Open up their eyes

THIS cogent restating of the case for science, reason, optimism and the other values of the Enlightenment is clear about its opponents. They include anyone who uses alternative medicine, or who buys organic food, or worries about genetic modification, or opposes nuclear power, or likes post-modernism, or doesn't vaccinate their children properly, or distrusts scientists, or believes the Bible, or dislikes global capitalism or thinks that human progress damages the environment. In Dick Taverne's view, all these wrong-headed beliefs are part of the same batty, sentimental mindset that ultimately threatens democracy.

A former lawyer and centre-left politician who was ennobled in 1996, Lord Taverne presents a useful compendium of facts and arguments that are often drowned out by media scare stories and green propaganda. Alternative medicine is at best a placebo, and at worst outright harmful; if it worked reliably, it would not be alternative. Organic food is often worse for the environment than conventional farming. GM crops, by contrast, are hugely promising and rich western nations' antipathy towards them is a mystifying bit of self-indulgence. The precautionary principle in science is either so vague as to be meaningless or a disastrous recipe for stagnation. Globalisation is making the planet richer and therefore cleaner. Global warming will not be solved by greater poverty.

Lord Taverne, who is married to a scientist, expounds and exposes like the barrister he once was. He is gutsy, fluent and ambitious. Rather than fight battles singly, he prefers all-out war on what he sees as unreason. But the result is also flawed. Although there is a common thread to much modern silliness—people who believe in astrology may well be easily convinced that “Frankenstein” GM food is poisonous and that well-shaken water heals—real life is often a compromise between different kinds of irrationality, not a choice between sense and nonsense. To take a small example, many quite sensible people buy organically produced meat, not because they believe in all the principles of the organic movement, or even because they think it tastes significantly better or is always more healthy, but just because they feel queasy about factory farming.

Lord Taverne ducks the problem. There are ethical issues in modern farming, but the market offers very few choices: conventional meat and free-range or organic. Consumers may plump for the latter as the least bad option, not because they are soft-headed green nutcases.

This is symptomatic of the book's greatest weakness: an insistence that the scientific, rationalist world-view is not just mostly right, but always so without exception. This is manifest in its skimpy and simplistic treatment of religion. In attacking a loosely defined “fundamentalism”, Lord Taverne conflates private piety with public zealotry, and appears to assume that deeply held religious belief is always synonymous with intolerance. Evidence-based approaches to life are undoubtedly useful, but what about ethics?

The real question for supporters of Lord Taverne's excellent causes is how to deal with opponents who are wrong but not wrong-headed. If a mother, for example, wants her child vaccinated with individual mumps, measles and rubella shots, rather than a combined one, are doctors wise to refuse on the quite reasonable grounds that there is no medical evidence that multiple vaccines are dangerous?

In Britain, where this was recently an issue of national debate, the medical authorities were so keen not to bow to popular hysteria following the assertion that the multiple vaccine was linked to an increase in autism that they refused to make single shots available. The result was not a triumph for reason. It stoked conspiracy theories, and vaccination rates plunged dangerously. For Lord Taverne, that is all the more cause to bewail the march of unreason. In retrospect, it might have been better quietly to make single vaccines available, which would have defused a popular panic, rather than aggravating it.

Similarly, alternative medicine may have the flimsiest conceptual foundations. But as a placebo, it helps some people recover. That presents an interesting ethical dilemma for doctors who themselves believe in medical science, but who treat patients who don't—something that this forceful but unfocused book ignores.