Soundings, April 2002

If environmental skeptics are rare, one need look no further for an explanation than the treatment meted out to dissidents by the environmentalist establishment. The most recent case in point is the ferocious attack on Bjørn Lomborg, not only in far-Left journals such as the Nation but even in prestigious scientific journals such as Nature. The following account comes from the even-handed online Statistical Assessment Service (www.stats.org), which aptly entitled it "A Low Blow":

"Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg annoyed many of his friends in the Green movement when he published The Skeptical Environmentalist last year. To his credit, he has started a serious debate about the data behind claims that things are going wrong with the planet. Some of the criticism he has come in for, however, goes beyond the confines of civilized debate.

"A case in point is the review of his book in Nature magazine by Stuart Pimm of the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation at Columbia and Jeff Harvey of the Netherlands Institute of Technology. In the course of their review they say, 'the text employs the strategy of those who, for example, argue that gay men aren't dying of AIDS, that Jews weren't singled out by the Nazis for extermination, and so on.'

"Not only have Pimm and Harvey erected a straw man here, they have accused Lomborg of something as bad as holocaust denial. That is a serious allegation, and, given the genuine scientific debate over these issues, one not worthy of publication in such a respected source. It certainly does nothing to improve the standing of science in the eyes of the public.

"To his credit, Lomborg refuses to rise to this bait. He told the online publication Spiked ('This is a case of table pounding,' Jan 24), 'I actually feel kind of good, because it shows the desperateness of their argument.' As long as Lomborg continues to concentrate on the data, the cause of genuine scientific debate will have at least one champion."

"Sound and Fury is an Oscar-nominated documentary on the controversy over cochlear implants, the technology that allows [some] deaf people to hear. Why is there a dispute? Because many deaf people now view themselves as an identity group under assault from the hearing world.

"Cochlear implants, which work best with children, are viewed as an example of intolerance and aggression that remove deaf children from their culture, just as missionaries once took Indian children from their tribes and put them in Christian boarding schools. In Sound and Fury, a deaf Long Island couple refuse to let their 5-year-old daughter get a cochlear implant. The father has a lament: 'If the technology progresses, maybe it's true that deaf people will become extinct, and my heart will be broken.'

"This is a poignant moment. The parents know that if they approve the implant, they will lose their daughter to a wider world they can never enter (and don't want to enter). The daughter would go to a hearing school and have hearing friends, to the probable exclusion of her family. But the plain fact is that the parents are preventing a cure for deafness for ideological reasons. An upside-down logic is at work here: helping a girl to hear is an attack on her and her culture, as many voices in the film keep insisting.

As columnist Cathy Young writes in Reason magazine, this is an example of how 'the celebration of difference and pluralism has brought modern Western culture to the brink of lunacy.' In the movie, the father talks of how 'peaceful' it is to live in a world of total silence. This defense mechanism, Young says, is shockingly treated as a serious argument these days, particularly among the intellectual elites. Once deaf people are defined as a cultural group, not inferior to hearing culture, then any move by hearing people to correct deafness is illegitimate. This follows from the belief, now widely held in the academic world, that all cultures and all arguments are equal." John Leo, "Disability Activism Turns to Identity Politics," Universal Press Syndicate, March 18, 2002.

"No cause in the history of mankind has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than communism. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. No one honors those dead. No one does penance for them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag: 'No, no one would have to answer.'" Alan Charles Kors, "Rose-Colored Glasses: What Even Disillusioned Marxists Missed," Reason, April 2002.