Lysenko and Climate Change Denial: Why its probably a False Equivalency
My opinion of the newspapers is pretty low, but if only to help me along to a conclusion
there was a commentary in the Independent comparing Donald Trump's Climate Change Denial with the Politicisation of Science in the Soviet Union, particularly Lysenko in Biology. This is sadly just an attempt to put Trump and Stalin in the same headline, without giving much thought to the background. Perhaps the market for comparing Hitler and Trump has been so saturated since Charlottesville that the media is looking for new ways to slander him by comparing him to dead dictators both with a higher body counts (and arguably far greater achievements) exceeding terms of office than Trumps current seven months in the White House. In terms of the currency of popular evil in the West, Stalin is either first or second on the list depending how you compare him with Hitler. Its cheap journalism even if it is trying to make an important point about the boundary between politics and science. But it reflects the shallowness of historical parallels and how much they have to do with popular myth rather than history.
There are several reasons why it can be treated as a false equivalency. If we treat the remaining Five Communist states as heirs to Stalin's politicisation of Science, North Korea, China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam all accept the science of Climate Change and are members of the Paris Climate Accord. Even though North Korea is an international pariah for its nuclear programme, it still takes its obligation to deal with climate change seriously (probably due to its vulnerability to famine from climate instability). North Korea
condemned Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement as "the height of egotism and moral vacuum seeking only their own well-being at the cost of the entire planet".
In response to the effort to roll back regulations on Coal, Chinese state media said: “Western opinion should continue to pressure the Trump administration on climate change. Washington’s political selfishness must be discouraged.” “China will remain the world’s biggest developing country for a long time. How can it be expected to sacrifice its own development space for those developed western powerhouses?”
Possibly a
s early as 1945, Soviet Scientists
Aleksei Pavlov and
Vladimir Vernadsky recognised the role of human agency in altering the environment, predating the concept of the Anthropocene (coined in 2000) buy over half a century. Whilst the support of Lysenko's theories of biology was a serious error in Soviet science, it was not representative of Soviet Science as a whole and the complex relationship between politics, science and philosophy in the Soviet Union. Moreover, Lyensko's theories closely resembled those of Lemarckian theories of inheritance of acquired traits over Mandells theories of inheritance of genetic traits. Even though the methods Lysenko employed were primarily political, the dispute over the nature of inheritance has its origins in an older debate over the mechanism of inheritance. By comparison Climate Change denial is built not on potentially falsifiable assertions about the properties of inheritance but on grossly exaggerating the level of uncertainty in Climate Change to the point of attacking scientists ability to reach any sort of conclusion and exploiting the illiteracy of the general public in scientific matters.
Here the equivalency begins to show in that challenges to politically correct science are deliberate deceptions by a foreign enemy. In the case of Stalin, genetics was treated as a "fascist" science for its relationship with eugenics and its association with Nazi ideology. Trump meanwhile accuses Climate Change of being a hoax perpetrated by China to undermine America's competitiveness in the world economy. It is simplistic however to treat them as equivalent because it mistakes the Soviet politicisation of Science as
automatically repressive or reactionary when Soviet science was also capable of advances. The value of the comparison lies, only in discussing the political nature of the methods used and the way in which political interests interfere with and distort Science. Even here, however, there are significant distinctions between the distortion of science in a (a largely) democratic country and a totalitarian state as scientists are not killed by the state for saying that "climate change is real and man-made" even though they did so in the Soviet Union for saying "genetics is real".
In terms of environmental science however, the Soviets would have found much of the Green movement distinctly "reactionary" or even "fascist" for its association with Thomas Malthus,
dating back to Marx and Engels objection to Malthus' theory of population. In this sense, there is a distinct similarity between the anti-environmentalism of the Right and the Left because they would insist on the primacy of Economic growth above "physical limits to growth" imposed upon man by the environment. Both would necessarily favour technological solutions to the problems, especially the Soviets whose ideology included the willingness to consciously and deliberately plan nature as part of their totalitarian scientific mastery over it. In the USSR, this often had its own catastrophic results such as the over-irrigation of the
Aral sea in Central Asia. Here a certain level of technological arrogance is worth comparing.
Personally, I'd think it is however unlikely that even Joseph Stalin would have denied Climate Change as there was nothing to be gained by the Soviets in doing so as China and North Korea show today. Whilst it is true I could well be projecting my own opinions onto history, it is wrong to use Stalin (or Hitler) as short hand for a standard unit measurement of evil. If we are to judge Trump, the value of historical comparisons and parallels is as a beginning rather than the end of the story. The confrontation between Science and Politics is still a product of its time, and its why a Climate Change denier cannot legitimately compare themselves to Galileo's conflict with the Catholic Church over a sun or earth centred universe. Climate Change denial is not being suppressed being it conflicts with Christian Theology, nor is Climate Change Science being suppressed because of its implications regarding human hereditary and the permanence of social hierarchy on a system professing egalitarian goals. Ultimately, Trump is a product of our time, not Stalin's. If you look deeper, the shallowness of the comparison becomes more obvious.
