The Propaganda of Irrationalism
This piece so perfectly describes climate science, how outright flat Earth pseudoscience can overtake the entire system of civilization of a scientific world.
Rafe Champion emails me: “Collingwood’s book An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) looks as though he saw POMO coming early in the piece. Chapter 13, “The Propaganda of Irrationalism,” depicts with chilling accuracy the process that occurs in many courses where the critical faculties of students are systematically destroyed. Collingwood first asks us to picture a civilisation where respect for truth is a powerful belief and systematic thinking is prized in intellectual and practical pursuits. Each feature of this civilisation would have characteristics derived from that prevailing habit of mind.
‘Religion would be predominantly a worship of truth … . Philosophy would be predominantly an exposition not merely of the nature of thought, action & etc. but of scientific thought and orderly (principled, thought-out) action, with special attention to method and to the problem of establishing standards by which on reflection truth can be distinguished from falsehood.
Politics would be predominantly the attempt to build up a common life by the methods of reason (free discussion, public criticism). Education would be predominantly a method for inducing habits of orderly and systematic thinking’. And so on.
‘And suppose that now within this same civilisation a movement grew up hostile to these fundamental principles … an epidemic disease: a kind of epidemic withering of belief in the importance of truth and in the obligation to think and act in a systematic and methodical way. Such an irrationalist epidemic infecting religion would turn it from a worship of truth to a worship of emotion and a cultivation of certain emotional states
Infecting politics it would substitute for the ideal of orderly thinking in that field the ideal of tangled, immediate, emotional thinking; for the idea of a political thinker as a political leader the idea of a leader focussing and personifying the mass emotions of his community’.
This movement of thought would need to proceed by stealth because the healthy tissues of thought would strongly resist any open attack on the springs of rationality and scientific thinking.
‘Let a sufficient number of men whose intellectual respectability is vouched for by their academic position pay sufficient lip-service to the ideals of scientific method, and they will be allowed to teach by example whatever kind of anti-science they like, even if this involves a hardly disguised breach with all the accepted canons of scientific method.’
‘The ease with which this can be done will be much greater if it is done in an academic society where scientific specialisation is so taken for granted that no one dare criticise the work of a man in another faculty. In that case all that is necessary to ensure immunity for the irrationalist agents is that they should put forward their propaganda under the pretence that it is itself a special science, which therefore other scientists will understand that they must not criticise’.
See more here: climateofsophistry.com
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Greg Spinolae
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“Science” is only ever “settled” in the minds of the scientifically illiterate.
A “Scientific Truth” is only ever, at best, an approximation to the absolute truth.
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Ken Irwin
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Firstly you should consider the “two cultures” problem where science and the humanities have become distinctly separated and in most cases “real scientists” are outnumbered and outgunned by liberal “humanities” educated persons who feel that they can pronounce their opinions on matters of a scientific nature – for which they have no background or education.
This from the seminal 1959 Rede lecture by Prof. C P Snow on “The intellectual life of the whole of western society” :
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespear’s ?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.”
Professor Snow effectively stood before the university senate and called them cavemen.
The rebuke has been long remembered but little has changed.
Richard Lindzen – Professor of Climatology MIT. Comment on Snow’s lecture.
“I fear that little has changed since Snow’s assessment 60 years ago. While some might maintain that ignorance of physics does not impact political ability, it most certainly impacts the ability of non-scientific politicians to deal with nominally science-based issues. The gap in understanding is also an invitation to malicious exploitation. Given the democratic necessity for non-scientists to take positions on scientific problems, belief and faith inevitably replace understanding, though trivially oversimplified false narratives serve to reassure the non-scientists that they are not totally without scientific ‘understanding.’ The issue of global warming offers numerous examples of all of this.”
I believe the number of appropriately qualified scientists who are pro AGW are well in the minority – but they are almost universally supported by the rest of the classically well educated but otherwise scientifically illiterate “humanities” intellectuals.
This gives the pro side an entirely unwarranted appearance of academic support and a consensus that simply has no validity – It is simply a consensus of ignorance.
The scientific method relies on data and reproducible observations – consensus has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Unfortunately the liberal arts and humanities scholars are seldom schooled in the scientific method and in most cases are fed a diet of opinion – there can be no proof that Picasso was a better artist than Monet or similar comparisons between poets, music, law, philosophy, medieval literature, political science (an oxymoron) etc. etc. and even (to a much lesser extent) medicine.
All that is given and accepted is learned opinion.
Consequently such persons are easily swayed by the “majority of” or the “consensus of opinion is” type of arguments without a shred of proof being required.
I fear the majority of otherwise well-educated persons are hopelessly ill-equipped to scientifically evaluate global warming / climate change and thus fall into the “consensus” trap.
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Doug Harrison
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A wonderful article with what amounts to a wonderful addendum by Ken Irwin. Thank you one and all.
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JaKo
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Hi Ken,
A couple of points, if I may. You wrote: “I believe the number of appropriately qualified scientists who are pro AGW are well in the minority…” Try to add another qualifier — e.g. ‘AND honest’ — I bet that your original minority would approach zero.
The second argument in that sentence “– but they are almost universally supported by the rest …” is, IMHO, missing the point of corruption of science, any science. A few naive/activist academics may make fools of themselves, but could not corrupt the ‘hard science’. Science for money, whether in “just” competing for grants, tenure, or outright collaborating with the world (financial) elites is the real reason why we have this consensus/nonsensus icing on the hockey-stick cake.
Cheers, JaKo
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A Reasonable Man
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So much of what the general population believes today is simply not true. Propaganda combined with corrupt MSM and internet/social media control and censorship gives corrupt groups a powerful tool to do terrible things.
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Artelia
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Please rethink about whether satan the master of deception and the God of truth do actually exist spiritually. The debunking of Christianity and of Christ is worse than the debunking of Ivermectin. A good look at Humane Vitae also deserves to be relooked at.
The sexual revolution needs to be debunked.
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