Our President Doesn’t Understand Science, Or How Science Works

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This is a problem across our society, a major problem. Perhaps it’s a significant problem in every society, but at least some other societies more implicitly trust people who understand science to be leaders in society. In the US, the issue is that we’re making one disastrous decision after another due to our president and others in country leadership positions not understanding science.

Naturally, hopefully, we all learned about the scientific method in elementary school. But that’s like learning A, B, and C. There are a lot more letters to learn in order to learn the alphabet and then to learn to read. I got a bachelor’s degree in sociology and environmental studies, and then a master’s degree in city and regional planning. I had to take some statistics courses in both of those cases. Without a doubt, I am not a statistics or science expert, but I learned to greatly respect what those people do and learned to be very careful about a natural tendency of humans — assuming that what we think and feel after thinking about something for a few minutes — or even days and weeks — is as valid as what scientific experts in the field think after massive, rigorous statistical testing and reviewing other professional research.

In the US, for some reason (there are definitely some known reasons for this that I won’t get into here), Americans are more and more comfortable not trusting scientific experts — or even eager to not trust them. It has been happening in field after field. It has been getting absurd and ridiculous, and it is going to harm our society. Take that back — it is surely already harming our society greatly.

Our current president, Donald Trump, has demonstrated for decades that he doesn’t understand science. He has developed hunches and agendas against certain scientific understandings. He thought the push to get asbestos out of buildings was a mafia-driven scam. (Naturally, he was not eager to spend the money to clean up his buildings and build safer buildings back when he was in the business of building things, so maybe he did trust that asbestos was deadly but just didn’t want to deal with it. however, even as recently as last year, he was trying to get the ban on asbestos rewritten!) He has been strongly against scientific conclusions regarding the harms of pollution and climate change, giving much more favor to his feeling that wind turbines are ugly and climate change is a Chinese hoax (where he got such a stupid idea, I don’t know, but it seems to be one of his stronger beliefs). Now the US is pulling out of a climate organization the whole world has been a part of since 1992 — for more than 33 years. It’s one of his peak moments of anti-science behavior, along with pulling out of the Paris climate treaty in his first term in office.

Trump also has an anti-vaccine non-scientist leading scientists at the US Department of Health and Human Services. Naturally, this demented gym rat is going against common scientific understanding and safety recommendations. I was working on this article in response to the UNFCCC news, but before I could even write most of it, this happened.

The fact is: Trump, like many others, doesn’t understand science at all. He doesn’t understand how scientific and statistical work bring us to conclusions that go a universe beyond his gut feelings. And he is taking sledge hammer after sledge hammer to the United States by ignoring science and disregarding what scientists say. Even compared to George W. Bush, this is not normal. It is far beyond any anti-science decisions Bush made.

In regard to the UNFCCC news, Sierra Club Executive Director Loren Blackford provided the following statement:

“Donald Trump may talk tough, but time and again he proves incapable of leading. […] On the one-year anniversary of the wildfires that stole dozens of lives, thousands of homes, and the sense of safety for millions as it reduced Los Angeles communities to ash, Trump is making it clear he has no interest in protecting Americans from the rapidly increasing impacts on our health and safety of the worsening climate crisis. This is not leadership, it is cowardice.”

Ignoring science has consequences. Having leaders who both don’t understand science and don’t respect science has consequences. But who is going to hold him accountable? People who vote also don’t understand science and don’t respect science far too often as well.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how we resolve this. Many countries provide a college degree to young adults for free. That should help more of the population to learn the ABCs of science and statistics. But that’s not happening in the United States.

Are we merely destined to fade and decline as a society? As Wikipedia summarizes, “Manifest destiny was the expansionist belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand westward across North America, and that this belief was both obvious (‘manifest’) and certain (‘destiny’). The belief is rooted in American exceptionalism, romantic nationalism, and white nationalism, implying the inevitable spread of republicanism and the American way. It is one of the earliest expressions of American imperialism.” Have we become so complacent and arrogant now that we are destined to crumble, like all empires do? Instead of searching more deeply for truth and trying to democratize and revolutionize how society operates, we are more and more focused on going backwards — fighting science, fighting diversity, and fighting compassion.

It’s hard to see how we turn this around. But I also think we have no other good choice than to try.

What are your thoughts for how we bring more scientific understanding — or at least more trust in scientists — back to the United States? Ignoring the issue of the anti-scientist in the White House, how do we build up support for science more on the grassroots level?

Featured image: “Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0 license), via Flickr.