Science is for Stupid People
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Every ideology needs to believe in its
inevitability. Religions get their inevitability
from prophecies; secular ideologies get theirs from
the modernist fallacy.
The modernist fallacy says that history is moving
on an inevitable track toward their ideology.
Resistance is futile, you will be liberalized.
Marxism predicted the inevitable breakdown of
capitalism. Obama keeps talking about being “on the
right side of history” as if history, like a
university history curriculum, has a right side and
a wrong side. All everyone has to do is grab a sign
and march “Forward!” to the future.
The bad economics and sociology around which the
left builds its Socialist sand castles assume that
technological progress will mean improved control.
Capitalism with its mass production convinced
budding Socialists that the entire world could be
run like a giant factory under technocrats who would
use industrial techniques to control the economic
production of mankind in line with their ideals.
The USSR and moribund European economies broke that
theory into a million little pieces.
The dot com revolution with its databases and subtle
tools for manipulating individuals on a collective
basis led to a Facebook Socialism that crowdsources
its culture wars and “nudges” everyone into better
habits, lower body masses and conveniently available
death panels.
The iSocialist, like his industrial predecessor,
assumes that technology gives superintelligent
leftists better tools for controlling everything.
The planned economy failed in the twentieth because
the tools of propaganda posters, quotas and gulags
were too crude. This time he is certain that it will
work.
Intelligence is to leftists what divine right was to
the crowned kings of Europe. They frantically brand
themselves as smart because in a technocracy,
superiority comes from intelligence. Their vision is
the right one because they are the smart ones. Their
shiny future is backed by what they call “science”.
Science, the magic of the secular age, is their
church. But science isn’t anyone’s church. Science
is much better at disproving things than at proving
them. It’s a useful tool for skeptics, but a
dangerous tool for rulers. Like art, science is
inherently subversive and like art, when it’s
restricted and controlled, it stops being
interesting.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s defenders reacted to his basic
errors by asserting that even if he had made a
mistake, science, collectively, was right. Science
is of course neither right nor wrong; its
methodology can be used to determine whether
something is right or wrong.
In Tyson’s case, science determined long ago that at
least one of his claims was wrong. Neil deGrasse
Tyson doesn’t embody science. No individual does.
What Tyson embodies is manufactured intelligence.
Manufactured intelligence is how we knew that Obama
was smart. But manufactured intelligence has the
same relationship to intelligence as a painting of
the ocean does to the real thing.
The real ocean is complicated and messy. So is real
intelligence. Manufactured intelligence is the
fashion model playing a genius in a movie. Real
intelligence is an awkward man obsessing over a
handful of ideas, some of them ridiculously wrong,
but one of which will change the world.
Real intelligence isn’t marketable because it
doesn’t make an elite feel good about its power.
Biblical fake prophets were often preferred to real
prophets because they made rulers feel comfortable
about the future. The modern technoprophet assures a
secular elite that it can effectively control people
and that it even has the obligation to do so. It
tells them that “science” is on their side.
The easy way to tell real religion from fake
religion is that real religion doesn’t make you feel
good. It doesn’t assure you that everything you’re
doing is right and that you ought to keep on doing
it.
The same holds true for science. Real science
doesn’t make you feel smart. Fake science does.
No matter how smart you think you are, real
science will make you feel stupid far more often
than it will make you feel smart. Real science not
only tells us how much more we don’t know than we
know, a state of affairs that will continue for all
of human history, but it tells us how fragile the
knowledge that we have gained is, how prone we are
to making childish mistakes and allowing our biases
to think for us.
Science is a rigorous way of making fewer mistakes.
It’s not very useful to people who already know
everything. Science is for stupid people who know
how much they don’t know.
A look back at the march of science doesn’t show an
even line of progress led by smooth-talking
popularizers who are never wrong. Instead the
cabinets of science are full of oddballs,
unqualified, jealous, obsessed and eccentric, whose
pivotal discoveries sometimes came about by
accident. Science, like so much of human
accomplishment, often depended on lucky accidents to
provide a result that could then be isolated and
systematized into a useful understanding of the
process.
Modernism is a style that offers a seamless vision
of perfection that doesn’t exist. The
accomplishments of our age haven’t changed human
nature and they have not made us infallible.
Real science tells us that we are basically stupid.
A close study of history proves it. And that’s a
good thing. Stupid people can learn from their
mistakes. Self-assured elites convinced of their own
superior intelligence can’t. Everyone makes
mistakes. The future belongs to those who recognize
them.
The inability of Neil deGrasse Tyson and his
defenders to acknowledge that he is wrong is a
revealing look at the rotten core of the liberal
elite which is incapable of admitting its errors,
but sneers and smears its way out of a moral
reckoning every time. Its ideology with its
assumption of central control over lives and
economies is too dependent on its own illusion of
genius not to lie about its failures.
It is too big to fail and that makes its failure
inevitable.
Tysonism is why ObamaCare suffered a disastrous
launch, why the VA reorganization didn’t work and
why we’re back in Iraq. Technocrats don’t make
mistakes. They can’t. They’re only at the top
because they’re smart. If they ever admitted to
being stupid, they would lose their right to rule.
Like Lysenkoism, Tysonism uses ideology to determine
the outcomes of science. That’s how we keep ending
up with Global Warming as settled science no matter
how often the actual science contradicts it.
Tysonism appropriates science without understanding
it. Its science consists of factoids, some right and
some wrong, which simplify and clarify everything.
Its manufactured intelligence makes people feel
smart without actually giving them the critical
tools to question the false assumptions of a Tyson.
What the left calls science is really a
hypothesis accepted as a fact without the
skepticism. Its intelligence is a conclusion without
bothering to determine whether it’s true. Science
and intelligence are perpetual processes that are
never truly settled. But in law and government, as
in all other fields, the left discards the process
and asserts an inevitable outcome by virtue of its
superiority.
Intelligence as ideology is at the heart of the
left. Its Orwellian twist discards the need for
using intelligence to question its ideology by
asserting that the issue is settled. To be smart is
to be left and to be left is to be smart. And only
stupid people would question that.
There is no need to think about anything because the
smart people have already done all the thinking. You
can show you are smart by accepting their
conclusions or show your stupidity by questioning
them.
Science and skepticism are the tools of stupid
people. As Socrates put it, I know that I know
nothing. We have the most to fear from the smart
people who don’t know and will never admit how
little they know.