In her essay "Truth and Politics", philosopher Hannah Arendt states that humans only accept truth, as long as the truth is not to their disadvantage and does not interfere with their pleasures. Hannah Arendt differentiates between "rational truth" (scientific and philosophic) and "factual truth" (truth based on human related facts, events, that serve political opinion). She writes that the "truth" of our thinking is only guaranteed, if our thinking is exposed to the general public, taking into account their thoughts respectively.
In an article of Professor Dr. Gerhard Schulze, Chair of Empirical Social Research at the University of Bamberg (Neue Zürcher Zeitung - Dec 31, 2009), I found an interesting quote from Professor Stephen H. Schneider, Climatologist at Stanford University and former scientific advisor of Al Gore (text translated from German): "On one hand, scientists are ethically bound to the scientific methodology. This means that uncertainty and differentiation are always taken into account. On the other hand it is in the interest of every human being to make our world a better place to live. To make the world a better place for everyone, support from every person is needed. Broad support can only be achieved if we reach the general public and make them aware of the problems, our world has to deal with. A large and global community is only reached through divulging scary scenarios, through issuing bald and dramatic statements. Although some level uncertainty always remains, these uncertainties are hardly raised publicly in order to keep the awareness creation and communication process as efficient as possible. There is no standard formula to cover the scientist's dual ethical and moral commitment."
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Citation: "A large and global community is only reached through divulging scary scenarios, ..."
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of the goal of the authors of the greek tragedy (sophokles,..) to capture the audience emotionally and bring the spectator into a state of kaharsis.
Perhaps you can emotionally affect people once in a month but if you do that regularly you will get problems: either you loose your crediblity or people just want not hear you any more because the normal life must go on. I think most media people know this problem.
You cannot achieve " Broad support " in this way.