|
By ARIS T.
CHRISTOFIDES
You probably know Penn &
Teller as professional magicians. They are also
well known skeptics, just like their fellow
magician James Randi, the indefatigable scourge of
charlatans of all sorts. It does help to know
magic if one is to debunk all the flimflammery
practiced by those who would like to convince the
gullible that they have
supernatural powers, when they're only doing tricks.
With the first season of the "Penn & Teller:
Bullsh*t!" show, which ran on the Showtime Network
in 2003, the boisterous Penn Jillette and his
silent partner NFN Teller (reportedly, "NFN" is
short for "No First Name"), take on several
obvious targets, such as those who talk to the
dead (like the unscrupulous John Edward),
alternative medicine, alien abductions,
end-of-worlders, Feng Shui, Creationism, Ouija
boards, ESP, penis enlargements, and other similar
nonsense. All are worthy targets, and as promised,
Penn & Teller do a mostly decent job of
eviscerating bunk. They do it by providing
both evidence and entertainment -- their
debunkings are laced with a lot
of fitting, often raunchy sarcasm.
So far so good. However, for those who don't know,
Penn & Teller are not only professional magicians
and self-declared skeptics. They are also
libertarians, disciples of the Cato Institute and
other libertarian institutions.
Libertarians
insist on casting themselves as congenitally
skeptical of all nonsense, as using only reason as
their guiding intellectual principle, and as being
pro-science. But for true skeptics, for those who
resist all preconceived ideas and do not subscribe
to any supernatural belief system, Libertarianism
seems very much like a religion.
While
Libertarianism is ostensibly about the freedom of
the individual from any government or other
organized control, it doesn't take long after
reading libertarian literature for a skeptic to
realize that what motivates libertarians is
supernatural faith in the inerrancy of capitalism. While they may argue from time to time
for individual freedoms -- even unpopular individual
freedoms like the right to produce and consume
pornography, drugs, etc. -- what really motivates
them is the absolute preservation of the sanctity
of all property. From this tenet it follows that
any joker has the freedom to do whatever he wants
with his own stuff. That is, his stuff (whether
money, land, factory, shop, house, car, etc.) is
transcendentally his and inviolable and should be
immune from any regulation whatsoever.
In practical terms, libertarians are against all
taxes used for anything but defense, and against
all regulations on businesses, especially
environmental and zoning laws. They seem to think
that unencumbered, predatory capitalism will
magically solve all problems, as long as irritating
humans do not interfere with any aspect of
commerce.
I think that we can all agree that everybody
should have a right to his own stuff, and in a
democracy the government should not have the right
to seize anyone's property, at least without due
process (for
instance, libertarians are quite right to oppose
Eminent Domain abuses). However, to live in a
civilized society, we need to live in communities.
And to preserve communities we need to make sure that freedom for some
does not become license to destroy that which
belongs to everybody. No business has a right to
pollute the air we all breathe.
Hence, when Penn & Teller attack nonsense, they
don't just stop with obvious flimflam. Like the good
libertarians they are, they also assault
"nonsense" as defined by their political religion:
Environmentalism comes in for criticism in one
absurd episode, as well as prohibitions of smoking
in public places that are designed to spare us
from breathing in secondhand smoke.
With both
episodes Penn & Teller demonstrate another trait
of the libertarian, the uncanny facility to argue
for trusting science only when science is useful
in advancing a libertarian cause, and to dismiss
overwhelming scientific evidence when this
evidence can lead to the support of business
regulation (the corollary is that libertarians
trust industry scientists, but distrust academic
scientists).
With the secondhand smoke episode, the principal
Penn & Teller argument is that there's no
scientific evidence that secondhand smoke is bad
for you, therefore when the government bans
smoking in bars and restaurants (as in NYC) it is
violating the right of the proprietor to allow
smoking in his own premises.
First the science: The American Cancer Society,
the International Agency for Research on Cancer
(which is part of the World Health Organization),
as well as the EPA, recognize the dangers of
secondhand smoke. However, The Advancement of
Sound Science Coalition does not. And what exactly
is The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition?
Why, it's a Philip Morris frontgroup, created by
their public relations firm for the express
purpose of undermining sound science when it comes
to investigating the effects of smoking tobacco.
Don't let the Orwellian name fool you.
Do we really not know by now that the chemicals
contained in tobacco smoke are toxic and therefore
not good for human consumption? I guess that if
this knowledge is not
enough to convince people that inhaling tobacco
smoke directly is a bad idea, some people will
never be convinced that inhaling someone's exhaled
tobacco smoke can't be a good idea either.
I can sympathize with the right of smokers
to get together and puff away if they want to,
because, you know, people should have a right to damage their
own lungs if they want to. But I also have the right to
be spared from breathing in the by-product of their
addiction. And while a smoker should be able to do
whatever he wants in his own space, as long as he's
the only one affected, when it comes to public
spaces non-smokers have the right not to inhale
someone else's detritus. To put it in crass terms,
one has every right to defecate, but as a society
we have decided we should not be allowed to
defecate in public. Communities should have the right to regulate
public activities. These decisions are often
aesthetic -- even if Penn & Teller could somehow
prove that secondhand smoke is not bad for you,
it still stinks to high heaven for a lot people.
So, argue for one side or the other and compare
the evidence for and against. But attacking
anti-smoking regulation as somehow akin to alien
abductions along the spectrum of idiocy, is
devious.
Yet, the most frustrating and disheartening
episode is the one tiled "Environmental Hysteria."
Libertarians have long been fervently against any
and all environmental regulation. The fact that
the world's scientific community, en masse,
agrees that humans activity is affecting the
planet in very undesirable ways will not convince
libertarians -- these self-proclaimed advocates of
reason and science -- that we need to do something. Their usual methods of "debunking"
the scientific consensus is to raise objections to
that or the other aspect of environmental science,
to trot out the odd Ph.D. who thinks the
environment is doing hunky-dory (preferably one
with a degree in science, but usually any
doctorate will do),
and to interpret very specific, often complex
criticisms by pro-regulation climatologists to
false, full-fledged polemics against all
environmental science.
Do these methods remind you of anything? Why,
these are the exact methods creationists use to
attack Evolution. Ironically, Penn & Teller do a
very good job in one episode of debunking
Creationism as the absurdity it really is. They do
it by interviewing the primary proponents of
Creationism. That's fair and smart since
Creationism's proponents can't help come across as
the dolts they really are. But when it
comes to environmentalism, Penn & Teller go to a
rally attended by well meaning but childish
worshipers of anything that's termed "natural."
And Penn & Teller seem exceedingly satisfied with
themselves when they convince these newagers to sign a petition calling for the banning
of "dihydrogen monoxide," which is, of course,
water (two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen).
How amusing!
But where are the environmental scientists? We do
get Bjorn Lomborg (whose Ph.D., it should be
noted, is in Statistics and not Environmental
Science or any related discipline) as the voice of
authority on the anti-environmental side, but it
is never mentioned that many scientists have
accused him of carefully picking only data that
support his conclusions. Furthermore, no
mainstream environmental scientist is invited to
debate him for the episode. Why? Because then the
audience would realize that climatologists, like
other scientists but unlike creationists, tend to
be lucid, knowledgeable and measured.
Every idea will attract some who will embrace it
reflexively but not reflectively. Their enthusiasm leads to
immoderation. However, using the fact that a few
passionate environmentalists who have nothing
whatsoever to do with climate research do not know
chemistry to discredit environmental science in its totality,
is like trying to undermine the germ theory of
disease by pointing out the excesses of notorious
microbiophobic Howard Hughes. It is a cheap trick.
Environmentalism has serious political
implications. But here Penn & Teller accuse all
who disagree with their position of being naïve
neo-Luddites, while representing their side as
being proponents of hardheaded science -- without
revealing the political ideology that informs
their own convictions. Surely, truly rational,
honest skeptics must first and foremost be aware
and guard against their own prejudices (and we all
have them). Could Penn & Teller, like fellow
libertarian Michael Crichton, be really so unaware
that their anti-environmentalism is little more
than a pious adherence to libertarian dogma?
People who don't believe that we are doing great
damage to the Earth should be forced to answer a
simple question: What would convince them that any
type of environmental catastrophe has been caused
by human activity? I think nothing. Is the Earth
getting warmer? Well, even if they agree that it
is, they can easily respond that the cause is
natural variations in climate. Even if the earth
does warm up so much as to have the polar ice caps
totally melt, anti-environmentalists can still
argue that it wasn't the consumption of fossil
fuels that brought the catastrophe but
something else, something natural and unavoidable.
This is not an argument that can be won on purely
scientific terms because unlike other natural
sciences environmentalism is mostly a historical,
not a laboratory science. We simply cannot create
several identical Earths and experiment by varying
the consumption of fossil fuels among them over
centuries and then determine if global warming
occurs due to the high consumption of fossil
fuels. It is impossible. In terms of environmental
policy, we therefore need to reach a political
decisions based on limited information and perhaps
inexact projections. Our best guide in this case
is the prevailing scientific consensus, and in
this case it's pretty one sided in supporting
environmentalism.
Am I being too harsh on Penn & Teller? Should I
give them a pass because I liked most of the
episodes and disapproved of only a couple? Well, I
still recommend that you check out this DVD title,
especially for the two episodes I am criticizing.
Just view them skeptically. And I think you'll see
why I object to them so intensely: It is
impetrative that any scientific idea be subjected
to as much scrutiny, debate and dissent as
possible -- since that's how science advances.
However, it is extremely dangerous in a democracy
when there's an attempt to delegitimize a scientific idea with political
implications. If
Penn & Teller think environmentalism is bunk, they
should have the courage to invite
environmentalism's most prominent and informed
proponents to discuss their evidence with their
critics. What they did instead was to "expose" all
environmentalists as kooks by portraying the
fervent fringe of the environmental movement as
representative of the whole movement, and the
science behind it. And unfortunately they are not
alone. There's a concerted effort by libertarians
and other conservatives (Crichton's novel "State
of Fear" is another recent attempt) to destroy any debate
they're losing on evidence by casting mainstream
scientists as delusional, or dunces, or venal
partisans, or simply interested in securing
research funds by making stuff up. Is it really
reasonable to assume that so many highly regarded
climatologists are dead wrong when it comes to
environmental research, but magicians Penn &
Teller and author of pop thrillers Crichton are
dead right? Only if you believe in bullshit.
In any case, strictly as a DVD release, "Penn &
Teller: Bullsh*t" won't play in older RCA players.
Otherwise, it looks fine. There are a few extras:
A short promo features naked models from the penis
enlargements and sex aids and therapies episode;
"Junkyard Ghost" follows a "ghost hunter" as he
investigates supernatural sightings in an Oklahoma
junkyard; Randi is interviewed by Penn & Teller;
there are deleted scenes and outtakes from several
episodes; a "Behind the Scenes" featurette;
biographies; and trailers of other Showtime
titles, as well as the Las Vegas hotel and casino
where Penn & Teller perform. Please note that the
episode on sex is very explicit. |
