"A rising tide of "irrationalism" in the United States and Europe is helping to fuel dangerous anti-science sentiments, according to a number of researchers and academics. Proof, they say, can be seen in the increased prominence given to postmodernist science studies in the universities, creationism, and alternative medicine. ... "There is a widespread, powerful, corrosive hostility toward science," declares Paul R. Gross, University Professor of Life Sciences and director of the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. "It's really toward scientists, by the way, but the confusion is universally made between scientists as persons and the body of knowledge that survives called science." "
"Having lost our firm credulity about just what man (sic) "is" and what society is "for", we have become confused about what is relevant, useful, or efficient. Thomas Huxley or Thorstein Veblen were thinking of a "scientific society" where people were critical and modest, accurate and objective; where they shared in an international community of inquiry; where they lived "naturally", without superstitions or taboos; and they hoped to make this come to be for every child. Is anybody saying anything like this? ...
In my opinion , science has become a superstition for both the mass of the people and scientists themselves. ...
Our hope was, during the Enlightenment, to dissolve all such magical fears. Tyrannies and castes were undermined; religion was refuted; progressive education began to be invented; and the claims of science, too, became modest (I think that this was the chief contribution of Hume). (perhaps a reference to the "Prometheanism" of such earlier investigators as Bacon and Newton.)The climax of this effort against superstition was the amazing synthesis of Kant, who managed to combine Hume and Rousseau with his own background of astronomer and pietist. But the history has turned out otherwise. For political, economic, and technological reasons, magical fears have not been dissolved. Calling this antiscientific bent Luddite, machine-breaking, is to miss the public tone, which is rather a murderousness toward the scientists as persons, more like anti-Semitism. * Wiser scientists, like Huxley (apparently Thomas H., based on the context) or Helmholtz or Einstein, have been sensitive to the danger of scientific estrangement, but their efforts of a hundred years to enlighten the people have not suceeded."
by Paul Goodman,
originally printed as "The Human Uses of Science" in Commentary, DEC 1960
and included as "'Applied Science' and Superstition"
in Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals.
Highly recommended
see also pages on this site on / Humanism / and / Modernism /
and especially Cosma Shalizi's comments based on
In Bluebeard's Castle : Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture by George Steiner
* I think serious ("murderous") hostility toward Science and scientists is not strong in our culture at this time. But Postman's comments in Amusing Ourselves to Death come to mind: that while Orwell feared that the future would be one of violence and repression, we have instead entered a Huxleyan (Aldous, this time) era of light entertainment and consumerism, the aspect of which in relation to Science, rationalism, and critical thinking is our postmodern "culture of ignorance" in which much of the population, rather than feeling hostility toward Science and scientists, regards them with the same fatuous bemusement as everything else.
"The great reward of Western causal logic has been technology and the manipulation of the environment. The loss has come about because we consider every act as a closed system with short range predictable consequences. The result is therefore a loss of meaning to the act."
The Parable of the Beast
by John N. Bleitreu
page 33
"There is a view abroad in the land that science is more of an ideology than a methodology, and thus that it cannot legitimately claim to have a corner on reality. ...
Can science be shown to be a superior means of acquiring knowledge? Yes it can, but only by showing that it is more likely to yield justified beliefs than any other methodology. Thus the real issue is not whether a belief is scientific or pseudoscientific but whether it is justified or unjustified.
We are justified in believing something to be true when it provides the best explanation of the evidence. Science is superior to other methods of inquiry because it usually provides better explanations than they do. The goodness of an explanation is determined by the amount of understanding it produces, and the amount of understanding an explanation produces is determined by how much it systematizes and unifies our knowledge. The extent to which an explanation does this can be determined by appealing to various criteria of adequacy such as simplicity, scope, conservatism, and fruitfulness. No one wants to hold unjustified beliefs. The problem is that most people never learn the difference between a good explanation and a bad one. Consequently they come to believe all sorts of weird things for no good reason."
"Yes, there's no getting around the fact that I prefer reason (or what I take to be reason) to what I take to be nonsense.
... this is the best way I know of for separating sanity from insanity. Always assuming we want to."
Linux Advocacy Guidelines: Canons of Conduct
Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov ?