Controversial controversies

Imagine some crank claiming that the earth is flat. A ship coming over the horizon? An optical illusion. The shadow of the earth on the moon? The shadow of a flat plate. Traveling round the globe? Going round a circle in a plane.

That, in the eyes of the media who regard truth as "relative," is enough to make the subject "controversial;" imagine that they give him a forum where he adds five other fallacies to the "controversy," which is now "legitimate." He is invited to debate professors of geodesy and astronomy; he answers their objections with more shallow sophistries and accuses them of being in the pay of the travel industry, which makes its profits by maintaining the myth of a round earth.

It is now the geodesists who have become "controversial" and who must defend themselves as having no links with the tourist industry; airline pilots, navigators and astronauts are disqualified from the "debate" by their "conflict of interest." The media give equal time to both sides so as to present a balanced view...

Enough. None of this can happen. But why not? Because people are too familiar with the round earth; and because no ideological, material or other significant benefit accrues to flat-earth promoters.

But take away these two conditions, and you have a "controversy" such as the nuclear waste "controversy." Yes, there are controversies among scientists, such as whether to seal the wastes into borosilicate glass, or perovskite, or carborundum, or other material that will contain them indefinitely. But there is no controversy, for example, over the fact that they are incomparably smaller in quantity, shorter in duration, and easier to monitor than many chemical wastes routinely handled by an industrialized society. Like so many other subjects made artificially controversial, this is open to measurement and to conclusions by uncontested rules of logic.

Obfuscation by artificial controversy is being used in a wider field. The December issue of Commentary brings Lucy S. Dawidowicz's article "Lies about the holocaust," showing that even such widely known and provable facts as the Jewish holocaust can be made "controversial" by a handful of cranks with the help of the ignorant and the dishonest.

The article has nothing to do with energy; but there is one crucial point made by the author in recounting how Northwestern University tried, by elaborate programs, to atone for the falsehoods published by one of its faculty members. "It seemed that they regarded the affair as an unfortunate incident affecting Jewish sensibilities," she writes." .... No one at this great center of learning seemed to regard [these] absurdities as an offense against historical truth...."

This is reminiscent of the "controversies" recalled above. Of course it is of paramount importance to remove the administrative barriers (there are essentially no others) to nuclear waste disposal. But far more important still is the defense of the truth for its own sake.