The semantics of activism

During a bit of channel hopping the other day, I stumbled upon BBC Parliament. I would usually flick straight past in search of the endless reruns of Grand Designs or Location Location Location on More4. But this time BBC Parliament grabbed my eye.

It was the Government's Climate Change Select Committee. They were interviewing two self-defining US climate sceptics, Donna Laframboise and Professor Lindzen from MIT, and climate scientist Nic Lewis, about the IPCC's Report on Climate Change.

Lindzen argued without any substantiation that climatologists were, well, simply a bit thick. Clever kids, he claimed, studied physics or 'math'. It was generally the stupid kids who studied climate.

Nic Lewis said next to nothing.

Laframboise questioned the value of a report written by scientists who had been chosen by governments rather than by the scientific community itself (fair point, perhaps). But she also claimed that we could not trust the accuracy of a report where key sections had been written by activists.

"Marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who has a long history of writing reports for both Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), leads another chapter. Alistair Woodward, a New Zealand medical doctor, is in charge of a third - despite his nakedly activist worldview." (Written evidence submitted by Donna Laframboise (IPC0039): The Lipstick on the Pig)

This set me thinking. Her use of the word activist is an interesting one. It suggests that the person in question is convinced of something to the point of illogic and anarchy. Perhaps to the point of deviance. And we all know that activism, like disease, spreads.

If Laframboise had been at home in the US, I wonder, could she have evoked the same effect by whispering the word communist?

The sceptic, by comparison? Oh, the sceptic is pure and true, purging the world of deviant activism. Whereas the activist manipulates the evidence for his own quasi-socialist aims, the sceptic reviews the evidence with complete objectivity and condemns the activist before the court.

But does either really exist beyond the word? Is 'sceptic' a sacred inquisitorial robe, donned to bring the bearer authority? And 'activist' the tattered rag which takes it away?

And is the sceptic, with their zeal and ardour, their conviction in face of the evidence, all that different from the activist of their mind's eye?