![Thomas Babington Macaulay, National Portrait Gallery, London [John Partridge d.1872]](https://thecoralinememe.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/thomas_babington_macaulay_john_partridge.jpg)
Thomas Babington Macaulay, National Portrait Gallery, London [John Partridge d.1872]
David Berlinski begins his, still unacountably unfinished, book The Best of Times with this quote from 19th century British philosopher and Whig politician Thomas Babington Macaulay:
“We rely on the natural tendency of the human intellect to truth, and of the natural tendency of society to improvement.”
The 20th and 21st centuries speak otherwise according to Berlinski.
Science journalist Keith Kloor, has an article up at his blog Collide-a-Scape at the Discover.com website titled: Trusted communicators who shape the GMO Discourse. Kloor seems to be a fairly sensible fellow, and is a journalist who is generally rising in the Meme Merchant’s quality blogger index.
Lately, KK has been on a sort of anti anti-GMO tear, that is trying to roll back some of the fear, hysteria and disinformation that is surrounding the entire anti-gmo movement. In today’s case he talks about the role of people he terms “influentials” in shaping the debate within the anti-GMO movement:
Influentials are the information brokers that have major media platforms and big receptive audiences. For example, on the GMO issue, top influentials include Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Dr. Oz, and Vandana Shiva. Each of these influentials have been responsible for spreading or endorsing nonsense about GMOs via social media and other highly trafficked venues.
Its not the point of this blog post to take on the topic of Genetically Modified Organisms in general, or even the anti-GMO movement in particular. I am much more interested in the notion of “Trusted Communicators”, why do we trust them? And why do we continue to trust them even if they have been demonstrated to be wrong on many occasions about what they are saying?
Trusted is not the same as trustworthy, as I’m sure we can all agree – at least in principle. But when it come to your own cherished beliefs however…
Kloor quotes Princeton social scientist Linda Fiske:
People trust people they think are like themselves. This is human nature. They trust people who they think share their values and goals.
I would paraphrase Ms Fiske slightly, ‘People trust people who think like themselves’. People like having their world view reinforced, its very natural. People don’t like cognitive dissonance, they don’t like doubt or uncertainty. An excess of doubt or uncertainty can make decision making difficult, or even day to day functioning. People walk out the door every day with the expectation that they will not be run over by the bus or a planetesimals will fall out of the sky and wipe out civilization. We tend to reserve doubt for critical situations, and ones where we expect to need it.
Glass Empty, c. 1000CE
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr, [‘Pielke the Younger’ around here] my go-to-guy for science policy related topics posted a video on his excellent blog produced by NPR entitled, “Filling Up – 7 Billion, How Did We Get So Big So Fast” a several days ago which hasn’t attracted much comment, but was particularly interesting to me in light of having spent an electricityless weekend two weeks ago reading David P. Goldman’s [the online columnist ‘Spengler’ over at Asia Times Online] very new book, “How Civilizations Die, (and why islam is dying too)” – a must read for people interested in the geo and socio-political implications of demographic trends [well worth looking at as long as you remain aware that his thesis has some theoretical limitations] If you are frightened of the Islam angle for some reason, it is possible to subtract out that aspect and you still come up with a fascinating thesis – which I will let you read the book to discover – or maybe I will write more at a future date.
The take away I will leave you from that book is that the radical decline in fertility rates in the Western world in the last three centuries and the currently collapsing fertility rate in the muslim [you didn’t know either?] and much of the developing world requires a radical rethink of the neo-Malthusian paranoia, of overpopulation apocalypse we have been force fed since the Ehrlichs and their ilk made their onto the scene in the ’60’s and continues to be a core assumption of a great many people, as we grope out way forward into a global future that may be dominated by demographic decline rather than a population bomb. In other words, it reintroduces that concept of depopulation to the modern vocabulary, which used to be a subject of great concern in the premodern and classical worlds.
The Coraline Meme 