GOP anti-intellectualism

Paul Braun, as chair of a subcommittee of the Science and Technology Committee, is part of the larger Republican anti-intellectualism and its war on science. I would like to explain it all as simply coming from the influence of the uneducated and willfully ignorant right fringe in its latest version.

But an interesting article by Judith Warner in today's New York Times Magaine puts the origins of such thinking in the liberal academic world of the 1960s and 1970s, when post-modernist thinkers began "questioning accepted fact, revealing the myths and politics behind established certainties."

It's true -- the trend in academia was toward contextualized "truths" (note the plural), relativism, deconstruction, and the idea that multiple points of view can be simultaneously "true," even if seemingly contradictory. Or, rather, that there is no one Truth. This intellectual, philosophical challenge to "received truth" perhaps had some influence on blind acceptance of governmental authority (about Viet Nam, for example). But I think that's really a leap into a different category of discourse.

Warner also makes too great a leap and gives the Paul Brauns and the Glenn Becks too much credit for being thinking human beings. They are not coming from a position of such lofty and abstract relativism -- they're coming straight out of rigid literalism of anti-scientific, religious beliefs, not from advances in free thinking.

Philosophical academics may discuss such relative truths for hours on end, without actually having to grapple with the practical world we live in -- but their lofty abstraction is not a world where science is dismissed, only "problematized," to use one of their favorite words. They don't deny scientific findings; they say it's far more complex than we thought. They don't, for example, deny evolution or global warming.

They accept evidence-based data; they just think that there are always more data and other observation points that give another perspective.

The fringe right, which has a strangle hold on the Republican party right now, is on an anti-science roller coaster down into the valley of ignorance and third-world mentality -- all distracting us from the scariest truth of all: that big money interests (Koch brothers) and rightwing media empires (Rupert Murdoch) are funding and amplifying all these hypocritical, unprincipled purveyors of untruths for their own political advantage.

Getting rid of public sector unions is only part of that far-flung strategy.

This is a dark time, indeed.

Ralph