Just when I wrote here last week that I distrust people who shout ‘fact’ too loud to make a point, Minister of Education, Culture and Science Robbert Dijkgraaf (D66) started it. “I stand for scientific facts and those who proclaim them,” he wrote on Twitteras a kind of creed. The message was intended to motivate the establishment of a new national center for the mission, pardon, and communication of science. All those enthusiastic scientists had to work together more to ensure that everyone in museums, schools and on market squares hears the good news and no one has wrong thoughts.
A conversation about this at Beau, with Beau van Erven Dorens, became a textbook example of what goes wrong when you make an excellent top scientist a minister. People immediately stop asking critical questions when confronted with such unadulterated brilliance. You have to be quite a radicalized yoga mom to argue with it. I mean, the guy is a theoretical physicist. How on earth do you come to know better? Rather ask him what the solution is to our problems. For example, what does Professor Dijkgraaf think, as Van Erven Dorens asked, about what we should do about the chaos at Schiphol? Oh well-wrapped one, deliver us from evil.
While there were quite a few questions to ask about this D66 plan. For example: for which problem exactly is this national communication center a solution? Dijkgraaf argues that the once unshakable status of science is under pressure. Earlier in a high mass for Leiden University Dijkgraaf complained about all those people who prefer not to open the door when “knowledge knocks on the door.” How there are still individuals who refuse to accept “the most tried and true way to the truth.” How they questioned facts, and threatened the “bringers of those facts.” How „the vaccine [werd] labeled as untrustworthy, a poison, part of a global conspiracy.”
Now the confrontation with dissenters can of course be traumatizing, but let’s take a look at the studies on Dutch trust in science. I quote conclusion 1 of the latter Rathenau Report: “The average confidence in science has increased from 7.07 in 2018 to 7.42 in 2021.” I look at the corona dashboard of the central government and see that 13 million people were voluntarily vaccinated last year. It may well be that disinformation “spread the earth as quickly as the virus particles”, as Dijkgraaf said in his lecture, but in the Netherlands there is simply very little evidence that that information had much persuasiveness.
If the campaigns of conspiracy theorists get so little footing, Professor, why do you think communication from your national center is going to change much? Do you think that after a ‘dialogue’ with a funny math girl on the market, Jürgen Conings suddenly thought: that Marc Van Ranst is quite a cool pear. I put my machine gun away again?
Do you know that there is also little evidence for this: that distrust in science can be fixed with correct information. As much as we’d like to believe it, lack of confidence isn’t caused by a lack of knowledge or exposure to scientists. In fact, it just doesn’t seem that people have much of a problem with scientists, but are mainly bracing themselves against the increasingly escalating balance of power in the world. It’s not about mRNA vaccination technology, it’s about the pharmaceutical industry. It is not about genetically modified crops, but about Big Biotech and Monsanto. It’s not about 5G, but about Chinese infrastructure and questionable information technology. It’s about billionaires who use their own wealth to ‘improve’ the world on their own initiative. Nothing at all that a bunch of nanotechnologists or molecular biologists can straighten out on a market.
But that wasn’t what Beau was asking. He asked to this D66 director: you are a reliable scientist, we trust you, why not a ‘Dijkgraaf.platform’? That’s not such a bad idea, is it?
Yes, Beau, that’s a very bad idea.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 28, 2022