When Pop Science Attacks
Generally speaking, trashy pseudo-scientific trivia-pr0n like you might find in your local rag's Science section, a TLC special or on NOVA tends to say in those less-trafficked, generally irrelevant parts of the media-sphere. But what happens when pop science sends a man over the wall?
Friday, 2010-01-08 | On the Internet, On Writing Well, Science
| "Pulitzer Prize-winner Natalie Angier (Woman: An Intimate Geography), a science journalist at the New York Times, was writing an article on whale genetics when her editor suggested that she define the term mammal for her readers and confirm that mammals are animals. That was the last straw for Angier, who nevertheless writes with respect for The Canon's intended audience. She incorporates imaginative metaphors, concise analogies, and jokes into her writing, which result in clear and accessible explanations of complex ideas. " |
| Philips & Nelson Media |
A certain NYT article keeps turning up.
Sometime Wired contributor Clive Thompson just blogged about it today: even Bad Bruce Schneier couldn't resist making a few comments earlier this week. This story--this shit on my shoe, this bad penny--keeps turning up all over the place. As soon as everyone came back to work on the fourth of January, I started seeing this thing in tweets, in unrelated searches (although that probably has more to do with the ultra high Google-visibility of anything published by the NYT than anything else), on del.icio.us feeds, reddit, etc.
Yes, I think it's more than fair to say that Pulitzer Prize winning gazetteer Natalie Angier's thoroughly idiotic "Sorry Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live Too" has been ubiquitous this week.
And normally, at this point, I would exult in the fact that most of the notice that Angier has gotten has been negative: the prose is vapid, the arguments are lazy, the focus is weak, the metaphors clumsy and the author is clearly unashamed of the fact that she is very much that weak-willed 'Boomer who "just can't live without my Starbucks!" and whose disposable income combined, quite famously, with her lazily self-righteous, bourgeois, "me first!" attitude over the last 30 years to give rise to every fully-globalized mega-corporate annoyance from Nike Town and Pitney Bowes to Blackwater and Tamiflu.
But instead of being exultant at the fact that there has been such a widespread negative response to Natalie Angier and her gormless meditations* on the "ethical penthouse" and moral ivory tower that she imagines that vegetarians imagine for themselves, I feel agitated.
I feel agitated because of how seriously so many people seem to be taking this thing.
I want to grab the World by the lapels, give it a good, hard shake (and maybe a quick slap) and shout, "this is a genre piece! It was published to kill some space in the freaking science section of an international news site! It possesses about as much scientific relevance as it does scientific facts, which is to say 'none at all'! Becoming outraged about the opinions of this person--this person whose article purports to discuss 'the lurid Edgar Allan Poetry of' wasp reproduction--is like yelling at a two year old for falling on his ass!"
Simply put, journalistic genre writing is a game of Clue: the category is "pop science", the topic is "auto-immune responses in plants" and the hook is "plants have feelings too". Or, maybe, the category is "human interest", the topic is "homelessness" and the hook is "some homeless people have interesting stories to tell." Perhaps the category is "local interest", the topic is "art gallery" and the hook is "surprisingly you artists' work on display".
To put it even more simply, an article like this isn't much more than a Mad Libs. In Angier's case, she takes a few hastily collected facts and quotes about auto-immune responses in plants, teases some provocative/amusing implications out of the unfortunate metaphors of scientists (who, generally speaking, are very nearly the least eloquent members of the professional class, after IT workers) and slaps an attention-getting lede on it. It's not rocket science. It's not proper argumentation. It's not science. It's not good rhetoric. It's not even good writing.
It's actually pretty bad writing, for whatever that's worth:
Just because we humans can't hear them doesn't mean plants don't howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication--their feedback, you might say--are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help.Doesn't it? Might I?
Her annoying tendency to ask rhetorical questions and put idiotic words into the mouth of the hypothetical reader (hint to other aspiring writers: don't ever write in the second person unless you're damn sure you've got your reader on your side...or you're a text-based adventure) to one side, there's just not a lot to think about or talk about in this article.
Or so you might think.
The most polished and sophisticated rebuttals to Angier's moronic pop science seem to be coming from the Internet's (burgeoning) ethical vegetarian community. Joshua Katcher, a fairly popular blogger, says her arguments are "artless and callow" and and calls her out for "anthropomorphizing plants", among other offenses against Western scientific and rhetorical paradigms. Essentially, Katcher concludes that Angier's gutless, formulaic, pseudo-scientific drivel is not unlike a child's guilty conscience speaking for itself: Katcher locks on to the points faible of her (admittedly circumstantial and non-integral) argument about what constitutes a violation of the will of a sentient being and sites the flimsiness of that argument as implicit evidence that she simply feels bad about being made to feel bad about eating meat.
And, though he's not wrong to accuse her thus or call "bullshit" on her for writing what amounts to a smear piece against ethical vegetarianism, the potential PR damage that Angier might do to "political" (as opposed to "religious" or "medical" or "aesthetic") vegetarians and the hold they've been gaining in recent days on the public imagination is the very least of her offenses against good taste and good sense.
The fact of the matter is that anyone who engages this kind of writing on its own terms--attempting to rebut its dodgy rhetoric, striving to reset the facts into the correct context, struggling to point out the logical aporiae--is only making things worse.
For this is a genre piece, after all, and, in 99 out of 100 cases, that would mean that this, like the rest of the filler copy that breaks up the low-rent advertisements, would simply pass before the eyes of a few drowsy commuters and a handful of indolent cube-dwellers and die a quiet death. But for some reason, this thing "went viral", as they say in the advertising business, and now some reference to this piece of trash seems obliged by some weird, sci-fi law of memetics to show up in my feed reader at least twice a day.
Look: of course it's idiotic to compare an auto-immune response to a nervous system; of course Angier neglects the larger, more important arguments about ecosystem, marketplace and metabolic efficiency; of-fucking-course her tone is patronizing and her generalizations pejorative!
That's part of the form! That's how this formula article has been written, is written and always will be written! That's how they write it in manually photo-copied high school papers, how they write it in university journalism programs and how they write it everywhere else.
And guess what: it's not worth getting bent out of shape about, no matter who writes it or where she gets it published.
Which, finally, brings me to the point of my essay, which is, contrary to my exasperated tone, not to waste even more words refuting Angier. The point I'm trying to make is that treating this sort of bland, formulaic genre-writing as if it were a.) science, b.) a serious "position piece" or some kind of philosophical/political gauntlet-toss only makes it easier for hack writers to win Pulitzer Prizes. Hacks and Hallmark Card writers like Natalie Angier--whose Woman: An Intimate Geography won her a Pulitzer and whose The Canon purports to be a "playful and passionate guide to the science all around us"--are out there selling books and making money because adult people (who should know better) are out there taking them seriously.
And though, as the Great Philosopher once remarked, "I'll never try to stop another American from making money", it really burns my butt when this trash comes across my desk two and three times a day.
Bottom line, the filter has to stay tight--the bar has to stay high--or else why even bother? When garbage proliferates, its stink fills every nostril and sets every eye to watering and discernment--that human facility that medieval thinkers prized above nearly all others--is thrown away in the name of tolerance and some old half-baked idiocy about being "willing to learn from anyone": the more willing we as readers and writers are to consider generic pablum as legitimate essay-writing, the more of our valuable time and energy is wasted on the (admittedly, sometimes enjoyable but) ultimately fruitless task of refusing (at length) to suffer fools gladly.
We should, of course, refuse to suffer fools gladly. But we shouldn't have to write at length about it. It ought to be a quick shake of the head, not 2000 carefully chosen words.
* i.e. her achievement of true mindlessness, in the sense that she clearly has one foot on either side of the line between states that neurologists refer to as "awake" and "unconscious".