Because I Say So!

What former child doesn’t remember being frustrated and angry when our parents responded to “why?” with, “Because I said so.

Because I said so seems to be the up and coming response for governments, academics and the media throughout the world. As I read the December 3, 2009, Wall Street Journal I was struck with how many times the articles listing abuses of individual rights or lazy scientific outcomes ended with a quote from a government or academic official plainly stating that none of the preceding incidents, nothing in the interviews with numerous sources, none of the facts listed were true.

Why? Were they countered with facts, examples of in accuracies, evidence from well managed scientific inquiry? No. None of the accounts of opponents of governments or scientific findings were true, because the official government or scientific arbiter said so.

Consider if you will, the article by Farnaz Fasshari, “Iranian Crackdown Goes Global”. Accounts of Iranians living abroad being detained and questions as they enter Iran, or who have had their members arrested or threatened in retaliation for speaking out against the regime on Face book, Twitter, You Tube, etc are detailed in the article. The Iranian official contacted simply responded”…false…we have no reports of…” Take my word, because I say so.

The second example is Daniel Henninger’s editorial entitled, “Climategate: Science is Dying”. In this piece he rightly points out the scientific community, once viewed as the last bastion of fact based, evidence based decision making, should be concerned about the East Anglia Research Units liberal use of bias in interrupting and, shall I say, fudging the finding related to climate. He points out that this scandal has little to with climate, but much to do with how science must move to restore its creditability.

He states, “because ‘science’ said so, all the world was about to undergo a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost.”

Even as children we knew that the response, “because I said so” was either an indication of the lack of a logical explanation for why; or, a certainty that the real answer was beyond our capacity to understand and our parent’s patience to explain it.

Just as we outgrew accepting this answer from our parents and teachers, we, as adults must outgrow the willingness to accept this answer from those in positions of authority such as academics, the media and politicians. We must shirk our intellectual laziness and find the answer to why ourselves. Try reading a source document related to an area of interest in your world, like say a few hundred pages of any health care reform legislation, or cap and trade. Not because I say so, but because you want to know why?