I too was stuck by the “everyone has an agenda. Except me” bit at the end. And by “stuck by” I mean “really annoyed with”. Of course you have an agenda, you fuck!! What makes you think you’re work is not infused with the same cultural, political, scientific discourse that everyone else’s everything is shaped by? His entire fucking book is about how what we assume to be “natural facts” “proven with data” are actually influenced by politics and money and the media, and how nothing is so simple as it’s presented, devoid of it’s background. Asserting he has no agenda kind of seems to be asserting that his thoughts, work of fiction etc are paradigm free. Every graph he chose and plot twist and even the words he used were used for a reason (whether he knows it or not). It’s like advertising–even if we can’t explain it, we can still put together a video or image and know that it’s appealing. If you stop to analyze each little component you get a rich cultural history for each and start to understand why we are programmed to think it is appealing. Crichton’s presentation of the story is the same way–even if he doesn’t understand what influences his choice of words, graphs, characters etc (and therefore assumes it is “random), our culture does–thousands of paradigms. Actually, now that I think about it, saying “Everyone except me” makes no sense because it is at the end of his huge blurb of his own thoughts on the issue, that correspond to Morton’s conclusion (it seems) at the end of the book. So it seems that Crichton’s story was used to convince us of (emotionally hook us onto) his message at the end of the book. My passage of the novel actually corresponds to this thought–on page 114, Jennifer and Evans are discussing the data that is to be presented in court in the Vanutu lawsuit. Crichton writes (Jennifer speaking), “Newspapers and television are susceptible to carefully orchestrated media campaigns. Lawsuits are not”. I feel like this is a direct contradiction to Crichton “everyone except me” bit (and his “footnotes are real” bit too…). By that I do not mean that I think this book or all the data cited was a mass media campaign. I do however, think that the broader point Jennifer is making is that everything is influenced in some way, be it the media or whatever. I really don’t understand how Crichton can assert that what he presents at the back of the book is neutral and objective–neither such things exist, nothing is without a paradigm. What an idiot.
I think Crichton’s choice of including graphs in the book also kind of exemplify this. He chooses to include “seeing devices” as a way to convince the reader of the legitimacy of his argument. And it works–as I looked at the “redone” versions of the graphs, I found myself questioning what I have accepted for years as “natural facts”. It seems like the inclusion of the graphs in the book (as opposed to just describing them or something) is an example of subconsciously choosing something to make an argument. Presenting a plot with a seeing device makes the plot seem more convincing, which in turn strengthens his argument at the end.
Another thing I really dislike about this book is the language he uses. Not just the super objectifying descriptions of literally every female character, or the horrible “seductive” dialogue between the female characters and the male characters, but the tone the language creates. Crichton criticizes climate scientists for the state of emergency they have put us in (both within the book and his bit at the end), but uses the exact same device in the book to make us more susceptible to his message at the end. The entire idea of writing a thriller about the issue of global warming and how it may be a hoax is to plant the idea in our head and put us into an emotional state so that at the end of the novel, we are more than ready to listen to his message. The tense tone of the book, the fast-moving plot filled with murder and other disasters (scary cannibals, scary arctic, scary people in trucks, chases, etc) is designed to freak us out so that at the end of the book we listen to “the voice of reason”.
This is way too long and pretty unorganized…I apologize, I just really don’t like this guy.
I totally agree. It's grating to read this book. It's so full of subtle little attacks on a well understood phenomenon that it's kind of ridiculous. I have often been angered by blatant lies like the "i don't have an agenda" thing. I mean really, who is it that's creating a state of fear? I would say it's Crichton, for misrepresenting the facts in a way that leads people to doubt valid scientific findings. Although, he, like everyone, has the right to speak his mind, so I guess it's society that makes me even more mad about this. A society that falls into a herd mentality that believes facts not by observations and experiments, but on political motivation. If society were one mind, right now I would call this cognitive dissonance, when one's worldview is upset by the intrusion of reality into the personal world that an individual has created for them-self. Part of my intervention deals with the watered down tripe that passes for educational television lately, and this is just another example of that. It's the fact that people are going to read this and say "oh, hey, this guy disproved the whole thing, I'm going to go buy a 8MPG truck." When our society is so influenced by this B.S. it (our society) seems so fragile and it really seems to me that we are doomed. Either doomed to be surrounded by the ignorance of the herd, or Doomed with a capital D due to the stupidification of the masses. Have you seen that movie Idiocracy? That's a possible future. One that Crichton is helping create.
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