by Sudhamshu
Attacks paid for by big business are ‘driving science into a dark era’
[Via Science | The Observer]
Most scientists, on achieving high office, keep their public remarks to the bland and reassuring. Last week Nina Fedoroff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), broke ranks in a spectacular manner.
She confessed that she was now “scared to death” by the anti-science movement that was spreading, uncontrolled, across the US and the rest of the western world.
“We are sliding back into a dark era,” she said. “And there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms.”
[More]
Clarence Darrow described these people best in the Scopes Trial:
I will tell you what is going to happen, and I do not pretend to be a prophet, but I do not need to be a prophet to know. Your Honor knows that the fires that have been lighted in America to kindle religious bigotry and hate. You can take ,judicial notice of them if you cannot of anything else. You know that there is no suspicion which possesses the minds of men like bigotry and ignorance and hatred.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Catholic and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one, you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.
They were strong during a previous epoch in American history where fear had a stronger hold on many people than courage. We see the same thing today – fear driving people’s views rather than courage.
Today, we hear fearful, ignorant ramblings about Girl Scout cookies, contraception, prenatal screening, global warming, vaccines and more. We have Catholic against Catholic and Protestant against Protestant. We even have Catholic against Protestant. I expect man against man shortly.
Forty years ago, we had the courage to put a man on the Moon. Today, we no longer have the ability to launch anyone to the Moon. In another generation will we have marched backwards enough to think that Armstrong on the Moon was all a myth?
Ignorance and fanaticism are busier than ever. They have taken hold in almost every area of our social discourse. Facts seldom matter; simply emotional ferocity.
Dickens explained it also in A Christmas Carol, written in another era of fear:
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit, are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.”
Doom indeed is on our foreheads if ignorance continues its backward march.
At the very least, it slows down our forward march towards the solutions that we need to face the complex world surrounding us.
That is ignorance’s key feature – it makes us less likely to survive. It will literally kill us.
