Dignity, Integrity and Professionalism beget Respect

but respect does not arrive on its own

Just a few weeks ago an eighteen-year-old girl from a nearby ranch named Mary visited us, along with her younger brother Jake. I was just standing in the pasture, emanating my innate dignity. It is clear to most that I have no intentions to hurt people, even to most one-time visitors, and they will leave me in peace. Our Tornado, even though he’s growing up now, is still much more playful. As Jake and Mary first heeded him, Jake ran toward him and he tried to grab him by the neck. Unfortunately, Tornado read that as aggression. He swung his left hind leg out and Jake’s femur was broken.

The incident didn’t end there, though. Jake got medical treatment and his parents understood the situation. Mary, on the contrary, kept on yelling how she couldn’t understand that Tornado “didn’t have respect” and she waned him removed from the pasture. I found it hard to listen to and at times, I felt like giving her a kick too. Yet I didn’t end up doing so. Mary didn’t seem to be willing to move even an inch in our direction and listen to the fact that Jake had triggered the kick and suffered the consequences. Instead, she spoke in an irritable self-righteous tone about how we all have to be “kind and respectful” and how “such behaviour cannot be tolerated”. She must have learnt that at school, I thought. Turned out she did, and I happened to discover that this seems to be a trend in present day society. There are fewer people than ever who grasp the common sense that one does not get to be respected unconditionally. Respect has to be earned. I do not respect Mary for her statements. She will need to open her eyes and realize another truth: snowflakes melt.

If you don’t remember, here’s our Tornado again. He’s still cute. Photo by Hillary Halliwell.

An example that illustrates this trend is the Mann vs. Steyn lawsuit in which a jury in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia ruled journalist Mark Steyn guilty of defamation for a handful of statements about climate scientist Michael Mann and fined him a million dollars. The background of this lawsuit is complicated and goes back all the way to the late nineties, but in a nutshell, here is what happened. Michael Mann co-authored a 1999 scientific paper that raised alarm on the rapid rise of global temperatures. The paper mainly rose to fame because of the ‘hockey stick’ curve it presented, which illustrates that temperatures have been largely flat throughout most of the data history, but started rising very fast recently, whence the curve looks like a hockey stick.

The original hockey stick curve adapted from Mann’s 1998 paper. Image public domain, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

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While the hockey stick curve was adapted in the 2001 report by the Interplanetary Council on Climate Change (IPCC) as a motivator for action, the scientific methods used by Mann and co-authors were soon put in question by other scientists. Critics pointed out different flaws in the original paper, which can mainly be categorized into cherry-picking the data to construct the curve from and misguided application of statistics, such as principal component analysis. Further criticism of Mann’s scientific method arose when e-mails were made public between Mann and the University of East Anglia that suggested dubious practices to suppress publication of critical findings. The latter spurred an ethics investigation against Mann at Penn State university, which exonerated him of any wrongdoing. Yet this outcome did not quench the critics’ thirst to see Mann dethroned. One such critic was Canadian journalist Mark Steyn, who continued to refer to Mann’s research as ‘fraudulent’, among other even more hyperbolic claims. Mann then sued Steyn for defamation, claiming that Steyn’s comments hurt his academic career.

On Mann’s scientific findings related to the hockey stick curve, the following observation can be made. In more recent years, independent scientists have been able to come up with similarly shaped curves as a result of different and scientifically more thorough data processing. One can thus argue that Mann may well have accidentally drawn the right conclusions based on flawed analytics. On the other hand, the fact that his data analytics were not appropriate, is hardly contested. In science, whoever publishes results based on dubious scientific practices should expect to get criticized. Instead of being open to criticism, it seems though, that Mann has a strongly inflated ego, not uncommon in North American academia. His ego was too big to allow himself to be questioned. He sued the journalists in the hope that that would force us to respect him and his work. He even recently as much as confirmed this assertion publicly in an interview with the Washington Post.

Now this lawsuit is a good example of parties who seem to desire respect without earning it. No matter how many defamation lawsuits Mann wins, I will still not respect his scientific results. When I see data analytics from his group, I will scrutinize them more than ever. But the fact that Steyn continued to refer to him as a ‘fraud’, among other vilifications, is equally misguided. I do not believe that Mann committed fraud in his 1998 paper, for the reason that there is a much more straightforward explanation: he was simply not capable of producing better data analytics. We already referred to Stanford professor John Ioannidis, who posited back in 2005 that most research findings are false. While true, that statement does not imply that most researchers commit fraud. It does imply though, that many researchers are either not up to the job, or conduct research negligently as the publication pressure is too high. Mann is no exception to this. Steyn may have resorted to sensational statements about fraud to unduly accelerate attention, and in some sense respect, for his journalistic work. On the other hand, his statements may also be seen as merely a hyperbolic and distasteful way to draw attention to the scientific debate. It is hugely bizarre that a court would allow this case go to trial. Mann is in a faculty position with higher acclaim today than he was when the comments were made, so I do not see which real damages he has incurred. A logical decision would be to dismiss this case based on lack of standing to sue. The decision not to dismiss this case is in my perception rather an effect of the political culture of the Beltway class, which we have mused on before, that results in this case in having judges who are all to eager to make a statement by trialing a ‘climate denier’. My assertion is that they would have readily dismissed the case if the plaintiff were a climate critical scientist. The court may have authority, but by making what at least looks like biased judgments, it has not earned my respect. And it makes me all the more fearful if we ever have a lawsuit about culling horses because they ‘fart too much’.

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If it were up to the mainstream media, though, I would have no other option than blind respect for Mann, the academic institutions and the court involved. These media, along with so-called ‘left-wing’ politicians in many countries, repeatedly state that voices need to be silenced to avoid undermining the ‘respect for our democratic institutions’. The BBC, for instance, said as much in its new mission statement: “Disinformation, propaganda, and partial news is [sic] weakening our shared understanding of the world, undermining trust in our institutions and our democratic process.” There seems to be an opinion in the ruling classes that the times when democracy respected the will of the people are bygone and that we are switching to a democracy of ‘democratic institutions’ instead. In this view, the hoi polloi have no option other than to respect them. This is again: bizarre.

At first, let’s remark that ‘democratic institutions’ that do not represent the will of the people are not democratic. Moreover, we are frequently observing comments, rules and decisions of very dubious nature from such institutions. Thus, it may be a better time than ever to question them. The court mentioned above is just a symptom of the increasingly biased judicial branches around the world. In a world where powers are truly separated, courts will consider cases based on evidence obtained from due diligence rather than to assume positions based on personal political convictions. Howbeit, we presently observe a move toward the latter in many countries. Another lawsuit emblematic of the growing systemic rot is Murthy vs. Missouri, for which the US Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments. In a fair world, the merits in this case are clear: some of the defendants incurred financial damages because the US government pressured social media companies to boot them from their platforms, maybe most explicitly observable for the defendants who belonged to the so-called “disinformation dozen”. Just to clarify: a “disinformation dozen” is a group of twelve people whose opinions the US government does not like. Yet instead of trying to gauge just how bad this infringement of the US First Amendment was and which guardrails to put up for the future, recently appointed justice Brown-Jackson found no better statement to make than to lament that she is “worried that the First Amendment may be hamstringing the government”. Any legal scholar with conscience will respond that the purpose why the First Amendment was set up in the first place, is precisely to hamstring the government, such that it cannot censor speech. In this case, I am unwilling to accept the argument of incompetence: I am sure that Justice Brown-Jackson is well aware of the intent of the First Amendment. Instead, what we are observing here, is a judge who decides to blatantly ignore what she learnt in law school, because she is convinced that in a “just, liberal society” (whatever that means), the government should be able to censor whoever challenges the status quo. This is very scary. Justice Brown-Jackson has not earned my respect in that hearing.

Justice Brown-Jackson. Has she read the Bill of Rights? Official US government picture, public domain.

Biased justice is not what is found in a democracy, but rather in a society that oppresses its denizens into “respect” for its institutions. In such a society, the judicial branch is just one of the tentacles of oppression. To avoid that we end up exactly in such a society, we have a moral obligation to undermine the rhetoric towards unchallenged trust in institutions. Let’s recall that Adolf Hitler was elected democratically. As such, the Nazi institutions were democratic institutions. The concentration camps are a part of the fabric of the Nazi society’s democratic institutions. Let’s imagine how much better the world would have been off, if more Germans had actually undermined trust in the democratic institutions back in the 1930s… Too bad present-day German Nanci Faeser repeatedly laments that so-called “disinformation undermines the trust in the institutions”. Does she have Sehnsucht for the 1930s in her country?

Winter is coming to an end here on the pasture. I can still observe the basic principles of the universe. One of them is: snowflakes melt. I see it happen right now. So does my Tornado. He does not need to respect entities that wish him harmed, be it individuals or institutions.