You’ve got to respect George Monbiot, and I mean that literally. You’ve got to. You may not want to – I don’t want to. But have a look at this:
Absolutely splendid.
For all that he’s gazing off into the distance inspirationally in his byline pic, Monbiot just authored an extremely interesting article in the Guardian which I recommend you read here. If you can stomach the comments which follow it – and I should warn you before you try that one of the people in them is denying the existence of “anthropological global warming” – you do find some little gems. The one I’ve pasted above points towards an issue absolutely central to my research: ‘experts’ have to a greater or lesser extent in the public mind become a cohesive, coherent and (most importantly) discrete body. It never occurs to stesimbrotos that ‘experts’ could disagree; that different groups of them could predict different things or produce different data. Indeed, the joke in his question turns on the assumption that all experts speak with one voice, and the point behind the joke is that that voice makes no sense.
This is deeper than merely the commenter being an idiot (although they are). We conceive of institutions, peoples and nations as having individual identities (America wants nothing but oil, the English are bad at dancing, Tesco want to ruin a nice bit of Bristol) as a matter of necessary convenience. As long as part of us understands that these generalisations aren’t universally applicable, the system works. But whenever any of us do it – and we all need to do it – there’s a risk of solidifying these generalisations into tropes, which are much more dangerous. Take it away, George:
Popular mythology – from Faust through Frankenstein to Dr No – casts scientists as sinister schemers, harnessing the dark arts to further their diabolical powers. Sometimes this isn’t far from the truth. Some use their genius to weaponise anthrax for the US and Russian governments. Some isolate terminator genes for biotech companies, to prevent farmers from saving their own seed. Some lend their names to articles ghostwritten by pharmaceutical companies, which mislead doctors about the drugs they sell. Until there is a global code of practice or a Hippocratic oath binding scientists to do no harm, the reputation of science will be dragged through the dirt by researchers who devise new means of hurting us.
The media’s constant willingness to use science as a shorthand authority figure – when the whole point of science is to refute the notion of the authority figure – is at the heart of what has created the ‘expert’ trope, the “Scientists say…” article. Monbiot writes about this unfortunate contradiction much better than I can, but from my perspective this passage also underlines the fact that the really dangerous thing about tropes is that a lot of them are right a lot of the time. There really are bad scientists out there – the media insistence on conflating all scientists into one authority figure has tarred reputable practitioners with the same brush.
Seen in this light, it becomes possible to read stesimbrotos’s comment as a confused cry for help (”Was this study done by the same experts?”) rather than as the triumphant cackle it was probably intended to be – it’s understandably confusing when the stereotypes you rely on to understand your world start to crack around the edges. For readers of a media dominated by, as Monbiot notes, humanities graduates with no understanding of (or inclination to understand) science, ‘experts’ simply means a group of bespectacled, labcoat-wearing nutters whose most important (and only final) defining characteristic is that they are not you. Division – the laying down of boundaries and the assumption of opposition accross them – is, as ever, at the bottom of all this.
But what has this got to do with Science Fiction? Well, you probably noticed Monbiot’s glancing reference to Frankenstein et. al. in my quotation above. He doesn’t dwell on it, because they are tropes too now, or ‘myths’ as he calls them. But of course the media doesn’t invent its own myths, however inadvisedly it may apply them – they are constructed across the breadth of culture, and turn up in fiction as often as they do in your newspaper. The difference is that the material conditions of your newspaper make long-term resonance virtually impossible, whilst fiction, locked in the secure vessel of the book, can hang around long enough to really get into people’s heads. Sci-fi stories have played a crucial role in manufacturing the various different images of scientists which persist today. The question which inevitably occurs, somewhat troublingly to a fan, is this: are they, then, part-responsible for the tropes which are causing such problems to the understanding of global warming today?
The answer to that question will be out in about three years and will be roughly 90,000 words long. But at the risk of jumping the gun, I suspect that it may be that it’s more complicated than that. One only has to look at how poorly understood Frankenstein or, say, Nineteen Eighty-Four are outside the sphere of literary criticism to come to two other conclusions – that science isn’t the only academic institution which has a bad relationship with public perception, and that literature might not be the only academic institution to benefit if it looked to improve its own.
Will Tattersdill