This book review was originally posted at Minding the Campus, a project of the National Association of Scholars. The title I had proposed was: “The Hobbits Go to War,” but their recommendation is better. Today also represents the very rare (unprecedented?) multiple-THB posts in one day. Sorry for flooding your in-box — but it is good stuff. Enjoy! —RP
With Science Under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces that Threaten Our World, climatologist Michael E. Mann and virologist Peter J. Hotez have written an important book. When future historians look back at the early twenty-first century and document the causes and consequences of the intense politicization of the U.S. scientific community, Science Under Siege (SUS) will be a core reading.
The central argument of the book is apocalyptic.
“The future of humankind and the health of our planet now depend on surmounting the dark forces of antiscience” (p. 3)
“Unless we find a way to overcome antiscience, humankind will face its gravest threat yet – the collapse of civilization as we know it.” (p. 27)
“Antiscience,” they tell us, is “politically and ideologically motivated opposition to any science that threatens powerful special interests and their political agenda” (p. 2).
Mann and Hotez define opposition specifically—Republicans:
The fact that antiscience has been embraced so fully by one of the two major parties is a grave concern. Today’s Republican Party is an authoritarian, anti-democratic political entity . . . we face a stark realty (sic): the Republican Party now represents a very real threat to human civilization itself.
More granularly, Mann and Hotez identify the threat to human civilization as coming from a Republican “antiscience ecosystem” that they sub-group into five alliterative categories, shown in the nonsensical figure below:
Page from Science Under Siege
Much of the book is spent denigrating those the authors see as enemies within these five categories. I counted 137 people who they namecheck as part of the antiscience cabal threatening the world. Many on the enemies list are not Republicans, or even on the political right. That seeming incoherence can be quickly resolved by recognizing that the list is simply people Mann and Hotez don’t like for one reason or another.
Full disclosure: I’m listed as enemy #136, oddly, in their enemies sub-category “The Press.” They explain that I am on the list because of my book, The Honest Broker, which argues that scientists should fully engage in democratic processes and discusses the different ways this might occur.
Their enemies list includes many of the authors’ critics and political opponents. Mann repeats his longstanding beefs with Bjorn Lomborg (#70) and Judy Curry (#92) over climate. Hotez does the same on COVID-19 origins, criticizing Alina Chan and Matt Ridley (#133 and #134), co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.
For a book supposedly about threats to science, it is not strong on scientific accuracy in the rare places that it actually discusses science. For instance, the book claims, contrary to the evidence, that: “Deadly weather extremes exacerbated by human-caused warming – floods, storms, droughts, wildfire and extreme heat – lead to many millions more lives lost per year” (p. 13).
Continue reading this piece at RogerPielkejr.substack.com
