Yesterday, I was trying to work up an article expressing my dissatisfaction with the Science Daily posting about a University of North Carolina study on the invasion of Caribbean reefs by lionfish. I didn’t get very far, however, because I kept going off on tangents (A brand-new species has entered competition in an abundant ecosystem. Isn’t this the ideal opportunity to observe Darwinian evolution in action?). Talking about it with a co-worker, she offered, “They’re calling for government intervention, and we want less government intervention, correct?”
In this case, that is actually a secondary concern.
In this case, my concern is not that a call for government intervention has been made, so much as who made this call. Scientists should not be in the business–and it has become a business, fueled by grant money–of calling for government intervention. Or any kind of action. If you wish to write policy papers, become a politician. The job of the scientist is to analyze: observe a phenomenon, develop an hypothesis, test the hypothesis, record the results, get peer review. It’s called “science.” Too often today, papers are written not to present a new finding, but to support whatever position for which the government is paying grants. That’s one of the reasons we keep finding so many papers and articles being published “calling for action” against Anthropogenic Global Warming (which by now is debunked by even a cursory examination): because governments will happily keep paying grant money to those who provide them with justification to take more money and more control of their constituents. This does not lead only to a corruption of politics, however; it corrupts science. People who should be attempting to disprove their hypotheses are instead trying to find evidence to prop them up.
What does this have to do with post-modernism? Post-modernism rejects logic and reason, and embraces “feeling“. “I WANT this to be true, so I will make it the conclusion of my paper.” It is the mother of socialism and the antithesis of science, reason and freedom.
It is what our children are being taught throughout grade school and college.
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