The point has ultimately arrived where public ignorance of the progress and purpose of science is not only harmful to the field, it also promotes an entire litter of pseudoscientific disciplines that suck away time, money, and brainpower
Most of which capitalise really well on the idea that science is a kind of arbitrary set of rules designed to be non-questionable by the ruling elite. I've seen alternative medicine's supporters pull that one a lot ("but of course they want you to believe that double-blind testing is a good idea! It helps them maintain their monopoly!"), and of course the creationists have built an entire pseudoscientific movement out of it.
I think there's a pervasive anti-intellectualism that goes through and beyond the sciences (but then, maybe 'anti-intellectualism' sounds a little too much like it's implying that only the ivory tower elite could possibly know or care about what natural selection is or when the First World War broke out). To some level, I suppose that's inevitable - working in a discipline you can pretty much make up as you go along is great if you want to feel really, really clever without working too hard at understanding. (Otherwise, literary theory would never have caught on.) But whole areas of learning presented as being entirely non-understandable by the ordinary public in the first place, yeah, that definitely doesn't help.
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Date: 2006-06-10 10:22 am (UTC)Most of which capitalise really well on the idea that science is a kind of arbitrary set of rules designed to be non-questionable by the ruling elite. I've seen alternative medicine's supporters pull that one a lot ("but of course they want you to believe that double-blind testing is a good idea! It helps them maintain their monopoly!"), and of course the creationists have built an entire pseudoscientific movement out of it.
I think there's a pervasive anti-intellectualism that goes through and beyond the sciences (but then, maybe 'anti-intellectualism' sounds a little too much like it's implying that only the ivory tower elite could possibly know or care about what natural selection is or when the First World War broke out). To some level, I suppose that's inevitable - working in a discipline you can pretty much make up as you go along is great if you want to feel really, really clever without working too hard at understanding. (Otherwise, literary theory would never have caught on.) But whole areas of learning presented as being entirely non-understandable by the ordinary public in the first place, yeah, that definitely doesn't help.