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| State of Fear -- Michael Crichton | | Date Created: Jan 10, 2005, 05:21 PM |
OK, book reviews, like movie reviews, involve a few things that are important. One is that the author of the review has read the book and/or seen the movie. Another is that you should be able to tell from what the reviewer says whether you should bother to read the book (or see the movie). But the difference is that a complete book review can give you the basic information or plot of the book and you don't really have to read it. (A sort of Cliff Notes of the book) whereas this is not really feasible or desirable in a movie review.
Well, State of Fear is a book, not a movie, although it may well be a movie some day. It's a novel, but it has an amazing nonfiction component to it. How many novels do you know that have an "Author's Message", two appendices, and a bibliography? You should read it. And you should read it for a number of reasons, regardless of what I say about it. You're more likely to be like Crichton as you approach the subject of environmental science. You'll enjoy yourself and learn something.
I have read the book. I've also seen and listened to several interviews with the author, Michael Crichton. (One of them is available for free on Audible.com which I also recommend). But more importantly, I get Michael Crichton. I'm practically channeling him. I know where he's coming from, where he's been, how he thinks, and how he writes. Sadly, the main difference between us is that I can't write as well and I stayed in medicine while he bailed on medicine and became a world class author.
Seriously, Michael Crichton is a few years older than I am, graduating from Harvard Medical School in '69, did an internship, and never practiced medicine because his writing was so successful. His first book, Five Patients, is still a classic that should be read by all doctors and those hoping to understand them. One of his early novels, The Andromeda Strain, made a pile of money. Why practice medicine when Hollywood is calling? The point is that Crichton is a scientist first. You have to be to get into medical school and to get through it. It suffuses all of his work. He investigates, reads, studies, and understands a subject from a scientific viewpoint and then takes those issues and makes a novel out of them. I happened to have read some of the same science that Crichton was reading before he wrote Jurassic Park and when I read that book it was perfectly transparent where he came up with the ideas and issues. He just extrapolated them into the a "what if" of the future where science meets science fiction.
So what has Crichton been reading for the last several years? Environmental science obviously. It's clear he approached it as a scientist and with conventional wisdom prejudices but without a political agenda. He calls himself a political agnostic. If you're intelligent, trained as a scientist, and read the research on a subject, you can understand it rather well. To his surprise, Crichton found that the science didn't match the political-legal-media promotion of the application of environmental science in such areas as Global Warming, prediction of the future, and management of the environment. The environmentalists of today are more like fundamentalists or religious zealots. They are certain they know what's right and what should be done and they will sometimes stop at nothing to achieve it. And they certainly can't be argued with, properly evaluate reality, or learn anything that would modify their righteous views. They hate religious fundamentalists but engage in the same sort of behavior in a secular setting. Crichton feels that is a part of human nature that has detached itself from conventional religious beliefs and attached itself to such areas as the environment.
And it's not just a bunch of talk. This is serious real world stuff and involves huge amounts of money and power. And it's all based on fundamentalist type belief rather than real science. My own undergraduate study was on the history and philosophy of science (as it related to the field of psychology) and I documented how scientific understanding gets off course with such things as Freudian psychology. Crichton documents other examples like eugenics and the Lysenko affair in the Soviet Union. Political or, more properly, politicized science is pseudoscience. Today's dogmatic attitudes about global warming will be forgotten, laughed at, or intentional forgotten just as eugenics were by the middle of the 20th century.
So Crichton takes us on his personal odyssey to the understanding of what's really going on in environmental science. And specifically how this interacts with fundamentalists of the left and their lawyer and media supporters and realizes that what these people are doing is promoting fear similar to the way religions use guilt. Thus, the book, State of Fear. Since I've already figured this out through dealing with Skeptics and their issues, the alternative medicine field, the tort litigation field, and the methods of the political left to name a few, it wasn't hard to see how the environmental movement works. Crichton tries to carry you along on the same journey of discovery and reasoning but feels obligated to generate characters who give the full lecture within the context of a novel (not to mention the Author's Message, the appendices, and the bibliography again). The prime example is the character of Professor Norman Hoffman who reminds me of James Randi. If you want to read how a treatise can be fitted into a novel, start on page 456. Another great visual is the portrayal of limousine liberals characterized by one of the main characters in the book who subs for Martin Sheen.
As a thriller, the book is necessarily a bit disjointed and suffers from characters shifting their previous development as well as added characters that are overdeveloped in order to carry the real purpose of the book which is to convince you that everything you think you know about the environment and global warming is wrong. If we are really going to "save the environment", we are going to have to use real science and not the pseudoscience and tactics of the environmental groups of today. There's even a question of whether any governmental body or agency can "manage" the environment. Crichton doesn't make the correlation but it's the same issue as the federal government trying to manage the economy, education, medical care, energy, or any of a number of areas where history shows us that it can't manage such things better than individual choice, property rights, rule of law, and free markets. Crichton is in favor of setting aside tracts of environment but feels we don't have enough knowledge to manage them properly and certainly not global weather.
Still, it can read as a real page turner just like Crichton's other books. It will make a good movie and it will be interesting to see how Hollywood will deal with it. I suspect they will ignore it. Crichton clearly has no love lost with Hollywood and limousine liberals, and he's wealthy and powerful enough to ignore them now. I think you should read it as a classic text in the history and philosophy of science, and as a warning about the direction we're headed with politicized science.
All right. All right. Here's the abstract. We don't have enough understanding of global weather to predict the future let alone make policy decisions about what to do in the present. There are trends but no causality. Even the trends are contradictory. It is much more likely that we happen to be in a slight warming trend and can easily adjust to it. We've adjusted to worse in the past. Things may be different next year or the year after that. There are plenty of things that are here and now that can be addressed rather than some possible effects of some possible trend in the future that we don't understand and can't currently control. Environmental advocacy groups are like politicians. They're really interested in fomenting fear and dependency so they can gain further power and control You shouldn't fall for this ruse.
Oh, and Crichton is now reading about the US in the 30's and the psychology applied to courtrooms in the "post-freudian" era. He better be prepared to destroy conventional wisdom again. I should recommend he read FDR's Folly by Jim Powell and I can give him chapter and verse on how a "jury of peers" has been corrupted. I'll be anxiously awaiting those novels.
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