It’s difficult to empathize with people we disagree with. It’s difficult to look at the world as if you knew only what they knew and nothing of what you know that they didn’t.
Many people seem unable to distinguish understanding and empathizing with someone from agree with or supporting them. I think part of our inhibition comes from fearing that we’ll find that we would have felt and done things we consider abhorrent. Psychological research shows most of us can be induced to act in violation of our values. I think many of us fear acknowledging what we would have done had we been born with white skin in the South before the Civil War or in Germany as a German to come of age around 1933.
I wrote yesterday about a documentary I watched last week on eugenics. It showed some of the movement’s roots in people who in their minds thought they were helping humanity based in scientific results. They influenced others to follow them and gained political power. When scientific results conflicted with theirs, they stuck with theirs, which scientists often do. New results can be flawed.
The parallels to technologies that people want to spread all over the world courtesy of taxpayer funding, in defiance of data contradicting theirs, seem overwhelming.
If we aren’t humble in considering scientific results that conflict with ours, we’re liable to follow eugenicists’ footsteps. People today seem too gung-ho for technologies that don’t deliver results promised by their supporters.
I recommend watching the documentary, asking yourself what the world looked like for them. I suspect you’ll find the people drawn into the movement following motivations and perceptions very similar to mainstream ones today. I don’t think many people today have a place to stand to criticize people who did something we’re doing or are close to doing.
Copying from my post:
The Eugenics Crusade: Eugenics in the USA, American Experience: I saw this movie while browsing American Experience’s videos after finding last week’s documentary on Citizen Kane.
This movie presents an important historical precedent of how pseudoscience works that is way more relevant to today than anyone promoting so-called “clean,” “green,” or “renewable” energies, or geoengineering would be comfortable with.
First and foremost: people that later generations say were practicing pseudoscience didn’t start with ill intention or wrong science. They start out intending to help humanity as they understand it with cutting edge science. They don’t dismiss the people hurt by their work. Like anyone, including you and me, they are influenced by their culture and they have blind spots. If you attack them, and I hope you do, be humble and notice how your attacks apply to yourself. What are your blind spots? Whom are you disregarding in promoting, say, technologies that require cobalt, which is mined by slaves, or fossil-fuels, as wind and solar do?
What science are you disregarding when you call technologies that require fossil fuels for manufacture, transportation, installation, and decommissioning, and that will fill landfills, “clean,” “green,” or “renewable”? Cleaner than fossil fuels doesn’t mean clean.
It’s tempting to show how today’s “experts” promoting science backed by government programs to benefit humanity differ from eugenicists. The challenge is seeing how similar they are, especially from the perspective of future generations who can’t look past the data undermining their world views, however good they think they are.
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