Yesterday in my Masterly science communication—treating your opponent with respect post, I talked about ‘expert/institutionally authoritative’ groups heaping scorn on their opponents, today I’m going to focus on scorn going in the other direction, i. e., scorn being heaped on experts/institutional authorities. I found an example of this in Slate magazine in a piece by Jim Thomas, from his article, The Sins of Syn Bio: How synthetic biology will bring us cheaper plastics by ruining the poorest nations on Earth,

Here’s a grim prediction to chew on. This biotech craze dubbed “synthetic biology”—where hipster geeks design quirky life-forms: That technology is going to wind up costing lives—likely a lot of them. I’m not suggesting a direct kill by rogue viruses. These will be economic deaths. The dead will not be noteworthy: farmers, pastoralists, and forest dwellers who live in poor nations that depend on plant commodities.

Generally, writers have nothing to do with the  headlines for their articles so I won’t lay that ‘sin’ at the writer’s door (I admit it’s not a great pun). Let’s start with the second sentence where we’re introduced to the “biotech craze” which is synthetic biology, followed by “hipster geeks,” presumably scientists, with “quirky life-forms” close behind, and, finally we’re informed “That technology is going to wind up costing lives,” probably lots of them.

That’s a lot of scorn and derision and it’s followed by a dire prediction of death, all in the same sentence. We’re given a respite of sorts in the next few sentences and then the coup de grâce in the final one. The deaths, we’re told, are not “noteworthy” and, by implication, the “hipster geeks” are condemned as casual murderers.

The writer is a member of The ETC Group, a civil society group, that publishes lot of valuable information and research, unfortunately couched in precisely this fashion. The article is publicizing the Future Tense event that I mentioned in my Mon., Jan. 31, 2011 posting, Can governments keep pace with science and technology? Given the two articles I’ve seen (the first one was by Robert J. Sawyer, a science fiction writer), I imagine discussion will be lively.

There is an argument to be made that groups perceived as less powerful, e.g. civil society organizations such as The ETC Group as opposed to a government agency such as Environment Canada, must provoke the institutions they want to change. This leads me to sometimes wonder if The ETC Group is more moderate/respectful in its ‘behind closed doors’ and/or face-to-face discussions than it is in its publications and articles (the ones I’ve read).

In any event, the scorn goes in both directions and I’m inclined to think that it’s used too freely, i.e. constantly, as a weapon. With regard to the astrology/astronomy discourse mentioned yesterday, it is possible to disagree about astrology’s merits without deriding astrologers. As for the strategy used by The ETC Group (a handy example, there are many others doing precisely the same thing), the discussion is couched in a fashion I find relentlessly rude and, ultimately, tiresome. Too many use this approach with the consequence that many are retreating. I point to Canada’s historically low voter turnouts in the last few elections as proof of the Canadian public’s weariness with the current tone of public discourse. (I believe this phenomenon of low voter turnouts has been observed elsewhere as well and attributed to the same cause.)