Blog 702

Blog 702:

"So too for members of the Republican Party, whose posture toward science may also be on a collision course with itself. On the one hand, there is the programmatic desire, among the party elite, to govern largely through an ideology of Official Science, according to which no danger can be counted as serious unless generally recognized as such by an institutional scientific community that happens, by Remarkable Coincidence, to be increasingly dominated by the very corporate interests responsible for creating the dangers in the first place. This philosophy of governance permits critics to be pegged as fuzzy-headed alarmists who should grow up, take a science course, and abandon an insidious cultural pessimism that springs (so goes the ideology) more from ignorance and childish superstition than from the cold, hard, complicated facts. Of course, this is a primarily rhetorical strategy of governance, and one that works only so long as the rhetoric is taken at face value and the science largely ignored. But as ID proponents have already found, science is not some taxicab from which riders may necessarily disembark at will. Once its logic is embraced, consequences follow. And so, on the other hand, the elite must confront those of the rank-and-file who may have little left to them, in late capitalism, except for cherished beliefs to which scientific learning is rightly seen as a major threat. Organized capital operating within a globally competitive economy needs workers and managers who are capable of analyzing empirical reality with eyes wide open, undimmed by religious or ideological preconception. In the long run, it can't afford to train them, in high-school, to disregard whatever scientific teachings may be dismissed, by fundamentalist religiosity, as heretical. And yet that educational program is precisely what many of the rank-and-file will no doubt continue to demand, from organized capital's party of record.

posted by pn at 1:30 PM"