Â鶹Éç

Good morning.

Former US president Donald Trump was booed by his own supporters at a mask-free rally in Alabama over the weekend. His misdemeanor in their eyes? Apparently giving encouragement to republican voters to get vaccinated against Covid. It turns out that this sort of political polarization around attitudes to science and scientific advice, in America is actually a more recent phenomenon than many might think.

Science on its own cannot make political decisions; it can only advise on them. And there do exist communities whose experience of the mis-use of science leads still today to an understandable suspicion. But it is surely inappropriate that reactions to scientific advice become a sort of political badge or token of allegiance?

Over this summer I have been re-acquainting myself with that wonderful, gritty, puzzling, disturbing Biblical Wisdom book called Ecclesiastes, or in Hebrew just Qohelet – The Teacher. It’s pithily quotable: There is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,’ and so on.

As a scientist, the ancient text reminds me of how deep and old is the human desire to seek knowledge of the material world around us: ‘I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the sun,’ runs its introduction. Crucially, Qohelet’s wisdom knows that the physical world acts alike on the rich and the poor, on the wise and the foolish. ‘Whoever digs a pit may fall into it; whoever breaks through a wall may be bitten by a snake.’ In today’s terms, no one escapes the effects of gravity, nor is anyone immune to biological toxins. Neither physics nor biology, nor even death itself, respects human allegiances, and to pretend that anyone can escape the consequences of a careless attitude to nature, or to decide that to be mindful of the material world’s dangers is ‘for other people, not for me,’ is what the Teacher of Ecclesiastes would call ‘foolishness.’

As it becomes daily clearer that the future of our planet, and of our species, depends on listening dispassionately and wisely to the growing body of scientific knowledge about the climate, viruses, and more, no country, the UK included, can afford to respond by tempting short-cuts offered by the colour of political badges.

Show less