1984...in 2017?

Life imitating art imitating life. Such is the horrific snake eating its own tail approach of the Trump administration. The ‘Donald’ has obviously read 1984 – sadly he has taken it to be an instruction manual.

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” So went the infamous Inner Party mantra in the dystopian novel. It is the last part which seems most germane – especially when it comes to science. And he seems particularly intent on burying his head in the sand when it comes to the science pertaining to climate change.

In a move that really is the perfect crystallisation of Orwell, staff at the Environmental Protection Agency have been told to freeze all grants, and – worse, so much worse – to remain silent in their dissent. This means that no external press releases will be issued and no social media posts will be permitted. Same goes for the National Park Service (particularly nasty on Trump’s part this, given he has just okayed a couple of oil pipe lines to be burrowed through their turf) and, as I understand it, even NASA.

Associated Press have even reported that the Trump administration have gone so far as to demand that political staff review data generated by EPA scientific studies before public release.  I am aware how easily paranoia can creep in when big change is afoot, but really, can this be anything other than a simple re-writing of knowledge? Post-truth personified. One US climate scientist has called this a ‘control-alt-delete’ strategy seeking to control federal scientists in order to alter science-based policies to fit the administration’s agenda. I can’t see how it could be anything other.

Luckily for those concerned with the open discussion of actual facts – scientists have dissented. Staff from Nasa, the EPA and the National Park Service have all set up alternation ‘rogue’ twitter accounts (check out @rogueNASA, @AltNatParkSer and @ActualEPAFacts) in defiance of this muzzling.

That all this seems to revolve around climate change is bad enough – that it is happening at all is simply petrifying. The sheer unwillingness to engage with the scientific process and consider the evidence is incredibly damaging to the ongoing project of civilisation. Just what must it be like to be so certain in your beliefs that you are happy to discount reams upon reams of counterevidence? Especially with climate change denial – where does their certainty come from? Is it simply an inability to change their minds?

Seems like the kind of question that will be forever unanswerable – which is why I was drawn to a Nature Scientific Reports article titled Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence. This, incredibly enough, is essentially the emerging neuroscience of stubbornness. The US team behind this fMRI study attempted to locate areas of the brain which appear active when subjects were confronted with evidence contradicting their strongly held views.

It turns out (and this is, of course, a simplification) that the subjects with greatest resistance to counterevidence showed increased response in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and decreased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex. Brain structures thought to support stimulus-independent, internally directed cognition – that is to say the kinds of areas involved in a sense of social identity. Individual differences in persuasion were related to differences in activity within the insular cortex and the amygdala – structures crucial to emotion and feeling.

So could it be that there is potentially understandable and predictable brain activity underlying our propensity to dogma – specifically an unscientific world-view? It seems increasingly likely when dealing with beliefs. However a central problem is why climate change denial should be held as a ‘belief’ in the first place? The ways in which our atmosphere changes over time is an overtly scientific question – one that is very difficult to answer (hence the reams upon reams of studies), but a consensus has emerged – belief shouldn’t come into it. If you disagree with the consensus fine, but that has to be based on scientifically robust evidence or your views should simply be discounted.

And so as Trump continues to ride roughshod over scientific evidence, we have to remain hopeful that his dorsomedial prefrontal cortex abates and allows the light of reason to shine in…

Phil Prime, Editor