Somehow, the sociology of bogus scares seems all the more predictable when you see it play out in a foreign land, perhaps because you can ignore the cultural nuances that give a scare the appearance of legitimacy to natives and keep your eyes on the illogic of the scaremongers.
So, for instance, Americans might listen with some sympathy to an American alternative medicine buff who says he knows, from his years studying with Native American medicine men, that we should avoid all man-made chemicals and instead buy his elixirs. But if we hear a British alternative medicine buff hawking the same wares on the grounds that they worked well in King Arthur's day and have Morgana LeFay's seal of approval, we suddenly see how silly the whole thing is. (By the same token, maybe some of those mobs in Africa who reportedly attack people accused of witchcraft think Americans are crazy to believe in UFO abductions — though I'd rather have neighbors who claim to be abductees than neighbors who think I'm a witch, if I really had to choose.)
England, a land not so unlike our own, has seen many of the same anti-chemical, anti-vaccination, anti-pharmaceutical, and anti-biotech scares that have plagued the U.S. in recent decades. But some things are different over there. While it has often been libertarian and conservative groups that have criticized such scares here, one of the feistiest outfits fighting panic in England has been the magazine http://www.spiked-online.com, which, like their friends at the debate society called the Institute of Ideas, came from the Marxist left.
No, England is not a Mirror Universe or Bizarro World (as in science fiction or Canada). The Spiked folk are just keeping the old, all too often forgotten, left-wing faith in progress. Remember progress? That was the idea — popular with the individualistic liberals of the nineteenth century and to some extent the twentieth-century "liberals" (i.e., socialists) who supplanted them — that technology and new ideas would radically improve our lives, making many aspects of past civilization obsolete. But something went wrong (well, a lot of things went wrong, but this was one of them): the left spent so much of its time in the twentieth century opposing capitalism and all that it wrought that a significant portion of the left became knee-jerk opponents of any new technology or manifestations of industrial civilization. It's easier to gripe and tear down than to create after all, and this Luddite, vandalism-prone faction of the left has taken on a life of its own as the green movement.
The Spiked-Online crowd, without endorsing all that capitalism has done, sticks up for the vilified vaccinations, biotech, and other scientific marvels that are making the life of the common person better. They struggle mightily to prevent the greens from being the only left-wing voice on science and technology issues, and they sometimes get accused of being sell-outs because of it.
So, it'll be a joy to be on a panel of commentators discussing the public's fear of chemicals at Spiked's May 9 London conference on public hysteria called Panic Attack (you can get details and sign up to attend at: http://www.spiked-online.com/PanicAttack), co-hosted by our friends at TechCentralStation.com (for whom I recently wrote an article on this very topic). A bevy of skeptical, rational Europeans will be in attendance, including Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg, so I'll try not to say anything embarrassing and alienate one of the European nations that still likes us.
Objective physical reality and science, which best describes reality, are the same on both sides of the ocean, which is all the more reason to be suspicious of the scientific validity of claims that seem to resonate far more on one side of the ocean than the other. Here, the latest groundless health fear might be mysterious health effects from diet soda, while over there, people may be paranoid about measles, mumps, and rubella vaccinations, depending on the moods and interests of the respective populations rather than any difference in the available facts (though the broad themes of anti-technology paranoia, unfortunately, seem to transcend place and time). Science, which knows no party affiliation or cultural allegiances, is the best antidote.
