Anti-Science - left and right together?

2012-12-12 · first published in CounterPunch · 203 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

As credited on the page: “link to counterpunch.org”

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did.

---

A Systematic Attack on Rationality

The suggestion that left and right thinking may be converging on matters scientific will, no doubt, be offensive to some on the left. After all, the right chooses myth over evolution, and oil profits over climate science. We would never do that.

Nevertheless, I’ve begun to notice a whole lot of anti-science among progressive and left intellectuals. Smart people all, some of them dear friends of mine. Then I read a column in the November Scientific American on magical thinking in American politics. It rubbed my sore spot.

This scary trend seems to be growing.

I went to my friends’ home for a lovely Thanksgiving dinner. One of several grad students there was talking about “Western Science.” I butted in with “science doesn’t come in regional flavors.” I am not known for tact. To prove that lack of tact, I then added an example: Newtonian physics is universal. He granted that, but then said something to the effect that Relativity shows the Western-ness of science. (My mind wandered during this fuzz, but I doubt I missed much.)