I have a friend, a fella whom I’ve known for years, whom I like and admire, and who went to the great climate march recently. Let’s call him Homo Sapiens.
Sapiens put a picture of himself on his Facebook page — yes, I admit it, I still do Facebook. He was carrying a placard, printed out in the approved 350.org color scheme, that read, “Teach science!”
Now the pedant in me immediately wondered, what the hell is “science”? Last I heard, there were only sciences: physics, chemistry, herpetology and so on. Grand unification seems to be some ways off. But this wonderment rapidly gave way to another: What the hell was my old pal Sap doing saying such a thing?
He’s a smart guy, but his education was purely literary; he doesn’t know the first thing about any science. I doubt that he could tell you what the law of gravitation really says, or how Copernicus was right and how he was wrong, or the relationship between a watt and a volt, or what was interesting about Darwin’s finches. “Teach science?” Nobody ever taught Sap any science at all, and he wouldn’t have taken to it if they had tried.
I’m afraid that what old Sap meant, by holding up this placard, was something which could be unpacked more or less as follows:
There are all these stupid benighted people out there who think that the world was created day before yesterday, who don’t believe in evolution, whatever the hell that is, or in global warming. These people have a bad belief system. It needs to be replaced with a good belief system. Like… science! Teachers, do your thing! Students, listen to your teachers! Parents, shut the fuck up and leave it to the professionals!
The problem here is that what makes ‘science’ a good thing is that it is not a belief system. Sap, I suspect, thinks that there are people who believe in Genesis and other people who believe in ‘science’ — people mostly rather like himself.
Now there are a number of things wrong with this analogy, starting with the fact that believers in Genesis are quite likely to have read the book at some point, while Sap has certainly never peeked into the Origin of Species, not to mention any technical discussions of atmospheric chemistry.
But even more importantly, it’s apples and oranges. Biblical fundamentalism is a belief system, but science is an activity; a very worthwhile one, whose work product is always and only provisional hypotheses, subject at any time to revision or, for that matter, repudiation. The history of science makes this very clear; but Sapiens knows as little about the history of science as he does about ‘science’ itself.
Science, for real scientists, is a job, something they do; not a faith commitment, a body of dogmata that they believe in. This is precisely what constitutes its appeal and value.
But I’m afraid that what brother Sap means when he says ‘teach science’ is very much a matter of indoctrination. I don’t suppose that Sap cares much whether kids emerge from high school able to explain Avogadro’s number or Planck’s constant. But he would rather they were listening to jolly jokey Neil Degrasse Tyson, retailing his smooth popularized certainties and potted chronicle of progress on NPR, than so some wild man who doesn’t have a degree from a good school and who exhibits an unhealthy interest in the Epistle to the Romans.
Sap’s fideistic attitude toward ‘science’ is highly characteristic of the tribe to which he and I both belong. It’s part of our self-identification: we’re the party of enlightenment and, even more important, of expertise. Sap doesn’t understand the climate scientists’ reasoning; but he believes it, because they’re the duly ordained experts. Teach ‘science’! — but there’s no urgent need to teach any actual sciences. That is to say: teach belief, rather than content or method.
Obligatory disclaimer:
I think the climate-science boys are probably right, though I’m so poorly informed on the subject that I have no right to an opinion. And even if they’re wrong, I wish we’d act on the implications of their hypotheses. I wish we’d rip up all the asphalt and ban the manufacture of cars. I wish that everybody who didn’t live in a shack in the woods, ten miles from the nearest neighbor, lived in an apartment two blocks from a subway line. I wish every roof were covered with solar panels. I wish that air travel were a once-in-a-lifetime experience — if that — and that container ships were propelled by sail power. I wish we had a walloping carbon tax — as long as it’s rebated, on a strict per capita basis, to every man woman and child. All the things we might do in a desperate last-ditch effort against climate change are well worth doing for any number of other reasons — except, except! teaching people to believe the experts.
What are the implications of their hypotheses? Judging from what they themselves do, the implications are about as profoundly helpful as No Child Left Behind. Dogma begets dogma, and distracting non-issues beget distracting non-issues. You’re not going to get a Democrat who doesn’t bomb children in some distant place, and you’re not going to get a sustained American media crusade that isn’t a deliberate lie.
Embrace extinction.
that climate change gets tossed around like a political football like *every other issue* doesn’t make per se make it false. that the issue, like everything else, is used to entrench existing power doesn’t negate it. but not being a science guy, what do i know? it just seems the overabundance of other factors make it seem probable, e.g., deforestation, ocean acidification, fresh water depletion, etc., etc. but, as many here and elsewhere have pointed out, climate change is a symptom, and not even the most pressing or threatening (hello, fukushima & nuclear weapons upgrades). despite all the pomp and ceremony of the last 30 years on the subject, nothing is being done about it. nothing. “we must not allow a mine shaft gap” is our betters’ mantra for the (perhaps) coming post-apocalyptic world.
The most problematic part of this post is that you still do Facebook. Mind you, I point no fingers — trying very hard to wean myself off of it, and proud to report I’m having some success. The place wears me out, for all of the obvious reasons. But I’ve come to see it as pernicious, too — the evil of banality.
Yes, it’s awful. I only do it when I’m bored. I think of it as being a bit like the car infrastructure: a terrible way to provide the value it does provide, but faute de mieux, one drives on it occasionally.
Became a problem for me when I found myself disliking some of my actual-world friends (not just my “friends”), many of whom revealed themselves to be narcissists, windbags, prone to presenting perfectly curated lives, cat-obsessed, and/or all of the above. More significantly, I found myself disliking myself.
And all in the service of the hoodie-wearing punk billionaire? Fughetaboutit.
Though I confess I haven’t gone cold turkey, haven’t deactivated.
In so far as facebook, I have friends who live far away and shame on me, I write no letters. So it’s a way to keep in touch. Sue me.
Michael Says:
“I wish we’d rip up all the asphalt and ban the manufacture of cars. I wish that everybody who didn’t live in a shack in the woods, ten miles from the nearest neighbor, lived in an apartment two blocks from a subway line. I wish every roof were covered with solar panels. I wish that air travel were a once-in-a-lifetime experience — if that — and that container ships were propelled by sail power. I wish we had a walloping carbon tax — as long as it’s rebated, on a strict per capita basis, to every man woman and child. All the things we might do in a desperate last-ditch effort against climate change are well worth doing for any number of other reasons — except, except! teaching people to believe the experts.”
Well that’s the thing, the right thing to do is the right thing to do. It doesn’t become the right thing to do because we have to avoid a catastrophe, instead we’re headed for catastrophe because we don’t do the right things.
Cars are awful – yes, they should be banned. When you get rid of the cars the asphalt just goes away on it’s own after a while. When people try to tell me that humans are intelligent apes I just point at cars and have them explain that to me. Why would anyone get in a rolling piece of metal and hurtle themselves down a road at lethal speeds? It’s nuts I tell ya, nuts. Look at all the people who die or are permanently injured from them every year. And the pollution and the disfigurement of the landscape and all the wasted resources poured into them?
Often times I don’t get my fellow apes, I just don’t understand them.
By the way Michael, I always enjoy when you pick up and write after a hiatus. I miss ya when you’re gone.
Thanks for the kind words!
“But even more importantly, it’s apples and oranges. Biblical fundamentalism is a belief system, but science is an activity; a very worthwhile one, whose work product is always and only provisional hypotheses, subject at any time to revision or, for that matter, repudiation.”
You’re being awfully kind to the scientists themselves, when you intend to be kind to the method. Niggling, it would seem, and yet…there’s that entire field of enquiry concerning one’s ability to underestimate humans. Some say you can, some say you can’t.
btw, thanks for the wheelock.
You make a good point. Many scientists are in fact scientismists, at least with one side of their brain.
It was a wonderful illusion, before the long sad come-down. Science and math were a very nice kind of vast fractal image and it certainly got things done.
But I have come down from it, must now go out and get breakfast. It was great.
Great to think that science is somehow apart from and even somehow above religion, astrology, etc. But it seems the deepest truth is that there is no real difference at all. It is just another box to stuff your mind into. The great scientists are just as befuddled as the people who come to the door bearing religious pamphlets.
Just my perspective, and I can’t argue about it because you just have to see it or think you see it for yourself. Or not.
Fantastic!
I am always amused by those who abandoned Jesus to worship at the Church of Monsanto. People never so much give up religions as they do replace them. If Science! says that GMO foods, vaccines and pharmaceuticals are all safe, you have to be a snake-handling, poison-drinking fundamentalist fanatic to question it. Or a white-male republican. Never mind the science that says otherwise. Seems as much a faith–based world view as religion, even if there is usually evidence for (and against) Science! and zero for religion.
I’m all for the scientific method and the wonderful things an honest and moral application of it can produce, but it does strike me that much of the whole atheist/skeptic/scientism movement is as much a tool of power as religion has always been, and often employing the same levers of manipulation and dogmatic certainties. Looking at creatures like Sam Harris, Michael Shermer and Lord Daw Daw, I almost prefer the snake-handlers.
As for our future existence civilizations like the Maya put themselves out of business using nothing but hand tools and human labor. It seems that in the competition for a collective Darwin Award, we are far better placed with our destructive industrialization than the Maya were. Industrialization, cars and roads are here to stay however so the only way through is forward. Our massive population is unsustainable without them so there is no going back without massive loss of life that will make the Black Plague look like yuppie flu. We can only hope that Science! comes up with an answer, or Jesus steps up in time.
Geez, these are exactly the same thoughts that have been rattling around in my brain! Everything!
It definitely seems as if we’re playing some sort of biological roulette! industrialization is only here as long as the power stays on, though and Mother Nature doesn’t give a fuck. We’ve had the type of energy we’ve been using for about 100 years now, it took us millions of years to get to this point, I don’t think what we have is necessarily built to last. We’ve jimmy rigged up some pretty sparkly stuff, but it still remains jimmy rigged. Which gives me hope!
‘People never so much give up religions as they do replace them. If Science! says that GMO foods, vaccines and pharmaceuticals are all safe, you have to be a snake-handling, poison-drinking fundamentalist fanatic to question it. Or a white-male republican. Never mind the science that says otherwise.’ Ding ding ding! I can’t look at my Facebook page without someone posting a link to a solitary study that makes some outrageous claim, but is accepted because some bozo with a biology degree from Cal State Northridge says so. Have you ever tried to discussing accepted scientific or medical matter in a questioning manner? You might as well be questioning God…if there were such a thing.
“Our massive population is unsustainable without them…”
Oh, Sean, you deathlusting madman; you sad forsaken soul.
You see how the long con works? Like Gould, we adopt an insane narcissism that concludes that our grandiose population numbers and mighty technology are so mighty that the Earth can’t handle them. Therefore, shared sacrifices are necessary: we blame the proles’ smartphones and used Elantras for their removal, as though it’s “necessary” to exterminate people.
6 billion, massive? What a load of self-centered, temporally-stunted bullshit. If ingenuity were permitted, Earth could easily handle 18-20. You’re like some guy in ancient Athens, fretting that 10,000 people in such a small place equals instant death. Or one of those grandmothers who wouldn’t ride on trains, claiming that speeds in excess of 20 miles an hour would cause internal bleeding.
Arguments like that are how elite plans for underclass culling get advanced. Essentially, Sean, what you’ve said is, “Well, yes, any degree of civilization is incompatible with the religion of Islam,” making a point that can only lead to genocide. No matter how nicely or self-deprecatingly you say, “There are too many excess people,” you are making the case for killing us all.
Light, so many people obsessing over a “new plague.” You guys really want it, don’t you? Oh, those guilty, exotic sins of your forebears, that you never really felt you deserved!
“If ingenuity were permitted, Earth could easily handle 18-20”
I love numbers like “18-20” (trillion people). What’s an extra 2 trillion people give or take when you are pulling figures out of your ass? If you think we can sustain a population of 20 trillion people delivering food in horse-drawn wagons and sailing ships while plowing the land with mules and seeding the soil with hollow sticks, you need to stop getting high, Arka. What do you think is going to happen when the oil runs out or becomes too costly to make it economically viable for most nations? Monsanto to the rescue? Already soils are being depleted by excess agriculture or becoming too saline from irrigation and you think we can just go find some more somewhere to grow the food necessary for 20 trillion people. Get a grip. Maybe we should colonize Tralfamadore?
You are peddling the capitalist fiction that unlimited growth in production and population is sustainable, when a quick look around the planet proves it is not. Capitalism requires an ever-growing surplus of workers to keep labor costs down and continual population growth to create new markets for the useless crap they make. So they have their shills in the religion industry preach against birth control while self-absorbed idiots like you scream “genocide” at anyone who recognizes that massive population growth is not only self-destructive it feeds the very forces that enslave us. Birth control and true social safety nets go a long way in keeping people from having kids as a form of social security. The genocide will come when there are so many of us we have to kill one another to survive even more than we did in the past. Crack a history book. Look at the endless warfare in tribal societies where food and land were abundant and imagine what will happen when they are not. If this is your vision of the future you can stuff it.
“Well, yes, any degree of civilization is incompatible with the religion of Islam”
and
“Light, so many people obsessing over a “new plague.” You guys really want it, don’t you? Oh, those guilty, exotic sins of your forebears, that you never really felt you deserved!”
Your cryptic solipsism sounds increasingly psychotic with every post. Get Big Pharma to up your meds.
“The genocide will come when there are so many of us we have to kill one another to survive even more than we did in the past.”
^ This is what it looks like, ladies and gents. They are actually out there, in the open, slavering for depopulation.
Take another coupla’ notes, while you’re here:
1) The recurrence of the “everything sucks” argument as a justification for murder. Like Hobbes, they say, “All tribes are always at war; there was never peace. That means it’s impossible. So don’t bother trying.” Truth: the universal assumption of greed and violence is projection by the deathluster.
2) The shifting of the burden of Original Sin onto the proletariat. Because of “capitalism,” which was the tool of the creditor-priests, all of those excess people have to die.
…(as though wishfully ignorant smartphone use is equivalent to the calculated redirection of an aluminum plant’s runoff into the water supply of three Cambodian villages.) Here, the deathluster uses a variation on Eve’s Sin to saddle all afterborn children with guilt.
3) The conflation of capitalism and product. It’s always appealing to Marxists to condemn capital, but–as this blog has pointed out before–Marx saw great value in labor and ingenuity. It was finance capital that drained that value away and/or perverted it into horrible things. Yet, deathlusters will attempt to scare people by saying, “Capitalism necessitates the purge,” which cleverly implies, “Without capitalism, you can’t have technology.” That’s ridiculous. Capitalism is a brutal way of slowing technological advancement by redirecting intangible “profits” to capitalists. Better economic systems produce better results.
4) Psychiatric accusations of mental instability levied against the party who argues against genocide. This is a weird correlation, but somehow, the person who wants billions of people to die in order to “return” to an agrarian fantasy life they might have read about somewhere, feels it is “increasingly psychotic” and “cryptic” to argue that mass extermination need not occur. There’s an element of projection there, to be sure, but more important is the direct connection between “life” and “psychotic.” The deathluster hates life so much that s/he feels it is crazy to advocate for billions of people living together in harmony.
Out of their hatred for human beings, and for life itself, these people will try to scare you. How dare you eat from the Tree of Knowledge? You will be destroyed! Your naughty, naughty understanding has earned you destruction!
But we’ve read that story before, haven’t we?
Go fuck yourself, Arka If you think everyone who recognizes the need for birth control and family planning wants to exterminate the human race, you are a bigger whack job than anyone on the right I can think of. But I’ve wasted enough time with your psychotic projection, strawmen and trolling.
[ “The genocide will come” ]
≠
[ “birth control and family planning” ]
If you don’t support extermination, please don’t suggest that genocide is inevitable, or that the use of technology requires letting large numbers of people die. Those are terrible things. They are entirely different from, as you now put it, “birth control.”
It bears mentioning here that birth control requires relatively modern technology, in order to allow us to produce and refine the hormonal drugs and/or artificial substances that we use for family planning.
Church of Monsanto? Really?
From the vast department of Things I Did Not Expect.
Comes this:
Wayne Madsen !!!
Meet the ‘Beast of SAVAK’
SAVAK’http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/10/13/382024/meet-the-beast-of-savak/
The End is so near I can smell its awful butt.
“Church of Monsanto? Really?”
Yes, really.
http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/11/08/argumentum-ad-monsantium/
http://www.skepticink.com/incredulous/2013/08/25/fail-orama-futurama-feeds-anti-gmo-paranoia/