BPSDB
Guest post by Marion Delgado.
Marion also penned the following brief autobiography:
I am a former talk show host, journalist and high school teacher from central Alaska, and for the past dozen years I’ve been a webmaster in Oregon for both for-profit and non-profit organizations. My background is in math, physics and linguistics. I did some blogging but that blog (a political sci-fi blog) is pretty much in disrepair.
There really is no web presence for me, right now, but a friend and I have reserved greenteaparties.net for future use. The paper I work at has cut its staff in half so everyone there, me included, is a one-armed paper-hanger nowadays, and I’m doing some solar and statistical course-work on the side.
On a couple of science blogs, I commented how eerily familiar a lot of the drummed up conflict and attacks in the last dozen or so years are to An Enemy of the People, a play by Henrik Ibsen about a small coastal Norwegian town in the late 19th century. It’s available at Project Gutenberg here. I note that right here on Greenfyre, commenter Brian Davey said much the same thing.
Wikipedia has a good summary:
Dr. Stockmann discovers that waste products from the town’s tannery are contaminating the waters, causing serious illness amongst the tourists. He expects this important discovery to be his greatest achievement, and promptly sends a detailed report to the Mayor, which includes a proposed solution but this would come at a considerable cost to the town.To his surprise, Stockmann finds it difficult to get through to the authorities. They seem unable to appreciate the seriousness of the issue and unwilling to publicly acknowledge and address the problem because it could mean financial ruin for the town….
The townspeople – eagerly anticipating the prosperity that the baths will bring – refuse to accept Stockmann’s claims, and his friends and allies, who had explicitly given support for his campaign, turn against him en masse. He is taunted and denounced as a lunatic, an “Enemy of the People.”
In a blog post, it’s not possible to convey very much of what makes the actual play so meaningful, and I would hope people would feel inspired to read it, or read about it further, anyway.
The hero, Dr. Stockmann, is not in the same position as, e.g., James Hansen or Michael Mann. While he is monitoring the health statistics, he depends on the lab results from the water samples he sent out of town to a city where they have adequate science facilities. In that sense, the science is not his, he doesn’t necessarily completely understand it, and the results are not his. But he trusts the science because it’s proven itself robust on tens of thousands of occasions and ameliorated disease outbreaks and reduced deaths all over the world. In this regard, he resembles people like US VP Al Gore, and even more strongly, the IPCC as a whole, especially its Working Groups I & II, and perhaps Nicholas Stern and his group.
Neither big business nor the heavy hand of big government are involved. No Exxon is swooping in with an army of lawyers to sue or bribe every responsible figure into silence, and no EPA bureaucrat is there making the tourist industry jump through hoops. The town has to figure out the issues for itself, with almost no proxies, and with less distance and fewer layers of rhetoric between them and the problem. They are a good proxy for all of us.
Ibsen and his protagonist are ideologically scolding democracy and conformity, not greedy businessmen (which, given the circumstances – one business, the tannery, is polluting the water supply, another businessman, the mayor, wants no action because it’s expensive and will harm the economy – Ibsen could have easily done). He’s saying that in some areas, such as science, you have a meritocracy, not a democracy – that one correct person outweighs a thousand incorrect people. This is a persistent denialist trope, usually associated with libertarians, so it’s curious to see it used the other way. It’s important to point out that he’s not arguing against scientific consensus but for it, over letting the people decide matters of fact. I would say this represents the formal skeptical community (not the denialists who call themselves that lately) very well.
Ibsen’s protagonist is good at his actual job, but terrible at communicating, politicking, and networking. He alienates people right and left, is impatient and intemperate and doesn’t like explaining things. He expects the weight of evidence and the authority of science to prevail and has contempt for democracy, everyday commerce, and interpersonal politics. In many ways, he’s his own worst enemy. But he’s also honest, stubborn, unsinkable, a whistleblower and a crusader. In that way, he resembles the somewhat insular science community – good at their jobs, terrible at the part that keeps their jobs funded and let them operate, and at communicating their job to the public. His stubbornness and persistence is reminiscent of James Hansen’s. His radical demonization reminds me of what’s been done to Rachel Carston.
The experience Ibsen had that led him to such a visceral portrayal of this situation was the firestorm of criticism he received after his play Ghosts with its message that Victorian taboos about sex were aiding the syphillis epidemic. It would be analogous to the early controversies around the AIDS pandemic, and to some of the flak vaccination advocates get now.
Ibsen was insightful enough to have his hero cause some of his own problems with his naivete and arrogance and coldness. There’s a definite caution there to never overlook the importance of the politics of a situation, regardless of how right you are. But most importantly, his message is that if you’re sure you’re right, it’s a moral imperative to never give up, because that’s the only way you can be finally beaten.
It could be that this resonates so much with me because I am from rural Alaska, where literally our first industry, polluting resource extraction, has repeatedly poisoned our second industry, tourism. Our then-governor Palin, for instance, acted exactly like the doctor’s older brother, the mayor, first embracing AGW science then turning on it when it appeared too expensive and politically inexpedient. I urge everyone to read it, because the feel of the play is as important as a dry analysis.
IMAGE CREDITS:
[1] – The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
[2] – Wikipedia
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I have to thank you on at least three different levels:
1) For the post, obviously, which is excellent. 🙂
2) For introducing me to Ibsen. I’d heard of Ibsen of course, and I can remember people raving about Hedda Gabler in my undergraduate days, but I somehow never got around to reading it or anything else by Ibsen until now.
I really enjoyed reading the play (so much that I read it twice).
3) For introducing me to Project Gutenberg. I am amazed that I have not come across this before – it is an excellent resource.
I’m not sure that your comparison between Sarah Palin and Peter Stockmann holds (but of course you know Palin better than I do).
I would have said that Peter was against “the science” from the outset (rather like S. Fred Singer & co). 😕
“An Enemy of the People” is superb drama. Ibsen liked to define the hero.
What is missing from the play are the dead bodies. Because it is stage drama, everyone is strident and shouting points of view. If Hollywood produced this, there would be great wealth that quickly transforms into choking, sputtering gore.
Real life is not so clean. The poisons now are invisible multigenerational, but just as perfectly linked to easy wealth. The spring water and the oil come out of the ground – essentially free. The townspeople then and now are just as set in their ways. The Drama persists. Only the setting and age has changed.
Greetings Marion,
Thank you for this.
I really like the questions raised.
I think not giving up is a dynamic process that strives for a comprehensive view of the problem (and ourselves in relation to it) that includes different ways of thinking about the problem. What is right requires a state of increased awareness.
There are at least two movies based on the play.
S2:
My take was that at first when it might have been a relatively cheap fix, he was supportive of his brother – you could close the baths for maintenance or something, and negotiate with the tannery to pay something to the city to dig a settling pond, or something. If people were concerned, you could say the system works, and point out how vigilant the Dr. of the baths was for the public safety.
When it became clear that it would be expensive, bad PR for the town, and be a fight with the tannery, he turned on the science as the easiest target and was suddenly full of doubt and skepticism*.
Palin at first supported climate science – both verbally and actually, financially. The first sign of change was when she started spending Alaskan tax money the other way – for a hand-picked survey to show polar bears weren’t endangered.
She had her finger to the GOP wind, and as the moderate McCain approach didn’t fly with the base, her opinion on the science altered like a graph of the polling data.
*shades of “Jaws!”
The BBC recently broadcast a version of the play that took place in India. Great story, and serendipitous that you post on this right after I listened to it!
I find it odd that even Bush admitted that climate change was real (even though he preferred to let the market guide any change) yet his biggest fans don’t. Still.
I know people like Palin. They are truly creepy. Everyone KNOWS they’re fake, but they are so bubbly and have their fingers in so many pots, no one is able to stay away. They always seem to come out on top, usually because they have dirt on someone when it counts.
Global Warming GOOOOOOD!
It is the Will Of Fod, as this video proves…..
Good post, but a minor niggle:
It’s Rachel Carson.
Sorry, Lars, a typo. Of course I know her name .. that was one of those typos I get because I type everything on my macbook and half the time the pad of my hand mouses for me and moves words around, then I have to go back and manually fix it, and sometimes an extra letter gets left in because I didn’t backspace enough. If I kept a proper bridge to my hands I’d be fine, but that’s tiring 🙂
For those who are interested I found the play on Youtube:
The parallels are indeed astounding!
We have established that more than one writer wrote Ibsen’s plays, and will reveal our data more completely in the book. However, as can be seen clearly from the style of language Ibsen used, one of the writers (called “Ibsen 4” in the study) is clearly speaks danish fluently. And, we believe there is a case that Ibsen 4 was the dramaturg for the group, engineering the plots and mechanics of the plays. To reveal one exciting finding of the study, it is clear that the cabal of playwrights who actually wrote so-called Ibsen’s works were women. certainly, any reasonable person will not find it odd that a woman in that oppressed day and age would both write “Hedda Gabler” and be unable to publish it because of the repression of her gender.
As a young man, Ibsen bought Peer Gynt from a starving poet and set himself up as a pretender to being a playwright. Then, in Germany, he was killed in a bar fight, and a group of young German writers wrote his plays for a while as a joke, eventually hiring an out-of-work actor to impersonate him. My book will decode all of the jokes the playwrights wrote into the plays in code, though anyone can tell Peer Gynt was written by a different author than the one who wrote Hedda Gabler. Further stylistic analysis, date comparisons and research will be provided. See the upcoming TV special.
Alas, I have NOT brought in the comments like the other guest poster.
However, I did get a Shakespeare/Bacon/Earl of Oxford goes to Norway out of it. Is this Hamlet’s revenge?
Er du norsk, dansk, eller tysk, Old Billyam?