A world of science is there to save us – and nobody trusts it
By David Salt
Every day the world goes a little crazier, and with every slip everyone grows more fearful of what the future holds. Central to our fears is trust, or a lack of it. If we can’t trust our leaders, or the institutions upon which civilisation is founded, then how can we trust in the future?
2020 has been an awful and tumultuous year full of ‘natural’ disasters, plague and populist politics. We want it to be over; we want some return to normal; but most of us are too scared to honestly engage with what science is telling us – that there is no return to ‘normal’ in respect of the Earth System.
Yesterday, as I write this, Trump announced he was CoVID positive (one of his few ‘positive’ tweets quipped one larrikin tweeter), one month out from the US election. Today it’s turning out the White House is actually a hotbed of infection. If things were uncertain, now they seem to be slipping towards deep chaos.
And chaos creates a feedback loop that can lead to despair.
The antidote to chaos is trust. When the chips are down, when the fire is lapping at our front door, when a pandemic stalks the streets; it’s trust in our leaders, our friends, our neighbours, our mainstream media, our emergency workers, and health workers (and other miscellaneous experts) that will see us through.
Trust is one of the bulwarks of community resilience, and in this year of tumult, I fear it’s often forgotten and been allowed to whither.
Science and truth
Trust lies bleeding and this has enabled our partisan politics to eviscerate truth; and that comes with some awful consequences. Consider the strange paradox of the power of science (and technology). It has enabled us to transform our planet while seemingly being impotent to save it.
On the one hand we have an enormous bank of evidence and a scientific consensus telling us that human activity has pushed Earth into a new state of being, referred to by many as the Anthropocene. Global modification involving too many carbon emissions, biodiversity decline and nutrient pollution (to name three planetary boundaries) is causing changes to our climate and life support systems. Our coral reefs are bleaching while our great forests are going up in flames. Sea ice is disappearing, the permafrost is melting and seas are rising – it’s everything science has been predicting but 2020 has seen those predictions become horrifyingly real.
Science has also told us what we need to do to reduce the impact of these changes.
On the other hand we see our political leaders pandering to the lowest common denominator; prioritising the short term over the long; and ignoring, discounting or rubbishing the science.
Consider this exchange a couple of weeks ago between President Trump and the California Secretary for Natural Resources in the wake of California’s horror fires:
“It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch.” – President Trump.
“I wish science agreed with you” – CA Natural Resources Secretary.
“I don’t think science knows actually.”- President Trump.
Trump has been denigrating and discounting the institution of science since he took office, as have many other populist leaders. It serves his political agenda and the coterie of vested interests that stand behind him.
He can stare into the flames of a massive and unprecedented conflagration and simply deny its reality and the science that explains it. That he is allowed to get away with this strikes me as surreal and absurd. However, that a sizeable chunk of America will simply accept what he says (they don’t think ‘science actually knows’ either) I find horrifying. They don’t trust science.
Trust this knowledge
It’s strange to think that we live at a time in history when science and technology (and specifically Information Technology) has made the world’s storehouses of knowledge (think libraries, universities and scientific journals) available to anyone with a smart phone or tablet. We have more scientists working today than at any time in history, and the power of science enables us to see further, or closer or finer than ever before.
And yet, in this same age, some 40% of Americans lap up every falsehood blurted out by a sociopathic anti-science president who has ignored all the warnings on climate change and CoVID to the detriment of his own country (and now looks to have fallen to the same infection he has shown no leadership on). A time when anti-vaxxers are on the rise, conspiracy theories abound and voodoo cures have as much currency as mainstream science.
I try to understand what explains this growing abyss between our burgeoning knowledge and the floundering confidence in that knowledge being shown by so many in the community; with one symptom of this gulf being the rise and rise of anti-truth tellers like Trump (and Bolsonaro in Brazil). And I think the answer has everything to do with the loss of trust.
Inequity and dispossession
It’s widely said that a major reason that Trump won in 2016 was because Hilary Clinton inadvisably described Trump’s supporters as “basket of deplorables”, people of little worth, who are ignorant and wrong-headed. It was enough, some believed, to rile them up and get them to spit in the eye of traditional politics and vote for Trump the outsider.
I think of that basket of deplorables as more of a barrel of the dispossessed. They largely come from poor socio-economic backgrounds and they no longer believe the future holds much for them. The status quo in recent decades seems to have enabled the rich to get even richer (truly filthy rich) while most of humanity looks at a bleaker and bleaker future.
Science reinforces this bleakness, shouting from the side lines that we’ll all be ruined if society doesn’t change to a more sustainable pathway.
And all the time inequity grows, while the winners of the status quo increase their stranglehold on the levers of power.
Trust lies bleeding.
In such an atmosphere, hyper charged by the reach and speed of social media, the simple solutions put forward by the Trumps, Johnsons and Bolsonaros of the world find fertile ground. And rather than solving the complex challenges rising around us, they sow further distrust and chaos.
Here’s just one topical example. According to Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic, 38% of media stories containing misinformation about the virus refer to the President: Trump is literally, not metaphorically, the single most important reason so many Americans distrust information they receive about the disease.
Cause or symptom
But the rise of the sociopathic liars I believe is a more a symptom than the cause of the problem. Their capacity to spread untruth is only made possible when a significant portion of the community don’t trust the mainstream media or the science it reports on.
Anti-vaxxers and Q-Anonists don’t get to spread their vicious conspiracies if the broader public is resistant to their poison; informed and responsive to real emerging threats.
And climate deniers (and the many vested interests that use them to sustain their wealth) won’t be able to distort and pervert important policy reform to move humanity to a more sustainable footing.
Today leaders are so obsessed with the impact of CoVID on our economic life (which clearly preferences society’s winners). Maybe we should all be rethinking our slavish neoliberal obsession with protecting traditional stocks of capital and investing more in social and environmental capital, and specifically making a few deposits into the rapidly draining trust bank.
Our capacity to absorb disturbance and sustain a quality life as we move into an increasingly uncertain future absolutely depends upon it.
Images by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Sustainability Bites 
One thought on “Trust lies bleeding”