Dr. Forbush Thinks

Will we go quietly into the deep dark night?

I am asking this question because it seems to me that America is on the verge of falling into the Dark Ages. I am sure that the Romans never felt like their empire would crumble, but it did. It took a while as the thinking and questioning of the Greek intellectuals was replaced by the non-questioning anti-intellectual religious that came to lead the Roman Empire into the Dark Middle Ages.

Yesterday, I was startled by a comment on my recent “Global Warming” post. The commenter, that I regard as quite thoughtful on many subjects, wrote, “it comes as no surprise there would be disagreement on such a politicized issue as global warming.” He went on to suggest that bureaucrats tended to be left leaning Democrats, therefore it would be natural that government scientists would promote the idea of Global Warming.

This sentiment should frighten us all.

First of all we should examine why we have government scientists at all. Is it because each issue needs to create a means to support its pre-determined agenda? If that is the case, then we should not have government scientists at all. Each political party should just pay additional science consultants to create their personal fiction to support their own ideas. Of course this is stupid from the point of view of an American citizen, but not the politician. No, Americans have government scientists for the same reason they have government intelligence agencies and government ambassadors. Government scientists among the many things that they do they look at the science and determine the risks of policy on our country, and based on those risks they offer suggestions for policy proposals and the risks of those policy proposals. If the scientists are influenced by the politics, then their assessment of the risks are as flaw as the CIA’s intelligence on the WMDs in Iraq.

The charter of government is to provide security, and if the risks are not studied in a fair non-political light the policy based on those assessments will certainly be flawed.

So, to think that government scientists are mainly left leaning Democrats flies in the face of the entire point of having government scientists at all.

But, it is easy to see how someone might come to this conclusion in a culture that is moving further away from science. When I was in college during one of those late night philosophical discussions that generally involve a bit of alcohol a friend told me that she had no idea how a TV worked. Well, I knew a bit about how a TV worked and I offered to explain it to her, but she told me that she didn’t care because she was happy to believe that it all worked by magic. And, I realized that I was in the minority and she was in the majority of the American people.

However, if we begin to fall back on the idea that we don’t care how things work and we can imagine them working by some mysterious magic called “science” we are not to far away from the dark ages. Because if we don’t think about how things work, we can easily begin to mix up the ideas of science and the fantasy ideas of magic that are removed by impossibility from the truth. And, if we allow our minds to intermingle these concepts based in reality and these concepts based in fiction our culture will be more susceptible to leaders who justify their actions with fiction and lies.

Perhaps that is the true reason we now find ourselves under the power of this regime, the extreme right wing coalition of neo-cons and fundamentalist Christians. These people have an agenda and they only need to search for the justification. They discredit science as a rule so that they can pick the things that they like, but then they can deny the rest as “only a theory” or “inconclusive.”

Aristotle was the main scientific philosopher of ancient Greece. His work was based on observation of the world around him and reasoning that allowed him to understand that the world was round long before Christopher Columbus. He estimated the circumference of the Earth by measuring the difference in the length of a shadow cast by the sun at noon on uniform sticks placed in two different locations across the Mediterranean Sea from each other. But, the works of Aristotle were lost in the burning of the libraries brought on by the religious leaders. If it weren’t for the Muslim clerics who found value in these writings we may have never heard of Aristotle today.

Similarly, if we lose the culture of scientific inquiry our people will be doomed to memorize texts and believe what they read without questioning. If these religious zealots that continue to plant seeds of doubt in the general public continue to grow in strength everything we know about the world will gradually be lost. If the value of science continues to be reduced our children will be pushed away from pure science.

In fact, I have heard arguments from the right claiming that only science with a known economic benefit should be pursued. But, if you know that it has economic benefit, then it isn’t science anymore, it is called engineering. Engineering uses what science has discovered and applies that to known problems. And, if we push our children away from pure science this “new” knowledge will not exist for the engineers who want to build “new” projects. Engineers will eventually be reduced to repeating old engineering ideas over and over again. Progress will only be made by accident, instead of by applying “new” science. And, slowly we will become a stagnant culture relying on other cultures to provide “new” things for us.

Even the fall into the Dark Ages wasn’t instantaneous. And, I wouldn’t expect America’s fall to be any different. Those scientists that are alive today will continue to use the science that they know and understand. They will continue to publish their work, but fewer young people will read their work. And over time these scientific reports and papers will have less influence on the American culture. Things on the fringe will be the first to be lost, but as time goes on fewer people will be able to understand more common things like Particle Physics, General Relativity, Physical Chemistry and Organic Chemistry. Some ideas about genetics will continue, because with the birth of every baby the parents look for the influence of genetics. But, the idea of evolution will certainly disappear from the main culture. Instead conversations will center on the idea that the different races must have descended from the different sons of Noah, or some other malarkey.

People will be happy to know that the wizards at Apple will continue to recite the incantations to create the same iPod that has existed for a hundred years, but it still plays the same 10,000 songs, because someone lost the recipe for downloading new ones.






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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


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Politics, Science, Religion, History, Global Warming