The article below is a reprint from a post by David Frum, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Though the post is on the current climate debate crisis, read it carefully. The point he is making is actually significantly more important than just the climate debate. They key phrase is, “It used to be said that we were all entitled to our own opinions, but not entitled to our own facts. No more. In modern America, we choose our facts to fit our opinions.” And that is the sadness of what is happening currently. Reasoned debate no longer exists.
But, it is even worse than that. It is not just that reasoned debate no longer exists. It is that, as a culture, we no longer even see our failure to have reasoned debate. Rather, the opposite is true. We have come to believe that our debate is a reasoned debate. David From has been intelligent enough to see that what we think of as reasoned debate is simply our cherry-picking those facts that will confirm our already held opinions. But, look carefully at the conclusion of his debate. Having cherry-picked the facts, we all too often accuse the other side of doing what we have just finished doing. And, let me go one step further. Were we to actually encounter reasoned debate, too many of us would be fully unable to differentiate it from cherry-picking debate.
How do we get out of this vicious circle? Frankly, I doubt that we can. Decades ago, Josh McDowell published a book Evidence that Demands a Verdict. It was written at a time when one could still expect such a debate. For us Christians in America today, such a book would now be nearly useless for use in current culture except with those few people who continue in old style thinking.
But, though I disagree with some of the implied conclusions about global warming in this article, I find myself warmly disposed towards David Frum. I think that even if he did a logical beat-down on me and convinced me to change my viewpoints in some areas that I would enjoy the debate. I would enjoy debating commonly held facts rather than cherry-picked facts. I would enjoy the “iron sharpening iron” effect of dialoguing with a mind as sharp as his. We really do need more David Frum types in this country, on both sides of the various debates. You see, those types of minds are also the types of minds most likely to admit weaknesses in their own positions and–for the sake of the country–the types of minds most likely to work towards an acceptable compromise.
The distorted global-warming debate
By David Frum, Special to CNN
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- David Frum says the global warming debate has been distorted by intellectual self-ghettoization
- How can we reach conclusions if we can’t agree on rules of discussion, Frum says
- Frum says that in modern America, we choose our facts to fit our opinions
Editor’s note: David Frum, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was special assistant to President George W. Bush in 2001-2. He is the author of six books, including “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again” and the editor of FrumForum.
(CNN) — I asked a knowledgeable environmentalist earlier this week: “How big a story is the CRU scandal in your community?”
“The what?”
“The e-mails hacked at the Climate Research Unit at [the British] East Anglia University?”
“Ah.” He smiled. “It says something that I didn’t immediately recognize what you were talking about. I suppose on my side we’d take the same view that the Pentagon took of Abu Ghraib: a few bad apples on the night shift.”
Meanwhile, on the right, the story is the biggest scandal since the leak of the Pentagon Papers.
Seemingly unperturbed by the CRU embarrassment, President Obama will shortly jet to Copenhagen to pledge reductions in U.S. carbon emissions. The Democratic majority in Congress continues to work on a cap-and-trade bill.
At the same time, Gallup has recorded an amazing 20 point drop since summer 2008 in the number of Republicans who believe that global warming is occurring. Among Republican conservatives, the drop is slightly smaller — 13 points — but that’s because so few of them believed in the reality of global warming in the first place.
It used to be said that we were all entitled to our own opinions, but not entitled to our own facts. No more. In modern America, we choose our facts to fit our opinions. Michael Barone drove this point home in a 2008 column for the magazine of the American Enterprise Institute:
Americans’ views of the economy are increasingly a function of voting behavior or party loyalty, rather than the other way around. In early 2006, a time of vibrant economic growth, 56 percent of Republicans said the economy was excellent or good, while only 28 percent of independents and 23 percent of Democrats agreed.
Maybe Republicans were just doing better than Democrats? No — the partisan divergence held true among Republicans and Democrats even of the same income level. The same effect showed up in reverse in the 1990s. Under President Clinton, Democrats were more likely to assess the economy positively than were Republicans of the same income level.
Media critics often blame cable, talk radio and blogs for isolating the public into self-satisfied information communities. And for sure, Fox News, MSNBC, Rush Limbaugh and the Daily Show have done good business serving niche markets. But it’s a real question: What is cause and what is effect?
Maybe customers always wanted to have their pre-existing opinions confirmed. Notice how often 19th century newspapers had names like the “Clay County Whig” or the “Jacksonville Democrat.” What were these old county papers if not the Fox News and MSNBC of their day?
The whole global warming debate has been distorted from the start by intellectual self-ghettoization. Suffused by self-righteousness, the East Anglian scientists felt entitled to twist the evidence and delete the counter-evidence.
But it also helped that they felt sure they would not be caught. They had defined their community in a way that excluded skepticism, that defined skeptics as the enemy, as liars, as Holocaust deniers.
Private e-mails and documents allegedly from the servers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned center on the study of climate change, are thought to have been leaked by hackers.
Everything important about global warming remains disputed:
How fast is it happening? How much of it is attributable to human activity? How dangerous is it? How much should we pay to avert or mitigate it? Who should do the paying?
How are to begin to reach conclusions if we cannot even agree on the rules of discussion? The most famous public document on global warming calls itself “An Inconvenient Truth” — and yet that document itself is filled with untruths, on every subject from sea levels to polar bears. (The bears are doing fine, populations at record levels in the Canadian Arctic.)
In his first book, “Earth in the Balance,” former Vice President Al Gore wrote that human consciousness itself may be the most important obstacle to environmental improvement. He spoke more accurately than he knew.
The global warming controversy has been pervaded from the start by the human instinct to divide the world into “us” and “them” — and then believe only the news we hear from “us.”
Global warming advocates can see this weakness in their opponents. It was the same weakness in themselves that led the advocates themselves to cheat and twist and betray scientific standards and public trust.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum.
I rather think that human beings being the imperfect creatures that they are, this type of thinking has been around since forever. (But the serpent said…..and I was wondering about that tree anyway…..). If I talk to enough people about any subject, I can find someone who agrees with me and some institution of supposed higher learning that will back me up. It is very difficult to even DO research that is not even unconsciously biased. If I have a certain theory, I may unconsciously and with the best intentions in the world set up the experiment in such a way that my theory is favored. Then when you get the results, look out….The old saying is that there are lies, d*** lies and statistics! With any set of numbers I can play….and I am not even that good at it. Sometimes, I think that the only way is to take everyone’s opinion and everyone’s data and everyone’s theories and realize that the probable truth is somewhere in the unknown middle. So you take that middle and then use common sense and the “smell” test and then decide. Of course, that is supposing that folks are not intentionally manipulating the facts and the data. When folks start to lie about the raw data…..sigh…..But then it is not the first time that lies have been used to color the opinions of the audience. (You know God, said the serpent, he just wants to keep you ignorant. Why shouldn’t you get some of that fruit and know what He is trying to hide from you?)
There is an old Sunday School ditty that describes my outlook and the best that I can do–“Brighten the corner where you are, brighten the corner where you are. Someone far from harbor, you may guide across the bar. Brighten the corner where you are.” So I stand here in my corner with my little candle and trust that God can magnify my small and rather insignificant light.
Alix
Fr. Ernesto,
I am one of many who would love to know the plain truth about global warming; it’s cause, effects, solutions, etc. However, I feel that the waters upon which this whole debate is being waged are very poisoned from numerous sources. I don’t know who to believe and therefore I don’t know what to believe?? It’s been said that politics should never be mixed with religion. Maybe the same should be said about mixing science and politics. More and more of the big issues in life seem to be mired in this quagmire, be it climate change, taxes, health care, Manhattan Declarations, etc. Can we agree on anything?
Thank you, you have caught precisely the point of this posting. The well is poisoned by both the left and the right on this issue. But, decisions still have to be made. Yet, how can we make the decisions if we cannot even agree on the facts?
It is a vicious circle that goes round and round. I know that I do tend to believe in global warming for several reasons that I think are verifiable. But, on almost every social subject there is, there is no longer a general public debate over the facts, except a few on the right and a few on the left, and some moderates. As Mr. Frum points out, this makes decisions not fully based on facts but partially based on an ideology, whether of the right or of the left.
Perhaps the place to begin reading is not with political pundits, who by the nature of their jobs cannot and really do not possess true expertise in those subjects upon which they expound. This is particularly true in the areas of both economics and science, although economics is often the easier for pundits to look as though they know something.
Science, on the other hand, offers a methodology of observable and verifiable phenomenon which can be tested and either proven or disproven. If you wish to study this matter in earnest, take up the issue with true experts in field. Read science magazines and journals, Scientific American, science and physics blogs, read footnotes, and check sources. Become familiar with who are the actual scientific experts both inside and outside the United States. Become fluent in the language of science. Learn the topic from those scientists and climatologists who have devoted their lives to subject, not from third, fourth, and fifth-hand sources who have a political or an ideological axe to grind.
The problem is those idiots over in England who appear to have deleted data, falsified results, and deliberately withheld contradictory data. I realize that there are several other data dumps that do not appear to be contaminated. And, it would take an unbelievable conspiracy for every data dump in every part of the world to be corrupted in exactly the same way. That is what makes the non-global warming triumphalism somewhat over the top.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that there was incalculable harm done to the pursuit of science by what those men and women did.