Bestselling author and TV producer Michael Crichton has died of cancer at the age of 66. Known for his hugely popular thriller novels dealing with scientific subjects and for his TV series ER, he infused his works with a great sense of scientific investigation as an adventure and the world as a place of real wonders.
In Crichton’s world, knowledge is always a good thing, but what people do with it is often foolish and enormously destructive. That accords with reality, of course. That insight sometimes made Crichton’s narratives seem to suggest that the public should put strong strictures on science and technology. As science writer Ronald Bailey noted in a review of Next, this implication could be interpreted as a Luddite vision assuming that "humanity rushes headlong into misusing powerful new technologies."
That, however, was not the real thrust of Crichton’s works. Love for knowledge—philosophy in its basic sense—was clearly what drove him and is most evident in his writings. There was never anything cynical about his works. Crichton’s observance of the ills people can bring through science need not suggest that science is intrinsically bad. In fact, his attitude looks rather like a scientist’s puzzled acknowledgment of original sin.
To some extent Crichton’s writings reflected an attitude of scientism in its totalizing sense, the fallacious assumption that nothing not readily explainable by science is true. In a book such as Congo, for example, there is a strong implication that human beings are not unique in this creation and thus intrinsically of greater importance than other creatures. That line of thinking actually contradicts the warm feelings toward humanity that are necessary to justify his and the reader’s concern for the characters.
Fortunately, that sort of scientism is usually not too annoyingly evident in his works. Very much on the positive side, in addition, was his crusade in recent years to tell the truth about global warming: there is no manmade global warming crisis. None. In speeches, articles, and his excellent potboiler novel State of Fear, he not only refuted the scientific and economic assertions of global-warming alarmists but also, and perhaps more importantly in cultural terms, pointed out their real motivation for pursuing their agenda: money.
As Crichton made clear in his typically melodramatic and entertaining fashion in that book, there has been a huge amount of money to be made by scaring people about global warming, and the activists who have flocked to that cause have made vast sums of it by exploiting the public’s natural and laudable concern for taking good care of the environment. State of Fear was thus an important cultural event in addition to being a highly entertaining read.
In all, Crichton’s works reflect an unfailingly benevolent but reasonably skeptical atitude toward humanity, and an appropriately ambivalent attitude toward science—an awareness that knowledge is always good, but human beings are not.
Thanks for the comment, Russell, especially the quite fascinating insights into Crichton’s oddly blithe attitude toward his fiction writing. Given the powerful effect the culture has on what people think, it’s now more essential than ever that writers incorporate truth (inconvenient or otherwise) and common sense into their popular tales.
Mike’s ability to ask intelligent, and raise troubling questions remains beyond reproach. What he occasionally did with the answers is another matter.
Long before he applied his considerable skepticism to the climate wars, he approached an assortment of geophysicists to research his next blockbuster, Congo. Being Tom Clancy’s science guy, I was among them, and recounted some of the wonders of the deep earth, focusing on the high pressure alchemy that crushes one crystal structure into another, to produce extraordinary materials like diamonds and jade .
Mike paused frequently to type notes , the seeming model of due scientific diligence, and I thoroughly enjoyed the exchange. Yet when the book , and the film of it materialized, I literally could not recognize the science that went into it – industrial diamonds fit for electronic use remained Congo’s Maguffin, but instead of being objects of geophysical realism they were spouted out of a volcano from central casting in geodes the size of houses., to become the playthings of telepathic gorillas.
Congo remains a much beloved academic cult film ,a geophysical dog’s breakfast that still sets grad students rolling on the floor with laughter. I too was disarmed by his stock response to protests about the science that got lost in translation,- quoting Alfred Hitchcock, he replied †It’s just a movie.†He trotted out that oft repeated remark when the American Enterprise Institute predictably lionized him as author of State of Fear. Sadly, no one in that think tank thought to remind this gentle giant of letters that no such film existed to counterpoise the signed copy of the book decorating George Bush’s bedside table.
I wish he had lived to write , or scenarize with Spielberg ,on the grave and ironic responsibility that can attend the office of President’s Novelist when reality is in short supply. As is generally the case when ideologues are encouraged to congregate to denounce the existence of an inconvenient consensus.