It’s a bit odd to sit down and write just for myself. Twice a day (sometimes more often if I’ve fallen behind), I research a subject, marshal my facts, dig for a snappy lede and start building the old inverted pyramid. It’s liberating to step outside that rigid structure, but it’s also disconcerting: kind of like walking after you’ve been cycling all day.
I’m continue to wrestle with the idea of becoming a science journalist. I see the need, but the challenges are almost overwhelming. On the climate change issue alone, coverage in the popular media and the blawg-o-sfear has essentially taken on the trappings of religion: one believes what one believes, and people take any argument as a grave insult. Any issue that requires some understanding of the underlying science to discuss meaningfully – 9/11, vaccinations, vegetative states, alternative power, animal testing - have devolved into rigid controversies that seem almost theological. Arguments are by assertion, nothing more. If necessary, people cherry-pick research that they think supports their position, and discard anything that contradicts it.
People on both sides of these debates do that, by the way. I’ve seen blog posters defending the global warming hypothesis with the same sort of blind faith in scientists that my great-grandparents had in the Pope. And just try talking a 9/11 believer out of the proposition that Dick Cheney personally set the thermite charges on the core box columns of WTC 1.
My point is not that I know what the “truth” is about these or any of the other controversies of our time. It’s that everything is just so damn personal. To some extent, I think it does have to do with the fact that American society has always had a strong faith-based element, and that now that religion rings hollow for most educated people, something else needs to take its place. Thus: the culture wars. There is now a liberal and conservative take on pretty much everything: Red science and Blue science, coastal medicine and flyover-country medicine.
I don’t even think that one perspective is “wrong’ and one is “right,” or even that the truth lies somewhere in between: in fact, I think that “let’s split the differences, average it out, and call that the real story” is one of the greatest sins of modern journalism. I think it’s more a case like the old “blind men and the elephant” fable: each perspective sees a bit of it, while missing the bigger picture.
Problem is, I don’t know how to describe the bigger picture, because I’m still yanking on the elephant’s tail myself trying to convince everybody that it’s a rope. It’s important, it’s a question much more interesting than the things I’m paid to write about… but I just don’t quite know how to wrap my head around it yet.
