Debunkers' Delight: Penn & Teller, Sullum, Sokal, Waite, and New Atlantis

In an episode called "Eat This," debunking anti-biotech crusaders, Penn Jilette summarizes Borlaug's role in the so-called Green Revolution (not to be confused with the rise of the green banner of Islamic fundamentalism, nor the rise of the Green Party): "Norman Borlaug is an amazing man who changed the world...At a time when doomsayers were hoppin' around saying everyone was gonna starve, Norman was working. He moved to Mexico, and he lived among the people there until he figured out how to improve the output of the farmers. So, that saved a million lives. Then, he picked up his family and moved to India, where in spite of a war with Pakistan, he managed to introduce new wheat strains that quadrupled their food output, so that saved another million...When he won the Nobel Prize in 1970, they said that he had saved a billion people...Unfortunately, the humanitarian efforts of people like Dr. Borlaug are undermined by Greenpeace and other assholes."

Penn and Teller can be offensive, and this culture needs them badly.

Sullum makes the simple, obvious, and utterly taboo case that most people who use drugs enjoy it and don't end up being junkies, violent offenders, or burdens on society. He opens with a description of a highly successful CEO who did it all while smoking large amounts of marijuana, notes that most people learn moderation (as with alcohol) because of its practical benefits rather than legal threats, and outlines the statistics that suggest America has many, many drug users, of which only a tiny percentage become addicts.

We at ACSH have sometimes taken issue with the attitude common among conservatives and libertarians, including Sullum, that smoking is not a true health crisis because it is a voluntary behavior (we note numerous overlooked negative health effects and millions of deaths from smoking, voluntary or not). It is fascinating, though, to read Sullum's account of how virtually every disfavored substance, including cigarettes, has at some point been the target of hysterical claims that users will be turned into mindless, jobless, amoral zombies. Henry Ford and other philanthropists published pamphlets a century ago warning that "cigarette fiends" have no future, since they quickly lose their ability to hold down a job or function in society (cigarettes have dire enough physical effects without adding this sort of propaganda to the mix).

It seems that fear of a zombified populace may just be perpetual, always shifting to the latest dangerous-new-drug-on-the-horizon: marijuana, then crack, then ecstasy, and so on. (Senators Biden and Leahy were frightened enough about ecstasy to lead Congress in effectively outlawing large informal dance parties raves on the grounds that they are often sites of drug use.) Sullum counters such fears with statistics showing that marijuana users, for instance, appear to have about the same average income and work output as non-marijuana users. Our stereotypical picture of drug users as zombies the picture eagerly spread by the government results partly, suggests Sullum, from the fact that only the handful of dysfunctional hard cases ever come to our attention. If one cocaine user loses his job, gets arrested, or ends up sleeping in an alley, we may hear about it on the evening news, but we won't hear about the hundred others who went about their business and lead ordinary lives. Any substance, such as alcohol, can be used with varying degrees of responsibility. Some people like skeptical magician James Randi (my childhood hero and an inspiration to Penn and Teller) will go the teetotaler route, eager to avoid the slightest impairment of their rational faculties. But as Sullum reports, Randi recognizes that he shouldn't impose his decision on others. Would that most people showed as much restraint controlling their personal behavior without feeling the need to control others'.

But it will be very interesting to see where the dialogue in New Atlantis leads. How much detail can anti-tech conservatives go into, for instance, about their belief that death is an essential component of the good life before they start sounding like ghouls? How sophisticated a dialogue can exist on these matters when people like New Atlantis editor Yuval Levin argues that such topics ought really to be taboo? [UPDATE: Levin writes in to say that his main point was that this taboo should be overcome; meanwhile, another neocon group, AEI, holds a conference on biotech on 6/12/03.] How seriously should we take an argument like that of contributor Gilbert Meilander (a theologian and one of Kass's fellow Bush advisors) that altering human DNA is like randomly scrambling the sentences of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea and expecting it to remain meaningful? We'll see. I'm inclined to agree more with the contributors who say that the future will eventually bring humanity's replacement by robots at which point, I suppose, we won't need a bioethics journal, nor a website called HealthFactsAndFears (I'm on the side of the robots, of course).

In the meantime, I wonder if the anti-biotech conservatives by wallowing in vague, moralistic language about human nature and society in order to guilt-trip us all into agreeing with their policy recommendations aren't risking becoming the victims of a hoax like the one that physicist Alan Sokal pulled on leftists in 1996, when he wrote a nonsensical article and got it published in Social Text by larding it with jargon from fashionable literary criticism? A hoax conservative anti-biotech argument would require references to the ancient Greeks and the Pope instead of Lacan and Derrida, but it shouldn't be hard to whip up, perhaps with a title like "Retaining the Fundamental: Cystic Fibrosis as an Essential Human Travail."

All the texts above, I must note, have one thing in common: They are better than the volumes of New Age nonsense I had to cart across the ocean recently as a favor for the friend who put me up in London during the recent risk conference I addressed there. Ironically, my HQ during the decidedly pro-science gathering was a household chock full of volumes on energy healing and astral projection, and I could hardly refuse to cart over a few additional volumes of the stuff from America when I was getting free digs out of the deal. Perhaps I should feel a bit like an "enabler" despite my repeated efforts to talk my friend out of believing in such things but plugging the fine items above helps put my conscience at ease.