Reason and Science in Danger.
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Thomas More wrote: “Science is only bourgeois when it is hijacked to back up bourgeois beliefs and perceptions.”
This statement starts from the ideological assumption that there is an asocial, ahistorical activity called ‘science’ which can be ‘hijacked’.
You’d have to prove this ‘science’ is a universal, absolute entity, not subject to change, and describe the parts which can’t be ‘hijacked’. There has to be an ‘unmalleable essence’ which you can appeal to, and ‘restored’, after it has been rescued from the ‘hijackers’.
History can easily demonstrate the origins and development of any ‘science’ that you can identify, how it changes over time and who made these changes.
Thomas More wrote: “The diameter of the sun is certainly beyond the control of any human society, even the most democratic.”
But ‘diameter’ is a human construct, and its measurement is a human activity.
For example, any ‘diameter’ would change depending upon the required accuracy and units employed to determine a ‘diameter’.
Thus, ‘the diameter of the sun’ is entirely within ‘the control of any human society’.
The real political question is, who would you have control that ‘diameter’ – an elite, or ‘the most democratic’?
Wonders of the Universe. BBC.
L. Bird, most flat-earthers, creationists and conspiraloons are working class, and usually the most disenfranchised and the poorest among the working class, but I wouldn’t want them determining science any more than i’d want Himmler doing it. (And he was working class too).
Expertise will still be required in socialism.
When you are next measuring an area for a new carpet, make sure your measuring tape is a proletarian, not a bourgeois, one.
TM, I don’t think these were Marx’s views:Postmodern view of RealityAccording to postmodernism, apparent realities are only social constructs and thereby these are not static but subject to change. It emphatically believes that for the formation of ideas and belief, the role of language, power, relations and motivations are immense. This approach of thought does not believe any sharp line of demarcation or classification between male and female, straight and gay, white and black or imperial and colonial. It does not believe any absolute truth. Rather it believes that reality is plural relative and dependent. The description of reality is dependent on the persons and their nature who describe it. Moreover, the description of the world is dependent on the persons who perceive it and thus this description is subjective.https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.998.6261&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Anyone who really thinks that “beliefs create reality” should be eager to explain how the real motions of all planets in the solar system changed from earth-centered orbits in 1500 (when this was believed by almost everyone) to sun-centered orbits in 1700 (when this was believed by almost all scientists). Did the change in beliefs (from theories of 1500 to theories of 1700) cause a change in reality (with planets beginning to orbit the sun at some time – but exactly when did this occur – between 1500 and 1700) ?That is precisely why I am saying L. Bird is confusing perceptions of reality with reality. He would only be right were there no external reality to perceive and then interpret.
Our universe is either heliocentric or geocentric. The geocentric model has been proven wrong and the heliocentric correct – unless something were to change this in the external reality. But I think L. Bird would say that the scientists telling us the universe is heliocentric are “bourgeois” scientists imposing their view on society. This is how conspiraloons think: that everything is a conspiracy, and L. Bird is unwittingly close to that view. But is the universe dependent on our terrestrial human social struggles and development? I think not, no more than other laws of physics.
Nature here on Earth can be subject to human action. The present climate crisis is caused by capitalist society. “Bourgeois” scientists is a term I would apply to those actually serving the profit system by accepting bribes from oil barons to deny climate change; but you cannot apply that epithet to those refusing to be bribed and simply telling us the facts and warning us. And these are most scientists today.
I think the term “bourgeois science” can only be applied to those who actually serve the class interests of the bourgeoisie. All military scientists are bourgeois scientists, therefore. But material reality exists that has no relation to our class struggles. It is only our perceptions that change, and our social reality – not natural universal reality beyond our power to change.
A good example of perception: dinosaurs.
A book has recently been written about the paleontologists (yes!) of ancient Greece and Rome, who examined dinosaur and other prehistoric fossils and bones.
L. Bird is correct that their deductions (science) were culturally determined. They gave rise to, or confirmed, the Hellenic monster myths.
The Judaeo-Christian Middle Ages deduced them to be the remains of dragons or of Old Testament pre-diluvian giants. Again, culturally determined.The (bourgeois!) 19th century had seen the arrival of scientific paleontology, enabling us to see the bones and fossils for what they were and, after Darwin’s tremendous blow to millenia of dependence on scriptures, date them accurately.
This was cultural in the sense that now that the science was available to begin to understand the reality of the fossils, bourgeois society would add its spin on “survival of the fittest” and so on – but largely these bourgeois slogans have, except among the ignorant, followed Cyclops and dragon on history’s dustheap.
The science of paleontology continues to discover, and to revise its formerly held convictions which have proved incorrect about these animals, but their existence and time period – although discovered by a capitalist society – will hardly be questioned, I think, by any sane socialist.Deleted.
It’s odd that ‘materialists’ fear that ‘Reason and Science’ are both ‘in Danger’, but won’t discuss just what ‘Reason and Science’ are, where they came from, who created them, and from who or what they are in danger.
Perhaps simple ‘common sense’ informs their claims, and it doesn’t need discussing.
Well, if so, then the subject is certainly a dead-end as far as any form of ‘democratic socialism’ is concerned.
The bogeyman of ‘postmodernism’ seems to satisfy and calm the ‘materialists’ fears. Black Hat / White Hat politics. Boo the baddies, cheer the goodies.
Here’s how reason and science are in danger. Mocking Stephen Hawking:
Flat Earthers mock Stephen Hawking from insanepeoplefacebook
More examples to follow.
And this site is a sickening feast of ignorance.
Reason is the ability to discern and sift information. With mental illness on the rise, and misery being exploited by pseudoscience and pseudohistory pushers, discernment is decreasing in favour of instant sensationalist myth-peddling. The fearful prefer to deny climate change and astronomical reality. They fight back against feelings of insignificance and inadequacy by embracing myths that grant them centrality, importance and special-ness, such as creationism, geocentrism, racialism. It is, again, the working class tragically taking the wrong, suicidal, direction, instead of the rational, aware, one (socialism).
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