Fear of Susceptiblility?

Overall, my reaction to "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton is a Utopian thumbs up! and a real world sneer. Yes, I did find myself being pulled into Crichton's book so much that I had to stop myself, do some global warming research, and reaffirm my beliefs in opposition to Crichton's superbly masterful text. However, many of the people I know would take up the ideas within a text like Crichton's without trying to found their own opinions through individual research; the problem with such a biased text in my view.

I think what SoF evidences for us is not necessarily that humans are in a perpetual 'state of fear', as he seems to make argument in favor of, but in a necessary 'state of susceptibility'. I feel he reinforces this notion in the last part of his Author's Message with his point, "Everybody has an agenda. Except me." (573). The first time I read that I laughed, thinking Crichton was serious, which is amusingly hypocritical since he just spent the last 572 pages, in my opinion, making a case against global warming. But the second time I read this section, I believed he was reminding readers that everyone has an agenda, and whether the agenda is obvious or not, it is always present, no matter how seemingly conclusive or firmly grounded their side of the story is.

As for me, I have always found it odd that we, as a collective, argue about 'global warming'. I feel the term is not realistic, especially for Americans, to use because, and I know I sound like a bigot, 'it doesn't work for stupid people'. In many ways, I feel like this naming ideology completely backfired, and continues to backfire on the very scientists who hoped to alert others of the potential problematic aspects our excessive pollution could be having on our environment. The emphasis is taken off of the pollution and put on this idea that, fundamentally, we are making the globe warmer. I hear, all the time, "It is so cold today...I hope global warming kicks in soon and warms us up!". Such statements evoke similar feelings as when I hear "AIDS is just a hoax!", usually in reference to information akin to House of Numbers documentary, found here http://www.houseofnumbers.com/site/about-house-of-numbers/trailer, that argues that HIV/AIDS is nothing more than another way for scientists to raise funds.

In my opinion, the core motivation for both people's resistance to ideas such as global warming and the reality of HIV/AIDS is laziness and fear. It is easier to find evidence against a hard issue, as Crichton says "And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed," (579), than to take the time and effort to research an issue and learn the facts to such an extent as you are able to found your own opinion on it. It is my opinion that this was true of eugenics, is true of climate change/pollution, and is especially, frighteningly true of HIV/AIDS.

Crichton is Full of Himself

Oh, boy. Where to start with this one?

I should preface this by saying that I really enjoy Michael Crichton's novels. They are usually excellent for shlocky beach reads or perhaps something to take with you when you travel. In other words, they’re good for when you’ve got some extra time on your hands. I’ve heard his novels referred to as the science fiction equivalent of “bodice ripper” romance novels, a statement with which I don’t disagree. I still like them, however. Seriously, what’s not to like about “Jurassic Park”? The guy’s good!

“State of Fear” is no exception. As the dust jacket of my edition says, “State of Fear” is an “exciting and provocative techno-thriller”. International espionage, Eco-terrorists, killer tsunamis, annotated bibliographies: this stuff is science fiction gold!

Except for the part about how it isn’t entirely fiction. And the part where Crichton asserts: “Everybody has an agenda. Except me.” This has to be the most horseshit I’ve ever seen packed into six words.

Regardless of whether or not Crichton has got his facts straight, he chose to go after some politically charged subject mater. Thus, “State of Fear” is undeniably a politically motivated novel. Remember, apolitical is still a political stance. Essentially, Crichton attempts to convince the reader that global warming is something that’s too complicated to fully understand. Therefore, we should, according to Crichton, not give credence to any supposed authority, scientist or politician, about the nature of the beast. But we should listen to him. Because Crichton says that he knows that he doesn’t know, which is just as good as knowing, no?

I think Crichton’s choice for the name of the terrorist group in “State of Fear” is also a good indicator of the author’s political stance. Crichton has an eco-terrorist group, the ELF, engineering completely implausible environmental disasters to coincide with another environmental group’s speech tour regarding the impending doom global warming will create. Crichton’s ELF is supposedly modeled after the non-fictional version. Crichton has really gone after some low-hanging fruit equating this real group to the one featured in “State of Fear”. By perpetuating the stereotype that environmentalists are all just a bunch of dirty hippies and Ed Abbey quoting nut-jobs, willing to blow shit up at the drop of a hat, it makes it much easier to discredit “their” theory of global warming.

Given the nuanced scientific tone that Crichton gives his prose in “State of Fear”, it’s difficult for me to understand why Crichton didn’t simply write a journal article and submit it for peer review. This is especially confusing, since he includes an entire querulous section of the appendix devoted to the evils of pseudoscience, as seen through the lenses of eugenics and Lysenkoism. I think if you are going to talk the talk, you should be prepared to walk the walk. Crichton’s celebrity affords him no exception in my book.

State of Fear, Question of Truth

May I just begin by saying, after reading about 250 pages of State of Fear … this novel is ridiculous! I’ve never read anything by Michael Crichton, and tend to steer clear of the cheap action-packed novels, pretty much any book with the words “gripping” or “thrilling,” but having said this, I thoroughly enjoy the story. The novel compiles one crazy event after another, killing people flippantly and in the strangest ways (the paralysis death and the lightening deaths being my favorite). I realize we are supposed to be focusing on the issues of science with this one, but I figured I’d just get all of that out of my system before delving into the topics of “fact” and fear. Seriously – ridiculous!

I was thoroughly impressed at Crichton’s ability to use “fact” in such an effective way, in such a convincing way. It is clear he has done his research, with his constant name-dropping of programs and organizations, to the point where I had to stop myself from googling Morton or Evans just to make sure they didn’t actually exist. His brief but informative descriptions of places, people, or organizations were also incredibly well written – for example, when describing Evan’s firm building, he says “They were a forward-looking, socially aware firm” (90). This is such a great short description of a place, a description that basically tells the reader exactly what they need to know about the building, the people, the work the firm does, etc. This speaks more to the literary styles he employs rather than the science he is speaking of, but the descriptions and language are so compelling and help shape the novel, a nice delivery of such an interesting story. He paints disaster and catastrophe in beautiful ways.

Someone already has brought up the quote comparing this book to The Da Vinci Code, which is actually something that I was thinking about while beginning to read this novel. While that book caused people to actually doubt their own faith, this book definitely could cause a person to doubt the science around them – especially with the knowledge that the only information we will ever have on anything major (in medicine, environmental sciences, etc.) we receive relying on those who research and expose it. Keeping this in mind, convincing yourself that any of this information is a hoax, a scam to cause people to change their behavior, collect money, create more surplus of supplies, whatever, is so easy even without novels like this to guide the doubt. I mean, beyond the numerous footnotes and references, there are about four pages of charts midway through this novel!

This reminds me of when we were talking about Nexium (pretend I put in a trademark symbol here). Not that Crichton ever said any of this information is true, or that he is stating true facts or potential hoaxes, but this is the basic sort of idea of misinformation, and what really is “truth”? The makers of Nexium, or any drug really, can trademark words, able to state whatever it is that they want about their drug or service, and as long as there’s a little symbol after the statement, it can literally say whatever they want. Much like in the story when they talk about the global warming hoax, it is possible to put out anything and label it as “semi-truth”. It’s a plausible thing – in fact, my parents were on the global-warming-doesn’t-exist train for a while, the information we get about that was so confusing and strange when it first started coming out (that I remember hearing about it, not when it was first discovered). This book demonstrates the manufacturing of truth.

An Irony-Free Zone

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?

Crichton: Using Literature, Using Masculinity

Latour writes, “To disbelieve or, so to speak, 'dis-buy' either a machine or a fact is to weaken its case, interrupt its spread, transform it into a dead end, reopen the black box, break it apart, and reallocate its components elsewhere” (29). This is one of the primary impacts of Crichton's novel—he is actively encouraging readngs to 'dis-buy' global warming. We've read about the importance of literature in this regard and Crichton 'martials' resources with ease—telling readers at the beginning of the novel that while it is a novel with fictional characters, corporations, institutions, and organizations but that “...references to real people, institutions, and organizations that are documented in the footnotes are accurate. Footnotes are real.” It's interesting that so much attention has been paid to Crichton's deployment of footnotes in this text because a huge part of the argument of the narrative is that even the most widely used sources may be biased or wrong. Crichton attempts to fix this, in my opinion, through his 'author's message' at the end of the novel, which closes with the statement, “Everybody has an agenda. Except me” (721). He also follows this with a section about why politicized science is dangerous, as though there can actually be a space outside of the political—I think that the Latour readings we have done regarding black boxes and the production of scientific knowledge illustrate that we don't really have a non-political space to operate in. Science-in-action is always political and saying otherwise does not change this fact.

Crichton's use of the character Peter Evans is remarkably deft and convincing in his anti-global warming construction because it provides us with someone that we would consider to be reasonable, well-educated, and successful. The point of Evans is to filter the information provided by characters like Kenner—he offers the rebuttals that I want to and is proven to be wrong again and again. Furthermore, Evans increasing unease with global warming parallels his transformation into less of a wuss and more of an action hero throughout the story. This is evident through Sarah's changing opinions of Evans. “She was disappointed with him and not even sure why. Probably, she thought, because she was nervous and wanted somebody competent to be with her. She liked being around Kenner. He was so knowledgeable, so skilled. He knew what was going on. He was quick to respond to any situation” (403). After many different people make attempts on Peter's life, he has a change of position--”If someone tried to kill you, you did not have the option of averting your eyes or changing the subject. You were forced to deal with that person's behavior. The experience was, in the end, a loss of certain illusions” (449). This change in his consciousness is matched by more responsiveness from women—notably Sarah, who “...noticed that Evan's voice had lost its boyish hesitancy. He was no longer protesting everything Kenner said. He sounded older somehow, more mature, more solid” (450). Folding the knowledge that Crichton is attempting to argue for, that “global warming is a hoax,” in the the character development and narrative structure in this way also makes it the right and proper path of a protagonist (which adds more force to his argument). It also constructs Peter Evans as a person who achieves a true Cartesian masculinity.

Crichton and "facts"

This is the second (actually, technically third) cheesy action novel I've read for school in the past few weeks and I'm afraid I'm beginning to develop a strange sort of affection for them, with their over-dramatic covers and the looming letters of the author's name spilling across the front.
Michael Crichton's name certainly covers a good part of the front of the book and, as we were discussing in another one of my classes, it's like the author's name sells as a brand and that the author's name is more important than the title. Michael Crichton is a sort of brand, with his pseudo-science novels and and familiar feeling plots. I haven't read any of his books before but I have seen the movie Jurassic Park about ten thousand times so every event and plot turn brings up this feeling of deja vu. However, Jurassic Park never made me doubt the world quite as much as State of Fear has.

A blurb from the Wall Street Journal in the front of the book sets things up nicely, in my opinion. "The Da Vinci Code with real facts, violent storms, and a different kind of faith altogether... Every bit as informative as it is entertaining. And it is very entertaining." So Dan Brown writes total fiction while Michael Crichton has "real facts?" What exactly are "real facts?" What are fake facts? Clearly, I don't know. I'm just like Peter Evans, pissed off that everything he knows about global warming appears to be wrong.

Crichton's use of rhetoric about facts is really interesting. Anytime someone opposes the information proving global warming is not happening, that character lacks "real" scientific data. Evans, for instance, is only a lawyer. Crichton and his perpetual love for bad-mouthing lawyers gives Evans no background knowledge to support his believe in global warming. Kenner adds to this on page 218 in my edition (2004 Avon paperback) stating, '"Now you know how legitimate scientists feel when their integrity is impugned by slimy characterizations like the one you just made. Sanjong and I gave you careful, peer-reviewed interpretations of data. Made by several groups of scientists from several different countries. And your response was first to ignore it, and then to make an ad hominem attack. You didn't answer the data. You didn't provide counter evidence. You just smeared with innuendo."' Ouch. If Evans were able to come back with savvy example which could be presented in the way Kenner presents his information, this would be a much complex debate. Instead, Evans just says, "Fuck you," and is meant to look like an asshole lawyer once again.

But of course Evans is going to reply with a "Fuck you." I probably would to. Latour has a nice little bit about this in Science in Action: "Faced with the thing itself that the technical paper was alluding to, the dessenters now have a choice between either accepting the fact or doubting their own sanity - the latter is much more painful" (page 70). I couldn't agree more. Kenner's little dialogue sends me spiraling back to my discomfort in my high school sciences classes, when I was supposed to measure out vaguely dangerous liquids and add strange chemicals to them, experiments I was convinced were always on the brink of exploding in my face. My skills in science labs are pretty poor but I'd like to think my knowledge of science "facts" are a lot stronger. However, reading Crichton and having him tell me that no, actually all that data you saw in high school about global warming is a hoax makes me feel a little unhinged. It's mind-boggling when he throws those footnotes at you and is says, "THESE ARE REAL." How the heck am I supposed to combat that with a very weak background in this stuff? It's a constant uphill battle and the not-so enjoyable part, reading his book and fighting to keep from being convinced. Crichton is just so seductive with his writing that it's eerie the way he throws anti-global warming "facts" into the action. I wonder if it would even matter if I had facts, when it's so easy to say, "No, those weren't collected properly" or "No, those aren't peer reviewed" or "No, you're not a legitimate scientist." What counts as legitimate? What's properly collected? Who even knows?

Crichton thinks he does. And that's the troubling part...

black boxes

First off, I just need to get this off my chest – this book is ridiculous. I found myself laughing out loud at so many points – the seductive woman just killed this guy! This guy just died by falling off a cliff! Now we’re in Antarctica and someone else is trying to kill us! Now we’re back in Arizona and someone is controlling the WEATHER to kill us!

Okay. That being said, through telling an absurd story, he is making some insightful comments of science and its relation to economic, politics and society, and how scary they can be. And while I’m mocking this type of novel, the fast paced, action packed narrative style makes it incredibly simple to read, and therefore incredible simple to digest the more pertinent issues that Crichton is presenting to the reader.

In the very beginning of the novel when Evans, Morton and Drake are in Iceland to visit with geologist Einarrson, Drake attempts to persuade the scientist to use certain “soft language”, let’s say, in the beginning of his paper that would not make his argument sound anti-climate change (read: detract evidence from his own interests, his own organization, his own conference, his own $$). Einarrson refuses, stating, “How the information is used is not my concern. My concern is to report the truth as best I can” (page 56). Drake believes this to be a noble, yet impractical opinion. This argument is telling. Einarrson believes that as a scientist, his main goal is to report. Drake, however, does not believe it is possible to simply “report fact” without having it be used politically. Drake is probably right.  This passage, and this book as a whole, attempts the reader to question where our “facts” are coming from. Crichton is demonstrating that each facet of society has its own set of interests, and each facet will attempt to use facts to their advantage in order to promote these interests.

Weeks ago, we discussed the black box effect that especially can result from science. Once something is published, it becomes real. People no longer question where it came from nor if there are different studies that could possible refute it. Instead, it is simply accepted at face value. While Crichton would not use this language, he is attempting the reader to start un-black boxing all they think of as fact. He is urging us to start seeing the different relationships at play that surround each issue of science that we accept without questioning. He wants the reader to comprehend the political, economic, and social factors that all are potentially invested in science.

That’s why he includes the issue of eugenics in Appendix 1. He writes, “What drove it was concern about immigration and racism and undesirable people moving into one’s neighborhood or country. Once again, vague terminology helped conceal what was really going on” (727). While he makes sure to specifically state that he not comparing climate change to eugenics, he uses it as particularly scary example of how what really are social, political issues can instead become issues of “science” to make them sound more real and factual.