The evidence-based approach to public policy of Justin Keating is badly needed at home and abroad
THE DEATH of Justin Keating, battery disposal, and vintage venting of spleen by the Daily Mail provide differently distressing views on menaces to progress.
Justin’s last departure from his beloved Ballymore Eustace was sublimely apt in his environmentally friendly cardboard coffin.
New EU rules on battery disposal oblige those who sell batteries to provide recycling containers to keep the more toxic elements of batteries such as cadmium and mercury out of our water supplies. The Daily Mail called this “European recycling laws that burden shops with more red tape” before acknowledging that only 3 per cent of the UK’s annual sales of 600 million batteries are currently recycled.
Justin Keating’s house may have reverberated to Edith Piaf’s Je ne regrette rien, but we have every reason to regret that our State structures could not make better use of his formidable talents. His wife Barbara Hussey recalled him as being first and foremost a scientist who accepted that “if you show me better, then I must change”.
Justin was a man of the Enlightenment, something of a rare species in Irish public life, now under serious global assault – an Enlightenment that built on the Renaissance and laid the basis for modern democratic societies. Europe’s renaissance spanned the 15th and 16th centuries. Its rebirth aspect came from revisiting the learning of Greek, Roman and other civilisations. Accepting Islam’s scientific prowess also helped. Milestones included the invention of the printing press in 1450, the beginnings of the Reformation in 1517, and the foundation of modern science with the publication in 1543 of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.
The revolutionary, and therefore bitterly resisted, aspect of all this was drawing a distinction between science and religion, between fact and belief. The Catholic Church condemned Galileo in 1633 for his heresy that the Earth was not at the centre of the universe, but rather a planet orbiting the sun. Scientific observation clashed with the religious belief that God’s creation, the Earth, had to be at the centre of the universe.
Galileo was finally rehabilitated by Pope John Paul II . . . in 1992.
The Enlightenment built on its Renaissance foundations, particularly the 17th century, to launch the industrial revolution, modern science, the concept of human rights and the beginnings of democratic government. Despite their European origins, these values and approaches have become universal, enshrined in the few declarations of global values we have managed to agree on.
The artefacts and technologies are more universal than their accompanying values as we can all think of societies where faiths continue to constrain human rights and where beliefs still clash with facts.
Until quite recently I would have argued that human progress was essentially constant where we learned from experience, built on facts, and profited from examples of approaches which had proven themselves. It is the constancy that is now challenged.
None of us is particularly fond of having our freedoms constrained. Most of us have a rebellious independent streak that chafes against rules and regulations of all kinds.
The American frontier myth speaks to that streak. If you live in the wilderness and take your drinking water from upstream, it matters little that your waste is carried away downstream. You have no need for water authorities, treatment facilities, planning permission and pollution standards.
All those constraints become not only necessary but desirable when you have to share that watercourse with thousands of others. Yet one of the more frightening realities of our planet is the growing demand for wilderness freedoms in densely populated modern economies. The menacing core of this demand is that belief should trump established facts, and offer a reasonable basis for policy decisions.
The Daily Mailpeddles what is at heart an English (as opposed to British) xenophobic argument that the whole European project is vile. All actions of the EU, including those agreed by London, must thus be condemned – irrespective of whether the actions themselves are desirable. Taken to its extreme, this translates into preferring mercury-poisoned water if the price of clean water is EU action.
In the US, this approach is epitomised by the so-called tea party protesters’ vitriolic hostility to anything the Obama administration proposes. David Brooks, the leading conservative columnist on the New York Times describes the tea party movement as “a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against”.
Brooks’s analysis of this angry movement (which takes its name from the Boston Tea Party, a popular protest in 1773 that was a key driver in the American Revolution), and one increasingly synonymous with swathes of the Republican party, is its hostility to what it he describes as the “educated class”. Since this “class” is concerned about climate change, “real” Americans should dismiss it as an invented threat. Similar knee-jerk rejection applies to issues as diverse as gun control or international co-operation.
In addition to this reaction’s racist undertones, there is also the inverted snobbery that makes Sarah Palin’s days at the University of Idaho reassuring, while Barack Obama’s time at Harvard becomes threatening. There is also a large dollop of sentimental delusion that sees Palin’s Wasilla, described by a member of its town council as “a big ugly strip mall from one end to the other”, as being an idyllic small US town.
We now suffer the material consequences of our own self-delusion, of our national suspension of rational thought. One expensive monument to our collective folly are the 15,000 unrentable Irish hotel rooms financed by tax breaks.
Our histories abound with evidence of the lethal human folly of reversing Justin Keating’s adage into “if you show me better, then you must be wrong”.
Evidence is usually lethal to ignore.