I don't agree with those who deny climate change and I dream of the day when Americans voluntarily revolutionize our way of life to be sustainable and healthy for us and the planet. But I can't help but comment on the mode of argument. What I find most intriguing, though, is the underlying thesis that those who refuse to believe in science - essentially who have a preference for any other belief - are in some way heretical and no longer worthy of the blessings of modernity. The tone is telling.
It shows just how thoroughly materialist-scientific thought and authority has supplanted, not undone or erased or broken with, religious thought and authority. While there are various double standards the writer allows himself in this argument, one of the most obviously linked to religion was his comment, one I've so often heard in religious settings when talking about the commandments and such, is that science isn't a buffet from which you can choose what works for you. In other words, it's just as dogmatic as religion. It requires the same full, unquestioning submission that religion so barbarically does… or else:
"...it's time, perhaps, for them to be consistent. Don't pick and choose between the science you like and the ones you deny. Chose between science and no science at all.
Hand in your cell phones."
Wowwwwww. What is the difference between the author's declaration and a papal bull of the Middle Ages? Not much, actually, when you consider the only thing that has changed is the overriding assumption in our culture of what has authority and what is worth believing in, not the actual existence of belief or acknowledgement of authority. People still believe in what the author calls "the veracity of evolution" (emphasis added), for example, which everyone knows is a sophisticated theory based on observation and some intelligent grasps at answers** beyond what the data itself shows. It's extremely intelligent and helpful in looking at the world. But if you don't believe in it - all of it - if you don't submit your mind to "reason," beware of the consequences. It's like the truly liberal-minded questioning so beloved by the Philosophes never existed! How pre-Enlightenment!
But because science has such a hold on us, we don't think about how it's a philosophical conundrum that excludes itself by its own materialist basis from commenting on anything metaphysical, including religion, at least with any authority. Why? Because if truth comes from observation, and nothing metaphysical can be observed with the senses (since it doesn't exist unless it can be observed), it is immaterial and outside the possibility of scientific exploration. Science declares itself they only way to truth, the only authority. Thinking about that makes this blog post more interesting to dissect, mostly because the people who read it probably don't realize they still have engrained belief taught to them by those they consider as having authority. In their case they believe in science and frame their lives based on its reassuring promise of "progress and reason." They are outraged at heretical questioning of their truths just as the Catholics were at the Albigensians, or the Jansenists who read the Bible all by themselves without submitting to clerical interpretation and direction.
But doesn't this go back to human nature - our propensity to believe? If humans were principally rational, wouldn't the scientific studies on climate change convince us? Wouldn't our habits and cultural urges dissolve before the all-powerful statistically-backed facts? Couldn't you do without going all medieval on the non-believers and threatening them with a hellish life sans cell phone if they don't convert?
Well no. Because modern humans aren't more sophisticated and detached from belief than pre-moderns. We just believe we are.
*I still hope the post was a satire.
**see Noam Chomsky on grasping toward truth and human creativity, particularly in The Chomsky-Foucault debate on Human Nature. I don't agree with Chomsky's conclusion that the answer to consciousness is physiological, but that book blew my mind.
