“The oceans are rising, and so are we”

To judge by what I saw in Frankfurt, the organisers did not managed to mobilise students effectively. Had they done that, the crowd would have been much bigger. It seems that professional scientists need to spend less time in libraries and laboratories to maximise turnout. The downside, of course, is that their research may suffer. It’ll suffer even more, however, if science is disregarded and defunded by policymakers.

In two important ways the Science March resembled the Women’s March:

• Everyone was aware that the reason it was organised was Trump’s disregard for scientific knowledge concerning global warming and other important matters, just as his contempt for women’s rights was the reason for the Women’s March. Nonetheless, the organisers of both events pointed out they were not demonstrating against him, but for something. In the case of the Science March is was that political leaders “enact evidence-based policies in the public interest”.
• The impetus came from the USA, but satellite events were organised all over the world. There was a Science March in 14 German cities, for example.

This looks like a new pattern. Frankfurt has a long history of rallies against US administrations, from the Vietnam war in the 1960s to the Iraq war after the turn of the Millennium. The conservative media often accused participants of being driven by anti-American sentiments, which was not entirely wrong, but certainly exaggerated. Nobody in Germany is suggesting that the Science Marches or the Women’s Marches in Germany were anti-American in any sense (though perhaps some Republicans in the USA think so). The marches, moreover, were not simply an expression of solidarity with like minded Americans. They referred to issues like fake news and divisive, right-wing populism that affect European societies too.

It is important to note that scientists do not claim to have a simple, ever-lasting truth. What they demanded during the marches was critical thinking, concern for empirical evidence and thorough assessment of hypotheses. Indeed, science has its own fake-news problems. Something cannot be accepted to be true simply because it is stated somewhere in some scientific study. If, however, insights are accepted by the relevant scientific community, which consists of researchers’ best informed peers, they should be taken seriously. There are no longer any serious doubts concerning the validity of climate change, for example.

Policymakers should take that into account. Donald Trump is not doing so, nor is Germany’s right-wing populist party AfD, which also denies climate change. This kind of disregard is making scientists agitate in the political sphere. One slogan in Washington was: “The oceans are rising, and so are we”. In prosperous western democracies, scientists are not used to seeing their work as political. They used to believe they are striving for objective evidence and need not worry about majorities in elections.

Things are a bit different in developing countries. Irrational beliefs and superstitions can thwart the fight against diseases, for example, as many scholars in the countries concerned know. Moreover, it can be dangerous to challenge such beliefs. In Bangladesh, science bloggers were murdered by Islamist fanatics, last year, for example. Charismatic leaders of various faiths wield huge influence in many places. Uneducated masses, moreover, are more likely to fall for politicians’ empty promises or “sell” their votes for a small gift.

Moreover, the BJP, India’s right-wing populist party has a history of taking Hindu myths for historical truth. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for example, once wrote in a school book that the Hindu God Rama flew the first aeroplane and that stem cell technology was known in ancient India. As in the USA, the insistence on scientific evidence has a sharp political edge in India today.

Last Saturday, there were some science marches in developing countries, including India. They were far fewer than in North America and Europe, and many of them – for instance the one in Bangladesh and the one in São Paulo – were apparently quite small. One reason, of course, is that the share of scientifically trained people is much smaller in poorer countries, and another reason that they are used to living in societies where scientific thinking has not been the general paradigm for decades.

It is a good sign, however, that there were more than 600 Science Marches all over the world. This was unusual evidence of an emerging global civil society.