Two Modern Dogmas

Back when I worked at the factory, I remember a co-worker approaching me at breaktime, holding a bottle of 7-Up he’d just bought from a vending machine. My co-workers often treated me as smart and authoritative because I have a good head for memorizing facts, and I’d grown accustomed to answering whatever questions might arise during the day. This guy pointed to some words printed on the label. “It says here ‘All Natural,’” he said, smiling smugly. “That means it’s good for you, right?”

Part of me hated to let the poor guy down, but not enough to shut me up. “You gotta be careful,” I said, “that’s one of the ways they fool you. They depend on you to think that way. But there’s no legally or scientifically binding definition of the word ‘Natural.’ You have to do more research than that to keep healthy.”

I recalled that exchange, and my co-worker’s crestfallen face, during a more recent disagreement. My friend, whom I love and respect, nevertheless said something I completely disagree with: that America can never abandon high-tech farming, despite its lousy environmental impact and its grotesque overproduction of food that often gets landfilled, because if we do, we’ll run out of affordable food, and the poor will suffer.

My friend is a big believer in GMOs and their potential to produce healthier, more abundant food. This despite the fact that they haven’t done so, and most GMOs have proven to be more expensive, more bland-tasting, and generally more disappointing versions of existing food crops. In the unlikely event my friend reads this essay, I’m confident he’ll feel motivated to defend his existing positions by asserting I’m just an enemy of “science.”

So we have two conflicting attitudes, which I’ve encapsulated in two people I know personally, though I’ve seen both repeated by other people and in mass media. On the one hand, we have the belief that “natural” means accord with human needs, and a general tinge of moral goodness. On the other, the belief that “science” is a humane progress through layers of understanding to the light of secular salvation.

Both attitudes are wrong.

The belief in nature’s goodness, as a sort of countercultural push against the heedless embrace of technology, is so completely mistaken that it has its own name: the Appeal to Nature Fallacy. Sometimes called the 100% Natural Fallacy, a name taken from a popular brand of breakfast cereal sold in the 1980s. From this fallacy, we get quack medicine, homeopathy, herbal “medicines,” and gullible people drinking their own pee.

The opposing belief, that what’s created in a laboratory is superior to dirty old nature, isn’t widespread enough to have its own name. Yet it demonstrates remarkably similar willingness to trust a dogmatic interpretation of evidence. Human ingenuity gets presented as innately morally good, and scientific advance becomes an end in its own right. But it requires an equal willingness to trust an abstract conviction without question.

Charles Darwin

When my friend argues, and he has, that we shouldn’t worry about mechanized farming damaging soil fertility, because we can replace lost fertility with synthetic chemicals, he makes the exact same appeal as homeopathy: that whatever made us sick will also make us well. This maybe made sense sixty years ago, when we had less empirical evidence. We formerly had to venture into new territory without a map.

But we don’t anymore. We have abundant evidence that peach pits don’t cure cancer, trace amounts of arsenic don’t reverse poisoning, and petroleum-derived fertilizers burn the soil, making future harvests less abundant. Blind trust in either nature or science has produced serious consequences, even cost lives. Experience tells us that calling something “natural” doesn’t make it healthful. And calling something “scientific” doesn’t make it good.

I don’t write this to accuse either my co-worker or my friend personally. Both men simply want a concise, intellectually coherent explanation for today’s difficult and often inconsistent circumstances. I frequently catch myself doing likewise. Unfortunately, modern complexity doesn’t permit such prefab consistency. Failing to frequently test our dogmas against evidence serves the same impulse formerly served by religion.

Tragically, both “nature” and “science” make pretty poor gods. From tapeworms to opioids, both have a track record of turning viciously on their worshipers. It isn’t comforting to say we have to review the evidence constantly, especially in today’s environment, saturated as it is with information. Yet we have to. The era of comforting dogmas, which both men described are seeking, is long over.