The nation’s foremost opponent of environmental neglect and genetic engineering is waving a $20 bill as he makes a bet. The scene happens to be a meeting of the Humane Society in Houston, but the wager, which is part of his script, could just as easily be offered to a gathering of born-again environmentalists in Aspen, Colo.; at the Los Angeles home of TV producer Norman Lear; or on a college campus. Jeremy Rifkin bets that no one can answer this question: “What value has emerged in the past 100 years as our most dominant value, a value that is the key to our science?” He rarely loses, not because the answer is so obscure but because it’s so obvious. At an easel, he writes his answer, leaving the word to hang like a biohazard warning sign: EFFICIENCY. “Everything is efficient,” he says. “We’re so skewed toward efficiency that we’ve lost our sense of humanity. What we need to do is to bring back a sense of the sacred.” Rifkin’s performance, which he delivers on average 90 times a year, is a mixture of Jimmy Swaggart, Phil Donahue and Werner Erhard. Twenty years of teaching, preaching and raising consciences — some would call it rabble- rousing — have refined this show to the point that it has a slick, thoroughly professional sheen. Rifkin moves through an audience as if it were his private party, talking, interviewing, questioning and, occasionally but ever so kindly, embarrassing. He will perform for 30 minutes or eight hours, depending on the contract. His basic sermon is an attack on “the Boys,” as he calls Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, John Locke and other architects of efficiency. And the Boys’ great sin? To have created an atmosphere that allows scientists to impose untested new technologies on society without considering their broader implications. Says Rifkin: “Faster is not necessarily better.” It’s a wonderful performance, but in the sour view of many scientists, it is largely flimflam. To them, Rifkin is a Luddite, whose opposition to DNA research is based on skewed science and misplaced mystical zeal. Geneticist Norton Zinder of New York City’s Rockefeller University calls him a “fool” and a “demagogue.” In a scathing 1984 review of Algeny, one of Rifkin’s nine books, Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould wrote that it was “a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship . . . I don’t think I have ever read a shoddier work.” To Rifkin, such criticism is merely evidence that he is on the right track. “My job,” he says, “is to point out some of the problems that might arise with new technologies. Scientists should show us how these new technologies work. Then society, not scientists, should decide if it wants to use them. Scientists are not gods; they’re just technicians. They’re just human beings, with all the good and bad intentions of everyone else. If you criticize them at all, you’re stopping the drive toward utopia. But there has to be both sides.”
