Knowing you’re absolutely, always right ? priceless

Maybe your mind went immediately to Darwinism, and that’s the prime example. It’s not the only one though. That debate roils while we move on to new issues like global climate change. The danger is that we’ll fall for about anything said by someone who acts smarter than we consider ourselves.

Here’s an example. In his book “Freakonomics,” Steven Levitt tells of Mitch Snyder who, in the 1980s, was a leading expert on homelessness in the U.S.?the critical issue of that decade. He startled everyone with his assertion that more than one of every hundred Americans was homeless. As he spoke across the country he once told a crowd that 45 homeless people die each second. We lapped it up. Someone finally did the math and figured that this number would mean 1.4 billion dead homeless people every year. That is nearly 500 times the number of homeless people Snyder claimed lived in the U.S.

When confronted with the number, our expert admitted that the media pushed him for the stat until he finally made up the homeless percentage and the death rate. And yet it was some time before anyone examined his claim for plausibility. We had already declared it a national crisis by that time. Maybe it was but we acted before we knew it to be true. It should make us wonder how many other things we just accept because some smart guy says it.

That kind of gullibility spreads like panic in a crowded theater. It’s a short trip from a 30-second clip on a morning news magazine to the front page of Time (even shorter to Newsweek). By then, student debaters are quoting the experts du jour with great passion. Some of them decide to make a career path change toward righting the wrongs or alleviating the suffering they read about in the news. If the cause turns out to be nothing or less than stated, it just fades into the background noise of our nation’s mythology.

How about global warming? Most scientists agree (that phrase is a warning) that the global temperature has gone up about one degree over the past 100 years. This might have resulted in droughts, floods, famine, and the melting of polar ice.

A clear majority of Americans also believe global climate change to be real, threatening, and within our power to stabilize. We didn’t get that opinion from our careful reading of scientific journals. We got it from popular news outlets yelling loudly in our ears and eyes. Such an opinion is easily formed and difficult to correct as the evidence starts to clarify.

Evangelical leaders recently signed on to a statement calling global warming an issue of compassion and mercy for the poor. They too accept warming as established science and a significant threat. Those scientists and laymen who don’t accept it are, by definition, hacks or shills for the oil companies.

And yet, as George Will pointed out in a recent column, 30 years ago global cooling was the trendy crisis. Global temperatures were observed to have dropped by one-half a degree between the 1940s and the 1970s. We were warned by some to prepare for a new Ice Age (hundreds or thousands of years in the future), that growing seasons were shortening, and that famine and poverty would be magnified by every year we delayed in making drastic changes in our (American) lifestyles. Scientists were not unanimous on this but those who doubted were derided by true believers as hacks or shills for the energy companies.

I don’t know they are wrong about global climate change. Speculation about causes, consequences, solutions, the severity of the change, etc. are all over the map and make confidence in the experts more difficult. Their contradictory certainties and cont1:PersonName w:st=”on”>tempt for those less shrill than themselves also present a challenge for those of us who want to understand. It is reasonable to say that they don’t know they’re right, at least not to the degree they claim.

Now we come to Darwinism. The volume with which “objective” analysts in the evolutionist camp are willing shout down dissenters

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