests burned down periodically, so they’d have game to hunt and room to plant crops. “Native Americans had strongly shaped the `untouched wilderness’ that the first white men saw – or thought they were seeing – when they first arrived in the New World. The `untouched wilderness’ was nothing of the sort. Human beings on the North American continent had exerted a huge influence on the environment for thousands of years – burning plains grasses, modifying forests, thinning specific animal populations, and hunting others to extinction.” (pp. 406, 485) n “US hurricane strikes over the last hundred years are clearly not increasing. And, similarly, extreme weather is not more frequent globally.” (pp. 425-26.)
Former President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the “military-industrial complex” in the early 1960s. But that complex “is no longer the primary driver of society,” Crichton writes. “In reality, for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more persuasive.” Crichton calls it the PLM – the “political-legal-media complex” – which uses fear to manipulate public opinion: “Western nations are fabulously safe. Yet people do not feel they are, because of the PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable, precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need fears to litigate, and make money. The media need scare stories to capture an audience. Together, the three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless.”
As an example, Crichton cites silicon breast implants: “You will recall that breast implants were claimed to cause cancer and autoimmune diseases. Despite statistical evidence that this was not true, we saw high-profile lawsuits, high-profile political hearings. The manufacturer, Dow Corning, was hounded out of the business after paying $3.2 billion, and juries awarded huge cash payments to plaintiffs and their lawyers.
“Four years later, definitive epidemiological studies showed beyond a doubt that breast implants did not cause disease. But by then the crisis had already served its purpose, and the PLM had moved on, a ravenous machine seeking new fears, new terrors. I’m telling you, this is the way modern society works – by the constant creation of fear. And there is no countervailing force. There is no system of checks and balances, no restraint on the perpetual promotion of fear after fear after fear . . . .”
(p. 456.) Another example Crichton cites of the PLM and its influence on public policy is the banning of smoking in public places. California passed the first anti-smoking laws, almost ten years before New York or any other Eastern state did. “And even when a Federal Court overturned the EPA on the issue of secondhand smoke in 1998, saying that the EPA had violated its own rules of evidence and banned a substance they had failed to prove caused any harm at all – . . . even then, California did not budge. The anti-smoking laws stayed. In fact, Santa Monica was about to ban all smoking outdoors, even at the beach!” (p. 438). Since Crichton wrote those words, other cities and states have banned smoking in public places – as a result of the propaganda campaign by the political-legal-media complex and special interest groups like the American Cancer Society, which propagate the myth that secondhand smoke poses health risks to non-smokers casually exposed to it. (That myth is based on two flawed studies, one by the EPA – which the federal court rejected in that 1998 case referred to by Crichton – the other by the UN’s World Health Organization, continually cited by anti-smoking activists, despite their flaws. Indeed, anti-smoking groups bandy about the number “53,000,” which supposedly represents the number of people each year who die from second-hand smoke, but that’s entirely a myth; the figure is a phony number, based on extrapolations from these flawed EPA and WHO studies. See my discussion of “The 53K Lie,” in “More Spring Briefs,” April 25, 2005.) The plot of State of Fear is not far-fetched, when one considers the real-life counterparts of the environmental radicals whom Crichton exposes in the book. There are indeed environmental terrorists – “eco-terrorists” – such as the members of the so-called Earth Liberation Front (ELF), who have committed arson and other violent crimes in Colorado and other western states. And among many proponents of global warming (or “climate change,” as they now prefer to call it) and other environmentalist scares, there is a fanaticism that, while falling short of the physical violence of the eco-terrorists, nevertheless does violence to those who stand in their way. As Crichton notes in his essay on the dangers of “politicized science,” “open and frank discussion of the data is being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions on the side of global warming, which . . . they have no business doing.” Further proof of this “suppression,” he adds, “is the fact that so many of the outspoken critics of global warming are retired professors. These individuals are no longer seeking grants, and no longer have to face colleagues whose grant applications and career advancement may be jeopardized by their criticisms. . . . [A]s Alston Chase put it, `when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.’” The PLM is not a fantasy of conspiracy theorists; it’s a force that’s really at work behind modern public policy. Patrick J. Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, writes in his book, Meltdown, that the surest prediction regarding global-warming theory is that it will be distorted by the scientific community, politicians, and the media. That’s the inevitable result when a scientific paradigm like the global-warming thesis interacts with the politicization of science that results from federal government grants distorting research. Exaggerated warnings – talk of significant increases in carbon dioxide or of polar icecaps melting – result from “the culture of modern science, where competition for tax monies requires histrionic proposals, engenders a political response, and rewards scientists for going along with the charade.” (Meltdown: The Predictable Distortions of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media (2004), pp. 32, 221-35.) “Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks, or worse,” wrote the author of a recent op-ed detailing how global-warming alarmists have intimidated dissenting scientists into silence. Richard Lindzen, who is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, notes that “Alarm, rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining [research] funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against the alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.” (Lindzen, “Climate of Fear,” Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2006.) Global warming may be objectively defined, as Crichton does, as “the theory that increased levels of carbon dioxide and certain other gases are causing an increase in the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere because of the so-called `greenhouse effect.’” The fundamental problem with the theory is that it relies on computer models that are inherently unreliable: global weather is so complicated that current data and computer methods are insufficient to make accurate predictions. (Arthur B. Robinson and Zachary W. Robinson, “Science Has Spoken: Global Warming Is a Myth,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 4, 1997.) Although scientific methods are improving, there’s still plenty of room for doubt about the basic theory and especially room for doubt about some of the dire predictions of the global-warming true believers. What we do know is that the temperature of the atmosphere fluctuates over a wide range, the result of solar activity and other influences. As summarized by Robinson & Robinson, “During the past 3,000 years, there have been five extended periods when t was distinctly warmer than today. One of the two coldest periods, known as the Little Ice Age, occurred 300 years ago. Atmospheric temperatures have been rising from that low for the past 300 years, but remain below the 3,000-year average.” We are now in the midst of that natural warming trend, following the Little Ice Age – a trend that began about 1850. “Nobody knows” how much of the present warming trend may be a natural phenomenon, as opposed to being man-made, Crichton concludes at the end of State of Fear. Early critics of the global-warming thesis, like Robinson & Robinson, have observed that the single strongest correlation to temperature changes is not carbon dioxide levels but rather solar activity; in other words, natural phenomena related to increased solar activity (the shorter the solar magnetic cycle, the more active the sun) seem to have more to do with temperature increases than man-made activity that might increase carbon dioxide levels. Some early critics of the global warming thesis also argued that, even if true, global warming might actually be beneficial to people living in many parts of the world. Robinson & Robinson pointed out that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide accelerate the growth rate of plants and permit plants to grow in drier regions – meaning that we are living in an increasingly lush environment of plants and animals as a result of the carbon dioxide increase. “Our children will enjoy an earth with twice as much plant and animal life as that with which we are now blessed. That is a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution,” they wrote. Other skeptics have pointed out that global warming mainly has taken place in the winter, not the summer – meaning it is likely to lead to fewer cold spells, saving lives in winter. Alarmists like Gore blame the disappearing snows on Mount Kilimanjaro on global warming, but a 2003 study in Nature identified the cause as the clear-cutting of surrounding moisture-laden forests. Yes, man-made activity has caused the snows to recede; but no, it’s not because of global warming. Scientists may agree on three claims – first, that global temperatures have risen about a degree since the late 19th century; second, that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% during the same period; and third, that CO2 should contribute to future warming – but, as Professor Lindzen points out, “the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man’s responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred.” In fact, the most outlandish or alarmist claims – those made by the AlGores of the world – are “trumpeting catastrophes that couldn’t happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.” (Lindzen, “Climate of Fear,” April 12.) We know, for example, that the much-touted Kyoto Protocol (the international agreement that Bill Clinton signed but the U.S. Senate wisely rejected, on a 95-0 nay vote, in 1999) would have negligible impact, at best, on average global temperature: the most generous estimate, offered by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, forecasts that without the implementation of Kyoto, by 2050 average global temperature will rise about one degree, but with Kyoto, would rise 0.94 degrees – in other words, a difference of 0.06 degrees in half a century. Nevertheless, implementation of the Kyoto agreements would have a devastating impact on the economy of developed countries; conservative estimates from macroeconomic models show that Kyoto would cost $150-350 billion globally every year. As one skeptic noted, “It is a very expensive way to achieve very little.” The latest twist on the myth of global warming, circulated by environmental activists last fall, was the erroneous idea that hurricane Katrina was caused by it. In fact, there is no scientifically sound link between rising global temperatures and an increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. Hurricanes tend to vary, both in frequency and intensity, in cycles, determined by atmospheric weather patterns; and unfortunately, for Americans who live in the hurricane zone of the Gulf South, we’re in the midst of a cycle of higher-than-normal number of hurricanes, which experts predict might last five to ten more years. Global warming has nothing to do with it, despite what the scare-mongers say.
More Eco-Hysteria
One case in point, illustrating the fanaticism of radical environmentalism, is the way that many people in the environmental movement and in the scientific establishment – the editors of Scientific American are particularly guilty – have treated Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press, 2002), a splendid book that shatters many of the myths held dear by radical environmentalists. Lomborg’s story is ably summarized by Crichton in his bibliography to State of Fear: “The author, a Danish statistician and Greenpeace activist, set out to disprove the views of the late Julian Simon, an economist who claimed that dire environmental fears were wrong and that the world was actually improving. To Lomborg’s surprise, he found that Simon was mostly right. Lomborg’s text is crisp, clean, calm, devastating to established dogma. Since publication, the author has been subjected to relentless ad hominem attacks, which can only mean his conclusions are unobjectionable in any serious scientific way. Throughout the long controversy, Lomborg has behaved in exemplary fashion. Sadly, his critics have not. . . . All in all, the treatment accorded Lomborg can be viewed as a confirmation of the postmodern critique of science as just another power struggle. A sad episode for science.” Among the many myths that Bjorn Lomborg exposes in The Skeptical Environmentalist are those he identifies as the core beliefs in what he calls “the Litany of our ever deteriorating environment”: “The environment is in poor shape here on Earth. Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and the water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet’s species are becoming extinct in vast numbers – we kill off more than 40,000 each year. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing, and the coral reefs are dying. We are defiling the Earth, the fertile topsoil is disappearing, we are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, decimating the biosphere, and will end up killing our selves in the process. The world’s ecosystem is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limit of viability, and the limits of growth are becoming apparent.”
(Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist, p. 4.) On virtually every point, this Litany is wrong, he shows. Lomborg’s book discloses many really “inconvenient truths” – facts that are inconvenient to the scare-mongering agenda of radical environmentalists:
n Industrialization has significantly increased human life expectancy. For most of the couple of million years we have been on the planet, we have had a life expectancy of about 20-30 years. During the past century, we have more than doubled our life expectancy, to 67 years (and much higher in Western societies). (p. 328) n Infant mortality rates have fallen dramatically (from 50%, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, to 5% and still falling today). (p. 328) n Contrary to the dire predictions of 18th-century political economist Thomas Malthus, the growth in food production has kept pace with and even exceeded human population growth. “We have far more food to eat – despite the fact that the Earth is home to far more people: the average inhabitant in the Third World now has 38 percent more calories. The proportion of people starving has fallen dramatically from 35 percent to 18 percent, and by the year 2010 this share will probably have fallen further to 12 percent.” (p. 328) n “We have increased unprecedented growth in human prosperity. In the course of the last 40 years, everyone – in the developed as well as the developing world – has become more than three times richer. . . . Americans have become 36 times richer over the past 200 years.” (p. 328) n “We have gained access to far more amenities, from clean drinking water to telephones, computers, and cars. We are better educated; in the Third World, illiteracy has fallen from 75 percent to less than 20 percent.” (p. 328) n “Our chemical worries and fears of pesticides are misplaced and counterproductive. First, phasing out pesticides will probably waste resources and actually cause more cancer. Second, the main causes of cancer are not chemicals but our own lifestyle.” (pp. 245, 329.) n “Acid rain did not kill off our forests.” Forests, it must be emphasized, are renewable resources. Indeed, although historically about 20 percent of the Earth’s forest has been lost, about a third of the world’s land mass is still covered by forest, and since World War II this area has not changed much. Tropical forests are being deforested, but at a much lower rate than the feared 1.5 – 4.6 percent per year (the actual rate is 0.46 percent). And “the world’s demand for paper can be permanently satisfied by the wood production of just 5 percent of the current forest cover.” (pp. 117, 178-81, 329) n “Our species are not dying out as many have claimed, with half of them disappearing over the next 50 years – the figure is likely to be about 0.7 percent.” (pp. 257, 329) n “We have reduced atmospheric pollution in the cities of the developed world and have good reason to believe that this will also be achieved in the developing world.” (p. 329) n “Our oceans have not been defiled, our rivers have become cleaner and support more life, and although the nutrient influx has increased in many coastal waters like the Gulf of Mexico, this does not constitute a major problem – in fact, benefits generally outweigh costs.” (p. 329) n We will not run out of energy or vital raw materials. “Although we use more and more fossil energy we have found even more. Our reserves – even measured in years of consumption – of oil, coal, and gas have increased. Today we have oil for at least 40 years at present consumption, at least 60 years’ worth of gas, and 230 years’ worth of coal. At $40 a barrel (less than one-third above the current world price) [and now far below the current world price], shale oil can supply oil for the next 250 years at current consumption. And all in all there is oil enough to cover our total energy consumption for the next 5,000 years. There is uranium for the next 14,000 years. . . . Moreover there are many options using renewable energy sources. . . . The cost of both solar energy and wind energy has dropped by 94-98 percent over the last 20 years such that they have come much closer to being strictly profitable. . . . [C]overing just 2.6 percent of the Sahara Desert with solar cells could supply our entire global energy consumption.” (pp. 135-36.) n Waste is not a big problem, and we are not running out of landfill space. “The total U.S. waste throughout the twenty-first century could be deposited in a single square landfill, less than 18 miles on the side – or 26 percent of Woodward County, Oklahoma.” (pp. 206-9, 329) n “The problem of the ozone layer has been more or less solved.” (pp. 273-76, 329) Finally, he also notes: n “The current outlook on the development of global warming does not indicate a catastrophe – rather, there is good reason to believe that our energy consumption will change towards renewable energy sources way before the end of the century. Indeed, the catastrophe seems rather in spending our resources unwisely on curbing present carbon emissions at high costs instead of helping the developing countries and increasing non-fossil fuel research.” (p. 329)
Lomborg’s book is a refreshing bit of common sense – and of true scientific facts – in a debate in which, increasingly, facts are sacrificed to hype. Perhaps it should not be surprising that one of the current developments in the environmental movement is the increasing number of evangelical Christians who are preaching environmentalism. “Ecotheologists,” as some scholars call them – perhaps a better name might be “ecotheocrats” – do such things as turn down thermostats and install solar heating in their churches, urge their members to recycle, and rail against “gas-guzzling” SUVs, with ad campaigns asking, “What Would Jesus Drive?” Nothing so poignantly shows how radical environmentalism has become, for many, a religion – which means it’s based on myths, or beliefs accepted unquestioningly, without regard for scientific facts.
Bird Flu and Other Over-Hyped Media Scares
Al Gore is not alone, in his “green scare” mongering. As conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg pointed out in a recent op-ed, a host of new environmental scare books are out or on the way. In March, Time magazine’s cover warned, “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.” And, as Goldberg also notes, “Those renowned climatologists who make up Vanity Fair’s editorial board have unveiled a `green issue’ that informs us that `green is the new black’ and that global warming is a `threat graver than terrorism.’” (Goldberg, “Seeing red over `green scare,’” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2006.) The news media – which tend to rely on negative stories and sensationalism in order to generate public interest (and thus to sell their products, whether it’s newspapers, magazines, or TV and radio broadcasts) – has, unfortunately, a long history of scare-mongering. Often, hysterical media stories on supposed dangers to public health have disparaged not only particular businesses but whole industries, with little or no credible scientific evidence supporting the hysterical claims. Perhaps the most famous example is the DDT scare of the early 1960s. DDT was an effective pesticide – perhaps the best agent against mosquitoes, the most effective and the safest – that nevertheless was banned by the EPA, in response to lobbying by environmentalists who believed it to be a carcinogenic hazard. To this day, there is no hard scientific evidence that DDT is harmful to human beings. In contrast, we know that banning DDT has definitely been harmful: since the ban, two million people a year (mostly children) have died unnecessarily from malaria. Before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness, with about 50,000 deaths a year worldwide. Fifty million people have died, unnecessarily, since the ban. Similarly, as discussed above in the summary of Michael Crichton’s book, the media helped create and perpetuate the false belief that silicon breast implants caused cancer. Two more recent cases in point were the so-called “Alar scare” of the early 1990s and the “Mad Cow Disease” hysteria of the late 1990s. The former resulted from a CBS 60 Minutes broadcast, entitled “`A is for Apple,” which was an exposé on the use of the pesticide Alar that was sprayed on apples and, according to a report by the radical environmentalist group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, was carcinogenic. Following the broadcast, consumer demand for apples fell, and the industry suffered damages. When Washington state apple growers sued CBS, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted summary judgment in favor of CBS on the grounds that the plaintiffs had not raised a genuine issue of material fact as to the falsity of the broadcast (even though, again, there’s no hard evidence that Alar posed a carcinogenic hazard to humans). The case led many states – including Ohio and Texas – to pass laws directed at disparagement of perishable food products; but those laws provide little protection for producers against media scares, as the second case shows. After the Oprah Winfrey Show broadcasted an episode on “Dangerous Food” in 1996 – which included a segment on “Mad Cow Disease” that suggested that beef was not safe to eat – the cattle market in Texas suffered a drastic drop in price, which also reverberated in the national cattle markets, causing a depression in price that last over eleven weeks. Texas beef producers sued Oprah Winfrey, under the Texas disparagement law, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found insufficient evidence that Winfrey’s producers has knowingly disseminated false information about U.S. beef. The current example of a public-health scare being over-hyped, to the point of hysteria, by the news media is the predicted bird flu pandemic. In mid-March, for example, USA Today reported that “U.S. expects bird flu this year.” Epidemiologists fear that the avian influenza virus, H5N1, could mutate, begin spreading from human to human, and cause a global pandemic, like the 1918 “swine flu” epidemic which killed millions of persons world-wide. The fear is understandable: the H5N1 virus is deadly, having killed millions of birds and infected about 200 people, killing more than half of them. But nearly all the humans infected by bird flu so far had close contact with infected poultry; the virus has yet to mutate in a way that allows it to spread easily from person to person, causing a flu pandemic. Scare-mongers claim that the global migration of wild birds will eventually bring the bird flu virus to the U.S. and that, once it mutates to a form easily transmissible from human to human, a pandemic could result that would be reminiscent not only of the 1918 influenza pandemic but also the infamous “Black Death” (the bubonic plague) of the 14th century, which killed an estimated one-third of the population of western Europe. Recent news reports, however, have cautioned that fears of an imminent pandemic are exaggerated. A New York Times article over the past weekend noted that “even as it crops up in the far corners of Europe and Africa, the virulent bird flu that raised fears of a human pandemic has been largely snuffed out in the parts of Asia where it claimed its first and most numerous victims.” Dr. David Nabarro, chief pandemic flue coordinator for the United Nations, reports “fabulous success stories” in combating the disease in Vietnam and Thailand. Vietnam, which has had almost half of the human cases of H5N1 flu in the world, has not had a single case in humans or a single outbreak in poultry reported this year. Thailand has not had a human case reported in nearly a year or one in poultry in six months. Moreover, the Times reports, “Confounding expectations, birds making the spring migration north from Africa have not carried the virus into Europe.” (“Bird flu weakening in hardest-hit areas,” New York Times article reprinted in Columbus Dispatch, May 14, 2006.) Monday’s USA Today reports that with warmer weather approaching, the number of new countries with bird flu cases, in either birds or humans, has declined: in February, it was 17 new countries; in March, 14 new countries; in April, just 5; and in May, thus far, only one. “We haven’t seen the virus move to as many countries as we saw in the beginning of the year,” said Maria Cheng, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization. Cheng said WHO has been monitoring the H5N1 virus and its movement closely since early 2003, and every year “it does tend to drop off activity in the summer,” when wild birds are nesting and not concentrated in large flocks. “We don’t know if this will ever materialize into a pandemic virus,” she said. (“Bird flu is taking a bit of a breather,” USA Today, May 15, 2006.) David Safir, M.D., in a March 24 letter to the editor of USA Today, may have been prescient when he commented about the bird flu hyperbole. Noting that there is “plenty of blame to go around – the news media, publicity-hungry public figures, and egotistical [I’d add, grant-hungry] scientists are just a few obvious examples,” he pointed out how, during the years he has been a doctor, he’s experienced several exaggerated, hysterical claims of predicted pandemics: in 1976, when the government pushed doctors into a national vaccine campaign to prevent a repeat of a flu pandemic like that of 1918, which “never materialized”; the same year, Legionnaire’s disease was also predicted to be the next pandemic, but it “went nowhere”; in 2003, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) was predicted to be the next pandemic, but “most mention of it disappeared in about two years.” As Dr. Safir notes, when the flu pandemic hit in 1918, “antibiotics were more than 20 years from being discovered, critical care was in its infant stages, and health facilities were fairly inadequate to care for large numbers of people with pneumonia and respiratory failure.” So, he adds, “all of these current dire predictions are really very unscientific because they are based upon a comparison with a 90-year-old event in a different period of medical history. . . . I’d like to see a few rational heads come to the forefront and calm down an understandably anxious and unnecessarily frightened public.” Bravo, Dr. Safir, bravo! It’s not surprising that the media engages in fear-mongering, or that it should join politicians and lawyers as part of the “political-legal-media” complex about which Michael Crichton warns in State of Fear. After all, the news media in America has had a long history of creating “crises,” by scaring the public, distorting reality; and the media-manufactured perception of reality influences public policy, prompting legislatures to pass wrong-headed laws. In the late 19th century, media-promoted fears about “the railroad problem” (which really was based complaints about high or discriminatory rates by special interest groups – namely, certain shippers, including Standard Oil competitors in the East and farmers in the Midwest) led to Congress creating the Interstate Commerce Commission, the first major federal regulatory agency, whose misguided regulatory polices in the 20th century have virtually destroyed the railroad industry in the United States. Similarly, media-promoted fears about “the trust problem” created the perception that because of various forms of mergers or business combinations (trusts, holding companies, cartels, etc.) “big business” was growing bigger and competition was lessened. In fact, as business and economic historians know today, most major industries were becoming more rather than less competitive in the 1870s and 1880s – which explains the merger wave, in an effort by businesses to increase efficiency, to meet the competition – but the false perception that “monopolies” were dominating major industries prompted Congress to enact the Sherman Antitrust Act, the first of the major antitrust laws. As critics of antitrust law have pointed out, the laws were unnecessary, based on false economic models, and they’ve had the effect of penalizing successful businesses simply because they’re successful. But they stay on the books – providing fodder for federal courts and lucrative fees for antitrust lawyers – because the “political-legal-media complex” perception of reality still holds sway over U.S. public policy. And, coinciding with the rise of “yellow journalism” in the early 20th century, “muckraking” reporters tattling on dangerous patent medicines and unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry stirred up public opinion in support of federal government regulation of food and drugs – the origins of the FDA – and thus ended the free market in drugs that had prevailed in America prior to 1900. Other false “crises,” resulting from media fear-mongering in recent decades, include “the crime problem,” “the drug problem,” and today, “the teenage sex problem.” Most Americans believe that crime in the U.S. is increasing, when violent crime rates have been declining for the past decade or more. As Crichton notes in State of Fear, “The US murder rate is as low as it was in the early 1970s, but Americans are more frightened than ever, because so much more airtime is devoted to crime, they naturally assume there is more in real life too. . . . There is no greater proof that all reality is media reality.” Similarly, a spate of media stories in the early 1980s created the public impression that narcotic drug use was on the increase in the U.S., although the “drug problem” in the 1980s was no worse than it was in the 1970s, 1960s, or even 1950s; but well-publicized campaigns by anti-drug groups (“Just Say No,” D.A.R.E., “This is your brain on drugs,” etc.) created the impression that drug use was rampant, to help generate public support for continuing drug prohibition. Today, another flood of media stories about teenagers having sex – not only stories of pedophiles cruising the Internet but also stories of female school teachers having sex with their teenage boy students – have helped create the public impression that today’s teenagers are far more sexually promiscuous than those of previous generations. In an interesting story in the May issue of Reason magazine, “The Great Fellatio Scare,” Cathy Young reports on the alleged oral sex craze among teenagers today – a craze that might be traced back to Bill Clinton’s famous claim that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky” and the subsequent debate on whether receiving a blow job qualified as “sexual relations.” In July 1998 The Washington Post ran a front-page story with the provocative headline, “Parents Are Alarmed by an Unsettling New Fad in Middle Schools: Oral Sex.” In 2003, the peril was explored by Oprah Winfrey, with the help of an O magazine feature writer who interviewed 50 girls, some as young as 9, and painted a frightening picture of so-called “rainbow parties,” where allegedly several girls wearing different colors of lipstick would take turns servicing a boy until their lipstick traces formed a “rainbow” of rings on his penis. Now, Young reports, the “rainbow party” tale – which has never been substantiated and may well have originated with the sensationalistic Washington Post story – has become the subject of a novel (Paul Ruditis’ The Rainbow Party, published by a division of Simon & Schuster – appropriately, the publisher of Bill Clinton’s “autobiography,” My Lies) as well as a topic of discussion on the Fox News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes show (where radio psychologist Judy Kuriansky’s wild claim that teenagers have been telling her about rainbow parties for years on her show prompted Sean Hannity to sputter, “Unbelievable”!) Young concludes, “The teenage fellatio craze exists mainly among adults. To those in the audience who are not worried parents, it provides both sexual and moralistic thrills; it plays both to the prurient fascination with teenage girls gone wild and to the paternalistic stereotype of girls as victims. It does very little to help either adolescents or their parents deal with the real problems of growing up.”
Conservative and Libertarian Fear Merchants
It’s not just people on the political left who are merchants of fear. Conservatives and some of my fellow libertarians are just as guilty of exploiting paranoia to gain public support for their political causes. Social conservatives perceive threats to what they call “family values.” They fear that legal recognition of marriage between same-sex couples would somehow “destroy the institution of marriage.” However, they offer little rational argument how exactly this would occur; and their almost-hysterical defense of “traditional marriage between a man and a woman” seems grounded on nothing more than homophobia – the irrational fear of homosexuality, which they fear either because they do not understand it or because it threatens their own repressed feelings about sexuality. (For more on this, see my essays on “Marriage, American Style,” May 19, 2004, and “In Defense of Sex,” May 16, 2005. As I argue in those essays, among other things, the real threat to the institution of marriage today comes from heterosexuals who do not take the commitment seriously enough, and not from homosexual couples desiring legal recognition of their romantic commitment to one another.) Social conservatives also perceive threats to traditional standards of morality; in their misguided efforts to use the coercive power of government to enforce Victorian mores no longer relevant in modern society, they seek to increase the FCC’s power to censor speech they regard as “indecent.” And the more popular culture evolves away from those outmoded Victorian standards (which were rooted in psychologically unhealthy and emotionally repressed feelings of guilt about sexuality, nudity, and normal human bodily functions), the more hysterical the would-be “morals” police seem to become. (For more on this, see my essay “Abolish the F*CCing FCC!” Feb. 8, 2006.) Religious conservatives perceive an attack on Christianity in American popular culture and in court decisions thwarting their attempts to get government to endorse religion in public schools or on public grounds. They talk derisively of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the early 1960s barring official prayers from public schools, as if that decision was the cause of the decline of the American public school system and not the government monopoly that lies at the root of it. And they demand the power to use government to endorse the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments in public places, such as Kentucky courthouses or the Texas Statehouse grounds. Their passionate belief that the Ten Commandments are the “foundations” of American law is a proposition of faith that has little support in the nation’s legal and constitutional history. If they fear that, without government-sanctioned prayer in public schools or without government endorsement of Old Testament religious beliefs, America will cease to be a “Christian nation” – well, they fear rightly, for the United States of America (thank God!) never was a “Christian nation,” in the sense they mean. Rather, it was founded on the fundamental principle that religion is a private matter, a matter of each individual’s own mind and conscious, and not the concern of government at all. It is no wonder, then, that some religious conservatives see the concept of the First Amendment religion clause as “a wall of separation between church and state” as such a threat to their nefarious and, I’d add, literally un-American designs. (For more on this issue and last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the Kentucky and Texas cases, see my essay on “The Ten Commandments Decisions,” July 5, 2005.) While left-liberals and social/religious conservatives exploit fears in their attempts to increase government control, or paternalism, over individuals’ lives, many of my fellow libertarians, unfortunately, also exploit fears in their otherwise noble efforts to reduce the coercive power of government and to enhance individual freedom and responsibility. Many libertarians write and speak fearfully about “The State” – and with good reason, for governmental power truly is dangerous, for it inherently involves the use of force, or violence, which only government may legitimately do in our society – but by masking government in the abstraction called “The State,” many libertarians ignore a fundamental problem in American politics today: that much of the paternalism that has eroded individual freedom and responsibility came into being, with the rise of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state, with a great deal of popular support. People generally do not fear “The State” anymore, because we are “The State”: when government uses its coercive power to collect Social Security taxes, transferring wealth earned by one group of citizens into “benefits” given to another group of citizens, it does so because the majority of voting Americans endorse this use of governmental power, notwithstanding its violation of fellow-citizens’ basic rights. Personally, I think libertarians would be far more effective in their political activism if they spent less time and effort campaigning negatively against “The State,” or government, and more time and effort educating non-libertarians about the positive values of a free society: the importance of individual freedom and responsibility, the virtues of free markets and of capitalism. Similarly, many libertarians (and some civil libertarians among both left-liberals and limited-government conservatives) speak or write hysterically about how the U.S. government’s war on radical Islamist terrorism will undermine Americans’ freedoms. Please do not misunderstand me here: there is much merit in the concern about how Congress (acting with bipartisan support) and the Bush administration have over-reacted, or reacted in a misguided way, to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Such measures as the so-called USA PATRIOT Act, that omnibus piece of legislation enacted by Congress too hastily – and with some of its most dangerous provisions unwisely renewed, earlier this year – truly do threaten to erode vital constitutional guarantees of individual rights. (For more on this, see my essay “Amend the PATRIOT Act,” Dec. 6, 2004.) But in their commendable zeal to safeguard constitutional liberties, many libertarians go too far: they overlook the fact that the United States is indeed at war with radical Islamists who seek nothing less than the destruction of our civilization, and that in order to effectively fight that war, the government must have certain legitimate powers. Much of the current hysteria over the National Security Agency (NSA) and its database of phone call records is nothing more than irrational hysteria, stirred up by “privacy” zealots, in disregard for legitimate government intelligence-gathering efforts that, in reality, pose little real danger of violating individual Americans’ genuine rights (notwithstanding USA Today’s sensationalistic cover story on May 11, claiming the NSA program “reaches into homes and business across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans” – when, as the article acknowledges, the program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations but only amassing the data, anonymously, to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist cells.) Other civil libertarians, fearing other kinds of loss of so-called “privacy” rights, ignore the vital distinction between governmental power and free markets and so oppose the legitimate sharing of data by private entities such as banks and other financial institutions, when individuals seek credit. The latter is not a violation of legitimate “privacy rights” at all – certainly not the constitutional right of privacy, which like all other valid constitutional rights, applies only against the government – but rather is a necessary means for credit markets to function, and a legitimate disclosure of information provided voluntarily by individuals who seek to obtain credit. There are also many conspiracy theorists and other paranoid libertarians who give the movement a bad name – such as those in the so-called (and ironically named) “tax honesty” movement. As described in Brian Doherty’s article in the May 2004 issue of Reason magazine, these anti-tax rebels argue that Americans have no legal obligation to pay the federal income tax. They passionately believe in a series of bogus propositions, most of them rooted in erroneous interpretations of statutory law. Many of these activists also argue that the Sixteenth Amendment, which gave Congress the power to tax incomes, was not properly ratified and that, therefore, the federal income tax is unconstitutional. Much as I wish these activists were right, they aren’t. Federal law indeed requires Americans who earn income to pay taxes on those earnings; and that law is backed up – as all governmental edicts are – by force, as anyone who disobeys the law is apt to learn when the IRS agents come auditing. (For more on this, as well as my own take on the true illegitimacy of federal income taxation, see my essay on “Those Damn Taxes,” April 15, 2004.) The case for less government, and more individual freedom and responsibility (the two go hand-in-hand, another vital fact that some libertarians overlook), is one that ought not to be based on fear – or any other negative emotion. Rather, it should be based on what is positive, or good, about a free society, in which individuals voluntarily deal with one another, by free consent, for their mutual benefit. And, I’d add, a society in which public policy is determined by reason and not in hysterical response to the irrational fears of a paranoid few. “Fear merchants” should try to sell their wares to those gullible members of society who base their lives, not on reason, but on on fear: folks like those recycling-crazy liberal yuppies who shun SUVs and don’t use paper because they believe it would “save the Earth,” or those religious zealots who want the Ten Commandments posted outside courthouse doors because they believe Americans must “fear God.” Such merchants of fear have nothing that people like me want to buy.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Wednesday, May 17, 2006 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
|