It’s a hard and scary effort to lift this book again, years after I first read it. It’s so loaded with straw men and hot air; I fear it may burst into flames. I first read it having no clue what its actual content was and found myself believing Crichton’s seemingly straightforward deconstruction of global warming. You totally buy into it and it’s hard to resist the narrative. It’s an easy set-up too; until Kenner appears, all the characters are patently unlikable.
My favorite sequence is the introduction of Kenner and his dossier to Morton (pages 52-56): “He is thirty-nine. Doctorate in civil engineering from Caltech at age twenty. Did his thesis on soil erosion in Nepal. Barely missed qualifying for the Olympic ski team. A JD from Harvard Law School. Spent thenext four years in government. Department of the Interior, Office of Policy Analysis. Scientific advisor to the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee. Hobby is mountain climbing; he was reported dead on Naya Khanga peak in Nepal, but he wasn’t. Tried to climb K2, driven back by weather.” I wrote something like this when I was seven and describing what I wanted to be when I grew up. It’s so clearly absurd, and yet Crichton makes us crave someone like this to enter the novel. He even has a firm handshake! The whole book hinges on us liking this guy, hence the impossibly over-the-top descriptions.
In terms of literary devices the novel is a hybrid political tract and roman-a-clef. We are meant to draw obvious parallels (and thus, conclusions) about real people. Ted Bradley is Martin Sheen/Ed Bagley, George Morton is George Soros, Vanutu is Vanuatu, NERF is Natural Resources Defense Council, Richard Kenner seems to resemble Richard Lindzen, and Evans is the reader. The women in the book don’t seem to resemble much of anything and are almost zero-dimensional, being either ’bright-eyed’, ‘attractive’, ‘beautiful’, or ‘startlingly beautiful’.
Unrelated to anything, what actually surprised me the most in terms of characterization was the deranged depiction of cannibalism. Michael Crichton graduated with honors from Harvard in Anthropology.
What it reminds of the most as a novel is actually Atlas Shrugged, a crumby one-dimensional story, practically designed to be so dull that one ass-kicking piece of rhetoric will convert you and bring color to the world again. John Galt’s speech, ridiculous in any other context, is Kenner converting Evans from wimpy, can’t-get-laid lawyer to righteous, virile hero by rapid-fire didacticism. Like Rand’s tract, State of Fear only works if everyone Evans (as a stand-in for the read) interacts with but Kenner is either a feckless alcoholic or woman defined by her high heels.
To turn to the back matter, notice in Appendix I that Godwin’s Law is in full effect. What happens when pseudoscience is allowed to flourish? Why Nazism and Soviet-style Communism of course. Hitler, Stalin, and the National Academy of Science, intellectual compatriots all. Then after two paragraphs further lumping all these together, on page 441 he argues, “I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial.” i.e. that thing you think I just said, never said it. Then from the last paragraph in Appendix I, “That is the danger we now face. And that is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.” That totally politicized piece of right-wing ax-grinding you just read, an irony-free zone.
From the Author’s Note, page 437, “We can only guess. An informed guess is just a guess.” To bring in the science studies angle, this is part of the post-modern deconstruction of science, an attempt deny a particular research program legitimacy to make claims. He isn’t just after global warming theory, he takes swipes at the science of DDT, ecology, and cultural anthropology. The language he uses to define science in this novel, e.g. “guess”, connotes that these predictions are just plucked from the air or invented for convenience. Of course, an informed guess is a fundamental foundation of science and to de-fang climate science in the way Crichton tries to do is to say science is perforce unable to make predictions or provide genuine descriptions that should impact decision-making.
The novel has the evasive duality of modern propaganda: it’s just a humble novel, one person’s opinion, but Michael Crichton also gets to be a very serious scholar, who researched this extensively. When criticized on factual grounds it morphs to opinion; when criticized as opinion it points back to its facts. When criticized as literature, well, who would make that mistake?
I agree with your assessment of what, exactly, Crichton is taking swipes at because it's way bigger than global warming. I really took issue with his dismissal of the 'precautionary' principle in the 'Author's Message' section because I've usually heard that term deployed more in relation to why we might want to think about carefully controlling environmental toxins (like atrazine) than in relation to global warming -- and I think that is going to be a really important fight in upcoming years because the body burden of people in places like New Orleans is really unfair (and it's called environmental racism).
ReplyDeleteI also couldn't help but notice that what winds up being just a "guess" in Crichton's argument is generally the kind of science that challenges us to really rethink the way we currently live. I think that is part of what is comforting about his book -- it says that the things that we do and the way that we do them are okay. Anyone who says different is just a dunce.
I think that is part of what makes so many of the characters in the novel unlikeable too -- if you are focusing on emissions, for example, it's really easy to point out how really wealthy people who advocate for strict environmental standards are hypocrites. An environmentalist shuttling himself on a private jet is a hypocrite. Someone who thinks that emissions from petroleum fuel sources don't matter to the environment at all is not a hypocrite.
He also does a really good job of painting environmentalism generally, as a call to change or otherwise, as a "special interest" and makes it suspect through conspiracy and derision. It's an upsetting read, for sure. But I think that in a lot of ways the reason that it works is because this kind of rhetoric is a lot more appealing than the potential disasters that people talking about climate change predict -- especially because the solution to global warming is often articulated through simple consumer choices like "change your lightbulbs."
I thought it was interesting how you compared John Galt's speech from Atlas Shrugged to Crichton's style of rhetoric in State of Fear. There is something really powerful in Rand's writing style that even when you disagree, it's hard to argue back against. I've been reading Glenn Beck's The Overton Window this weekend as well, and he fits right in to this grouping. Though he isn't talking about the environment, he is polarizing us to take sides as either friends or enemies - "either your with us or against us." There is no neutral space and I think this is something that Rand, Crichton and Beck all use to their advantage in their writing.
ReplyDeleteDoctorate @ 20? This really is a book for the non-scientists of the world.
ReplyDeleteAnd I wonder who gets the prize for the popular touch--Crichton or Rand? Got to give Aynnie credit; decades after her death, the books still sell and work.