The Apocalyptics: Politics, Science, and the Big Cancer Lie
Efron, Edith
based not on Lafferite fantasies but on spending cuts that, it turned out, couldn't be won from Congress. Stein also downplays the importance of the drastic decline in inflation as a source of...
...No one can read The Apocalyptics and ever again have the childish notion that American science is a machine devoted solely to pumping out truth for the public good...
...The difficulty, then, is to interpret Muslim views for those unfamiliar with the idiom of Islam without losing the evocative power of the original symbolism...
...So while Iran's juggernaut to Jerusalem inches through an Iraqi swamp, there is time to ponder the fortunes of Islam these last five years...
...And as a practical matter it is impossible to prove that any chemical will never cause cancer in some human being under some circumstances...
...Pipes frequently invites us to empathize with Muslim grief over the loss of world primacy, and he does so without indulging in Toynbeean selfflagellation over the West's alleged responsibility for the disarray of Islam...
...Those figures don't validate the Laffer curve, but they are nonetheless impressive...
...In a fantastic feat of scholarship, she unveils what she considers-with more than a little reason--the biggest scandal American science has ever known...
...Even more important, you'll learn a great deal that will be important and useful to you...
...Read it...
...This cynicism was best illustrated by the successful pressure on Congress to preserve our right to use saccharin though that substance had been "proved" carcinogenic by all the canons of regulatory science...
...The astonished man remonstrated, "That has nothing to do with you...
...When asked what he was doing, the friend replied, "Don't you know...
...The findings of this pseudo-science were sold to the American people with results that are still powerful as evidenced not only by existing law but also by the widespread hysteria about Love Canal, dioxin, and whatever chemical dump from 50 years ago is found in any normal American community these days...
...But as the tide of Western hegemony ebbed, and Muslim cash flow improved, the fundamentalists grew bold again...
...IN THE PATH OF GOD: ISLAM AND POLITICAL POWER Daniel Pipes/Basic Books/S22.50 Martin Kramer I s l a m no longer strikes blind fear in the world...
...To my dismay she shows that much of this trend began with one of my favorite writers, the late Rachel Carson, who, in Silent Spring, unjustly and inaccurately sold the idea that nature is benign and only man-made chemicals are the enemy...
...The reply came immediately, "Yes, but I can't prove I'm not, and neither can you...
...The decision last May by the chemical companies involved to settle the massive Agent Orange case rather than fight it out in court reflects a probably realistic estimate of how little chance scientific truth has in a lay forum these days...
...He has resisted a widespread tendency to translate Muslim self-expression into social science jargon as unintelligible as any mosque harangue...
...Miss Efron does two things superbly well...
...But even he wouldn't argue that the economy would be better off with a budget balanced by a continuation of high inflation...
...Daniel Pipes has searched the depths of specialist writing on behalf of the general reader, to produce a reliable guide for the perplexed...
...But Stein doesn't try to justify the various military commitments that make the Reagan defense budget necessary, or to answer 'To be reviewed next month by Thomas Hazlett...
...If fully successful, this campaign--which brought large numbers of chemicals under suspicion-could easily have crippled American industry and caused numerous essential substances to be declared illegal...
...She demonstrates that nature is not benign and that daily we are bathed in natural, potentially carcinogenic radiation and imbibe with our normal food and drink potential carcinogens which were there in the first place, not added by some greedy industrialist...
...Secondly, with scrupulous scholarship, she exposes the scaremongering that led high officials to frighten the American people with the idea that there were tens of thousands, even millions, of potentially carcinogenic chemicals being spewed out by our satanic factories and inflicted upon a helpless and unknowing populace...
...The brainwashing of the public and Congress, she shows, was accomplished with very shoddy and Harry Schwartz was a member o f the New York Times Editorial Board for almost 30 years and is Writer-inResidence at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University...
...At times like this he sounds like Felix Rohatyn...
...Herb Stein is no supplysider, but he may not be past redemption...
...movements that claim to champion true Islam...
...More startling still is Hausman's estimate that, at the margin, each dollar of income taxes collected costs the economy forty cents in "deadweight Ioss"--the total loss from exchanges that are not made because of taxes...
...Military defeat and cultural subjugation resulted in the collapse of the old Muslim complacency and a massive crisis...
...Those with less fortitude understandably cannot fathom how these ideas can survive in the harsh climate of modern skepticism...
...If Stein is acquainted with recent scholarship on the effects of taxes on work, he doesn't betray it...
...Consider that when the Great Mosque in Mecca--unmolested by foreigners even during imperialism's heyday--was 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984...
...In the Path of God is just such an appreciation, distinguished by the further merits of readability and comprehensiveness...
...Their methods were often heavyhanded, and opposition was driven into the mosques or underground...
...Moreover, there has been enough scientific debate and enough expensive industrial opposition in the courts and enough confusion in the laws actually passed by Congress so that the practical results of the legislation were far less than the proponents had hoped or the opponents had feared...
...To follow the debate within Islam is an exacting task, for the discourse is conducted largely in symbolic language...
...Past preeminence bred a Muslim pride in military self-sufficiency and a justified cultural conceit...
...This "evidence" was often exaggerated beyond its true significance by demagogic politicians and by journalists who proved patsies for scientists motivated often by the conviction that industrial capitalism was going to produce a needless epidemic of cancer deaths...
...Then, with the precipitous rise of the West, descended what Pipes calls Islam's "nightmare": "Once active, Islamdom became reactive...
...Pipes provides a catalogue of the challenges which they have posed, in a chapter consisting of some fifty country-sketches...
...THE APOCALYPTICS: POLITICS, SCIENCE, AND THE BIG CANCER LIE Edith Efron/Simon and Schuster/S19.95 Harry Schwartz An anecdote popular in Moscow at the height of the Stalin terror told of a man who came out on the street at 6 a.m...
...She has performed a major intellectual tour de force...
...Carried to its logical extreme, this alleged "prudence" against cancer risks sought to ban from the environment everything that might possibly cause cancer...
...once an integrated civilization, it became ruptured...
...Miss Efron's devotion to explaining the scientific debate with which she is concerned is enormous, and nobody can accuse her of hiding the arguments of those with whom she disagrees...
...I n short, the dominant school of what Miss Efron calls "regulatory science" --to distinguish it from real science-came dangerously close to assuming there could be no proven noncarcinogens, just as the Muscovite of our anecdote argued there could be no proven non-camels...
...This legislation and much of the accompanying public hysteria about the dangers of modern industrial society, its chemicals, and its pollutants, Miss Efron shows convincingly, were largely overkill...
...But radical Islam seems to have stalled alongside its Iranian standard-bearers in the forbidding bogs of southern Iraq...
...Fortunately, the public developed some cynicism and revolted against the idea that everything one liked caused cancer...
...Those burdened by this legacy have wavered between accommodation and resistance...
...An order has been issued that all camels must leave town by noon or else face summary execution...
...She does not even mention the case of saccharin...
...The anecdote comes to mind reading Edith Efron's The Apocalyptics because it neatly summarizes the plight of every new chemical synthesized in this country since about 1970...
...The present predicament has its origins in Muslim recollections of lost grandeur, to which Pipes devotes the first part of his book...
...But the American media make a religion of skepticism, of trying to show up all sources of authority in the White House, Congress, and corporate suites, to say nothing of the medical, legal, accounting, and other professions...
...often misrepresented scientific evidence...
...Although the impact of the resurgence has been uneven in these very different settings, the net effect has been to sanctify resentment of the West...
...Observes Pipes: " I t may be difficult to imagine in the late twentieth century, but lslamdom long predominated over its rivals in power, in wealth, and in culture...
...This is more than a little disingenuous...
...Presumably, their fear arises because the "regulatory scientists" hand out research grants and thus have a convenient means of punishing offenders against the party line...
...so intent are they upon praising the Lord that they have often neglected to pass the ammunition...
...There has been no further Islamic revolution, some Islamic terrorism, and a lot of Islamic verbiage since the West first began to wring its hands over resurgent Islam...
...When Khomeini reviles America as the "great Satan," the sense is clear enough, but most of his imagery is specifically Islamic, and even narrowly Shiite...
...A variety of legislation and bureaucratic regulations administered by agencies such as the FDA, EPA, OSHA, and others has in effect assumed that every chemical is born guilty of being harmful, probably carcinogenic, unless proved otherwise...
...This has meant that the fundamentalists have spent a lot of energy tilting at windmills...
...Then, the most influential school of thought held, there was no threshold effect, no minimum amount below which the substance could not cause cancer...
...While the West reigned supreme and confident, Muslim Westernizers could make a compelling case for dismantling much of the old order, and importing ideas and institutions...
...You'll like it...
...Then, even if the feeding and general care of these animals had been slovenly and even criminally careless, if some fraction of these animals seemed to develop a higher than expected number of tumors, the substance immediately became suspect as a potential human carcinogen, with the word potential too often omitted...
...Miss Efron approvingly cites a leading regulatory scientist in EPA who wrote in early 1983 that the public debate about the Reagan Administration's environmental policy missed the point...
...Stein also downplays the importance of the drastic decline in inflation as a source of the swollen deficit...
...And ponder how it was possible for the fable of a terrible cancer epidemic ahead to be sold the American people precisely in a period when all the relevant government data showed that the American people as a whole were getting healthier each year and living longer on the average than ever before...
...There is little reference to the bitter battles fought in courts and before regulatory bodies and to the manifold ways by which American industry, in most cases, helped avoid the worst possibilities that could have flowed from the doctrines and legislation she deals with...
...It is the basic assumption of a free press that in an unfettered marketplace of ideas where all may speak and be heard, good ideas will drive out the bad and the public weal will be served...
...I n a surprising section at the very end of this book, Miss Efron seeks to exculpate the media for their role in promoting this charade...
...his professional colleagues who argue that spending, not debt, is the obstacle to economic vitality...
...Stein also pays little heed to the growing number of economists who believe that deficits have much less impact on the economy than total spending, however financed...
...In fact, this taxpayer only needs to work a little more, while spending considerably less time and money in search of ways to avoid taxes, which his tax cut makes less valuable...
...In fact, he is smarter, and more attuned to the ingredients of sound economic policy...
...Mercifully, the early apprehension about a tidal wave of revolution has given way to a subtler appreciation of the assorted men and Martin Kramer is a research associate at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel A viv University, and a visiting professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University...
...His unadorned interpretation strikes a judicious balance between faithfulness to sources and clarity of presentation...
...once a leader, it became a follower...
...Simultaneously, it became accepted dogma that the mere fact that an experiment had not shown a substance to be carcinogenic in some animal species could not be taken as conclusive evidence of its safety since some other test in a different experimental animal might give the reverse result...
...You're not a camel...
...This clearly did not happen in this case, and this reviewer, for one, wonders whether Miss Efron's book will get the exposure and debate it deserves...
...Qaddafi's utterances on Islam are far beyond the comprehension of all but a few diligent mortals...
...The more violent acts of fanaticism, from Sadat's assassination to Shiite self-detonations, still shock...
...But ponder too the question of the responsibility of American industry in all this, responsibility arising from the careless way it used to dispose of its wastes and the disgraceful conditions under which many workers labored only two or three decades ago when they were handling asbestos and chemicals that were at least potentially harmful...
...This Pipes has done...
...Intervention has been ineffective, and acts of provocation such as the Iranian hostage episode and the Beirut bombings have demonstrated the West's vulnerability...
...A vast Western literature of explication also has accumulated, leaving not a single mad mullah whose scribblings and table talk have not been pored over by analysts...
...Moreover, by the author's own testimony, a number of outstanding authorities in this field agree with her conclusions but are so terrified of the consequences of saying so publicly that they have requested anonymity for their support...
...Unfortunately he is transfixed by the belief that the nation is undertaxed, particularly for its military needs, and by the worry that the deficit will impair growth...
...and was astonished to find a friend, all his few belongings in a pack on his back, walking rapidly toward the city's boundary...
...But she never really explains what was happening in the real world while the debate she chronicles was going on...
...Premodern Muslims were uniquely insular, able to ignore the innovations, ways, and beliefs of unbelievers," and their heirs paid dearly for an arrogance that lasted too long...
...The reporters were just repeating what their sources told them and they hadn't had the chance Miss Efron had to spend years studying the documentary record, she argues...
...No, in a curious way the failure of the media to penetrate the deception practiced upon us all is the central question raised by Miss Efron's important book...
...Instead he wastes space boring the reader with exhortations to "decision-makers" to "carry on a responsible discussion" toward a "useful consensus...
...As paraphrased by Miss Efron, "he pointed out that the issue was not whether the administration was more or less conserTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 37 vative in its approach to cancer prevention, but that there had never been a government cancer policy which had actually functioned . . . . The essential problem . . . was the 'hodgepodge of laws' produced by a succession of Congresses each of which had different theories about how to deal with carc i n o g e n s . . , thus the strangely small number of carcinogens which had ever been regulated...
...In this case it turned out to be a machine dedicated in large--but not exclusive--part to justifying the political and cultural presuppositions of some influential scientists and their political allies...
...His debunking of the likely effects of reductions in high marginal tax rates also misses the mark...
...But what is worrisome is that the press failed so abysmally to present an accurate picture of the flim-flam that was being sold the American people...
...The shoddy scholarship that produced the evidence for the mass brainwashing usually took this form: Some substance was fed to a rat or a mouse or some other experimental animal in huge quantities far beyond any reasonable human consumption equivalents...
...There was little to be learned from unbelievers, who were held in contempt for their ignorance of obvious theological truths (as well as their repelling uncleanliness...
...After all, the West has withdrawn from most of its forward positions in Muslim lands, and all but a few Muslim peoples exercise their right to self-government or misgovernment...
...No doubt that is why, while trying to put great distance between himself and sensible supply-siders, he ends up not so far away...
...He doesn't mention, for example, the work of MIT's Jerry Hausman, who estimated in 1980 that a 30 percent tax cut would increase the work effort of primary workers (which usually means husbands) by some five percent and of secondary workers (usually wives) by nine percent...
...And what is religious fervor without elementary logistics...
...From Stein's analysis, the reader would never get a clue how Reagan's tax cuts would, as it turned out, actually raise receipts in the upper brackets, rather than reducing them as expected...
...This points up a serious weakness of this book...
...After an inspired counteroffensive, Iran's beturbanned military minds seem to have dispensed with the science of war altogether...
...Those persuaded by Miss Efron's evidence will conclude we have been saved by probably undeserved good luck...
...And a guide is needed...
...Nonetheless, a belief in the malicious omnipotence of the West remains a widespread affliction in the abode of Islam...
...Someone earning $120,000 a year who gets a 30 percent cut in his marginal rate, Stein figures, would have to work 28.6 percent more hours to prevent revenues from dropping, which is plainly beyond possibility...
...In the end, though, Stein concedes much of the case made by intelligent supply-side economists--the importance of stable monetary policy, the obsolescence of the Phillips curve, the futility of "industrial policy," and-yes--the serious harm done by high marginal tax rates in the upper brackets...
Vol. 17 • July 1984 • No. 7
