If That's How "We" Are Then Include Me Out

In this week's London Review of Books, the culture critic John Lanchester writes about, and around, global warming. He declares:

Electric light and power, and television, and computers, and fridges, not to menton cars and planes and lasers and CD players and dialysis machines and wireless networking and synthetic materials, are things we take on trust; we don't know how they work but we're happy to benefit from them.

Who is "we"? I am neither a professional scientist nor an engineer but I understand perfectly well how these things work. All of them. I suppose Mr Lanchester means, by "we", people of a liberal humanities background who overwhelmingly occupy the media and most of politics; people who not infrequently pronounce upon a science or technology of which they know little and understand less, while proudly waving their ignorance as a badge of their refined sensibilities and social standing. In a world which is run more and more through technology, the sort of chap who says "Oh, I barely know how to turn the damn thing on, let alone how it works" seems less like the elevated being he imagines himself to be, and more like an idiot, in both the modern and the ancient Athenian senses of the word.

I suspect Mr Lanchester knows perfectly well how his stuff works and is just pretending he doesn't, in order not to seem common or blokeish.

But that approach leads him to make remarks like: "there is one school of thought, and a few nutters".

Tell that to Copernicus or any other scientists ("nutters") involved in serious paradigm shift. The truth about science is that, first, there's only a model, which it's everyone's duty to throw rocks at to see if it falls over, and, second, science being emphatically not a democracy, it's perfectly possible for one person to be right and everyone else wrong.

To us caring, egalitarian relativists, that may seem tough. But it's a tough world, and may do for us yet.

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