Irrlärornas tid

Vi lever i irrlärornas tid.

Den postmoderna kungstanken att det inte finns några sanningar har lett till att inte minst medierna betraktar alla påståenden som likvärdiga.

Det utomordentliga radioprogrammet Medierna i P1 hade nyligen ett mycket tänkvärt inslag om hur SvTs program Debatt likställde förnekande av mässlingsvaccineringens betydelse med uppfattningen att vaccineringen är en central folkhälsopolicy.

I USA har just misstron mot mässlingsvaccinering spritt sig och därmed mässlingsfallen. Detsamma rapporteras nu från Tyskland. Jag gissar att det bara är en tidsfråga innan vi har detsamma här i Sverige.

EUs helt förvirrade hantering av den s k GMO-debatten är en annan illustration till hur vanföreställningar vinner acceptans och sprids bara på grund av att det finns de som sprider föreställningar om GMO-födors farlighet.

Michael Gerson skriver i Washington Post idag om detta med fokus på hur en del stora företag medvetet marknadsför oseriösa uppfattningar.

Pass any Chipotle these days — and it is my gastronomic preference to pass rather than enter — and you will see signs claiming credit for removing ingredients that contain GMOs (genetically modified organisms) from the menu. It is the first big chain to do so, and probably not the last. The business press has pronounced it “a savvy move to impress millennials” and a “bet on the younger generations in America.”

This milestone in the history of fast-food scruples (and of advertising) is also a noteworthy cultural development: the systematic incorporation of anti-scientific attitudes into corporate branding strategies. There is no credible evidence that ingesting a plant that has been swiftly genetically modified in a lab has a different health outcome than ingesting a plant that has been slowly genetically modified through selective breeding. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the World Health Organization have concluded that GMOs are safe to eat. This scientific consensus is at least as strong as the one on human-caused climate change.

“They” say. “We” know.

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A certain kind of trendy parent believes that everything natural is preferable, forgetting that natural levels of mortality from childhood diseases are high. It is the same ideological impulse — the belief that nature is pure and artifice is unwholesome — that causes corporate leaders to spout pseudoscientific nonsense about GMOs, while employing the issue as a cultural marker. 

Although it may be rational for people to conform to the views of their team, the problem comes when those individual decisions are tallied up. As opinions on climate have become a cultural identifier, the prospects of legislative action on the issue have faded. When it comes to vaccines, herd ideology can disrupt herd immunity, leaving kids with dangerous and preventable diseases.