After what must have been a night of heavy drinking, the Great General of Carthage decided he was ‘finally gonna get those bloody Romans!’
He gathered up the state Treasury and set off toward the ice-capped Italian Alps with a barbarian horde complete with 37 elephants.
You may know him as ‘Hannibal’.
Sure, his military prowess is famous now, but those marching behind the elephants had their doubts.
If you have ever tried to climb a mountain covered in ice with a hungry backpack weighing 6,000 kilos that shits all over the narrow track – you might understand why the consensus among Hannibal’s troops was that this was probably a bad idea. Everyone knew that if you wanted to wage war on Rome, you took a fleet of ships. That was the accepted truth. It had been that way forever.
There was consensus among the elephants too, especially as they were hustled onto hand-built rafts and dragged across the rough waters of the Rhône. The tribes in the area were a little dodgy, often helping Hannibal to cross the rivers leading up to the ranges only to turn around and start raiding Hannibal’s camps. Moral was treacherously low by the time the caravan entered the narrow passages high up in the Alps, where the elephants and men were forced to traverse ravines while Gauls tossed boulders from the peaks above, flattening parts of the army. The consensus against Hannibal strengthened.
It is possible at this point the lone dissenter from the consensus was Hannibal himself. It’s a position more than one great scientist has found themselves in.
Galileo. Tesla. Darwin. Wegener. Mendel.
The tyranny of consensus didn’t bother Hannibal. He said to his troops: ‘We will find a way, and if there is no way, we will make a way!’
Hannibal did find a way and when his elephants faced off against the first Roman army, it was a massacre. The battle in 216 BC saw Hannibal kill 70,000 Romans, capture 10,000, and he left 3,000 to crawl back to Rome with tales of horror. The survivors were so badly shaken from the elephants that Roman priests started burying people alive as sacrificial offerings to the gods.
Personally, I feel that was an overreaction. But one thing is certain: the consensus regarding Hannibal had changed.
He was a bloody genius!
Elephants! Inspired. Why hadn’t anyone done this before?
Greatest. General. Ever.
It took the Romans a while to realise that elephants had weaknesses too. They were easy to scare and so, after many losses, the Romans decided to storm into battle like teenagers hitting Queensland for schoolies – banging drums, blowing horns, shouting, and generally creating hysteria in short skirts and thongs. The frightened elephants turned around and squashed most of Hannibal’s army.
The consensus shifted again. Stupid Hannibal. Elephants? What was he thinking???
You might be noticing something about the notion of a ‘consensus’ – it changes.
A consensus is a majority opinion and nothing more.
Sometimes it is useful. Sometimes it is correct. But the emphasis here is on sometimes.
A witch-burning mob is also a consensus. Religion is a consensus – albeit a different consensus in different times in different parts of the world.
Human rights are a consensus – a consensus that evolves and falls apart between nations. As a species, we cannot agree on simple fundamental acceptable behaviour, even though whole populations believe their opinion is correct. There is even a conflict of consensus between Generation TikTok and everyone else. These are irreconcilable consensuses…
Indeed there is a consensus among rainbow-haired teachers that biological gender is a construct and any attempt to enforce a binary gender ideology on students is – like – literally a form of slavery perpetrated by the Colonial patriarchy.
I might have embellished that last bit but you take my point.
A consensus is little more than a whole bunch of people standing around agreeing with each other.
Peer review is based on the concept of a slightly tyrannical consensus amongst self-appointed experts. Instead of assigning value to the arguments inside a scientific document and whether or not those are true, peer review has devolved into a room full of faceless nodding heads that are hoping if someone nods back at them, they will have access to a pile of grant money. The harder they nod, the more money they get.
This kind of system is deeply flawed.
The failure of peer review has been suspected for a long time, given how much junk science is blindly okayed and later debunked.
The rest of the world had a chance to laugh at the absurdity when an academic hoax conducted by three scholars submitted 20 fake papers. These were the most click-baity topics imaginable that set out to reach ridiculous conclusions. Think – academic trolling.
If peer review was a system that valued truth, the stunt would never have worked. But it did.
By the time the hoaxers pulled their experiment, they had seven articles accepted by serious peer-review journals in the area of gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies.
It wasn’t the scientific community that caught them out – it was the Wall Street Journal who realised that one of the authors did not exist. No doubt the Wall Street Journal saw the headline, ‘Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon’ and thought … hmm … something’s not right!
The hoaxers had a serious point – and that is, in the post-modernist world of so-called ‘science’, conclusions are being driven by the consensus of activism and political theory rather than reality. Worse than that – truth is actively rejected if it happens to interfere with activist thinking or hurts the fragile feelings of those who came up with the stupid ideas.
Effectively what the hoaxers were saying is that the consensus-driven scientific community had become ridiculous. And no, they were not only picking on the ‘fake’ science genres. Stem subjects have exactly the same problem festering within them.
The United Nations Secretary-General doesn’t stand up out of nowhere and indulge in an unhinged rant about ‘global boiling’. His speech is empowered by the failure of science and the establishment of a tyrannical consensus against truth funded by corporate and political interests.
The scientific community should have laughed when the same man waded out into the surf wearing an expensive suit to prove what – that water gets deeper the further in you walk?
To be fair I have to place some of this blame on the media. If there hadn’t been a lucrative and ego-stroking Time magazine cover in it, António Guterres probably would have kept his feet dry.
The media is definitely having a bit of a love affair with science and, in the process, the media is radicalising science into a more theatrical, ridiculous, and saleable item.
Now, I am not saying that the media created the problem of consensus science – but boy are they happy to cheer it on.
Let me put it this way. I love astronomy. Always have. But when I was growing up, media coverage of anything astronomical by a mainstream media outlet was … well … about as successful as watching a Labor Treasurer balance the Budget.
I have to give politicians credit. They saw the corruption of science via consensus and realised it could be used to make money for their mates and get themselves elected.
Science is knowledge and knowledge is power.
Lots of you can probably recite Sir Francis Bacon’s overused phrase in its traditional Latin. The Lord High Chancellor of England in the early 1600s was a fan of our now outdated and antiquated notion that science should be based upon inductive reasoning and careful observation of the natural world.
Bacon encouraged scepticism and cautioned scientists not to mislead themselves with pretty theories. His observation came during an arms race of knowledge. Everyone wanted to find out something new about the world – to light as many candles as possible to signify the end of the Dark Ages.
The Baconian method underpins much of the modern scientific philosophy and yet if you mention Bacon to those who have glued themselves to the main road in service of climate science, they are likely to report you to PETA for animal cruelty and deduct a few social credit points. The tasty sizzle of Bacon has been lost to history in favour of religious zeal.
Greta Thunberg is the new scientific standard. Once upon a time we threw virgins into volcanoes to control the weather, now we toss range rovers into landfill and expect a similar response.
The consensus is we can buy the weather.
At least, that is what those taking the money out of our hands promise.
In the old world, divine knowledge and – by extension – political power was held by the shamans. The witch doctors. The temple oracles who inhaled the fumes of underworld and whispered the future to princes, Caesars, and emperors.
This knowledge was accepted as true even though prophecies frequently failed, were often wrong, usually ambiguous, and obviously influenced by political ambition and money.
Those who tested the consensus were killed because the vested interests were protecting their power at the expense of truth.
Lies don’t like questions.
Bacon’s notion of science being powerful arose because science held truth in a world that lacked certainty. Science could be tested. Science was not bent by money or political influence. Laymen could replicate its truth.
Science was freedom for the common man.
When people say there is a consensus around gravity, they do not use the consensus as proof of gravity.
The laws of gravity are comfy in their consensus. You can trash-talk gravity on Twitter all day and no one is going to delete you from the internet.
When Commander David Scott dropped a hammer and a feather on the moon at the end of the Apollo 15 moonwalk, it was a curiosity, not a cataclysmic cultural moment.
Compare this to what happens if you say mean things about the Global Boiling theory or ask a few basic follow-up questions regarding the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines.
This consensus behaves like the lucrative cults of the old world, sending out a swarm of worker ants to defend the lie at the centre of the nest. The angrier the nest gets, the weaker its lie becomes.
It’s no wonder the West is sliding into an aggressive age of censorship, political overreach, outrageous propaganda, and coercive policy.
Science – bastardised by politics, touchy-feely activism, and corporate interest – knows that it has lost its truth, lost its power, and sacrificed its intellectual freedom.
I accept that the media is a lot like peer review. One person writes an article – usually from a story they nicked off Twitter – then it is copied blindly hundreds of times by outlets around the world, all of whom want a share of those clicks.
Eventually, the repetition of the press gallery transforms the absurd into ‘fact’. This happens in an environment where people have been conditioned to trust no one and believe the farcical.
We need to have a new Enlightenment. The press. The scientific community. Our political class. And most importantly – you – the people. We need to start lighting those candles and rewarding truth.
Our consensus should be fact over fantasy.
Freedom over tyranny.
This was adapted from my speech at The Australians for Science and Freedom weekend conference. Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
