Was Psychedelic Guru Terence McKenna Goofing About 2012 Prophecy?
By John Horgan on June 6, 2012 
Rational Scientific American readers surely scoff at claims—based on ancient Mayan calendars and other esoterica—that life as we know it will end this December, especially now that NASA experts have "crushed" the prophecy. But many folks out there are reportedly worried. Perhaps I can allay their anxieties by relating my encounter with a prominent popularizer of the 2012-doomsday meme, psychedelic guru Terence McKenna.

In his books and lectures, McKenna extolled psychedelic drugs as a spiritual path superior to that of any mainstream religion. His book The Food of the Gods (Bantam 1992) was a rigorous argument—complete with footnotes and bibliography—that mind-expanding plants and fungi catalyzed the transformation of our brutish ancestors into cultured modern humans. The visions inspired in our ancestors by these substances—and particularly by plants containing psilocybin, dimethytryptamine (DMT) and other psychedelics--were the seeds from which language sprung, followed by the arts, religion, philosophy, science and all of human culture, McKenna asserted. By outlawing psychedelics, he said, we have cut ourselves off from the wellspring of our humanity.

Food of the Gods showed that McKenna could play the serious scholar when he chose. But he was truer to himself in True Hallucinations (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), a memoir packed with psychedelic tall tales and wild riffs on the nature of reality. McKenna was less a scientist or even philosopher than a performance artist or jester, and I mean that as a compliment. What follows is an edited excerpt from Rational Mysticism (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), which describes my 1999 meeting with McKenna and my attempt to find out what he really thought would happen in December 2012.

The Man in the Purple Sparkly Suit

Raised in a Colorado ranching town, Terence McKenna discovered psychedelics in 1965 when he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied ecology and shamanism (ah, the Sixties). He became an itinerant scholar-adventurer, traveling to the Far East and South America in search of exotic mind-altering philosophies and substances, including two of his favorites, magic mushrooms and ayahuasca, a DMT-laced tea brewed from plants native to Amazonia.

In the early 1970s, McKenna and his younger brother Dennis (who became a slightly more sober authority on psychedelics) trekked into the jungles of Colombia, where they ingested enormous quantities of ayahuasca, marijuana and mushrooms. McKenna's visions persuaded him that tryptamines--a class of chemicals that includes DMT and psilocybin—were messages from an alien civilization, or "overmind."

McKenna's trips also inspired his "timewave" theory, which holds that existence and even time itself emerge from the interaction between two opposing forces, one conservative and the other creative. McKenna devised a mathematical model that charted the ebbs and surges of creative, "novel" events—including wars, revolutions, famines, plagues and scientific and technological advances--throughout human history. When McKenna extrapolated the model into the future, it predicted a huge spike in novelty in December 2012.

McKenna first suggested that something dramatic might happen in 2012 in his 1975 book The Invisible Landscape, co-written with Dennis, and he elaborated on his prediction—and the timewave theory--in True Hallucinations. In the latter book, McKenna's arch, ultra-hip tone gave way now and then to moments of genuine poignancy. He confessed that, as he was finishing his book, his sixteen-year marriage to his wife Kat, with whom he had two children, was dissolving. All his psychedelic insights, he said, had "done nothing to mitigate or ward off the ordinary vicissitudes of life. Like the Soul in Yeats's poem I am still an eternal thing fastened to the body of a dying animal."

I found this blend of earnestness and irony intriguing. McKenna himself seemed unsure whether his psychedelic visions were genuine revelations or just delusions, whether he was serious when he talked about the timewave and the impending apocalypse or just goofing. I hoped to get a better sense of McKenna’s true beliefs in May 1999, when he left his home in Hawaii and traveled to New York City to give a talk.

As I took my tape recorder and pad out of my backpack on the night of McKenna's performance at an auditorium in mid-town Manhattan, a man in front of me, whom I'll call Glen, turned around to chat. He was bearded, about my age, a bit wild-eyed. Glen had never seen "Terence" before, but he owned all his books and two of his taped lectures. He was blown away by Terence's prediction that in December 2012 the shit was going to hit the fan. Glen hoped that tonight Terence would get a little more specific about what was going to happen.

Glen had dropped a lot of acid when he was young. In fact, he liked drugs so much that he became a pharmacologist. Working in a pharmacy got boring after a while, so he became a psychotherapist specializing in "energy healing." Glen hadn’t done acid in a long time. He really wanted to do some again, but he didn’t know where to get it. Glen looked at me expectantly. When I shrugged, he glumly turned his back on me.

Applause erupted as McKenna strode onto the stage and sat in an armchair. Tall, bearded, owlish, with curly brown hair going grey, he looked like a gaunt, Gaelic Allen Ginsberg. His voice had a wheedling, nasal edge. His speech was much like his prose, a bouillabaisse of scientific and high-tech visions, primordial lore, environmental fear-mongering, anarchic political commentary and psychedelic metaphysics.

He kept wandering down apparent digressions that somehow circled back to his main theme: The purpose of existence is novelty-generation, and our culture is generating novelty at an accelerating rate. The internet, nanotechnology, pharmacology, superstring theory, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence are shattering our old paradigms and bearing us toward some fantastic, psychedelic future. And according to his calculations on December 21, 2012, something big would happen, something apocalyptic, that would bring about "the end of life as we know it."

One possible catalyst, McKenna said, was artificial intelligence, which would soon produce machines smarter than any human. (Yes, McKenna was an early proponent of the Singularity.) "If the hyper-intelligent AI is not filled with bodhisattva compassion," McKenna warned, "then our ass is probably grass." McKenna presented all of this with a mischievous grin, daring us to take him seriously.

I was still unsure what to make of McKenna when I met him the next day for lunch atop the Millennium Hotel, a gleaming ebony monolith in downtown Manhattan just across from the World Trade Center (which was still standing). We sat in a booth beside a window, McKenna with his back to the glass, beyond which skyscrapers loomed. McKenna looked even more owlish up close than he had on stage. He wore a black t-shirt emblazoned with a bronze dancing figure. The gap between his front teeth enhanced his air of raffishness.

When I said that his talk the previous evening had been quite entertaining, McKenna rolled my descriptor slowly around in his mouth—"En-ter-tain-ing"—as if he wasn’t sure he liked its taste. I added that I thought he had exaggerated the extent to which old scientific paradigms were crumbling and yielding to a radical new "psychedelic" vision of reality. I admitted that I had once been a staff writer for Scientific American, and I still shared that magazine's rather skeptical, conservative perspective.

Scientific American, McKenna assured me, was one of his favorite magazines. It was "incredibly psychedelic," and a major source of his inspiration. Anyone who reads Scientific American, McKenna continued, can see that science is in the throes of "an enormous crisis, or maybe not crisis but turmoil, based on the breakdown of paradigms." Just look at superstrings, parallel universes, hyper-dimensions, time travel and other bizarre notions emerging from physics, and technological advances like artificial intelligence. "Nobody knows what mind is," McKenna said, when it is "operating at multi-gigahertz speeds in virtual realities unconstrained by gravity and economy of any sort."


I told McKenna that many of the supposed revolutionary advances he had read about in Scientific American and elsewhere were grossly over-sold. Artificial intelligence, far from being on the verge of creating "hyper-intelligent" machines, is a joke, a failure, with a string of failed prophesies behind it. As for superstrings, they are so small that it would take a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way to detect them; that is why many physicists believe that superstring theory and its variants will turn out to be a theoretical dead end.

McKenna shrugged. Whether or not superstring theory pans out, no one can deny that physics is "a field in rich ferment, in need of broad new paradigmatic visions. I mean, sort of where physics was circa 1898, when no one could make sense of Planck's black-body studies and Einstein was chasing girls around bars in Basel, and it just hadn't quite frozen out to be what it was." What was most impressive about McKenna’s riffs was their apparent effortlessness.

When I asked McKenna if he seriously believed that psilocybin mushrooms represent messages from an alien intelligence, he told me that his proposal was not as whimsical as it sounded. Mushroom spores, he said, can survive the cold of outer space; in fact, mushroom cultivators here on earth store the spores in liquid nitrogen. "So if somebody were designing a bio-informational package, a spore is how you would go. Millions of them pushed around by light pressure and gravitational dynamics would percolate throughout the galaxy."

Psilocybin's unusual chemical structure suggested an unusual origin, McKenna added. It is "the only four-phosphorelated indol in all of nature," which indicated "that maybe it came from outside the terrestrial ecosystem." The personality of the mushroom, as revealed by the experiences it triggers in humans, also had an alien, science-fiction quality. "It presents itself as this particular slice of alien, aesthetic motif from Hollywood--the shiny metallic surfaces, the mercuroid forms, the piercing, instantaneous biointelligence." McKenna was enjoying himself; he uttered "aesthetic motif" and "mercuroid forms" with a kind of tactile relish.

I said my impression was that he was often... kidding. McKenna guffawed. "I'm Irish! What's your excuse!" He added soberly, "I'm cynical, and a fair cynic must also be cynical about himself." He called himself a "visionary fool," who "propounds this thing which is a trillion to one shot"—the timewave theory--and then "gets to live out the inevitably humorous implications of that."

He recognized that some people think he is "softheaded" because of his rants about "self-transforming machine elves from hyperspace and all that." Actually, he had a "keen nose for other peoples' bullshit." He despised New Agers who gave credibility to alien-abduction rumors or claimed to be channeling the spirits of long-dead sages. "These things are like intellectual viruses loose in the theater of discourse,” he said scornfully. "And you can't really argue with these people, because they don't understand the rules of argument." McKenna added that "the howling tide of unreason beats against pure fact with incredible fury."

When I told him that his writing sometimes reminded me of one of my favorite authors, the Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges, McKenna was delighted. He was a Borges fan, too. McKenna shared Borges's intuition that "scattered through the ordinary world there are books and artifacts and perhaps people who are like doorways into impossible realms, of impossible and contradictory truth. DMT being the chief example of this." DMT transports us not to heaven or hell but to a "parallel dimension that is somehow intimately tangled up with our own language processes and how we make reality." Modern science, McKenna remarked, "operates on the assumption that there are no miracles at the macro-physical level. Well, I would put it to you, DMT is a miracle at the macro-physical level. And the smarter you are, the more impressive it is."

I said that his riffs on extraterrestrial psilocybin spores and the coming apocalypse struck me as intellectual performance art, not to be taken too seriously, but I suspected that many of his fans took his ideas literally. I told him about my conversation the previous evening with Glen, the man who sat in front of me at McKenna's lecture. McKenna nodded ruefully. "My function is largely pedagogical," he said, "trying to teach people, first of all, that the world is a weird, weird place. And then, so what do you do about it? Do you become a Scientologist? Do you return to your Irish Catholic roots? What is the response," he said, "to the discovery that the world really is totally weird?"

When I told McKenna that I wasn’t sure exactly how his timewave theory worked, he launched into a vigorous explication of it. The essence of the theory is that existence emerges from the clash of two forces: not good and evil but habit and novelty. Habit is entropic, repetitious, conservative; novelty is creative, disjunctive, progressive. "In all processes at any scale, you can see these two forces grinding against each other. You can also see that novelty is winning."

As novelty increases, so does complexity. From the big bang on, McKenna elaborated, "the universe has been complexifying, and each level of complexity achieved becomes the platform for a further ascent into complexity. So fusion in early stars creates heavy elements and carbon. That becomes the basis for molecular chemistry. That becomes the basis for photobionic life. That becomes the basis for eukaryotic stuff. That becomes the basis for multicellular organisms, that for higher animals, that for culture, that for machine symbiosis, and on and on."

Modern science often depicts humanity as an accident, a bit player in the universe, but the timewave theory puts us at center stage in the cosmic drama, according to McKenna. If he had to define God, he would define it as this novelty-generating process. This definition could serve as the basis for a new moral order. "Anything which destroyed novelty would be bad, and anything which helped build it up and advance it would be good."

What about Nazi Germany? I asked. Wasn’t that novel? Or the hydrogen bomb? Or AIDS? McKenna acknowledged that novelty may be accompanied by increased suffering and death, but in general progress of some kind emerges out of these catastrophes. In the case of Nazi Germany, “the twentieth century had to deal with the issue of fascism. It couldn't close its eyes and waltz past that. And it did! So in that sense Nazi Germany, with its science-fiction production values and its silly rhetoric, served a useful purpose.” McKenna, deep down, was apparently an optimist.

As early as the 1970's, McKenna sought to make his drug-inspired insight precise and quantitative. He discovered that fractals, mathematical objects whose patterns repeat themselves at different scales, provide an excellent model of the entropy-novelty dialectic. "The fall of the dynasty, the collapse of the love affair, the ruin of the corporation, and the death of the amoeba are all somehow dramas with the same energy points and flows imbedded in them."

So what did McKenna really think would happen on December 21, 2012? "If you really understand what I'm saying," he replied, "you would understand it can't be said. It's a prediction of an unpredictable event." The event will be "some enormously reality-rearranging thing." Scientists will invent a truly intelligent computer, or a time-travel machine. Perhaps we will be visited by an alien spaceship, or an asteroid. "I don't know if it's built into the laws of spacetime, or it's generated out of human inventiveness, or whether it's a mile and a half wide and arrives unexpectedly in the center of North America."

But did he really think the apocalypse would arrive on December 21, 2012? "Well..." McKenna hesitated. "No." He had merely created one mathematical model of the flow and ebb of novelty in history. "It's a weak case, because history is not a mathematically defined entity," he said. His model was "just a kind of fantasizing within a certain kind of vocabulary." McKenna still believed in the legitimacy of his project, even if his particular model turned out to be a failure. "I'm trying to redeem history, make it make sense, show that it obeys laws," he said.

But he couldn’t stop there. His eyes glittering, he divulged a "huge--quote unquote—coincidence" involving his prophecy. After he made his prediction that the apocalypse would occur on December 21, 2012, he learned that thousands of years ago Mayan astronomers had predicted the world would end on the very same day. "And now there has been new scholarship that they were tracking the galactic center and its precessional path through the ecliptic plane. What does all this mean?" McKenna leaned toward me, his eyes slitted and his teeth bared. "It means we are trapped in software written by the ghost of Jorge Luis Borges!" He threw his head back and cackled. "Tell that to the National Academy of Sciences!"

Two weeks after I met him in New York, just after he returned to his home in Hawaii, McKenna collapsed in the throes of a seizure. Tests revealed an enormous, malignant tumor deep inside his brain. McKenna's choices were grim. The physician recommended gamma-ray surgery, in which converging beams of radiation bombard the tumor. This treatment might give McKenna another six months to a year, but it could also cause dementia and other side effects. Untreated, McKenna would probably die within a month. McKenna chose the radiation surgery. He made it past the great millennial cusp, but he went downhill rapidly after that. He died on April 3, 2000, less than eleven months after I met him. He was 53.

During my lunch with McKenna at the Millennium Hotel, I had asked him if all his psychedelic excursions had mitigated his fear of death. His reply revealed how hard-headed he was, beneath all the phantasmagoric blarney. "I wouldn't say I have no fear of death," he said. "I am interested. Ultimately, my assumption is that, if I have the opportunity, I would embrace it if I saw it coming. But I'm scientific in my approach to my own knowledge of death. In other words, DMT may show you what the dying brain is like… But dying is not death. Near-death experiences are not death experiences."

Just before his death, another psychedelic advocate told Wired that McKenna’s outrageousness, like that of Timothy Leary, may have harmed the psychedelic cause: "Some people would certainly argue that it doesn’t help to have the most famous second-generation psychedelicist be another man in a purple sparkly suit." McKenna’s attempts to serve as a serious advocate for psychedelics were no doubt undermined by his irony and wit, his penchant for Borgesian fantasy, but those were precisely the qualities that I found so appealing in him. To McKenna wonder was the essence of gnosis. As he told me during our interview, all his confabulations were intended to make us see that the world is "a weird, weird place."

To shake us out of our perceptual torpor, McKenna played the holy fool, the crazy wisdom sage. He pushed our faces in the most exotic, lurid inventions of modern science and technology, including superstring theory, time travel, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. He even stooped to speculating about extraterrestrials and to forecasting the end of life as we know it. What elevated him above most other prophets was that he delivered his prophesies with a wink, an implicit acknowledgement that ultimately reality is stranger than we can say or even imagine.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Addendum: Fans of McKenna will want to check out this wonderful series of videos, the Terence McKenna Omnibus, including one in which McKenna says: "Shamanism is just show business and philosophy is just a branch of that vaudevillian impulse." http://www.cognitionfactor.net/cinema/screen-7.aspx

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com.
Astrology, Tarot Cards and Psychotherapy
Responses to "The Cancer Industry: Hype vs. Real

A Very Hot Year

Bill McKibben
MARCH 12, 2020 ISSUE

Brook Mitchell/Stringer/Getty Images
Wildfires near the suburbs of Canberra, Australia, January 2020

This year began with huge bushfires in southeastern Australia that drove one community after another into temporary exile, killed an estimated billion animals, and turned Canberra’s air into the dirtiest on the planet. The temperatures across the continent broke records—one day, the average high was above 107 degrees, and the humidity so low that forests simply exploded into flames. The photos of the disaster were like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, with crowds gathered on beaches under blood-red skies, wading into the water as their only refuge from the flames licking nearby. But such scenes are only a chaotic reminder of what is now happening every hour of every day. This year wouldn’t have begun in such a conflagration if 2019 hadn’t been an extremely hot year on our planet—the second-hottest on record, and the hottest without a big El Niño event to help boost temperatures. And we can expect those numbers to be eclipsed as the decade goes on. Indeed, in mid-February the temperature at the Argentine research station on the Antarctic Peninsula hit 65 degrees Fahrenheit, crushing the old record for the entire continent.

It is far too late to stop global warming, but these next ten years seem as if they may be our last chance to limit the chaos. If there’s good news, it’s that 2019 was also a hot year politically, with the largest mass demonstrations about climate change taking place around the world.

We learned a great deal about the current state of the climate system in December, thanks to the annual confluence of the two most important events in the climate calendar: the UN Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, which met for the twenty-fifth time, this year in Madrid (it ended in a dispiriting semi-collapse), and the American Geophysical Union conference, which convened in San Francisco to listen to the newest data from researchers around the world. That latest news should help ground us as we enter this next, critical phase of the crisis.

The first piece of information emerged from a backward look at the accuracy of the models that scientists have been using to predict the warming of the earth. I wrote the Review’s first article about climate change in 1988, some months after NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress that what we then called the “greenhouse effect” was both real and underway. Even then, the basic mechanics of the problem were indisputable: burn coal and oil and gas and you emit carbon dioxide, whose molecular structure traps heat in the atmosphere.

Human activity was also spewing other gases with the same effect (methane, most importantly); it seemed clear the temperature would go up. But how much and how fast this would occur was a bewildering problem, involving calculations of myriad interactions across land and sea; we came to fear climate change in the 1980s largely because we finally had the computing power to model it. Critics—many of them mobilized by the fossil fuel industry—attacked those models as crude approximations of nature, and insisted they’d missed some negative feedback loop (the effect of clouds was a common candidate) that would surely moderate the warming.

These climate models got their first real chance to shine in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, injecting known amounts of various chemicals into the atmosphere, and the models passed with flying colors, accurately predicting the short-term cooling those chemicals produced. But the critique never completely died away, and remains a staple of the shrinking band of climate deniers. In December Zeke Hausfather, a UC Berkeley climate researcher, published a paper showing that the models that guided the early years of the climate debate were surprisingly accurate. “The warming we have experienced is pretty much exactly what climate models predicted it would be as much as 30 years ago,” he said. “This really gives us more confidence that today’s models are getting things largely right as well.”1

We now know that government and university labs were not the only ones predicting the climatic future: over the last five years, great investigative reporting by, among others, the Pulitzer-winning website InsideClimate News unearthed the large-scale investigations carried out in the 1980s by oil companies. Exxon, for instance, got the problem right: one of the graphs their researchers produced predicted with uncanny accuracy what the temperature and carbon dioxide concentration would be in 2019. That this knowledge did not stop the industry from its all-out decades-long war to prevent change is a fact to which we will return.

The rise in temperature should convince any fair-minded critic of the peril we face, and it is worth noting that in December one longtime skeptic, the libertarian writer Ronald Bailey, published a sort of mea culpa in Reason magazine. In 1992, at the first Earth Summit in Rio, he’d mourned that the United States government was “officially buying into the notion that ‘global warming’ is a serious environmental problem,” even as “more and more scientific evidence accumulates showing that the threat of global warming is overblown.” Over the years, Bailey had promoted many possible challenges to scientific orthodoxy—for example, the claim of MIT scientist Richard Lindzen that, as mentioned, clouds would prevent any dangerous rise in temperature—but, to his credit, in his new article he writes:





I have unhappily concluded, based on the balance of the evidence, that climate change is proceeding faster and is worse than I had earlier judged it to be…. Most of the evidence points toward a significantly warmer world by the end of the century.2

If scientists correctly judged the magnitude of the warming—about one degree Celsius, globally averaged, thus far—they were less perceptive about the magnitude of the impact. Given that this infusion of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is a large-scale experiment never carried out before during human history, or indeed primate evolution, it’s not really fair to complain, but many scientists, conservative by nature, did underestimate the rate and severity of the consequences that would come with the early stages of warming. As a result, the motto for those studying the real-world effects of the heating is probably “Faster Than Expected.”

The warmth we’ve added to the atmosphere—the heat equivalent, each day, of 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs—is already producing truly dire effects, decades or even centuries ahead of schedule. We’ve lost more than half the summer sea ice in the Arctic; coral reefs have begun to collapse, convincing researchers that we’re likely to lose virtually all of them by mid-century; sea-level rise is accelerating; and the planet’s hydrologic cycle—the way water moves around the planet—has been seriously disrupted. Warmer air increases evaporation, thus drought in arid areas and as a side effect the fires raging in places like California and Australia. The air also holds more water vapor, which tends to drop back to earth in wet places, increasing the risk of flooding: America has recently experienced the rainiest twelve months in its recorded history.

In late November a European-led team analyzed what they described as nine major tipping points—involving the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the boreal forests and permafrost layer of the north, and the Amazon rainforest and corals of the tropical latitudes. What they found was that the risk of “abrupt and irreversible changes” was much higher than previous researchers had believed, and that exceeding critical points in one system increases the risk of speeding past others—for instance, melting of Arctic sea ice increases the chance of seriously slowing the ocean currents that transport heat north from the equator, which in turn disrupt monsoons. “What we’re talking about is a point of no return,” Will Steffen, one of the researchers, told reporters. Earth won’t be the same old world “with just a bit more heat or a bit more rainfall. It’s a cascading process that gets out of control.”

That all of this has happened with one degree of warming makes clear that the targets set in the Paris climate accords—to try to hold temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and no more than 2 degrees—are not “safe” in any usual sense of the word. Already, according to an Oxfam report released in December,3 people are three times more likely to be displaced from their homes by cyclones, floods, or fires than by wars. Most of those people, of course, did nothing to cause the crisis from which they suffer; the same is true for those feeling the health effects of climate change, which a December report from the World Health Organization said was “potentially the greatest health threat of the 21st century.”

What’s worse, we’re nowhere close to meeting even those modest goals we set in Paris. Indeed, the most depressing news from December is that the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases rose yet again. Coal use has declined dramatically, especially in the developed world—the US has closed hundreds of coal-burning plants since 2010 and halved the amount of power generated by coal. But it’s mostly been replaced by natural gas, which produces not only carbon dioxide but also methane, so our emissions are barely budging; in Asia, continued fast-paced economic growth is outstripping even the accelerating deployment of renewable energy.

The United Nations Environment Programme released its latest annual report on the so-called emissions gap in December, and it was remarkably dire. To meet the Paris goal of limiting temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world would need to cut its emissions by 7.6 percent annually for the next decade.4 Stop and read that number again—it’s almost incomprehensibly large. No individual country, not to mention the planet, has ever cut emissions at that rate for a single year, much less a continuous decade. And yet that’s the inexorable mathematics of climate change. Had we started cutting when scientists set off the alarm, in the mid-1990s, the necessary cuts would have been a percent or two each year. A modest tax on carbon might well have sufficed to achieve that kind of reduction. But—thanks in no small part to the obstruction of the fossil fuel industry, which, as we have seen above, knew exactly what havoc it was courting—we didn’t start correcting the course of the supertanker that is our global economy. Instead, we went dead ahead: humans have released more carbon dioxide since Hansen’s congressional testimony than in all of history before.

That we have any chance at all of achieving any of these targets rests on the progress made by engineers in recent years—they’ve cut the price of renewable energy so decisively that the basic course is pretty clear. Essentially, we need to electrify everything we do, and produce that electricity from the sun and wind, which are now the cheapest ways to produce power around the world.5 Happily, storage batteries for the power thus generated are also dropping quickly in cost, and electric cars grow both more useful and more popular by the month—Tesla is the brand name we know, but the Chinese are already rolling out electric cars in large numbers, and, better yet, electric buses, which could lead to dramatically cleaner and quieter cities. In his State of the City address in early February, New York mayor Bill DeBlasio announced that every vehicle in the city fleet would be electrified in the years ahead. Despite such dramatic announcements, we’re adopting none of these technologies fast enough. In seventy-five years the world will probably run on sun and wind because they are so cheap, but if we wait for economics alone to do the job, it will be a broken world.

Radically speeding up that transition is the goal of the various Green New Deal policies that have emerged over the last year, beginning in the US, where the youthful Sunrise Movement recruited Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as an early supporter and used a sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office to draw attention to the legislation. Negotiations have been underway ever since about the exact shape of such a program, but its outlines are clear: extensive support for renewables, with an aim of making America’s electricity supply carbon-neutral by 2030, and a program to make homes and buildings far more efficient, coupled with large-scale social plans like universal health care and free college tuition. At first glance, combining all these goals may seem to make the task harder, but advocates like Naomi Klein have argued persuasively that the opposite is true.

The wide scope of the proposed Green New Deal may make it sound utopian—but it may be better to think of it as anti-dystopian, an alternative to the libertarian hyper-individualism that has left us with economically insecure communities whose divisions will be easy for the powerful to exploit on a degrading planet, where the UN expects as many as a billion climate refugees by 2050. A million Syrian refugees to Europe (driven in part by the deep drought that helped spark the civil war) and a million Central American refugees to our southern border (driven in part by relentless drought in Honduras and Guatemala) have unhinged the politics of both continents; imagine multiplying that by five hundred.

On the campaign trail, the Democratic nominees have mostly embraced the Green New Deal. Its sweeping economic and social ambition fits easily with the other campaign promises of Senators Sanders and Warren, but most of the rest of the field has also backed its promises of dramatic reductions in carbon emissions. For instance, Joe Biden’s climate plan says that “the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face. It powerfully captures two basic truths”—first, that “the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition…to meet the scope of this challenge,” and second, that “our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected.” Biden has waffled and wavered on the practicalities, at times endorsing a continued reliance on natural gas, but it’s pretty clear that, whoever the eventual nominee, the party will be at least somewhat more progressive on climate issues than in the past. And in one way the nominee will be more progressive even than the Green New Deal legislation. Sanders, Warren, Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and others have all called for an end to oil, gas, and coal production on public lands—something a new president could do by executive action. Some have gone farther, calling for an end to fracking across the nation.

These so-called Keep It in the Ground policies are less popular with labor unions that want to keep building pipelines, and therefore those writing the Green New Deal legislation have not yet included them in their bill, wary of losing congressional support. But the mathematical case for such action was greatly strengthened in November with the publication of the first production gap report, intended as a counterpart to the emissions gap research I described above. For almost thirty years, global warming efforts have focused on controlling and reducing the use of fossil fuel—which is hard, because there are billions of users. But in recent years activists and academics have looked harder at trying to regulate the production of coal, gas, and oil in the first place, reasoning that if it stayed beneath the soil, it would ipso facto not be warming the planet.

The first edition of this new report, issued by a consortium of researchers led by the Stockholm Environment Institute and the UN Environment Programme, makes for startling reading: between now and 2030 the world’s nations plan on producing 120 percent more coal, gas, and oil than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and 50 percent more than would let us meet even the 2 degree goal.6 That’s more coal and oil and gas than the world’s nations have told the UN they plan to burn: “As a consequence, the production gap is wider than the emissions gap.” “Indeed,” the authors write, “though many governments plan to decrease their emissions, they are signalling the opposite when it comes to fossil fuel production, with plans and projections for expansion.” Another way to look at it, as the Financial Times calculated in February, is that to meet the 1.5 degree target, the fossil fuel industry would have to leave 84 percent of its known reserves in the ground, writing off their value.

You would think that, compared with the billions of users, it would be easier to take on the handful of petro-states and oil companies that produce fossil fuel; after all, more than half of global emissions since 1988 “can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities,” according to the Climate Accountability Institute. By definition, those are among the most powerful players in our economic and political systems, and so far they’ve been able to escape any effective regulation. At the very top of the list is the United States, which, according to a December report from the Global Gas and Oil Network, is on track to produce four-fifths of the new supply of oil and gas over the next half decade.

Partly, this is the result of President Trump’s fanatical effort to eliminate any obstacles to new oil and gas production, including recently opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska—the nation’s largest wildlife preserve—to drilling. But there’s a fairly long lag time in building the necessary infrastructure—the fracking boom really had its roots in the Obama administration, as the former president boasted in a 2018 speech at Rice University in Texas. “I know we’re in oil country,” he told the cheering crowd. “You wouldn’t always know it, but [production] went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly, America’s, like, the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas…that was me, people,” he said. “Just say thank you please.”

The one cheerful development of the past year has been the continuing rise of a global climate movement, exemplified by the young activists who brought seven million people into the streets for global climate strikes in September. (Greta Thunberg is the best known, and rightly celebrated for her poise, but fortunately there are thousands of Gretas across the planet offering provocative challenges to their local officials.) The question is where to aim all that activism. The natural impulse is to direct it at our political leaders, because in a rational world they would be the ones making decisions and shaping change. This is part of the answer—it’s crucial that this year’s election in the US has the climate crisis at its center, and thanks to the Green New Deal that’s a real possibility.

But political change is uncertain—despite the remarkable activism of Extinction Rebellion across the UK, December’s elections there seemed little affected by the issue—and even when it comes it is slow. A new president and a new Senate would still mean a Washington rusted by influence and inertia. And winning this battle one national capitol at a time is a daunting challenge given the short time physics is allowing us.

A small but growing number of activists are also looking at a second set of targets—not Washington, but Wall Street. Over the past few years a mammoth divestment campaign has persuaded endowments and portfolios worth $12 trillion to sell their stocks in coal, oil, or gas companies, and now that effort is expanding to include the financial institutions (mostly banks, asset managers, and insurance companies) that provide the money that keeps those companies growing. A handful of American banks—Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America—are the biggest culprits, and incredibly they have increased their lending to fossil fuel companies in the years since the Paris accords. Take Chase Bank, which is the champion in this respect: in the last three years it has provided $196 billion to the fossil fuel industry. If Exxon is a carbon heavy, in other words, Chase is too (and in many ways they’re joined at the hip; Standard Oil heir David Rockefeller led Chase to its current prominence, and former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond is its lead independent director).

This financing—which has included supporting the most extreme oil and gas projects, like the huge pipelines planned in Canada’s uniquely filthy tar sands complex—is perhaps the single least defensible part of the fossil fuel enterprise. You can almost understand the refusal of oil companies to shift their business plans: they really only know how to do one thing. But banks can lend their money in a thousand different directions; they don’t need to fund the apocalypse. Given the trouble banks have already caused, it’s no wonder that environmentalists have begun using the phrase “Make Them Pay”—or at the very least make them invest in the renewables and conservation measures desperately needed to get us on the right track. My colleague at the grassroots campaign 350.org Tamara Toles O’Laughlin has compared this kind of funding to nineteenth-century support by financial institutions of slavery—it’s not the same crime, of course, but “the same instinct to abuse and extract, deplete, discard, and disavow holds.” It’s no surprise that the same demand for reparations—compensation for all those whose lives and communities are being wrecked—is being raised.

There’s no question that taking on one of the biggest parts of the planet’s economy is a daunting task. It’s possible that the Chases of the world can go on lending money to their friends in the oil industry without suffering any consequences. On the other hand, in the same way that the electoral map favors Republicans, the money map favors those who care about the climate. Chase branches, for instance, are concentrated in those small pockets of blue around our big cities (I was arrested in a protest in one of them, in Washington, D.C., in early January). And perhaps these institutions are beginning to bend: in mid-January the world’s largest financial firm, BlackRock, announced that it was taking broad, if still tentative, steps to include climate change in its analyses of potential investments. “Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” its CEO, Larry Fink, wrote in a letter to CEOs of the world’s largest corporations. That’s perhaps the most encouraging news about climate change since the signing of the Paris climate accords, because if these pillars of global capital could somehow be persuaded to act, that action could conceivably be both swift and global.

Anything is worth a try at this point, because we’re very nearly out of time.


1

Zeke Hausfather et al.,“Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections,” Geophysical Research Letters, December 4, 2019. ↩
2

Ronald Bailey, “Climate Change: How Lucky Do You Feel?,” Reason, January 2020. ↩
3

Oxfam International, “Forced from Home: Climate-Fuelled Displacement,” December 2, 2019. ↩
4

WHO Health and Climate Change Survey Report, 2019. ↩
5

We’d probably be well advised to keep current nuclear power plants operating where it’s relatively safe to do so until they can be replaced with renewables instead of natural gas—though at the moment new nuclear power is ruinously expensive in most places, existing plants are an important part of the low-carbon power supply. A good summary of the problem came in 2018 from the Union of Concerned Scientists. We definitely need to avoid not only natural gas, which as I have explained previously in these pages is not the “bridge fuel” its proponents contended, but also the burning of trees to generate electricity—the latest science is showing this so-called biomass energy to be more of a problem than a solution, and that by contrast letting mature trees continue to grow allows them to soak up large amounts of carbon. ↩
6

Stockholm Environment Institute et al., The Production Gap, 2019. ↩

The Real Meaning of ‘Religious Liberty’: A License to Discriminate

Katherine Stewart

Chris Kleponis–Pool/Getty Images

President Donald Trump speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, Washington, D.C., February 7, 2019

This past January, on national Religious Freedom Day, President Trump announced a new set of recommended regulations that will make it possible for essential care providers receiving government funds to discriminate on the basis of religion. Under the new regulations, a nonprofit religious organization that accepts government grants will potentially exclude gay people from receiving certain benefits. Counseling organizations that receive vouchers or other forms of “indirect aid” from the government may be allowed to tell their patients that submission to God will solve their problems. Food pantries receiving government aid in a similar fashion may require that clients attend religious services in order to receive benefits.

All of them will be allowed to exercise faith-based discrimination in hiring. None of them will henceforth be under any obligation to inform the people receiving their services about secular alternatives, nor will the government be required to provide them. This is what “religious freedom” has come to mean in Trump’s America.

Religious nationalists have succeeded in framing the issue of religious freedom as one that involves wedding service providers, such as cake bakers, florists, and other sensitive people performing personal but also hardly life-saving or essential services. Setting aside the question of principle—Is it ever right to grant business a license to discriminate against law-abiding citizens in this way?—the implication of these narratives is that the stakes are small: Why not take your business over to a baker who will actually find some pleasure in helping you celebrate your happy day?

But to see what’s truly at issue in the Trump administration’s focus in the area of health care, it is illuminating to understand the consequences of religious exemptions that have long been in place within the Catholic health care system. This type of “religious freedom” for essential care providers has already become a matter of life and death for patients across the country.

*

In an ACLU study (for which I served as an investigator), “Health Care Denied: Patients and Physicians Speak Out About Catholic Hospitals and the Threat to Women’s Health and Lives,” an Illinois doctor named David Eisenberg recalled that the sickest patient he ever cared for during his residency was a young woman experiencing a miscarriage. The patient had initially sought care at another hospital, which happened to be Catholic. Although her waters had broken, the hospital denied the necessary steps to hasten the safe completion of the miscarriage. Ten days later, the young woman transferred hospitals and came under Dr. Eisenberg’s care.

By that point, Eisenberg says, she had a fever of 106 degrees and was “dying of sepsis.” She survived, Eisenberg says, but suffered a cognitive impairment, as well as an acute kidney injury so severe that she required dialysis. The woman spent nearly two weeks in the hospital, after which she was transferred to a long-term care facility.

“To this day, I have never seen someone so sick,” Dr. Eisenberg says, “because we [in a non-Catholic health care facility] would never wait that long before evacuating the uterus.”

How is this possible? All Catholic Hospitals operate according to Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs), a numbered set of rules that reaffirm Catholic teachings as they relate to health care. The ERDs impose limitations on the types of services and procedures they are able to deliver. Based closely on Vatican teachings and codified by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, these directives are thus the work of clergymen, not doctors. Employees of Catholic-affiliated hospitals and health care facilities must typically follow the guidelines as a condition of their employment.

Naturally, given Catholic doctrine on the topic, the ERDs prohibit the administration of abortions. Directive 45 states:

Abortion (that is, the directly intended termination of pregnancy before viability or the directly intended destruction of a viable fetus) is never permitted. Every procedure whose sole immediate effect is the termination of pregnancy before viability is an abortion, which, in its moral context, includes the interval between conception and implantation of the embryo.

What many prospective patients would not know is that, thanks to this prohibition, many Catholic hospitals either ban outright or are reluctant to perform a number of miscarriage-related procedures because the Church chooses to characterize them as abortions. A further critical fact is that the religious beliefs of the entity directing care at the hospital (in this case, the Conference of Catholic Bishops) trump the beliefs of everybody else involved. They supersede the religious convictions not only of patients, who in fact have no say and often no knowledge of the options, but also of providers. Physicians and staff employed by Catholic hospitals must abide by the ERDs whatever their own religion or moral conviction tells them.

The ERDs do not just apply to Catholic hospitals. All Catholic health facilities, including clinics, affiliated providers, and even contractors and suppliers, are bound by the ERDs. And such prohibitions are not just limited to abortion provision; they apply to birth control, too. Directive 52 spells it out:

Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices but should provide, for married couples and the medical staff who counsel them, instruction both about the Church’s teaching on responsible parenthood and in methods of natural family planning.

I spoke with a medical doctor who asked to remain anonymous and whom I’ll call Dr. Reynolds who worked at an HIV clinic affiliated with a university hospital that had acquired a Catholic facility some years before. For Dr. Reynolds, Directive 52 presented a problem: some HIV medications, such as Efavirenz, which decreases the amount of HIV in the blood, are known to cause severe fetal malformations and other complications in pregnancy. Yet Dr. Reynolds was not allowed to prescribe medication to HIV patients for the explicit purpose of preventing pregnancy. “We still do not hand out condoms,” the doctor told me. “We don’t prescribe birth control.”

Dr. Reynolds recalled an experience with one patient, a young woman with HIV, who they wished to put on Efavirenz. “It’s a very potent antiviral medication, and has this very severe side effect of teratogenicity, which means it can cause severe harm to a developing fetus,” Dr. Reynolds said. “She said she wasn’t in a relationship and wasn’t sexually active. I gave her the medication and told her, ‘You shouldn’t get pregnant if you’re taking this.’” Because of the ERDs, Dr. Reynolds says, “I did not have the option of giving her birth control. I can do that by referring her out. But I could not prescribe birth control pills to prevent her from becoming pregnant on this med. She ended up getting pregnant and had a baby without a brain.”

Even before the Trump White House started to empower a much more expansive definition of “religious liberty” exemptions, the ERDs had broad reach in healthcare services because of the sheer scale of the Catholic network. One in six hospital beds in the United States is now in a Catholic-run medical facility, according to the ACLU report. Following a recent wave of mergers, the number is rising; in some states, the number exceeds 40 percent. Many Americans are, in effect, bound to accept treatment in Catholic facilities because there is no alternative within realistic travel distance.

The “religious freedom” of the Catholic health care system has long had far-reaching consequences for women and families across the country. America’s maternal mortality rate is already the highest among the nations of the developed world, and it is rising sharply, up by more than 26 percent between 2000 and 2015. In 2018, the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, a law and policy think tank based at Columbia Law School, conducted a survey in conjunction with the healthcare nonprofit Public Health Solutions that examined the particular danger this arrangement poses to women of color. Black women are three to four times as likely as white women to die of pregnancy complications.

The authors of the project’s report, “Bearing Faith: The Limits of Catholic Health Care for Women of Color,” found that “in many states women of color disproportionately receive reproductive health care restricted by the ERDs.” In short, they reported: “Pregnant women of color are more likely than their white counterparts to receive reproductive health care dictated by bishops rather than medical doctors.”

There is no official count of the number of pregnant women who have turned to Catholic hospitals and clinics when something goes wrong only to be denied the medical care they need. And it is not easy to find women willing to publicize the most intimate details of traumatic experiences in order to prove to the world what should not need even saying: that pregnancy carries significant risk of complications, and hospitals and medical professionals in a modern society ought to allow best practices, rather than religious dogma, to guide their protocols of care. But I do know one woman willing to relate such an experience: myself.

In the last days of December 2003, I was thirteen weeks pregnant and filled with joy at the prospect of having a second child. Then, one afternoon, I began to bleed heavily and soon became faint. Leaving my toddler at home with my husband, I was loaded on to a stretcher and taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, as ambulance drivers are often required by law to do. We were living in downtown Manhattan at the time, and so the ambulance took me to St. Vincent’s Hospital, a Catholic facility in the West Village that has since been shuttered.

By the time I arrived, my blood pressure was dangerously low. I felt I was passing in and out of consciousness. I know now that what I needed then was dilation and curettage, a D&C, the procedure that removes tissue from the uterus. I needed it immediately to staunch the bleeding, but hours passed and I was left to hemorrhage alone.

At some point, I started shaking; I was going into shock. I learned later that I lost nearly 40 percent of my blood. Only then did the hospital provide me with the abortion that saved my life.

When I was transported home, my two-year-old didn’t recognize me. It took weeks for me to recover from the loss of blood. It took much longer to stop reliving the experience in my mind.

I later inquired with the medical provider in order to review their records of the episode. I was able to confirm the amount of time that elapsed and the total loss of blood I had suffered, but I found no explanation for the delay in treatment. But given what I have since learned about the Ethical and Religious Directives under which St. Vincent’s would have been acting, I believe the hospital was willing to gamble with my life for the sake of preserving an imaginary child.

Since then, I have confirmed that patients commonly do not know when they are being denied treatment on “ethical and religious” grounds. Hospitals are not required to explain why they are denying service or to inform their patients about other options for treatment. Evidently, the Ethical and Religious Directives do not prohibit the practice of deceiving patients about their best interests or treatment options.

*

The aim of the Trump administration is, in effect, to nationalize the concept behind ERDs. Henceforth, all providers will have the latitude to deny services wherever they feel that violates their own religious belief.

In January 2018, the Trump administration established the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in the Office for Civil Rights at the US Department of Health and Human Services. From the name of the new unit, a visitor from outer space might have supposed that the purpose of the office was to guarantee the rights of health care patients to enjoy equal care and respect, without regard to their religion or other matters of conscience. The actual mission of the office is not to protect patients but providers. Its goal is not to ensure that patients get care but that providers may deprive them of it when it suits those providers’ religious beliefs.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Vice President Mike Pence and Karen Pence participating in a National Day of Prayer service in the Rose Garden at the White House, Washington, D.C., May 2, 2019

Under the leadership of Roger Severino, a trial attorney with a history of right-wing legal activism and opposition to LGBT equality, the Office for Civil Rights first focused its efforts on making it easier for providers to abstain from caring directly for women in need of certain reproductive health services and for LGBT Americans. Then, on May 2, 2019, after declaring a National Day of Prayer, President Trump proudly broadened the unit’s mandate to cover essentially all health services and staff that receive federal funds. Announcing a new rule, known as Protecting Statutory Conscience Rights in Health Care, the Trump administration signaled that all health care industry personnel, from physicians and nursing staff to receptionists, ambulance drivers, ultrasound technicians, and schedulers would be permitted to refuse to serve or treat patients if doing so offends their personal “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

Such a “liberty,” like the liberty of a medical institution to allow a woman to become septic to the point of cognitive injury, is really just a form of religious privilege. As a religious entitlement—a license to discriminate or deny treatment—it has increasingly become one of the chief talking points of leaders of the Christian right, who have made it work as a partisan appeal to both conservative evangelical Protestant and conservative Catholic voters. As a consequence, it won’t just be institutions now but also individuals that will have the “religious freedom” to revise or deny health care treatment to others on grounds of their own religious conscience.

And thanks to a huge influx of Trump-appointed federal judges—one hundred and ninety-two at time of writing, or over a fifth of the federal bench—and with more nominees pending, the judiciary is taking steps to entrench this new form of religious privilege. The greatest future gains for the Christian nationalist version of religious liberty, however, are likely to come from the Supreme Court.

During the now-forgotten part of then Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate testimony, before questions about his temperament and alleged past sexual aggressions consumed the proceedings, the two senators from Texas, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, both praised Kavanaugh as a jurist who would uphold “religious liberty”—that is, the religious privileges of conservative Christians at the expense of other people’s rights. Indeed, Kavanaugh repeatedly signaled his concurrence with this theory that now animates the Trump administration when Kavanaugh endorsed the appeal to “history and tradition” in discussing his record of defending certain forms of religious liberty.

*

The Department of Labor is another arm of government that has taken up the cause, issuing guidelines proposing a rule that would exempt federal contractors from certain anti-discrimination laws if they attribute their violations to sincerely held religious beliefs. In July 2018, the then Attorney General Jeff Sessions followed up with his own Religious Liberty Task Force, highlighting the Trump–Pence White House’s true priorities.

Let’s suppose you run a company that builds and/or runs continuing-care facilities for seniors and you don’t approve of same-sex relationships. The conventional understanding of civil rights law says you can’t discriminate against gay people as customers. But the new theory of religious liberty argues that you should be free to exclude same-sex couples from your facilities as an exercise of your conscience.

That’s exactly what happened to Mary Walsh and Bev Nance, a couple from Sunset Hills, Missouri, who had been together for about forty years when, in July 2016, their application for an apartment in the Friendship Village senior living community was rejected; Friendship Village had reasoned that their marriage is not “understood in the Bible.” Nance and Walsh challenged the decision in court, but their petition was rejected, in January 2019, by a federal judge in the Eastern District of Missouri.

The religious liberty movement now seems set to reshape a range of care-provider services. In South Carolina, Aimee Maddonna, a mother of three, was turned away from a government-funded foster care agency, Miracle Hill, because she is Catholic. “You sound like you’d be the perfect mentor but we only accept Protestant Christians,” she was told by agency staff. At least one Jewish woman who also sought to volunteer with Miracle Hill was rejected for the same reason—that her faith background did not conform to the agency’s confessional standard. At least nine other states have passed laws that allow state-licensed child-placement agencies to refuse services to individuals and couples if they belong to the wrong religion or do not match the agencies’ sincerely held religious belief or, as mentioned by at least four state laws, simply “moral conviction.”

This version of “religious liberty” relies on two basic assumptions. The first is that the religion in need of protection of its liberty almost always belongs to a particular family of socially conservative Christianity. It then follows that if a commitment to human equality, a right to best-practices medical care in all medical settings, or reproductive self-determination forms the basis of your sincerely held religious beliefs, there is no liberty in this movement for you. The second is that the exercise of this liberty always involves a target group: whether that’s LGBT Americans, members of religious or ethnic minority groups, nonreligious Americans, or women in need of reproductive health services, even to save their lives, Christian nationalists, it seems, will find an object for their condemnation—even as they attempt to justify it by a false narrative of persecution.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Then Senate candidate Roy Moore, Republican of Alabama, speaking at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit, Washington, D.C., October 13, 2017

The value of “religious liberty” for the religious right is therefore less about denial of services to particular people in need, and more about uniting and rallying support behind the broader religious-right movement. I saw this in action at the 2019 Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., an annual gathering of Christian right activists. A panel featuring people for whom anti-discrimination law poses a supposed threat to their “religious liberty” included Joanna Duka, a Christian calligrapher in Phoenix, Arizona.

“We are girls, we love weddings, but as Christians we have a special appreciation for the beauty of marriage,” Duka explained. “The city of Phoenix had a law that would threaten us with criminal penalties, including jail time, if we were to create art consistent with our beliefs.” In fact, no gay person or couple had asked Duka or her business partner to provide invitations or any other services to a same-sex wedding. But Duka, with the support of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a large Christian right legal advocacy group, went ahead and sued the city anyway, alleging that Phoenix anti-discrimination law violated her “religious liberty.” Presumably, the very thought that a gay couple might ask for her services was enough to constitute an alleged infringement of her freedom of religious conscience.

“The individuals here on stage, their experience was with the government coming in and trying to compel them to violate their conscience,” said Tony Perkins, long-time president of the Family Research Council, a leading right-wing policy group, who moderated Duka’s panel. “And thankfully under the current administration and through the court system we’ve been able to obtain justice for these clients here.”

The sham claim of persecution is too valuable in mobilizing the base to set aside just because it’s obviously a fable. It is used by leaders of the movement to solidify their power. The story of redemption under the Trump administration is a common theme in such company because in Trump the movement has finally found a leader suited to their cause.

This is the real meaning of “religious liberty”: the privilege enjoyed by certain favored groups to hold special status in our society, to claim public money and resources for themselves, and to identify a despised other and organize around their contempt of that enemy. Through the unlikely person of President Trump, the Christian nationalist movement has seized the levers of power at the heart of government. This is just the beginning.

---

This essay is adapted in part from the author’s book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, published on March 3 by Bloomsbury.

February 28, 2020, 7:00 am

Freeman Dyson: 1923 - 2020

Freeman Dyson [2.28.20]

Photo: Freeman Dyson, August 1939, compliments of George Dyson

Freeman Dyson (1923 - 2020)

ED. NOTE: On February 3, 2019, Freeman Dyson wrote to me in response to my interest in commissioning him to write a new essay for Edge:

From: dyson@ias.edu
Dear John,

Thank you for your message of January 2 announcing your new agenda and including the piece from George.

I have written a piece with the title, "Biological and Cultural Evolution: Six Characters in Search of an Author'', which I am offering for you to publish. I have adopted the design of Pirandello's play to introduce my six characters. The purpose is to give a public hearing to some unorthodox ideas about evolution.

Evolution is a dominating force in human affairs and in the workings of nature. An improved understanding of evolution may help us to deal wisely with human problems and also with the preservation of natural diversity.

Please let me know whether you find this piece appropriate for your new agenda. I send you a first draft. It will need some editorial work and some references to the literature before it is published.

I am sending you the text by a separate E-mail. With thanks for your consideration, yours ever, Freeman.

Freeman at that time was in La Jolla, and we were unable to sit down together for a videotaped interview. Nor would there be an audio. I asked if he could read the essay, and he agreed. A few days after sending him a USB microphone, my associate Russell Weinberger received an audio file with this note:


Thank you for your help this morning with the audio transfer. I could never have done this without guidance from both you and Imme. We sent it to you as soon as it was finished without checking the quality. I suspect the quality may be poor, since I was struggling with the GarageGang, a computer program that I still do not understand. If you find the quality unacceptable, I will be happy to do the whole recording over again. This will not take so long, now that we have some experience with the technical problems. In any case, I apologize for my incompetence in dealing with computers. Yours, Freeman Dyson.

Freeman, at the age of 96, had gone back to school to spend three days mastering the intricacies of Apple's "GarageGang."

So, we are pleased to reprise his piece, "Biological and Cultural Evolution: Six Characters in Search of an Author.” But, do yourself a favor. While the text of the essay is below, don't read it. Honor Freeman by listening to it: a wonderful way to spend an hour.

John Brockman
Editor, Edge

p.s. In the coming weeks, we are planning a tribute to Freeman, a founding member of both Edge, in 1996, and before that, The Reality Club, in 1980. Stay tuned.

Biological and Cultural Evolution
Six Characters in Search of an Author
An Edge Original Essay by Freeman Dyson [2.19.19]





In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.

Unfortunately, the first of our two tasks, the nurture of a brotherhood of man, has been made possible only by the dominant role of cultural evolution in recent centuries. The cultural evolution that damages and endangers natural diversity is the same force that drives human brotherhood through the mutual understanding of diverse societies. Wells's vision of human history as an accumulation of cultures, Dawkins's vision of memes bringing us together by sharing our arts and sciences, Pääbo's vision of our cousins in the cave sharing our language and our genes, show us how cultural evolution has made us what we are. Cultural evolution will be the main force driving our future.

FREEMAN DYSON was an emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In addition to fundamental contributions ranging from number theory to quantum electrodynamics, he worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied. His books include Disturbing the Universe, Weapons and Hope, Infinite in All Directions, Maker of Patterns, and Origins of Life. Freeman Dyson's Edge Bio Page

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

Freeman Dyson Takes on the Climate Establishment
Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has been roundly criticized for insisting global warming is not an urgent problem, with many climate scientists dismissing him as woefully ill-informed. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Dyson explains his iconoclastic views and why he believes they have stirred such controversy.

BY MICHAEL LEMONICK • JUNE 4, 2009

Yale Environment 360
Published at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

Freeman Dyson

On March 3, The New York Times Magazine created a major flap in the climate-change community by running a cover story on the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson that focused largely on his views of human-induced global warming.

Basically, he doesn’t buy it. The climate models used to forecast what will happen as we continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere are unreliable, Dyson claims, and so, therefore, are the projections. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, his first since the Times article appeared, Dyson contends that since carbon dioxide is good for plants, a warmer planet could be a very good thing. And if CO2 does get to be a problem, Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess.

These sorts of arguments are advanced routinely by climate-change skeptics, and dismissed just as routinely by those who work in the field as clueless at best and deliberately misleading at worst. Dyson is harder to dismiss, though, in part because of his brilliance. He’s on the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study, where as a young physicist he hobnobbed with Albert Einstein. When Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics for quantum electrodynamics, Dyson was widely acknowledged to be almost equally deserving — but the Nobel Committee only gives out three prizes for a given discovery.

Nevertheless, large numbers of climate modelers and others who actually work on climate change — as Dyson does not — rolled their collective eyes at assertions they consider appallingly ill-informed. In his interview with Yale Environment 360, Dyson also makes numerous assertions of fact — from his claim that warming today is largely confined to the Arctic to his contention that human activities are not primarily responsible for rising global temperatures — that climate scientists say are flat-out wrong.

Many climate scientists were especially distressed that the Times gave his views such prominence. Even worse, when the profile’s author, Nicholas Dawidoff, was asked on NPR’s “On The Media” whether it mattered if Dyson was right or wrong in his views, Dawidoff answered, “Oh, absolutely not. I don’t care what he thinks. I have no investment in what he thinks. I’m just interested in how he thinks and the depth and the singularity of his point of view.”

This is, to put it bluntly, bizarre. It matters a great deal whether he’s right or wrong, given that his views have been trumpeted in such a prominent forum with essentially no challenge. So I visited Dyson in his Princeton office in May to probe a little deeper into his views on climate change.

Yale Environment 360: First of all, was that article substantially accurate about your views?

Freeman Dyson: It’s difficult to say, “Yes” or “No.” It was reasonably accurate on details, because they did send a fact-checker. So I was able to correct the worst mistakes. But what I could not correct was the general emphasis of the thing. He had his agenda. Obviously he wanted to write a piece about global warming and I was just the instrument for that, and I am not so much interested in global warming. He portrayed me as sort of obsessed with the subject, which I am definitely not. To me it is a very small part of my life. I don’t claim to be an expert. I never did. I simply find that a lot of these claims that experts are making are absurd. Not that I know better, but I know a few things. My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me.


e360: So it’s a sense you get from the way the argument is conducted that it’s not being done in an honest way.

Dyson: I think the difference between me and most of the experts is that I think I have a much wider view of the whole subject. I was involved in climate studies seriously about 30 years ago. That’s how I got interested. There was an outfit called the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge. I visited Oak Ridge many times, and worked with those people, and I thought they were excellent. And the beauty of it was that it was multi-disciplinary. There were experts not just on hydrodynamics of the atmosphere, which of course is important, but also experts on vegetation, on soil, on trees, and so it was sort of half biological and half physics. And I felt that was a very good balance.
You can learn a lot from [models], but you cannot learn what’s going to happen 10 years from now.”

And there you got a very strong feeling for how uncertain the whole business is, that the five reservoirs of carbon all are in close contact — the atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, the land vegetation, the topsoil, and the fossil fuels. They are all about equal in size. They all interact with each other strongly. So you can’t understand any of them unless you understand all of them. Essentially that was the conclusion. It’s a problem of very complicated ecology, and to isolate the atmosphere and the ocean just as a hydrodynamics problem makes no sense.

Thirty years ago, there was a sort of a political split between the Oak Ridge community, which included biology, and people who were doing these fluid dynamics models, which don’t include biology. They got the lion’s share of money and attention. And since then, this group of pure modeling experts has become dominant.

I got out of the field then. I didn’t like the way it was going. It left me with a bad taste.

Syukuro Manabe, right here in Princeton, was the first person who did climate models with enhanced carbon dioxide and they were excellent models. And he used to say very firmly that these models are very good tools for understanding climate, but they are not good tools for predicting climate. I think that’s absolutely right. They are models, but they don’t pretend to be the real world. They are purely fluid dynamics. You can learn a lot from them, but you cannot learn what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

What’s wrong with the models. I mean, I haven’t examined them in detail, (but) I know roughly what’s in them. And the basic problem is that in the case of climate, very small structures, like clouds, dominate. And you cannot model them in any realistic way. They are far too small and too diverse.

So they say, ‘We represent cloudiness by a parameter,’ but I call it a fudge factor. So then you have a formula, which tells you if you have so much cloudiness and so much humidity, and so much temperature, and so much pressure, what will be the result… But if you are using it for a different climate, when you have twice as much carbon dioxide, there is no guarantee that that’s right. There is no way to test it.

We know that plants do react very strongly to enhanced carbon dioxide. At Oak Ridge, they did lots of experiments with enhanced carbon dioxide and it has a drastic effect on plants because it is the main food source for the plants… So if you change the carbon dioxide drastically by a factor of two, the whole behavior of the plant is different. Anyway, that’s so typical of the things they ignore. They are totally missing the biological side, which is probably more than half of the real system.

e360: Do you think it’s because they don’t consider it important, or they just don’t know how to model it?

Dyson: Well, both. I mean it’s a fact that they don’t know how to model it. And the question is, how does it happen that they end up believing their models? But I have seen that happen in many fields. You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real. It is also true that the whole livelihood of all these people depends on people being scared. Really, just psychologically, it would be very difficult for them to come out and say, “Don’t worry, there isn’t a problem.” It’s sort of natural, since their whole life depends on it being a problem. I don’t say that they’re dishonest. But I think it’s just a normal human reaction. It’s true of the military also. They always magnify the threat. Not because they are dishonest; they really believe that there is a threat and it is their job to take care of it. I think it’s the same as the climate community, that they do in a way have a tremendous vested interest in the problem being taken more seriously than it is.

“The whole livelihood of all these people depends on people being scared.”


e360: When I wrote my first story about this in 1987, I had to say this is all theoretical, we haven’t actually detected any signal of climate change. Now, people point to all sorts of signals, which are just the sort of things that were being predicted, based in part on the models. They made predictions and they’ve tested the predictions by seeing what happened in the real world, and they seem to be at least in the same direction, and in about the same magnitude, they were predicting. So isn’t that a hint that there is something right about the models?

Dyson: Of course. No doubt that warming is happening. I don’t think it is correct to say “global,” but certainly warming is happening. I have been to Greenland a year ago and saw it for myself. And that’s where the warming is most extreme. And it’s spectacular, no doubt about it. And glaciers are shrinking and so on.

But, there are all sorts of things that are not said, which decreases my feeling of alarm. First of all, the people in Greenland love it. They tell you it’s made their lives a lot easier. They hope it continues. I am not saying none of these consequences are happening. I am just questioning whether they are harmful.

There’s a lot made out of the people who died in heat waves. And there is no doubt that we have heat waves and people die. What they don’t say is actually five times as many people die of cold in winters as die of heat in summer. And it is also true that more of the warming happens in winter than in summer. So, if anything, it’s heavily favorable as far as that goes. It certainly saves more lives in winter than it costs in summer.

So that kind of argument is never made. And I see a systematic bias in the way things are reported. Anything that looks bad is reported, and anything that looks good is not reported.

A lot of these things are not anything to do with human activities. Take the shrinking of glaciers, which certainly has been going on for 300 years and has been well documented. So it certainly wasn’t due to human activities, most of the time. There’s been a very strong warming, in fact, ever since the Little Ice Age, which was most intense in the 17th century. That certainly was not due to human activity.

And the most serious of almost all the problems is the rising sea level. But there again, we have no evidence that this is due to climate change. A good deal of evidence says it’s not. I mean, we know that that’s been going on for 12,000 years, and there’s very doubtful arguments as to what’s been happening in the last 50 years and (whether) human activities have been important. It’s not clear whether it’s been accelerating or not. But certainly, most of it is not due to human activities. So it would be a shame if we’ve made huge efforts to stop global warming and the sea continued to rise. That would be a tragedy. Sea level is a real problem, but we should be attacking it directly and not attacking the wrong problem.

“Anything that looks bad is reported, and anything that looks good is not reported.”

e360: Another criticism that’s been leveled is that your thoughts and predictions about the climate models are relatively unsophisticated, because you haven’t been in close contact with the people who are doing them. But if you sit down and actually talk to the people about what goes into the models today and what they are thinking about and how they think about clouds, you might discover that your assumptions about what they are doing are not correct. Is that plausible? Do you think it might inform you better to actually sit down with these people and find out what they are doing today?

Dyson: Well, it depends on what you mean by sitting down with people. I do sit down with people. I don’t go over their calculations in detail. But I think I understand pretty well the world they live in.

I guess one thing I don’t want to do is to spend all my time arguing this business. I mean, I am not the person to do that. I have two great disadvantages. First of all, I am 85 years old. Obviously, I’m an old fuddy-duddy. So, I have no credibility.

And, secondly, I am not an expert, and that’s not going to change. I am not going to make myself an expert. What I do think I have is a better judgment, maybe because I have lived a bit longer, and maybe because I’ve done other things. So I am fairly confident about my judgment, and I doubt whether that will change. But I am certainly willing to change my mind about details. And if they find any real evidence that global warming is doing harm, I would be impressed. That’s the crucial point: I don’t see the evidence…

And why should you imagine that the climate of the 18th century — what they call the pre-industrial climate — is somehow the best possible?

e360: I don’t think people actually believe that. I think they believe it’s the one during which our modern civilization arose. And that a rapid change to a different set of circumstances wouldn’t be worse in a grand sense, but it would be very badly suited to the infrastructure that we have got.

Dyson: That’s sort of what I would call part of the propaganda — to take for granted that any change is bad.

e360: It’s more that any change is disruptive. You don’t think that’s reasonable?

Dyson: Well, disruptive is not the same as bad. A lot of disruptive things actually are good. That’s the point. There’s this sort of mindset that assumes any change is bad. You can call it disruptive or you can call it change. But it doesn’t have to be bad.

e360: One thing is that if the temperature change projections are accurate for the next 100 years, it would be equivalent to the change that took us out of the last Ice Age into the present interglacial period, which is a very dramatic change.

Dyson: Yes, that’s highly unlikely. But it’s possible certainly.

e360: And the further argument is that this would happen much more quickly than that change happened. So it is hard to imagine that, at least in the short run, it could be anything but highly destructive.

Dyson: There’s hidden assumptions there, which I question, that you can describe the climate by a single number. In the case of the Ice Age, that might be true, that it was cold everywhere. The ice was only in the northern regions, but it was also much colder at the equator in the Ice Age.

“If they find any real evidence that global warming is doing harm, I would be impressed.”

That’s not true of this change in temperature today. The change that’s now going on is very strongly concentrated in the Arctic. In fact in three respects, it’s not global, which I think is very important. First of all, it is mainly in the Arctic. Secondly, it’s mainly in the winter rather than summer. And thirdly, it’s mainly in the night rather than at the daytime. In all three respects, the warming is happening where it is cold, not where it is hot.

e360: So, the idea is that the parts that are being disrupted are the parts that are inhospitable to begin with?

Dyson: Mostly. It is not 100 percent. But mostly they are, Greenland being a great example.

e360: Do you mind being thrust in the limelight of talking about this when it is not your main interest. You’ve suddenly become the poster child for global warming skepticism.

Dyson: Yes, it is definitely a tactical mistake to use somebody like me for that job, because I am so easily shot down. I’d much rather the job would be done by somebody who is young and a real expert. But unfortunately, those people don’t come forward.

e360: Are there people who are knowledgeable about this topic who could do the job of pointing out what you see as the flaws?

Dyson: I am sure there are. But I don’t know who they are.

I have a lot of friends who think the same way I do. But I am sorry to say that most of them are old, and most of them are not experts. My views are very widely shared.

Anyway, the ideal protagonist I am still looking for. So the answer to your question is, I will do the job if nobody else shows up, but I regard it as a duty rather than as a pleasure.

e360: Because it is important for you that people not take drastic actions about a problem that you are not convinced exists?

Dyson: Yes. And I feel very strongly that China and India getting rich is the most important thing that’s going on in the world at present. That’s a real revolution, that the center of gravity of the whole population of the world would be middle class, and that’s a wonderful thing to happen. It would be a shame if we persuade them to stop that just for the sake of a problem that’s not that serious.

And I’m happy every time I see that the Chinese and Indians make a strong statement about going ahead with burning coal. Because that’s what it really depends on, is coal. They can’t do without coal. We could, but they certainly can’t.

So I think it is very important that they should not be under pressure. Luckily they are, in fact, pretty self-confident; (neither) of those countries pays too much attention to us.

But that’s my motivation… Anyhow, I think we have probably said enough.

Facebook
Twitter
Email



Michael D. Lemonick is an opinion editor at Scientific American and a former senior staff writer at Climate Central. Prior to joining Climate Central, he was a senior science writer at Time magazine, where he covered science and the environment for more than 20 years. He has also written four books on astronomical topics and has taught science journalism at Princeton University for the past decade. MOREABOUT MICHAEL LEMONICK →

Maverick Genius: the Pioneering Odyssey of Freeman Dyson

An iconoclast’s career
21 Mar 2013

QUANTUM MECHANICS
OPINION AND REVIEWS

Maverick Genius: the Pioneering Odyssey of Freeman Dyson

Phillip Schewe
2013 Thomas Dunne Books £17.49/$27.99hb 352pp

Ideas man

The “maverick genius” referred to in the title of Phillip Schewe’s book is Freeman Dyson: a truly great mathematical physicist, bestselling author, longest-serving member of the US military’s JASON advisory group, and occupant of the “fourth chair” when the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded for quantum electrodynamics (QED) – among many other distinctions. Indeed, a biography of Dyson was long overdue, even though his own autobiographical writings are extensive and so beautifully written that no ordinary author could match them, Schewe included.

Why, in that case, should we bother with this biography? Because, as the author makes clear, there are many Freeman Dysons, and how they developed (evolved?) into each other, and what their relationship is, are both relevant parts of his story – as is some kind of appraisal of what one is to make of the final individual.

My own contacts with Dyson have been indirect. Of course, I tried to understand the fundamental QED papers of 1949 that revised all our views of quantum field theory, and I used the techniques presented in them to help solve a puzzle in solid-state physics. Then, in 1958 I was chosen as a substitute for Dyson after he was enticed away from the University of California, Berkeley – where he had spent three summers researching condensed-matter problems with Charles Kittel – to work at General Atomics in La Jolla, California. There, for much more money than Kittel could command, Dyson helped design the safe reactor TRIGA and the Orion spaceship. (I had a marvellous summer at Berkeley, though my papers were crude compared with Dyson’s.) But we did not meet until the first energy crisis, when we both attended a workshop on energy that was sponsored by the American Physical Society. Afterwards, we met at disarmament seminars at Princeton University in New Jersey, which is where I first sensed his ambiguity about conventional liberal positions on subjects such as the “Star Wars” defence initiative – most of which I hold unambiguously.

This is not an authorized biography, so Schewe did not have access to any private letters in his research. However, he is a well-known popularizer of physics (being employed in that capacity by the American Institute of Physics) and he has done a meticulous job of finding all of the relevant sources available. He has researched the course of Dyson’s life in detail, beginning with his privileged and precocious childhood at Winchester and foreshortened Cambridge years, which were overshadowed by the approach of the Second World War. Dyson spent the war years doing operations research for Bomber Command, and his determinedly itinerant graduate years with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman culminated in the great breakthrough of QED. After his relatively brief, but scientifically fertile, junior faculty years at Birmingham and Cornell, he settled permanently at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton in 1953, at the age of 30.

“Settled”, however, is hardly the word for it: the liberal vacations and relaxed leave policies of the IAS have enabled Dyson to become the epitome of the “have briefcase, will travel” scientist, bringing him several further careers. The one that seemed to leave the strongest impression on him was his involvement with the nuclear world and particularly the Orion project, which foreshadowed major themes of his later career. Orion was a nuclear-powered spaceship that he, Edward Teller and Ted Taylor designed in 1959 and advocated thereafter, and this experience seems to have left him with a visionary predilection for thinking the unthinkable in terms of the long-term future of the human (or other intelligent) race in space. He also became a major influence in the effort to achieve some measure of nuclear disarmament; after initially opposing the test ban treaty, as a JASON consultant he co-wrote an influential report opposing the employment of nuclear weapons in Vietnam.

Until the 1980s Dyson kept up a continuous and active career in mathematical physics, with occasional forays into broader interests such as condensed matter, biology (particularly studies on the origins of life) and astronomy. Around that time, he discovered his second métier as a writer of extraordinarily readable prose. A number of well-received essays were followed by his first autobiographical book, Disturbing the Universe (1979), which was nominated for the US National Book Award. Then came Weapons and Hope (1984), which captured the public’s interest in the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (the aforementioned “Star Wars”). He continues to publish a book every few years as well as many articles and book reviews. Partly thanks to his prolific writing, but also because he seems to have something inspiring and beautifully phrased to say for any occasion, he has become a popular lecturer and maintains a frighteningly full travel schedule. Most recently he has delighted in maintaining minority views on a number of topics such as climate, religion (his Christianity places him in the minority for his profession) and genetic modification.

Did he ever have time for a private life? Schewe’s book records Dyson’s claim (perhaps a dubious one) to have had two principles in his relations with women: he did not allow himself to become interested if he didn’t have marriage in mind; and he intended to have six children. He proposed to his first wife, Verena – a bright, glamorous mathematician and single mother at the IAS – almost on meeting her, and wooed her by mail for over a year throughout his continual travels until (with some reluctance on her part) they married in 1950. She bore him two children before a miscarriage, but theirs was a somewhat stormy marriage, noteworthy for the fact that her thesis and mathematical notes were deliberately burned in the interest of domesticity. Both children, Esther and George, became well-known figures, she as a journalist-entrepreneur and he as an author. Dyson’s second wife Imme, formerly his children’s au pair, produced four more daughters. Friends of his children report that Dyson is a kindly, avuncular figure, though a rather strict father.

A more important question, though, is whether Dyson is the important world figure that Schewe makes him out to be. In his career, we can see traces of the mathematical physicist’s reluctance to tackle the ambiguous or deeply puzzling question, or to go out mathematically even a little bit on a limb – something that contrasts sharply with his joyful interest in bizarre futurology. Perhaps this is the source of Dyson’s dreadful misjudgment on the climate question: he sees that the possible errors are large, but does not factor in that they are likely to be large in the wrong direction, and does not credit obvious qualitative arguments from simple laws of physics.

One could wish, as in many biographies of scientists, that the scientific contributions were more critically presented and contextualized. Sometimes the hype goes too far, as when Schewe compares Dyson’s popularity as the guru of QED in the 1950s with the Beatles’ “conquest of America” in the 1960s. Dyson’s very elegant arguments do not always have much to say about how things work in the real world, and the author makes little effort to distinguish whether they do. He did not, for one thing, participate in any of the revolutionary events that created the Standard Model. However, my own preference is for the sloppy and practical rather than elegant and precise, so I am prejudiced.

It is natural for biographers to fall a little in love with their subjects, but on balance, this book leaves the reader intrigued but a bit unsatisfied. Dyson is a superbly able man and has done so much, but what if he had focused on one career? Perhaps the career he really wanted was scotched, as Schewe suggests, by the fallout problems of Orion? In any case, he is worth reading about and marvelling at.

Philip Anderson is a condensed-matter physicist at Princeton University in the US who has dabbled in complexity theory, astrophysics and even particle theory