Calling “Bullshit” on Ben Stein’s “gotcha” detractors

Genuine, government-certified, bullshit

As you probably already know, Ben Stein bowed out of speaking at University of Vermont’s commencement ceremony.  Apparently, students were upset by Stein’s creationist views, which he aired last year in the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I haven’t seen that movie, not because I had some concerns about accusations that he had hoodwinked people into participating in the film, but because I figured I could wait for Netflix.  Thus, I am not going to comment on criticism that the movie’s argument is logically flawed, though I suspect that criticism has its share of straw men.  I’m just calling “bullshit” on the “ant-science” allegation against Stein.

This “anti-science” characterization of Stein appears to be the principal objection of the students to having him as commencement speaker.  Even conservative bloggers like John Derbyshire, Charles Johnson, and Allah have twisted a comment Stein made in an interview to impose on him the view that science leads to murder . . . a view so obviously bizarre that the dishonesty of the charge should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual reader.  All of these guys should know better, and leave the “gotcha” journalism and defamation to the lefties, of which there were plenty jumping on Stein’s comment.  (I should note, too, that Allah’s comment might be tongue in cheek.)

So, let’s take a look at what Stein said, and see if he’s really “anti-science.”

Here’s the direct quote from the interview:

[S]cience leads you to killing people.

Gotcha! Pretty damning, right?  On that basis, apparently. we’re to believe that Stein wants to do away with all scientific inquiry.  Gosh, I have a hard time believing that. Maybe if I expand that quote a little, I’ll get a better understanding of it:

Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Hmmm . . . OK, he’s still saying science leads to killing people.  And worse, he’s drawing some sort of bright-line distinction between scientists and moral people!  Now, let’s look at the broader context of the interview (for which I have to rely on Derbyshire’s post, since I can’t find a transcript anywhere):

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Crouch: That’s right.

Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Crouch: Good word, good word

In essence, Stein seems to be rebutting the common charge that it’s wrong to let morality “intrude” on pure science.  His comment (and keep in mind I have not seen the clip he was talking about) seems pretty damn obvious to me what he was saying: science alone is nothing.  On the surface, his statement paints with too boad a brush, to be sure. But does anyone really believe that he meant science itself is evil?  He left out only one word that would have clarified his meaning: “alone.”

How is it even debatable that science, untempered by “compassion and empathy” would lead to wickedness?  Ever hear of the Tuskeegee Experiments?

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,”¹ their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all. The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”

Science, untempered by compassion or empathy.

How about this small sampling of experiments conducted at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz:

1. Live vivisections on patients

2. Blood experiments

3. Mengele injected methylne blue into patients eyes to try to change the brown eye color into blue (Gutman & Berenbaum, 1994)

4. Removal of womens breasts (Snyder, 1976)

5. Twin studies where Mengele would inject twins with various diseases to see the effects of them on the human body (Gutman & Berenbaum, 1994)  Mengele had tied the veins together of some of his patients to see what would happen (Gutman & Berenbaum, 1994)

6. At block ten, around 300 women were injected with various caustic substances such as prolusion and progynon (Fischer, 1995)

7. Most of the time if your treatment lasted more than four weeks, you were killed using phenol hexobarbitone or prussic acid (Sofsky, 1997)

8. Doctors punctured children’s livers or removed them (Annas & Grodin, 1992)

9. Doctors tried to brainwash prisoners by giving them high doses of barbiturates and morphine (Lifton, 1986)

10. They had a room full of skulls, body parts and mummies (Fischer, 1995)

Science, untempered by compassion or empathy.

Think about those things the next time you hear someone complain that a conservative is “putting ideology before science” when he opposes embryonic stem cell research or human cloning. Would scientists with a compassionate, empathic ideology have participated in Tuskeegee or Auschwitz?

If you want to see where science without morality can take us in the future, try watching The Island, a movie where an insurance company creates clones of its policyholders so that an “organ farm’ is available to them in the event they need it.  In the movie, society actually condemns this use of science, so it (the science) moves underground (both figuratively and literally).  Fiction, yes, but a harrowing vision of the future.

It is even worse for lefties to make the charge of “ideology over science,” since that side of the political spectrum is far more likely than my side to be against animal experimentation.  If the experimentation regards a household product, they tell us we should do without rather than experiment on animals.  If the experimentation is medical, they claim we have no moral right to sacrifice animal lives to save human ones.  How is this not putting ideology ahead of science?

In short, it is painfully obvious that Stein wasn’t making an either/or dichotomy between folks who are moral and folks who are scientific, and he wasn’t saying that science inexorably leads to murder.  To attribute this worldview to him is dishonest.  He’s simply saying that science alone is not the be all, end all of mankind.

So, everyone — and this includes conservatives — please spare me your “Stein is anti-science” bullshit.