Galileo's Middle Finger (18 page)

I stuck my camera phone in my pocket and took back my bag from the Secret Service agent. And I stepped onto that little prop plane positively high.

T
HE STORY
I
HAD
BEEN
TOLD
about Mike Bailey and Craig Palmer and so many other white straight male scientists accused of producing bad and dangerous findings, the story I had willingly heard as an academic feminist in the humanities, was that these guys were just soldiers of the oppressive establishment against which we good guys had come to fight.
They
came from old dogma about human nature;
we
came from progress and social justice, and so we had to win. But here I was faced with the fact that not only were these scientists politically progressive when it came to things like the rights of transgender people and rape victims, they were also willing to look for facts that might get them in hot water. They very much cared about progress in social justice, but they cared first about knowing what was true.

That didn’t mean that these scientists (or I, or anyone else) existed without bias. It didn’t mean their work wasn’t shaped and sometimes tainted by politics, ideologies, and loyalties. But it did mean they tried to adhere to an intellectual agenda that wasn’t first and only political. They believed that good science couldn’t be done by just Ouija-boarding your answers. Good scholarship had to put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.

In Missouri, I realized that there’s a practical reason for this order: Sustainable justice couldn’t be achieved if we didn’t know what’s true about the world. (You can’t effectively prosecute and prevent rape if you don’t understand why, where, and how rape happens.) But there was also a more essential reason for putting the quest for truth first:
it was who we scholars were supposed to be
. As the little prop plane flew from Columbia, Missouri, toward the sunrise, of this I was sure: We scholars had to put the search for evidence before everything else, even when the evidence pointed to facts we did not want to see. The world needed that of us, to maintain—by our example, by our very existence—a world that would keep learning and questioning, that would remain free in thought, inquiry, and word.

Nevertheless I knew many of my colleagues in the humanities would disagree. I could practically hear them arguing against me, as if they were seated all around me in those cramped fake-leather seats, yelling to be heard above the churning propellers.
We have to use our privilege to advance the rights of the marginalized. We can’t let people like Bailey and Palmer say what is true about the world. We have to give voice and power to the oppressed and let
them
say what is true. Science is as biased as all human
endeavors, and so we have to empower the disempowered, and speak always with them.

Involuntarily shaking my head, I argued back: “Justice cannot be determined merely by social position. Justice cannot be advanced by letting ‘truth’ be determined by political goals. Only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what is true. Only insanely privileged people like us, who never fear the knock of a corrupt police, could think guilt or innocence should be determined by identity rather than by facts. Science—the quest for evidence—is not ‘just another way of knowing.’ It’s a methodical process of checking each other, checking theory against experiment, checking claim against fact, and fact against fact. It isn’t perfect, but look what it has gotten us: antibiotics, an explanation and a treatment for AIDS, reliable histories of the Holocaust, DNA-based exonerations of those falsely accused of crimes, spaceships on the surface of Mars—hell, the plane we’re flying in now.”

Where would we be, I wondered, if the pope had ultimately won out over Galileo, if he had succeeded in using his self-serving Catholic identity politics to forever quash Galileo’s evidence that the ancients and the Bible were wrong about the Earth? Power plays as morality plays, whether by popes or feminists, are just that—
plays.
I longed for the real world, longed to get away from discussions about “representations” of reality. I longed to pick apart each history to know what’s true, to have my work judged by others, to find evidence that an idea is right
or wrong.

As we flew on, political loyalties that had once felt grounding to me now felt like heavy weights I longed to drop away. There seemed a promise, with this lifting, of being able to see much further, much clearer. Surely Galileo must have felt something like this combination of longing, doubt, and hope when he looked up and realized fully that there were no crystalline spheres of the kind the ancients had said affixed and turned the planets and stars around the Earth. No longer any rigid spheres in his world, just infinite soft space, infinite potential for discovery, for wonder, and for trouble. We are not standing on a still and special earth created by God in the very middle of a perfectly round universe, but on a lumpy twirling planet, a planet bright from reflecting sunshine just like the other planets, circling around a pimpled sun, spinning along in the middle of a comet-littered nowhere, somewhere in a vast and messy universe—a world that might now become known as never before.

No wonder Galileo learned what he needed to learn in order to construct good telescopes. No wonder he spent so many of his days struggling to make those visual portals better and better. Religiously speaking, the pope had the power to stop Galileo from achieving salvation; he could excommunicate him, mark him as a bad soul forevermore. But I suspect that, in his heart and through his telescopes, Galileo had already achieved the kind of salvation that matters to the seeker. He had achieved a philosophy that truly liberated him, and then also us, his enlightened descendants. The pope might claim to gatekeep for God, but in truth, even the pope couldn’t stop Galileo from climbing into the heavens to pull down facts and bring them back to Earth. And Galileo knew that he had achieved not only a physical truth, but a metaphysical liberation of sorts. And so he daringly composed his
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,
pushing Copernicanism and openly mocking those who resisted the new science of searching for
facts.
One middle finger, liberated, pointed to the stars.

 • • • 

A
COUPLE OF MONTHS
after my trip to Missouri, in January 2009, I drove three hours northwest from my home in East Lansing into the snow-covered woods near Traverse City, and knocked on the door of the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. By then I had talked to enough scientists attacked by various progressive activists that I could guess how I would find the septuagenarian Chagnon—engaged in a sort of self-imposed house arrest, treated by his peers as cancerous and contagious, portrayed by his friends as a martyr and by his enemies as a Nazi, disoriented, ineffectively angry, and essentially stuck at the moment his controversy had fully broken. I guessed about right. One might just add to the image a blue and gold University of Michigan baseball cap, an affinity for rambunctious dogs and children, a taste for bawdy jokes, and a seemingly endless thirst for coffee or beer, depending on the time of the day.

I had decided to carefully investigate Chagnon’s story because his was said by scientists I now trusted to illuminate like no other the dangerous intellectual rot occurring within certain branches of academe—the privileging of politics over evidence. Chagnon’s appeared to be a story of what happens when liberal hearts bleed so much that brains stop getting enough oxygen. Although I had no hope of curing this pathology now infecting parts of the ivory tower, I thought it might at least be useful to study and describe an index case.

Long before accusations against him started making front-page news, Napoleon Chagnon had gained worldwide renown for his groundbreaking studies of the Yanomamö, an indigenous people who live in sparsely populated rain forest where Brazil meets Venezuela. Besides living among the Yanomamö and learning their language, myths, and rituals, in the 1960s Chagnon began gathering gigantic amounts of data on Yanomamö genealogies, movement of villages, gardening and hunting practices, infanticide, nutrition, causes of mortality, and on and on. While many of his colleagues in cultural anthropology were collecting and producing largely qualitative data—
stories
of various peoples—Chagnon wanted to make his study as aggressively scientific as possible. He seized all available opportunities to study the Yanomamö
quantitatively,
looking precisely, for example, at how causes of death correlated with age and sex, at protein intake, and at kinship patterns. Indeed, Chagnon was so oriented to the quantitative that he was one of the first anthropologists to bring a computer to a remote field site. This extraordinarily deep and broad work on a relatively isolated indigenous people was a boon for science.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, pretty much every American college student who took an introductory anthropology course learned some part of Chagnon’s work. Many other Americans came to know his work via popular magazines like
National Geographic.
But Chagnon’s growing public fame had been steadily matched by growing infamy within his own field. That was in part because Chagnon had been an early and boisterous defender of sociobiology, the science of understanding the evolutionary bases for behaviors and cultures. Even so, by Chagnon’s time, all anthropologists believed in human evolution, and so his interest in studying humans as evolved animals might never have gotten him in so much trouble were it not for a couple of other things.

First, Chagnon saw and represented in the Yanomamö a somewhat shocking image of evolved “human nature”—one featuring males fighting violently over fertile females, domestic brutality, ritualized drug use, and ecological indifference. Not your standard liberal image of the unjustly oppressed, naturally peaceful, environmentally gentle rain-forest Indian family. Not the kind of image that will win you friends among those cultural anthropologists who see themselves primarily as defenders of the oppressed subjects they study, especially if you’re suggesting, as Chagnon was, that the Yanomamö showed us
our
human nature.

So Chagnon’s characterization of the Yanomamö as “the fierce people” alone could have gained him a fair number of academic enemies within anthropology, especially as cultural anthropologists moved en masse into political advocacy, including feminist and antiwar endeavors. But exacerbating tensions was the fact that Chagnon had the classic Galilean personality, complete with political tone dumbness—that inability (or constitutional unwillingness) to sing in tune. Indeed, descriptions of Chagnon provided to me by both his friends and enemies sounded eerily reminiscent of Galileo: a risk-taker, a loyal friend, a scientist obsessed with quantitative description, a brazen challenger to orthodoxy. When I came along, there remained an open question among Chagnon’s colleagues as to whether he was such a rough character because he spent his formative adult years among the Yanomamö, or whether he was able to study the Yanomamö precisely because he was
already
such a tough character. (Most colleagues guessed the latter.) But no one who knew Chagnon personally imagined him to be the kind of guy who could ever have had a polite academic conversation with colleagues whose political sensibilities caused them to challenge Chagnon’s view of the world.

The battles within anthropology between Chagnon and his detractors had finally exploded onto the world scene when, in 2000, following up on Chagnon’s disciplinary critics, the self-styled “journalist” Patrick Tierney started publicly alleging that, beginning in the 1960s, Chagnon had committed one atrocity after another against the Yanomamö. Tierney called his book on the subject
Darkness in El Dorado
: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon.
The work focused chiefly on Chagnon and James V. Neel Sr., a famous physician-geneticist who had collaborated with Chagnon in South American fieldwork. Neel, who many people knew had been suffering from terminal cancer, died just before Tierney’s work came out, and people said the timing of Tierney’s publications wasn’t a coincidence; a dead man can’t sue for libel. But Chagnon was alive, and Tierney’s claims made his life a living hell, largely because of the decision by Chagnon’s colleagues in the leadership of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) to take Tierney’s book and run with it.

The whole thing really took off just before Tierney’s work was published. In September 2000, two anthropologists who had long been on Chagnon’s case—
Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel
—wrote a letter to the heads of the AAA alerting them to Tierney’s soon-to-be-published work, summarizing the charges made against Chagnon and Neel, and sprinkling on lots of rhetorical pepper, including even an allusion to the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele. The Turner-Sponsel letter opened by announcing, “In its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption, [the scandal] is unparalleled in the history of Anthropology.” Turner and Sponsel then recounted Tierney’s most sensational claims, including that Neel had, “in all probability deliberately caused” an outbreak of measles in 1968 by knowingly using a bad vaccine among the Yanomamö to test an “extreme” and “fascistic” eugenic theory. Turner and Sponsel accused Chagnon of supporting Neel’s efforts by carrying out research that “formed integral parts of this massive, and massively fatal, human experiment.” Additional charges included “cooking and re-cooking” data, intentionally starting wars, aiding “sinister politicians” and illegal gold miners, and—perhaps the most inflammatory claim—purposefully withholding medical care while experimental subjects died from the allegedly vaccine-induced measles. This stuff made the charges against Bailey look like a schoolyard brawl, especially because those against Chagnon were coming from scholars in his own field.

Before the Internet, cooler heads might have prevailed. (Insiders knew this was
hardly Turner and Sponsel’s first attempt
to pick at the big dog Chagnon.) Instead Turner and Sponsel’s juicy “tell all” letter wound up circulated all over the world virtually overnight, and of course the press didn’t dare sit on such a hot story long enough to find out what was true, much less learn the backstory. Most reporters simply reiterated the charges. A headline in
The Guardian
screamed,
SCIENTIST “KILLED AMAZON INDIANS TO
TEST RACE THEORY
.
” The quotation marks likely would be lost on much of the public.