XPost: alt.atheism, alt.society.liberalism, alt.global-warming
XPost: alt.politics.conservative
From: gudloos@yahoo.com
"Dakota" skrev i meddelelsen
news:ld7qla$t3q$1@dont-email.me...
> On 2/9/2014 3:12 AM, thomas p. wrote:
>> "Jihad Jeffy" skrev i meddelelsen
>> news:v-CdnZrq7ar1PWvPnZ2dnUVZ_vGdnZ2d@earthlink.com...
>>> [Note: Pay special attention to the fourth and fifth paragraphs.]
>>> _______________________________________________________________________
>>> America's Science Problem
>>> By Shawn Lawrence Otto
>>> Scientific American, Nov. 2012
>>>
>>> [Excerpts]
>>>
>>> "The Founding Fathers were science enthusiasts. Thomas Jefferson, a
>>> lawyer
>>> and scientist, built the primary justification for the nation's
>>> independence on the thinking of Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon and John
>>> Locke -- the creators of physics, inductive reasoning and empiricism.
>>> ...
>>> Based on this foundation of science -- of knowledge gained by systematic
>>> study and testing instead of by the assertions of ideology --
>>> the argument for a new, democratic form of government was self-evident."
>>>
>>> "[S]ome 236 years after Jefferson penned the Declaration of
>>> Independence,
>>> several major party contenders for political office took positions that
>>> can only be described as 'antiscience': against evolution, human-induced
>>> climate change, vaccines, stem cell research, and more. A former
>>> Republican governor [Jon Huntsman] even warned that his own political
>>> party was in danger of becoming 'the antiscience party.'"
>>>
>>> "Such positions could typically be dismissed as nothing more than
>>> election-year posturing except that they reflect an anti-intellectual
>>> conformity that is gaining strength in the U.S. at precisely the moment
>>> that most of the important opportunities for economic growth, and
>>> serious
>>> threats to the well-being of the nation, require a better grasp of
>>> scientific issues. By turning public opinion away from the
>>> antiauthoritarian principles of the nation's founders, the new science
>>> denialism is creating an existential crisis like few the country has
>>> faced
>>> before."
>>>
>>> "Ironically, the intellectual tools currently being used by the
>>> political
>>> right to such harmful effect originated on the academic left. In the
>>> 1960s
>>> and 1970s a philosophical movement called postmodernism developed among
>>> humanities professors displeased at being deposed by science, which they
>>> regarded as right-leaning. Postmodernism adopted ideas from cultural
>>> anthropology and relativity theory to argue that truth is relative and
>>> subject to the assumptions and prejudices of the observer. Science is
>>> just
>>> one of many ways of knowing, they argued, neither more nor less valid
>>> than
>>> others, like those of Aborigines, Native Americans or women.
>>> Furthermore,
>>> they defined science as the way of knowing among Western white men and a
>>> tool of cultural oppression. This argument resonated with many feminists
>>> and civil-rights activists and became widely adopted, leading to the
>>> 'political correctness' justifiably hated by Rush Limbaugh and the
>>> 'mental
>>> masturbation' lampooned by Woody Allen."
>>>
>>> "By falsely equating knowledge with opinion, postmodernists and
>>> antiscience conservatives alike collapse our thinking back to a
>>> pre-Enlightenment era, leaving no common basis for public policy. Public
>>> discourse is reduced to endless warring opinions, none seen as more
>>> valid
>>> than another. Policy is determined by the loudest voices, reducing us to
>>> a
>>> world in which might makes right -- the classic definition of
>>> authoritarianism."
>>>
>>> "Postmodernism infiltrated a generation of American education programs,
>>> as
>>> Allan Bloom first pointed out in 'The Closing of the American Mind.' It
>>> also infected journalism, where the phrase 'there is no such thing as
>>> objectivity' is often repeated like a mantra."
>>>
>>> "Reporters who agree with this statement will not dig to get to the
>>> truth
>>> and will tend to simply present 'both sides' of contentious issues,
>>> especially if they cannot judge the validity of scientific evidence.
>>> This
>>> kind of false balance becomes a problem when one side is based on
>>> knowledge and the other is merely an opinion, as often occurs when
>>> policy
>>> problems intersect with science. If the press corps does not strive to
>>> report objective reality, for which scientific evidence is our only
>>> reliable guide, the ship of democracy is set adrift from its moorings in
>>> the well-informed voter and becomes vulnerable once again to the tyranny
>>> that Jefferson feared.
>>
>>
>> Wonderfully written, horribly accurate. I have noted the irony of this
>> insistence that every position is just a matter of opinion in many of the
>> posts to alt.atheism, irony because, as the author Shawn Lawrence Otto
>> points out, it comes from people who insist that their opinion is
>> undisputable fact making their opponents morally suspect. It turns every
>> controversy into a football game in which "both sides" cheer for their
>> side,
>> and nobody pays attention to reality; which very rudely refuses to go
>> away.
>>
> Shawn Otto and thomas p each win my applause.
>
Thank you.
--
thomas p
Ignorance is the mother of devotion.
David Hume
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