We live with an anti-science movement that includes more than just climate denial, and crosses sociological and political boundaries – perhaps as an outgrowth of general disenchantment with things “modern”, and the realization that the “City of Tomorrow” visions of world’s fairs and Disney installations have not played out as planned.
Recent news items tell us of an outbreak of measles, rare in the US with the advent of effective vaccine prevention programs. The outbreak occurred in the congregation of a right wing mega-church in Texas, where the television evangelist Pastor had railed against “all of these shots” for innocent babies. While its easy to snicker at the southern creationist crowd, the problem exists among the Silicon Forest elite as well as the granola and sandal crowd.
As school begins in Seattle this week, it’s worth revisiting a disturbing fact: The Pacific Northwest is the nation’s hot spot for anti-vaccination free-riders.
Washington ranks seventh, at 4.6 percent, in the percentage of kindergartners whose parents last year demanded exemptions from mandatory vaccinations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Oregon (6.4 percent) has the nation’s worst rate, followed closely by Idaho (5.9 percent) and Alaska (5.6 percent).
Call it a frontier mentality, or counterculturalism, or whatever. It is based on unfounded fear, not science.
The anti-vaccination craze was fueled by a 1998 study in the British medical journal The Lancet, which suggested a link between the vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella (the M.M.R. immunization) and autism. The study was retracted, subsequent research has disproved the link and, in 2010, Britain’s General Medical Council barred the researcher, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, from practicing medicine.
Great post about a very important cultural trend. Reminds me of the preacher in the movie “Contact”, a movie which, in an roundabout way, sums up the current atmosphere of climate reality denial nicely.
With one difference:
Vaccination deniers tend to remove themselves from the gene-pool.
Climate deniers attempt to remove *all* of us from the gene-pool!
So I guess it would be a good thing if climate deniers also became vaccine deniers? After all they often have a problem believing in science so why believe in vaccines? 🙂
Add it to the to-do list… 🙂
Climate denial and anti-vaxers are of a kind: those who assume that faith-beliefs beliefs are equivalent to evidence-based beliefs.
The enemy of reason is not ignorance; it’s faith. It is the assumption and assertion that our faith-based beliefs accurately describe reality rather than respect reality’s role to justify beliefs. That is why evidence adduced from reality does not have much if any effect on those want everyone to respect their method and practice to impose their faith-based beliefs on reality and assume that the incompatible results from these two methods are nothing more and nothing less than different but equivalent kinds of knowledge. That’s why faith-based believers cherry pick only supportive data that appears to align with the faith-based beliefs and either ignore or wave away data that does not. This practice is inherent in the methodology of faith-based beliefs. It’s also the reason why faithiests of all stripes cannot understand why others who respect only reality’s role to arbitrate claims made about it seem to be so intolerant and militant and strident. And this is why the method of science that respects reality is attacked as a different kind of faith-based belief: scientism!
It doesn’t help the cause of responding responsibly to information reality provides us by apologizing and accommodating and excusing and tolerating and respecting the method of inquiry that drives all faith-based beliefs. The symptoms are all around us from this broken epistemology and it includes climate change denial, anti-vaccine, conspiracy theories, astrology, anti-fluoride crusades, alternative medicines, tarot cards and tea leaf readings, dowsing, and all manner of superstitious nonsense. And yes, as uncomfortable as it may make some people, religious beliefs that make claims about reality. All are equivalent and none worthy of respect for anyone concerned with finding out how reality operates.
tildeb- I checked out your blog,and really liked what I saw. I’ve got it bookmarked and look forward to following your writings.