The global party of stupid

It’s striking in this context to recall that, only 20 years ago, the phrase “Science Wars” was used by the right in relation to generally leftish postmodernists in the humanities, who were seen as rejecting science and/or promoting pseudoscience (while it was easy to poke fun at some rather silly stuff, and to point out that it was a distraction from the real political needs of the left, there’s no evidence that it ever did any actual harm to science).

Some, like Steven Pinker, are still beating this dead horse today.

Why do Canadians keep the Harper government in power?

In part because there are two reasonably strong parties to the left (more or less) of his.

Frank Furedi, a leading figure in the former Revolutionary Communist Party which, over the course of the 1990s, morphed into the (rightwing libertarian) Spiked group.

The who the what now?

These days postmodernist and related “science studies” critiques of science are part of the rightwing arsenal used by Steven Fuller to defend creationism and by Daniel Sarewitz to argue that climate science is inherently political.

I’ve seen this sort of claim before, but I don’t entirely get it. Because it isn’t the same critique, is it? As in, there was a certain mode of pomo-left critique of science that was surely excessive (more often not entirely comprehensible); now there’s a markedly more venal attack on science when and because it reaches conclusions that speak against the policy preferences of the right. It hardly seems like the two are comparable.

Oh, you mean the British Revolutionary Communist Party.

I, too, was completely LOLwut? about John’s description of the RCP’s evolution, given that just a few weeks ago telephone poles up and down my street were plastered with a poster for speech by Bob Avakian.

I’m not sure this is as new as some are saying here? I remember Spiro Agnew (Richard Nixon’s veep) going off about pointy headed intellectuals. That was late 60’s.

“used by Steven Fuller to defend creationism “

Fuller isn’t defending creationism per se, but freedom of thought, and the rights of schoolchildren to think for themselves. His arguments equally defend evolutionary theory.

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.  

– John Stuart Mill, letter to the Conservative MP, Sir John Pakington (March, 1866)

@Hidari – surely Furedi is (these days) a less prominent public figure than Franzen? Wouldn’t that explain the lower level of flak?
I’m pretty sure I read plenty of flak for the Pinker article when it came out.

“The routine assumption that the analyses put forward of innumerate bloggers are just as valid as (in fact more valid than) as those of scientists who have devoted their life to the relevant field is one aspect of this”

As a (maybe numerate) blogger, I take exception to this. Quiggin is in an anti-intellectual, authoritarian discipline. For example, look at how citations indices are being used in the Research Assessment Exercise in the UK to purge economics departments of, for example, Post Keynesian economics. I understand that such a purge is currently underway in Australia, too. Maybe you can find bloggers, other than myself, who are more worth listening to those who write the widely-used textbooks in economics and are otherwise held up as authorities. In fact, I can easily name such authorities that, when they stooped to blogging, were seen by many to demonstrate their vileness and stupidity.

As a less contentious example, I was excited when creatures were “discovered” in California lakes that fed on arsenic. Consider the implications for xenobiology. This finding was overturned, apparently, by a (numerate) blogger. The categories of blogger and people who have devoted their life to a topic are not disjoint.

The question of how one becomes recognized as an authority on a topic, whether that be a science or not, is a tough question. Mayhaps those dreaded Post Modernists even have something worthwhile to say on the topic. (My name links to musings on the subject.)

Something of the same sort happened recenly in Spain: the newly-elected Popular Party government eliminated the Ministry of Science and Innovation (science now falls under the purview of the Ministry of Economy and Competition[*]):
http://www.nature.com/news/spain-cuts-science-ministry-in-government-changeover-1.9725

The previous conservative government in Spain (1996-2004) was a little unsure about this whole thing: they did something similar when the first came into power (Ministry of Education and Science + Ministry of Culture –> Ministry of Education and Culture), but then in 2000 they created a separate Ministry of Science and Technology.

[*] Which sounds a lot like the UK’s Department of Business, Skills, and Innovation, which is where science nominally happens[**] in the British government. But I gather that particular trend (science, universities, and other such frivolities being seen as something serving business first and foremost) started under Labour….

[**] Though there is apparently still a Department of Energy and Climate Change in the UK government, so there’s that.

Peter V – Fuller might be thinking that he’s defending free speech, but in reality the creationists and to any sensible onlooker it looks like he’s defending the right of anti-science creationists to force religious dogma down the throats of schoolchildren instead of teaching them actual known evolutionary biology. In this case it isn’t so much the argument he is making (Which, when I have tried to read his more academic stuff that I found online to be incomprehensible) but the actual use to which it is put and the causes he willingly lends a hand to. Amusingly, the creationists are very definitely against freedom of thought, expression or any such liberal approach to things, and yet Fuller has even appeared in court on their behalf.

I can’t find it now, but there’s a theory that the Spiked crowd are still deep-cover Marxists working from the right to bring about the crisis of capitalism. Which seems to make marginally more sense than the idea that a whole whack of Trotskyists could swing over the neo-con right in just a decade.

JQ @ 8:
The Lib Dems are fairly good on climate science. I’m not sure they’d agree with your characterising them as a right-wing party either, even if the more rightward elements of the party are currently most prominent. I don’t think the current Tory leadership are into climate science denialism either – they’re not so big on taking action, but not on basis of claiming that climate change is imaginary. Clearly you can find fruitbats in any political party, but the go-to guy here is Lord Lawson, and he’s been retired for 20 years.

harry b @11 (and Chris Brooke @25):

Thanks.

Nah. It seems to me that the most important characteristic specifically of the stupid people in this respect is that they are easy to manipulate, easy to demagogue, easy to turn into true believers. Today being ‘conservative’ is the way to save the world, tomorrow it might be some radical crusade. The crusade still might be called ‘conservative’, but not necessarily: it’s just a matter of marketing. I remember, for example, Mr. Newt Gingrich preferred expressing his ‘ideas’ in revolutionary terms.

Mao Cheng Ji 09.22.13 at 8:28 pm:
Nah. It seems to me that the most important characteristic specifically of the stupid people in this respect is that they are easy to manipulate….

I’ve often found it easier to get around smart people than stupid people, because you can play games with the smart person’s smartness, but many stupid people are very stubborn (conservative, one might say) and hang on to their positions or demands very tenaciously. I’m thinking of many, many tedious interviews with police and military officers, IRS agents, teachers, business managers, and other antagonists who were not the brightest of their kind. How often I longed for a little intelligence to get my hooks into — in vain!

@22

The NASA “Arsenic life” story was debunked by the microbiologist Rosie Redfield, of the University of British Columbia, not by a (numerate) blogger. The story was that the bacterium GFAJ-1 substituted Arsenic for Phosphorus in DNA, rather than tolerating high concentrations of the element, which is interesting rather than groundbreaking. So someone with technical expertise was suspicious of an over-hyped story which should not have been bunked in the first place (the chemistry doesn’t really make sense) and demonstrated that it was false through experimentation.

What about all the cultural liberals who embrace scientifically witless causes like homeopathy, anti-GMO crops, or the belief that gender rolles are a social construction?

I’d also add that there’s some reasonable skepticism around GMO crops that concerns intellectual property issues rather than questions of food safety.

Why do Canadians keep the Harper government in power?

To expand on this one… it’s not just that the left is divided and there’s FPTP, it’s that the Liberal Party loves to hippie-punch the NDP, and when the NDP blew past them to become the official Opposition, the Liberals were staggeringly angry about it.

The NDP spent a very, very long being treated as unserious also rans; the line usually used was “Canada is a center-left country, trying to govern as hard leftists isn’t going to work and will drive people to the Tories. Also, we have FPTP, so voting for them is throwing your vote away” or words to that effect.

Then the NDP blew right by the Liberals (it remains to be seen how long that lasts; Jack Layton’s successors may not be his equal) and there was a lot of bitching about how the Liberals had been doing the “hard work” of needing to oppose the Tories for years while making actual compromises needed to govern, whereas the NDP only had to talk a good game, and any serious attempt to unite the left would have to come on the Liberals terms, rather than the NDPs, because of “respect.”

Left unspoken here, of course, is the fact that maybe if the Liberals hadn’t spent years and years selling out and backing people who disgusted their base (Ignatieff) and were ineffectual milquetoasts (Dion) for leadership positions, maybe the NDP wouldn’t have been able to capitalize on widespread dissatisfaction with the left-wing establishment in Canada.

Alternative medicine isn’t *entirely* worthless, there are some plant based medications used in premodern medicine that are genuinely pharmacologically active, but as a body of thought none of these alternative medical systems hold up when compared to modern scientifically informed medicine.

The right has some rather odd views on the provenance of the scientific consensus. It always turns out to be the result of a conspiracy. Climate scientists, they say, espouse the views they hold because it gets them funding. They do it for the grants (the franklins being reserved perhaps for more productive routes of inquiry) and leave it unsaid that there is a deeper conspiracy at work to deprive us of everything we hold dear, our trucks and our lawns, even our precious lightbulbs.

The theory of evolution, they darkly hint, is a godless attempt to turn the minds of our vulnerable young to a life free of consequence. In some quarters it’s thought the theory of relativity and the uncertainty principle were also nefariously fashioned to unfasten us from our moral moorings.

As silly as it seems after Copernicus, a great many people still expect the structure of the universe to present a morality play, doling out a measure of meaning and purpose to victims of random fortune.

while it was easy to poke fun at some rather silly stuff, and to point out that it was a distraction from the real political needs of the left, there’s no evidence that it ever did any actual harm to science). These days postmodernist and related “science studies” critiques of science are part of the rightwing arsenal used by Steven Fuller to defend creationism and by Daniel Sarewitz to argue that climate science is inherently political.

Well, I’d say that’s evidence that it did harm, in a round about way. Would the Right have gone post-modern if they hadn’t been shown the way? Being stupid and all, maybe they wouldn’t have thought it up themselves. ;)

Here’s an old thread from this site in which Fuller participated, which shows pretty clearly how he argues. He willfully misconstrues the statements of others and even his own – for example, by phrasing an attack as a rhetorical question and then pretending he was just asking for clarification. Being deliberately obtuse is one thing; pretending to be too stupid to understand one’s own words is something else.

https://crookedtimber.org/2007/06/13/deluge-of-dershowitz/

bad Jim @52

” deeper conspiracy at work to deprive us of everything we hold dear, our trucks and our lawns, even our precious lightbulbs.

The theory of evolution, they darkly hint, is a godless attempt to turn the minds of our vulnerable young to a life free of consequence”

Very curious that they don’t see the contradiction in those two directly adjoint sentences (the deprevation of lightbulbs being a consequence of the externalities of energy use).

For the sake of argument, I’ll entertain the notion that Sokal and company attacked and satirized an oversimplified precis of postmodernist theory, rather than the real thing. (I won’t try to ascertain whether it is so, cuz ain’t nobody got time for that.) Nevertheless, I can tell you that in the fall of 1997, I sat in a classroom at MIT, and listened to a professor of psychology who bought in to that oversimplified precis, while he claimed that Einstein’s theory of relativity was justification for his own relativistic take on basic epistemology.

Uh, no. Interpreting Einsteinian relativity as a justification for postmodernist epistemology is not indicative of a belief in science.

bad Jim @52 reason @58
I just realised that of course the Theory of Evolution doesn’t teach people to lead a life free of consequence. The Theory of Evolution is nothing if not consequential.

@65 — You did say ‘justification’, so I was under the impression that your professor was indulging in the frequently observed sequential structure of (1) (mis)understanding a scientific theory and (2) using some kind of logic or narrative based on the (mis)understanding to (3) arrive at some peculiar conclusion, not that he was simply vacuuming up and dumping buzzwords. Some of the performances of the former type can be quite interesting — clouds of buzzwords, not so much, since they are so widely used in technology business advertising, which I suppose must have academic analogs.

@67 — I believe you’re referring to the overrated debating tactic of using one’s opponent’s evidence or logic against the opponent. In that case, actual belief in the opponent’s argument is not implied. I got the idea that your professor was providing a constructive support for his view of epistemology, in which case he would have to believe (I would think) that the support had some validity (or it would not be a very good support). Of course it is possible for a climate-change denier to believe in science, since as we know humans have little trouble simultaneously entertaining contradictory beliefs. (We have the far more egregious example of ‘Creation Science’.) So the professor could simultaneously believe that science was invalid and contained worthy material in support of his views, perhaps thus giving a living example of his Relativistic epistemology.