The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

Book Review - Five Stars

The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It by Shawn Otto

Snookered: Corporate greed of Big Tobacco contrived an ingenious end game to bank forty years worth of ill-gotten gains at the expense of untold suffering by people from cancer caused by tobacco. An industry was born that would plunder the world into of an era of science deniers. It was discovered that the American public could be sold anything, even a war, and buying politicians was cheaper than paying taxes or employees.

This huge but fast moving book gave honest answers to why anti-vaccination, climate change and a host of other happenings led to a science denying divided country.

I loved this profoundly honest and extremely well researched book. I consider it to be a “must read.”

Excerpts:

Political and religious institutions are pushing back against science and reason in a way that is threatening social and economic stability.

Inaccessibility makes science and technology more into a matter of belief than know-how, making people more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns.

Throughout 2009 and 2010, raging battles were fought in GOP primaries throughout the country as energy-industry-funded groups recruited and promoted Tea Party candidates to run against Republicans who had voted for the cap-and-trade bill, utilizing evangelical Republican foot soldiers, and knocking the offenders out with relatively small investments. Climate science became equated with Obama and socialism in Republican talking points, and the technique of bashing science or promoting brazenly anti scientific positions became a political identity statement. By late 2010, fully ninety-four of one hundred newly elected Republican members of Congress either denied that global warming was happening (it was all a vast hoax by scientists, they said) or signed pledges to oppose mitigation.

A classic example is the intellectual flight from fascist Europe in the years leading up to World War II. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Berlin was the world capital of science, culture, and art, and these aspects fed off one another. Persecution, particularly of Jews, homosexuals, and artists’ spurred emigration that turned the United States into an intellectual mecca.

Science took an important leap in public consciousness during World War II, when it transformed from an exploration of nature into a means to win the war for democracy and against the tyranny that had overtaken Germany, Italy, and Japan. Radar and the atomic bomb were both Allied inventions that had major impacts on the war’s outcome, as did sonar, synthetic rubber, the proximity fuse, the mass production of antibiotics, and other key wartime innovations, with many of the efforts led by emigrants from an increasingly antiscience Third Reich.