Denial

He tells her she’s fat,
she tackles him and
bites off part of his ear.

Americans appear to have an unusually powerful capacity for denial. Take this ongoing oil disaster in the Gulf. We have experienced these oil spills and disasters before, many times, the most horrible and dramatic being of course the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. It should be perfectly obvious to anyone that drilling and transporting oil is fraught with environmental dangers. When a spill happens everyone gets all upset and swears we are going to do better, design double-hulled ships, be more careful in the shipping lanes, and so on. And we are told over and over again that with modern technology it is possible to drill safely anywhere on earth or in the water. It is perfectly obvious that it is not safe. So President Obama decides that we need to do more offshore drilling, and a few days later an oil platform explodes and creates another monumental disaster.

We went through the nonsense with the tobacco industry as you probably remember. It took years and years before any legislation at all was passed to control what we knew to be an unhealthy and addictive drug, nicotine. The argument was repeated ad nauseam that there was no proof that smoking caused cancer because all the evidence was correlational rather than causational. So, of course, if all you have are very strong correlations between smoking and health problems, that could not demonstrate conclusively there was a genuine problem, it was easy to deny the obvious dangers, at least for a long time. And you might note there are still a great many smokers even today, those who either deny the risk or apparently just don’t care.

This same kind of denial has happened routinely with various drugs and drug companies. Many drugs have been put on the market before there was conclusive evidence they were not harmful. This is because drug companies are allowed to conduct their own studies and invariably argue that there are no problems with their drugs when eventually it turns out there are serious problems. People usually accept prescriptions from their doctors for drugs that are not yet known to be completely safe, thus denying what may be genuine possibilities they might be unsafe. Basically, this is a denial that the pharmaceutical companies could be premature or completely wrong in their rush to make more money.

For years the timber industry denied that clear-cutting the old growth and other forests was problematical. And those who wanted to build dams denied they would harm the fish, and now companies like Monsanto deny that genetically modified crops could possibly be dangerous, just as others deny that cloning cattle or sheep could possibly have any undesirable consequences even thought the long-term effects of these practices are mostly unknown.

Then we have the nuclear industry. In spite of Chernobyl and Three Mile, and in spite of reports that nuclear plants are often unsafe and dangerous, people go on arguing that we need more nuclear energy. This is denial at a level that is truly dangerous because it is simply a matter-of-fact that nuclear energy is extremely dangerous, and the dangers are so great they should not be tolerated even for a moment. A nuclear meltdown or explosion is not merely a case of blowing up a house or two, or losing a couple of fingers, but, rather, a disaster of absolutely monumental and long-lasting and serious implications that will affect thousands upon thousands of people for years, maybe forever. Indeed, the peril posed by nuclear energy could conceivably end civilization as we know it. We deny this at a risk that to me, at least, is completely unacceptable.

There are even people who currently deny that global warming is occurring, or if it is, that it has any man-made component. There are others who deny that President Obama was born in the United States. Some deny that poverty has any cause except the laziness of the poor, still others who deny that television and motion pictures have any effect upon their audiences, some who deny the Holocaust occurred, and still more who deny the civil rights of some members of the community. There are even those who deny we ever actually landed on the moon, and those who deny that Bush/Cheney lied to us to bring about the “war” with Iraq. We deny that Afghanistan is a lost cause and we can never “win” but continue anyway. Obviously not all Americans deny all these things, and some deny one thing and not another, and so on. My point is not that everyone is in denial at all times about everything, but, rather, that Americans seem to have an unusual capacity for denial. It seems to be a characteristic national defense mechanism. Not all people are so willing or so easy to deny the various dangers that lurk in our lives. New Zealand, for example, does not allow any nuclear material anywhere near them. I think Japan may do so also, and I suppose there are other places that act in much the same ways. In many places if there is even a hint of danger from something they stop using or doing it until they know the facts. Here in America, however, we seem to be willing to deny even the obvious for long periods of time, usually in the interest of making short-term profits.

Yet ah! why should they know their fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,'Tis folly to be wise.
Thomas Gray