Destructive Goodness

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the things we human beings do and more especially the way we do them. We have this thing we often talk about called the scientific method. I looked it up on Wikipedia – here’s what it says: The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge, as well as for correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical, measurable evidence, subject to specific principles of reasoning. (I especially liked the last part in bold.)

I started thinking about how some of us humans are willing to fight for and sometimes even die for an un-scientific opinion. This got me to thinking about the difference between something we’re emotionally invested in and… science.

I was born in South Africa and I had a keen awareness when I was growing up that people did destructive things to other human beings. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me but that was the consensus opinion. When asked to prove it they would point to a passage in the bible and show the ‘empirical, measurable evidence’ that black people were inferior to white people.

When the Iraq war broke out there was some debate for a while about weapons of mass destruction. Then we heard that there was consensus - that they did indeed have weapons of mass-destruction… and we went to war. When people spoke out they were called ‘traitors’ and even the Dixie chicks were boycotted. Speaking out against the war was ‘in bad taste’. The ‘empirical, measurable evidence’ was disregarded because intuitively some people felt going to war was the right thing to do. Somehow using destruction to stop destruction seemed OK.

It reminds me of an Aunt I had when I was a child. A giant of a woman (in girth) and the ability to strike fear in the hearts of young children. She was very passionate about us doing good things. Eating all our gruel (food) no matter how distasteful it was, always going to church, never questioning our elders. The way she enforced this was through a stick or a wooden spoon. Later she resorted to locking some of us in pantries for many hours for not eating our food and eventually graduated to trying to shoot her husband to see if he might mend his ways. She missed… and he never mended his ways. All that mattered to her was that people did what she wanted. How it was achieved was immaterial.

So this got me to thinking about another kind of enforcement that I’ve been noticing. In the scientific community it seems that sometimes scientists are ‘silenced’ and their empirical data suppressed. Global Warming has been in the news recently and I’ve heard it suggested that any scientist that questions the data or veracity of global warming is either a holocaust denier, needs to have their position revoked and even that some of them should be arrested. Now I think Global Warming is a crime against humanity but arresting scientists seems a bit harsh.

I’ve been spending some time recently with a number of scientists at various universities around the country. I sat with one of them one day and we were sharing some thoughts on the whole global warming crisis. He mentioned that there is data that suggests some uncertainty as to the effect anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 has on Global Warming. Having satisfied myself that he did not work for an Oil company I asked him what the percentage of man-made vs. natural CO2 was? We did some calculations and verified them with other sources. It came to 0.117%. I was a little surprised to say the least.

“Well that doesn’t mean we’re not causing it – right?” I asked.

“Right” he said. “We could still be.”

So if many climatologists know this, I asked, why wasn’t it discussed openly? He replied that scientists are somewhat afraid for their jobs and their livelihoods. It’s bad politics to say anything. Besides he said – scientists are often concerned that their reputations could be ruined. It seems that questioning could be a problem.

So I thought about my Aunt and the South African government and the Iraq war. And I saw a common thread. The enforcers believing they are doing the right thing and sometimes utterly unconcerned as to how that belief might be enforced. What happens if we are willing to do anything it takes to bring about our ‘perfect’ world? Isn’t the way we do things just as important as what we are trying to do? We all have a value of wanting to preserve our planet - so I started wondering if threatening scientists who didn’t go along with the consensus, was a good thing? That seemed just like any other activity where the end justifies the means. It didn’t seem to fit with the noble aspirations that we progressives aspire towards. Tyranny in the world is a problem. I wondered if this kind of thinking didn’t just reinforce it more.

So these are the kinds of questions I’ve been asking myself recently. We all believe in doing the things that we are so passionate about, but what about how we do them. Which led to the next question and the central theme of my next film: Is it better to do a good thing for a destructive reason or the other way around? And what does this have to do with the scientific method? Is feeling a strong emotion about something - the scientific method?

I’ve spent the last few weeks’ location scouting in Washington D.C. for my next movie project. “Occam’s Razor” (working title), which will begin shooting in summer of 2007 under the banner of my newly formed company, Insight Industries. It’s a political drama in the tradition of “Primary Colors,” “The Contender,” and “Mr. Smith goes to Washington ,” and a feature film that examines the lengths people will go to in order to bring about their vision of a better world. How do Politics, Science and Ethics relate to each other? To learn more about this project feel free to visit my website….

www.markvicente.com Mark Vicente © 2007 Mark Vicente lives in New York and spends his time making movies and studying the human psychodynamic. His aim is to apply that understanding to create motion pictures to shift human perception and consciousness.