The Real Danger of State of Fear

One thing that I actually really enjoyed was reading Crichton’s State of Fear. It was his profound statement that “the footnotes are real” that really made me pay more attention to what he was actually saying. He was legitimizing his work, with what many people believe as “truth” aka science. What is unsettling about Crichton’s work is his ability to make the readers question their own beliefs, especially in regards to the “reality” of science. Science is the one thing that people go to to prove something. But Crichton makes one think twice about doing this. He focuses on the fact that science data can be interpreted in a way that fits one’s hypothesis. Now, when I look at scientific papers I realize that I cannot take them at face value just because they are “scientific” and have footnotes with references to other works.

I worked through Crichton’s reading in depth because of the debate. My working group randomly picked the affirmative side and we ended up changing a lot of the minds in the class. I was actually shocked by the amount of people that did not agree his book was dangerous when we started the debate. We tried to make it very clear that we were not trying to censor his work in any sort of way, but just that it was dangerous to the public. It was his use of science in legitimizing his argument that really blurred the line between narrative (his fictional work) and “reality”-what we know as science. It was interesting to see as the debate went on, that we gained a lot of support. I think it was the fact that Crichton and his work questioned the one true thing many believe as “reality.”

As you can see throughout this post I do not say reality but “reality.” I put it in quotes because throughout this class I think what once was reality became “reality.” I have come to notice that it seems as though what one may perceive as “reality” is different from another. I thought it was disappointing that someone brought this up at the end of class so there wasn’t much discussion but I would have liked to hear other thoughts about it.