“Listen to this,” I said.  The opthalmologist had just walked into the room, and instead of a pliant patient waiting to be examined, found me up in arms.  As it were.  He and his technician stood stunned as I read them this passage from a speech by President Eisenhower in 1953, five years into the Cold War:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This is a world in arms.  This world in arms is not spending money alone;  it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…  This is not a way of life in any true sense.  Under the clouds of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

That is straight from the horse’s mouth — I mean, the five-star general’s mouth — and it features large in a superb piece by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker of a couple of weeks back (forgive me, I’ve been a tad distracted here with publication of The First Muslim, and am just beginning to catch up).

“How much military is enough?” reads the sub-heading of the piece.  You know the answer already, sadly:  the unholy alliance of military and industry means that there’s no such thing as enough.

The United States spends more on defense than all other countries combined, Lepore reports.  Military spending doubled between 1998 and 2011.  The United States sells more guns in foreign markets than any other country.   As she puts it, “At home and abroad, in uniform and out, in war and in peace, Americans are armed to the teeth.”  Make that the eyeballs.

Moreover, “much of the money that the federal government spends on ‘defense’ involves neither securing the nation’s borders nor protecting its citizens.  Instead, the US military enforces American foreign policy.”  Not least by dint of hundreds of military bases all over the world.

Lepore pays special attention to Andrew Bacevich, a former Army colonel who is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.  An avowed conservative “viscerally pained” by what he calls “Americans’ infatuation with military power,” Bacevich says that lately,

Americans have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force.  To a degree without precedent in US history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals.

In an updated edition of his 2005 book The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War (due out in a few weeks), Bacevich writes that “the surprises, disappointments, painful losses, and woeful, even shameless failures of the Iraq War” should have led to major rethinking of the use of force.  But there’s been none, and that, he says, is a civic failure:  “The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.”   As Lepore tartly notes:  “Don’t ask, don’t tell.  But especially, don’t ask.”

She’s written a densely argued article, one that I guess you’d call wonkish in its focus on the legislative debate over cuts in military spending.  It’s a good thing my eyes were judged fit to serve, since this is not your usual bedtime reading.  But then that’s Lepore’s point.  Unless we can rouse ourselves to pay attention and to insist that “between militarism and pacifism lie diplomacy, accountability, and restraint,” we only enable those besotted by guns and war.

The response to my TEDx Quran talk in the week since the video of it was released has been magnificent, and the comments here on the AT, on YouTube, and on many other sites, have been immensely moving, humbling, thought-provoking, and inspiring, sometimes all at the same time.

All of which means that I haven’t had much time for my usual reading.  So when I finally curled up late last night with last week’s New Yorker, I thought it would just be a relaxing break.   Instead, Jonah Lehrer’s densely argued article on scientific research called “The Truth Wears Off” had me sitting straight up in alert attention, and his conclusion left me kind of breathless:

We like to pretend that experiments define the truth for us.  But that’s often not the case.  Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved.  And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true.  When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

This article is dynamite.  I mean that almost literally, since Lehrer explodes the carefully nurtured image of scientific research as the ultimate arbiter of fact.  It demonstrates what he calls “the slipperiness of empiricism.”  And it challenges the faith in science – I use the word “faith” advisedly here – of “new atheists” like Sam Harris, Chris Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett (a foursome I think of H2D2 for short).

Lehrer focuses on what he calls “the decline effect” – the way much research across a wide range of fields, including psychology, ecology, biology, and medicine, fails the most basic scientific test, which is replicability.  If other researchers can produce the same results, then the research is valid;  if they cannot, it has to be assumed flawed.   And many, in some fields even most, cannot.  Results that initially seem ground-breaking often fade with each replication of the research, and sometimes even turn negative.

“It’s as if our facts were losing their truth,” says Lehrer.  As one somewhat depressed biologist told him:

We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some – perhaps many – cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their significance, and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs.

Citing the example of wildly divergent results for the efficacy of acupuncture in the Far East as opposed to Western Europe, for instance, Lehrer writes:

This wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see.  Our beliefs are a form of blindness.

It gets downright scary when he talks to a Stanford epidemiologist who looked at the 49 most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals.  “Of those that had been subject to replication, 41% had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.”   It gets even worse when the research is in a “fashionable” field like genetic differences in disease risk for men and women.  “Out of 432 claims, only a single one was consistently replicable.”

The Stanford epidemiologist suspects “significance chasing,” where “scientists are so eager to pass the magical test of statistical significance that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy.”   They don’t do this deliberately, but unconsciously.  “Knowing” that something has to be true, they find ways to make it seem so.

“The decline effect” may in fact be a decline of illusion, says Lehrer.  The problem being that it’s very hard to let go of illusions:

Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in textbooks and drive standard medical practice.  Why?  Because these ideas seem true.  Because they make sense.  Because we can’t bear to let them go.

Because, in short, scientists are as human as the rest of us.  And the very idea of truth — that absolute ideal of veracity — is as slippery and troubling as ever.