Image: Rodale books
When speaking about science to scientists, there is one thing that can be said that will almost always raise their indignation, and that is that science is inherently political and that the practice of science is a political act. Science, they will respond, has nothing to do with politics. But is that true?
Let's consider the relationship between knowledge and power. "Knowledge and power go hand in hand," said Francis Bacon, "so that the way to increase in power is to increase in knowledge."
At its core, science is a reliable method for creating knowledge, and thus power. Because science pushes the boundaries of knowledge, it pushes us to constantly refine our ethics and morality, and that is always political. But beyond that, science constantly disrupts hierarchical power structures and vested interests in a long drive to give knowledge, and thus power, to the individual, and that process is also political.
The politics of science is nothing new. Galileo, for example, committed a political act in 1610 when he simply wrote about his observations through a telescope. Jupiter had moons and Venus had phases, he wrote, which proved that Copernicus had been right in 1543: Earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, as contemporary opinion—and the Roman Catholic Church—held. These were simple observations, there for anyone who wanted to look through Galileo's telescope to see.
But the simple statement of an observable fact is a political act that either supports or challenges the current power structure. Every time a scientist makes a factual assertion—Earth goes around the sun, there is such a thing as evolution, humans are causing climate change—it either supports or challenges somebody's vested interests.
. . .
Why did the church go to such absurd lengths to deal with Galileo? For the same reasons we fight political battles over issues like climate change today: Because facts and observations are inherently powerful, and that power means they are political.
Failing to acknowledge this leaves both science and America vulnerable to attack by antiscience thinking—thinking that has come to dominate American politics and much of its news media coverage and educational curricula in the early twenty-first century. Thinking that has steered American politics off course and away from the vision held by the country's founders.
Wishing to sidestep the painful moral and ethical parsing that their discoveries sometimes compel, many scientists today see their role to be the creation of knowledge and believe they should leave the moral, ethical, and political implications to others to sort out. But the practice of science itself cannot possibly be apolitical, because it takes nothing on faith. The very essence of the scientific process is to question long-held assumptions about the nature of the universe, to dream up experiments that test those questions, and, based on the observations, to incrementally build knowledge that is independent of our beliefs and assumptions. A scientifically testable claim is utterly transparent and can be shown to be either most probably true or false, whether the claim is made by a king or a president, a pope, a congressperson, or a common citizen. Because of this, science is inherently antiauthoritarian, and a great equalizer of political power.
AUTHORITARIAN POLITICS
Because this is the case, it's reasonable to ask how science fits into political thought. Science writer Timothy Ferris reminds us that in politics there are not just two forces, the progressive left (encouraging change) and the conservative right (seeking constancy). In fact, there are four. Imagined on a vertical axis, there are also the authoritarian (totalitarian, closed, and controlling, at the bottom of the axis) and the antiauthoritarian (liberal, open, and freedom loving, at the top), which one can argue have actually played much more fundamental roles in human history. Politics, then, can be more accurately thought of as a box with four quadrants rather than as a linear continuum from left to right.
See what we're tweeting about
89 Comments
Add CommentA very worthwhile book.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is timely too, because we need to tighten the political moorings that are weakening to the point that good science is scoffed at by some major politicians.
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com/2011/11/matriarch-of-matrix.html
Instead of the three Rs; Readin, Writin, and Rithmatic. The education system should embrace my ALL curriculum; Arithmetic, Literacy and Logic. All other subjects, such as Science, Geography, History, etc. provide an opportunity for practical application of the three core subjects. If we were to follow this plan, I believe we would see a new era of enlightenment in twenty years. Instead of conservatives holding us back because of slavish devotion to bronze age myths and political ideology, we would have a thinking population with functioning B.S. detectors. The problem is; what government wants a thinking population?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The problem is; what government wants a thinking population?" - and therein lies the rub.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne current party candidate actually wants to get rid of the entire Dept of Education. Then religious zealots can home-school their kids in creationism and faith healing. Exactly the opposite direction for what your comment aspires to.
Great reflections here. This is an article and book that could be relevant to some of the debates on science in anthropology. I've written about similar issues in a summary of the recent session on "Science in Anthropology":
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.livinganthropologically.com/2011/11/17/science-in-anthropology/
"Then religious zealots can home-school their kids in creationism and faith healing."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this..and yet, I would be willing to bet you fancy yourself on the "liberal, open, and freedom loving" end of that vertical axis.
Deciding what a free human can teach to his/her own children to ensure that it matches your goals.. Isn't that rather "totalitarian, closed, and controlling?"
Live free.
Allowing parents to teach their children that the sun goes 'round the earth isn't going to help their children much, and I think speaks to the lack of freedom to information the children would be subjected to in that scenario.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt could be argued that Universal public education is the greatest thing any society could establish and yields more benefits than any other social program. However, these benefits require that only facts are taught, not unsubstantiated beliefs.
That is a great observation and comment. It somewhat goes along with the observation that society has become nicer and less violent. The public schools are one place where most of us meet and learn to deal with each other. It a reason to support them with fervor!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI will definitely buy this book. Relatedly, Google "Why Do Humans Reason?" Mercier & Sperber, a great read. I've written a lot about these issues on my blog (I work in Medical Information Technology). I also hang out a lot at sciencebasedmedicine.org (those folks are hardcore).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow, you certainly assume a lot of thins, most of them wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Candide - "One current party candidate actually wants to get rid of the entire Dept of Education."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, it's every candidate for that party, from what I can see during their debates.
@RookieRick - "Deciding what a free human can teach to his/her own children to ensure that it matches your goals.. Isn't that rather "totalitarian, closed, and controlling?""
No, actually it's not - sparing children from the crippling effects of misinformation is not an imposition. Don't confuse your desire to be totalitarian, closed and controlling with your "freedom" - and don't you dare try that tired old parade of "but that's my right". No. Your rights end where they impose on another. A person's right to raise their children remains fundamental, insofar as they do not cause harm to those children.
For the same reason you aren't allowed to cut off your kid's fingers, or lock them in the basement for years, or starve them, or beat them to death while attempting to drive out demons, you aren't allowed to cripple their minds.
Denying them a proper education cripples them, and the only reason anyone would do that to a child is on religious grounds - which is exactly why the rest of society says "Nope, park your scientology and other batshit at the door. School is where kids are taught about REAL things." It's very telling about your religion when you can't handle giving your kids a proper education about the world - if your "faith" flies in the face of reality so much that even a grade-school kid will know the difference, you've got some serious theological issues.
T
One of the people before Galileo also said the earth orbited around the sun. He was burned at the stake. Galileo got off easy. (The ignorant can defend their sacred cows to the point of killing.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe author has little or nothing to do with the scientific community. 99.9% of science involves the minutia of a discipline. As a geologist even I don't understand even the basics of 95% of geology papers. My research is so specific that every word would be an enigma to all but a few.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPOolitics and science have almost no interaction beyond a fraction of topical subjects.
Jefferson was probably wrong. Universal adult suffrage and direct democracy are terrible ideas. The power of the State cannot be entrusted to the entire population, bankruptcy is then inevitable. Sure people know their own interest and opinion better than others and should therefore elect, or not, representatives to their liking, that brings more stability and less violence in to the use and abuse of State power. That's the point of democracy, not imaginary rights or supposed popular intelligence.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIdeology in general like religion in general is just another power tool, worth avoiding. Science is more of a power creator, hence worth it even if resulting disruption caused by change is inconvenient. Change is always inconvenient, but to achieve either progress or stability, the profitable changes require adaptation to make better use of them. The unprofitable ones are sometimes inevitable, especially with popular democracy; here the adaptations to avoid loss tend to create further problems, like the vested interest leader oligarchy that runs the advanced countries.
All countries have that sort of thing, it’s in the nature of having a government in the first place, and a damn good reason to have government do as little as possible. The advanced ones just manage to combine it with a patina of democracy and hence have more staying power. Maybe Science and its child technology will overthrow them all, first by making what people actually do and want supportable without reference to government, then by making government irrelevant and impotent, and then perhaps the oligarchs will have to work for a living.
WRONG, the mosquitoes were becoming resistant to DDT a few years after widespread DDT spraying began and cases of malaria started rebounding to their previous levels:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/10/chapin.php
It's use in bed nets, especially for children, is okay, but covering the environment with it does more harm than good, especially if you keep spraying it after the disease vectors become resistant like we were doing in the U.S. Just because your belief system REQUIRES that environmentalists be thoroughly misguided and nefarious (for some reason) does not make it so in reality.
Really, you're just rad-baiting like McCarthy with your "anti-capitalist" label and I can plainly see way more emotion that logic in your words.
Even though Galileo didn't seek to upend the Church, his discoveries and the discoveries of the scientists after him, helped usher in the Enlightenment. He had a lot of skin in this game because the Church kept him under house arrest for the heresy of reporting what he saw with his own eyes. A lot of those Theists to come from the Enlightenment were our Founding Fathers, so check your beliefs before you go mouthing off again.
The WHOLE ARTICLE was about good science being INHERENTLY political because of its connection to power.
As for bringing up Al Gore, don't you get tired of bringing him up all the time? Why don't I bring up how much skin the Koch Brothers have in the climate change denial game, or how about Exxon shareholders in the obfuscation game they are playing with how little oil North America really has left? Seriously, who has more money (skin) in the game? A former VP who invests according to his convictions, or the race-to-the-bottom crowd that finances the ENTIRE Climate Denial Noise Machine?
Clearly you have not read the book or you wouldn't be offering this unsupported opinion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPoliticians and lawmakers, most of whom are lawyers, need to understand that physical reality cannot be manipulated, spun, or changed in the same way that lawyers use argument, analogy, and persuasion to change legal and political reality. To me this is the real "two cultures" divide, not the one C.P. Snow discussed. Physical reality exists independent of our hopes, wishes, and desires for it. We must study it, learn what it is, and adapt to it, because it will not adapt to us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClimate scientists I know are not "seeking political power." They are doing precisely what Galileo did: affirming simple observations and measurements that happen to upset the vested interests of the seat of world political and economic power. At the time that was the Catholic church. Today it is the U.S. energy industry. The validity of the comparison is self-evident.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou write "Galileo did not have skin in the Copernican game of orbital mechanics. Al Gore and others of his ilk do, and have profited handsomely."
Climate scientists have no more "skin in the game" than Galileo did. In both instances, scientists have made observations that are robust enough that vocal skeptics have not been able to dismiss them. In a recent example, the physicist and Koch-funded climate skeptic Richard Muller crunched 1.2 billion data points and concluded that in fact climate scientists had gotten it right - the Earth is indeed warming rapidly. Al Gore is not a climate scientist, so your comparison is a false equivalence.
You write that "Scientific inquiry and the knowledge revealed from that endeavor does not need the support of political activists, because it is self-validating."
This is true in the long run, but in the short run throughout history vested interests whose economic or power base is threatened by some new revelation by science have taken the strategy of denialism and obfuscation. The Catholic church said Galileo's assertion was "absurd, philosophically false, and
formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures." Right-wing anti-immigration activists in Weimar Germany called the theory of relativity "a hoax" and said Einstein was in it for the money - precisely what deniers say about climate scientists today, and as you repeat above.
This is an astute observation that gets at the difference between rhetorical arguments and scientific ones. Much of the problem today comes from the training of a generation under the educational and journalistic philosophical influence of postmodernism, which argues that there is no objective truth; there are many equally valid subjective truths. Under this thinking, science is but one of many "ways of knowing," and on par with any person's opinion. But we know this is false: there is objective truth and by learning about it science has doubled our lifespans and multiplied the productivity of our farms by 35 times in the last 150 years. That is something faith and opinion have not been able to do. By denying the primacy of objective knowledge, we undermine democracy, because all arguments are reduced to rhetorical debates that can go on forever. Without knowledge as an arbiter of what is true, we collapse all the way back to the brutal days of Thomas Hobbes, where not knowledge but the most forcefully voiced argument is how we settle disagreements.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Politics and science have almost no interaction beyond a fraction of topical subjects."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-------------
Spoken like a true authoritative conservative willing to protect fossil fuel interests at all costs to humanity!
"..science has doubled our lifespans and multiplied the productivity of our farms by 35 times in the last 150 years."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this------------
Not for the benefit of society, but for corporate profits, since agribusiness produces food that is unhealthy, in a way that is environmentally harmful and abusive of both animals and employees.
Controlled primarily by a handful of multinational corporations, the global food production business - with an emphasis on the business - has as its unwritten goals production of large quantities of food at low direct inputs (most often subsidized) resulting in enormous profits, which in turn results in greater control of the global supply of food sources within these few companies.
Watch the 2009 documentary 'Food, Inc.' for a better prospective, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly of our nation's food industry, that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.
http://www.ovguide.com/food,-inc.-9202a8c04000641f800000000b63f6e2
Clearly Scientific American is a liberal rag, since it publishes writings from authors with such left wing beliefs purporting to be “open to new ideas”.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReading several of the comments and responses below confirms that the A.S. audience is liberals who have no idea what conservatives think except what CNN, MSNBC, NPR and the Times fills their heads with, which is mostly garbage: garbage in – garbage out.
Conservatives find most science that bubbles up in the liberal ether to be bogus, as it is rarely tested and when exposed it is usually found to be supporting some social engineering project to save someone or save the planet.
Get a grip folks.
Real science would blow away virtually all liberal thought.
Can you back your opinions up with some examples of the "science that bubbles up in the liberal ether" that "conservatives find to be bogus," and some examples of "Real science (that) would blow away virtually all liberal thought"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is hard to imagine an argument that science's doubling of human lifespans has not been for the benefit of both individuals and society. Can you back this up? As to the negatives of corporate farming, that is a policy and economic issue and not a science issue, except when it gets into the vulnerabilities produced by a lack of genetic and bio diversity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI actually make a similar argument in my book, sans partisan slant. Part of the problem in American public dialogue is because for two generations scientists have been civicly disengaged. We need a plurality of voices in the United States to arrived at balanced policy positions. But the views of scientists are a critical part of that plurality.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you read my book you'll see the political quadrants I lay out illustrated more clearly with a graphic. One can be liberal and conservative at the same time; they are in no way exclusive. Conservative and progressive are opposing ends of the left-right spectrum. Liberal and authoritarian are opposing ends of the vertical political spectrum. Liberal means free. America is a liberal democracy and at the liberal end of the political spectrum, away from totalitarian states like Maoist China, the USSR, and Nazi Germany. Science is is at this end as well: both progressive and conservative - conservative: cautious and careful to retain what is of value before sticking one's neck out, and progressive: willing to embrace new ideas if that's where the progress of knowledge directs. In this sense it is non-partisan. But it is always political, in that it is at the liberal (as in freedom-loving and individualistic) end of the political spectrum. One of the worst things that has happened in republican politics and American political debate is the false, unexamined assumption put forth by authoritarians that one cannot be both liberal and conservative at the same time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It used to be a respectable journal of science and engineering." I think this is a bit of revisionism. SciAm was always focused on public outreach. You should read it during the 1920s when it was the democrats that were most actively antiscience, driving most scientists to become republicans. Science has always had a political aspect. You seek to minimize and belittle it now because it's making the republican party look bad and you are clearly a partisan. A better strategy would perhaps be to encourage scientists to rejoin the republican party and change the debate, than to defend antiscience and unreason and dismiss those who point to it as partisans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome of the past classic liberal science frauds:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe world can’t support 3 billion people – population control
The world can’t feed 4 billion people
Keynesian economics - spend our way to prosperity
The minimum wage lifts all wages
Diversity is a great thing.
And more recently:
Lead paint is killing all our children
Asbestos must be removed from everywhere
Our school systems perform poorly because we don’t spend enough
Ethanol use will reduce our greenhouse emissions.
And the hoax of the century so far:
Global warming (rebadged Climate Change) will devastate our planet – oops, we lied about our data; and oops again – it isn’t as bad as our last guess said!
And the list goes on and on.
Every one of these liberal supposedly scientific based themes except the last one has been thoroughly debunked; and once someone or some group steps up to do some real science where they haven’t been paid to come up with the POLITICALLY CORRECT (liberal) ANSWER the final shoe will fall on another scientific fraud. But fear not - another will be invented by the left to replace it.
"I'm already aware of the Political Compass. I chart smack dab in the middle, thank you." If that were true you would not be using the word "liberal" as an epithet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The sad thing is, we shouldn't even be discussing politics here." And yet science influences every aspect of life, and poses constant political challenges as we extend the bounds of knowledge. Today, the majority of the policy challenges we face have major science components. Of course they should be discussed here - especially in a day when the leading candidates for president feel obliged to take antiscience positions against the evidence in issues like evolution and climate change.
"I'm already aware of the Political Compass. I chart smack dab in the middle, thank you." If that were true you would not be using the word "liberal" as an epithet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The sad thing is, we shouldn't even be discussing politics here." And yet science influences every aspect of life, and poses constant political challenges as we extend the bounds of knowledge. Today, the majority of the policy challenges we face have major science components. Of course they should be discussed here - especially in a day when the leading candidates for president feel obliged to take antiscience positions against the evidence in issues like evolution and climate change.
Nagnostic, still willing to excuse andyw as simply using florid rhetoric? Your answer will tell us whether you are data-driven as you claim.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"They spend an awful lot of their time arguing for control of one thing or another." That is not a basis for an argument. Clearly, the same thing can be said of certain authoritarian conservatives, who seek to grow government control over personal behavior when it runs afoul of fundamentalism.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe idea that one can be conservative and liberal at the same time has some merit, but only at the very periphery where it almost doesn’t count. My favorite is “I’m a fiscal conservative and a social liberal”. If one takes almost any liberal issue and digs deep into how to bring it forth, fiscal reality rapidly sets in and destroys the fiscal conservative.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour quadrants make no sense and can never interconnect.
Your belief that America is center left is an excellent example of liberal scientific fraud. There is not a single credible scientific analysis that supports that. None.
Nagnostic's confirmation that Sci Amer is a liberal rag really came home to me in the doctor’s office the other day as I thumbed through a recent issue. Really sad.
Nagnostic is right. I would not be commenting here if Shawns article didn’t contain such flagrant anti-conservative rants. I came here from Realclearpolitics.com hoping for a non-political perspective on an issue - which can be very hard to find - and I was disappointed again. I guess I couldn't resist pushing back a bit in support of real science for a change.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience without politics would be wonderful, but the purse strings for scientific research are controlled by far too many politicians, academics, people with an agenda.
It seems to me that we agree on the value of freedom but disagree that science is political. I'd be interested in your (nag and andy) opinions once you've read the book. I suggest that science is our most effective means of creating knowledge (as defined by Locke). Knowledge increases power, and so increases freedom. Politics is the exercise of power. Science, knowledge, freedom and politics are thus inextricably intertwined. Reality is what it is. Our human knowledge of reality is what is political, and science is our tool for creating that knowledge. Much of this circles around economics and regulation, which works on the freedom question. Some regulations, as Friedman argued quite well, increase freedom - eg antipollution regulations. Others are simply government running amok as people in power are wont to do. The best arbiter of what is which is the knowledge created by science and data, which, again, makes it political.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLead definitely is poisonous when consumed in unusually large quantities. How many window sills or walls or mouldings did you chew on as kid?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, ethanol is the corn farmers subsidy, but remember it was sold by the enviros to Wash DC and the farmers looked up and went “hoorayyyyyyy”, I’m rich!
BTW, some of my fans include fmr Rep Congressman Vern Ehlers, who loves the book, and fmr Bush Senior Economist Doug Holz Eakin, whom I interview at length in the book.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe book is at http://bit.ly/fool2
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWait a minute, Nag and I believe science should not be political and you have been arguing that it is political. Are you changing horses here?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience definitely increases knowledge and power. Politics is power, but is rarely power applied to increase freedom; it usually reduces freedom through myriads of can’t-do laws and gives more power to the politicians. Friedman certainly conceded some regulations are beneficial, but from his aggressive stance against regulation in general he’s probably 85% against regulatory control.
Besides political agenda driven scientific funding, why should not all scientific endeavor be driven by the free market, which is looking for a solution to a problem? The current scientific malaise is perpetrated on the masses by the government running far to much scientific research in the name of the latest/last social problem.
How do we fix this?
Sorry, I miss-tyoped on the publications name. thanks for the correction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnjoy Shawn's book.
Ok Nag I was starting to sort of like you but then I left for a half and hour and you reverted to snarky type. I'm sure you can do better. My book is about both science and politics. And Andy, yes, science is political. And Andy, all scientific endeavor cannot be left to the free market because economics (currently) rewards only short-term innovate-to-market research investment on a (generally) shorter than annual window, ie applied research. That works for exploitation for a known field, but rarely for finding new economies. There is a role for basic research, which is akin to setting out to explore and not knowing what you will find. A lot of times it's a waste. But when you find gold, it can create a whole new economy that more than makes up for all the waste of years before. Government-funded research has helped to create these new economies that business cannot afford to bear the risk of, but can then move in to develop and exploit. Witness the internet. That is an appropriate role for public funded science: socializing high-risk research creates new opportunity and has led to the United States's current leadership position, in which more than half our economic growth since WWII has been driven by new science and technology. It's a far better socializing of risk than, say TARP was, because it's forward-looking and produces real rewards.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNag, it's late. Post dinner hour. Clearly the wine's been seeping into your arguments which have become untethered from any troublesome actual facts. Enjoy the rush and we'll catch you on the return to rationality. ;)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNagnostic
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Liberal politics permeates the magazine, and is oozing from the pores of a majority of those who choose to comment to its articles."
I agree that there seems to be (from your point of view) a liberal bias to many of the articles in SA and in many of the people that read it.
This fact could arise from two very different situations.
A.) Liberals have invaded SA, and many areas of the scientific community, bringing their political ideals to the arena of scientific pursuit in an effort to twist facts to suit the furtherance of their various liberal agendas.
OR
B.) Liberals base many of their ideas, and the arguments that support them, on facts supported by scientific research.
Situation "B" would make it appear as if liberals, and their ideas, had invaded the scientific community, consequently giving you the view you currently hold. But, you refuse to consider this option. Why?
Situation "B." would mean, of course, that liberals are simply on the right side of most of the issues.
Your refusal to accept option B. could arise from two possibilities.
A.) you're a conservative desperately grasping at straws because you're afraid of being wrong, and thus simply regurgitating the company line that's been force fed to you by Rush and Co.
OR
B.) you're an advocate of the very element within our society that sees currently emerging scientific truths as a threat to their vested interests.
I think you're B. But that's just my opinion.
No, I totally disproved everything you said. DDT? You're WRONG! Al Gore in it for the money? WRONG AGAIN! I mean, AT LEAST try to present your side of the argument, otherwise I will assume you have given up and are just trying to change the subject.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnline Conservtive stormtroopers such as yourself are trained to give negative reviews to anything that doesn't fit within your narrow worldview. Just because you don't agree with someone doesn't mean they're biased. Why don't YOU check your biases at the door before coming to a scientific discussion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you're takling so much trash about SciAm, why don't you just leave and go post on Conservapedia or Red State or something?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about the conservative tendency to throw people in jail for a variety of stupid reasons? Doesn't that break the budget and throw their fiscal conservatism into a tailspin? What about the conservative tendency to think that tax cuts for he rich will pay for themselves? This has been tried and it has failed ALL 3 TIMES it has been tried, with devestating results for the government's fiscal situation. What about the conservative tendency to invade other countries and start hostilities with no exit strategy? Aren't our wars and bloated military budget breaking the nation's fiscal outlook?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAntipollution regulations increase your, my, and everybody's freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water and generally not have to worry about other's pollution infringing on our freedom to live in a clean environment.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust to state the obvious, this essay is an excerpt of Shawn Otto's book. The book's premise is one that I think should be considered and debated civilly, without personal attacks. There are such things as facts--and wishing otherwise doesn't make them less so.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn his book, Otto takes that truism one step further and explores the idea that "science, like so many human endeavors, is political (although not necessarily partisan."
"The idea that one can be conservative and liberal at the same time has some merit, but only at the very periphery where it almost doesnt count." This is precisely the attitude by authoritarian partisans that has driven moderate republicans (ie, liberal conservatives) out of the republican party.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe time has come to "Occupy Algorithms" for sure, especially in healthcare and science as there's a lot of skewed and spun formulas floating around out there. We have a Congress that is gullible and naive as well as ourselves that believe too much of this and with the steroid marketing, its hard to tell some of it apart today.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Occupy Algorithms" is the next step I think as we can't regulate a lot of this code but we can certainly audit and see what's behind the scenes. A few yeas ago this was in the making but today it is all over the place and thus with mis matched data bases with queries making claims that are really not true, time to dig in and fix the math.
It is the attack of the killer algorithms in more ways than one.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2011/11/occupy-algorithmsthe-attack-of-killer.html
It seems that one thing kids aren't learning in public schools is science. I disagree that science is necessarily political (note that I didn't claim that all science is objective because we choose to look at this and not that, etc.). What politicizes science are (usually false) beliefs, ignorance of what science is/does, and the actions that are taken because of our beliefs, ignorance (or knowledge) about science. However, it is fair to say that education is political. Very political.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust so you know, some of the editors are also scientists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso FYI, Scientific American was never a scientific journal. But it used to be so technical that many who subscribed were indeed scientists. As far as I can tell, Scientific American has always been open to good science writing. If you associate being open with being an out-of-control liberal, well I guess then it is so. But I wonder why anyone with a closed mind and fixed beliefs would care about learning anyway.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNag: "I just want to read about science, without the political commentary." And yet it is you yourself who have supplied the majority of the commentary on this article, all of it political in nature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen Luther Terry released the 1964 Surgeon General's report on cigarette smoking, he chose to publish it on a Saturday so as to have less of a shock effect on the stock market, as well as to get more play in the Sunday newspapers (remember those?) http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/Narrative/NN/p-nid/60
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCigarette smoking's harmful effects on health was not a Republican fact or Democrat fact or a Socialist fact or a Communist fact or a Fascist fact or a Green fact. But it most certainly had political ramifications. Whether you are for or against warning labels on cigarette packs (a political action), you cannot deny that most lung cancers are caused by cigarette smoking.
I'd like to counter the mistaken notion that Scientific American was devoid of political content before 1990 with one example.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAfter World War II, physicist Hans Bethe often used the pages of Scientific American to explain the technical facts around nuclear weapons in general and the hydrogen bomb in particular. Indeed, his April 1950 article argued against a crash program for the development of a hydrogen bomb, which had just been announced by then President Truman.
Of course, Bethe's arguments (complete with technical information) did not hold sway. Indeed, Bethe himself helped to develop the H-bomb. But he continued to educate the public about nuclear weapons and argue for international control of nuclear weapons in the pages of Scientific American.
See “The Hydrogen Bomb II: In which the technical and strategic discussion of last issue is continued, and a proposal is made for a first step toward the international control of atomic weapons" by Hans. A. Bethe in Scientific American, April 1950.
Nag, you're the only one who keeps suggesting that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThen you'd be right in tune with the Scientific American of the 1920s, which wrote favorably about eugenics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNagnostic
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry if I wasn't clear, I was attempting to simply reiterate Shawn Otto's point (perhaps ineptly) by using your attitudes toward SciAm as an example.
Let me try again.
Emerging scientific truths don't emerge into a vacuum. Inevitably they enter the world by landing somewhere within the spectrum of public opinion. This can't be helped.
Now, if a scientific truth arises and lands somewhere, for example,"left of center", (when viewed from a political perspective), and necessitates an alteration in how we live out our lives and how we organize ourselves, people with a vested interest in the current system might (and do) push back (politically) by "labeling" the scientific truth as "leftist", thereby re-framing the scientific pursuit as a political debate and not a scientific one. This dynamic is real and has been present in our culture for centuries. Sucks? yeah. True? yeah.
Whether or not SciAm is a liberal rag is beside the point. However, I think it's important to point out that most people like to define themselves as a "centrist" (with some leanings), regardless of where their actions and their words actually place them within the political spectrum. It's comfy to think most people agree with you.
Given that, if a magazine happens to report on emerging scientific truths that just happen to land "left of (your) center", it's no surprise that you might view them as a bunch of lefty's, and by doing so, you make Shawn Ottos' point over and over and over with every word you type.
My question to you would be: are you doing it on purpose?
Oh, I don't view Amazon reviewers opinions as the bible that holds that last word on what is liberal or what is conservative. After all, I'm a centrist (with liberal leanings)
The government actually does not want a thinking populace. The current level of governmental waste, corruption and incompetence could not exist with a largely intelligent and informed electorate. As for the closing of the Dept. of Education, it is merely an attempt to rid the taxpayers of an ineffective, wasteful federal department that already exists among the states. Education funding would increase by billions of dollars. In so far as home schooling is concerned, I believe that home schooled students consistantly perform better than their public school counterparts and are spared the dangers of gangs, drugs and bullying. As a teacher, I have become appaulled at the lowered standards that have come as a result of federal intervention.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOK, I must have missed some earlier posts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow would you address this politically motivated, anti-science sentiment present within our society?
I'm sure you're aware that there are GOP candidates that call AGW and evolution "Junk Science". And, if they were to, even hint, that they thought there might be a tiny grain of truth to either one of these widely accepted scientific truths, they'd be political toast.
Half our country is being kept in the dark by religious zealots and a few oil companies.
Don't you think the scientific community has an obligation to make their case in the court of public opinion?
Does SciAm twist facts or lie?
I'm can't say for sure that SciAm has a political agenda, but someone better get one, and fast.
So we are supposed to believe a top down gravitational collapse is not scientifically testable?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT4BXIpdIdo
It has only been TEN YEARS. And it has political ramifications alright.
I don't give a damn about any conspiracies. An airliner hitting a skyscraper is Newtonian Physics. Skyscrapers must get stronger toward the bottom and therefore have more steel and so must be bottom heavy. So why don't we have data on the tons of steel and tons of concrete on every level of the towers to analyze the impact and supposed collapse? Interesting not to have that data after TEN YEARS.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDon't astronomers understand gravity? Why should we care about their exo-planets if they can't handle a measly skyscraper on this one? LOL It is going to take some pretty fancy physics and engineering to reach any of their exo-planets in less than 200 years so why can't they dispose of this simple ten year old problem?
"but his presidency became the most illiberal and antidemocratic in American history" Without a single thing supporting such a charge. Please feel free to give examples. One could be the "patriot act" but then the current president, congress and senate approved it again and added to it. You make this assertion but have no way to prove such an assertion nor can you point to a single right anyone lost during his tenure. Ad homenim attack, lack of logic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Will American-style democracy, run by the people, be able to compete in the complex, science-driven global economy with nations like China, which is run by highly educated engineers and scientists who have moved into government leadership roles? It's a critically important question, both for America and for our ideas about liberty."
So what you are saying is a tyranny, a dictatorship ruled by an iron fist with illiberal and antidemocratic tendancies is superior to a constitutional republic. By that statement, Bush must have been the type of leader you were looking for as long as he agreed with your personal point of view? So you have no problem with a dictator as long as he has your views.
Science presents facts. Politicians don't use facts, they use rethoric. That's both sides by the way. But your article was little more than an attack on the party you don't care for. Seems to me the anti-science party is the democrat party when it comes to nuclear power. So its all in your cause is your argument, you just don't have the intellect to stand back and see this.
Hi there
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wondered what happened, the thread got chopped in half. I complained to the webmaster.
"Science should not have to make a case before the court of public opinion."
Yes, yes, yes. Science should not HAVE to make its' case in the court..yada. Unfortunately, there are:
"......young, seemingly intelligent people out there that think the space shuttle was capable of traveling to the Moon. They are unaware or the discovery of other solar systems. They can't name what year Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and even then they might believe it was a hoax anyway."
There are also young intelligent people who think the Earth is 6000 years old and think that AWG is a liberal plot being used to further socialist political agendas (and to make money).
These people have got to be reached. And sure, churches aren't publishing their beliefs in science magazines, they've got their pulpits and their own publications for that.
The AGW deniers have fancy think tanks that issue policy briefs.
The practice of science takes place in the lab and in the field and, it should stay there. To people like you and me, the primacy of the scientific method is a no-brainer and, in a perfect world truth is truth. But when the truth threatens to change the world, the world is going to push back. If some science journalists see this problem and choose to use the truth to do a little pushing of their own, who's to blame them?
I'm not saying that this is SciAms' intentional agenda, but I for one, wish there were more publications that did more to reach the public.
After all, when good science has political ramifications, like it or not, science enters the political arena.
Nag, I have no idea why your comments disappeared. I think that's wrong and asked my contact at Sci Am what is going on. Even for those who disagree, they provided a means of educating readers, and the responses to them now make little sense.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the other hand, it may be that you triggered some keyword threshold. Using uncivil words like "idiot" in your commentary is not constructive to the discussion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHey shane
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"but his presidency became the most illiberal and antidemocratic in American history"
I think this is a true statement but, I must admit, I come at this with a liberal bias. I'm not sure if there IS an OBJECTIVE way of measuring George W's "illiberalness" or his "anitdemocraticness". We can only compare him to other presidents.
Shawn Otto doesn't give any examples in the article but since it's just an excerpt from his book on the subject, perhaps you should read the book and find out. Unless of course your conservative bias prevents any consideration of that option whatsoever. I understand.
"Will American-style democracy, run by the people, be able to compete in the complex, science-driven global economy with nations like China, which is run......yada"
This is a very important question and one that should, in my view, remain devoid of party-bashing. I'm sure you're well aware that a successful democracy depends on well informed voters. Given the state of our educational system and the general education level of our population, this question should concern us all. I'm sure you just misunderstood the nature if the issue that Shawn Otto was presenting and I'm equally sure you weren't letting your conservative bias cloud your thinking.
"Science presents facts. Politicians don't use facts, they use rethoric. That's both sides by the way. BUT YOUR ARTICLE WAS LITTLE MORE THAN AN ATTACK ON THE PARTY YOU DON"T CARE FOR. Seems to me the anti-science party is the democrat party.......yada"
Although there was a healthy dose of Bush-bashing in the article (and you should try it yourself sometime, Bush-bashing is good for the soul), that's not what the article was about.
This, in my opinion, was the main thrust of the article.
Emerging scientific truths don't emerge into a vacuum. Inevitably they enter the world by landing somewhere within the spectrum of public opinion. This can't be helped.
Now, if a scientific truth arises and lands somewhere, FOR EXAMPLE,"left of center", (when viewed from a political perspective), and necessitates an alteration in how we live out our lives or how we organize ourselves, people with a vested interest in the current system might (and do) push back (politically) by "labeling" the scientific truth as "leftist", thereby re-framing the scientific pursuit as a political debate and not a scientific one. This dynamic is real and has been present in our culture for centuries. Sucks? yeah. True? yeah.
Shawn...I love it when an author defends his work with such well written arguments. You have proven that you are the most intelligent person on the page. I just read every comment still available and yours are the best. Thank you for contributing and responding with such vigor. I would add that S.A. purposefully attracts these kooks with articles such as yours to stimulate this type of debate. The topics of evolution, religion, climate change and politics always provide the most comments. To have the author respond, rather than the opposite kooks, is elightening and entertaining.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCheers!
Shawn...I would add that this discussion is, to me, absolute proof that science is political and that you are correct.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"I came here from Realclearpolitics.com hoping for a non-political perspective on an issue......Science without politics would be wonderful, but the purse strings for scientific research are controlled by far too many politicians, academics, people with an agenda."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-------------
Come now andy, by your own admission, you came here from a political site.....and you want us to believe that you were looking for an apolitical perspective, after throwing out the typical authoritative conservative line of "purse strings for scientific research"?
In reality, Shawn nails it perfectly with:
"..science constantly disrupts hierarchical power structures and vested interests in a long drive to give knowledge, and thus power, to the individual, and that process is also political."
There's always "hierarchical power structures and vested interests" in every issue today, and they have far too much money invested to have scientific research rain on their parade.
I don't label scientific facts as left or right, they are neither they are simply facts. Both sides have ignored facts for political purposes. If bashing Bush makes your day go right ahead. Not sure why that would add anything to the current politicians handling of science. Bashing Obama isn't going to improve the prospects of nuclear power. It doesn't help to bash Ted Kennedy either and he knew nothing of the subject but affected it greatly. Both sides use science politically. Dismissing one side because you tend to vote that way doesn't remove the problem, it makes the bias worse.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this{{{ After all, when good science has political ramifications, like it or not, science enters the political arena. }}}
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell if you don't teach kids to start thinking scientifically while they are still in grade school you can forget it. The idea of having effective STEM classes in 11th grade and later after most of their biases have already formed isn't going to work.
Try some free reading material.
All Day September by Roger Kuykendall
http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2295/all-day-september
A story of water on the Moon 50 years before NASA found it.
Psikeyhackr, actually I generally support nuclear power as a transitional power source because it is non-GHG-emitting. And my family founded the Minnesota Republican party, while my wife is the democratic Minnesota state auditor. I see value in both perspectives, and also problems. What I am on the side of is knowledge, data, and calling a spade a spade. And the facts are that there is a growing science gap that is posing a growing challenge to democracy as a viable form of government, and we have simply got to get a handle on this before it is too late. Stating that does not mean that I favor authoritarianism. If you read the book you will see this is most definitely not the case. Just the opposite. I make the case that authoritarianism is illiberal and progress-killing, and I show the limitations of the Chinese approach. But over the next 40 years science is poised to create as much new knowledge as has been created in the last 400 years and it is a very serious question whether democracy will be able to withstand that rush. Even now, the majority of unsolved policy challenges revolve around science, and it's because policymakers (and their constituents) have been unwilling to accept the implications of the knowledge science is presenting. This science gap is reaching critical proportions in several areas. What will we do to solve the problems? I have some clear ideas, that I lay out in the book, but I don't know all the solutions. No one does. Yet.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWoops I meant to reply to Shane
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI posted this response in a discussion of an interview I did for the Financial Times, but it bears reposting in this context:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes that's (Postmodernism is) the great irony. Postmodernism was sold as antiauthoritarianism, but it made science, the ultimate antiauthoritarian system, into an authoritarian whipping boy, and so undermined itself. Without an objective system of knowledge (which science has proven over and over that it is) we have no objective basis by which to settle arguments, which can then go on forever. The result is the current gridlock we see. The only answer then is to settle them by authoritarian might: the president or the party in power ramrods an agenda through and opponents be damned. This is the precise opposite of what pomo sold itself as. Hobbes was, in a sense, right: without a common authority to keep them all in check, he wrote, men fall into war (The Leviathan). The only question is what is the common "authority" that men and women of diverse backgrounds will willingly subject themselves to? The authoritarian church or state, or that antiauthoritarian, individualistic rule of law based on knowledge derived from science as a measure of objective reality?
If you're wondering where certain comments went, Scientific American's Terms of Service forbid spamming (including the cut-and-paste posting of multiple copies of the same comment) across the site. Violation leads to deletion of the user's account. The comments database showed a dozen copies of the same message across the website and so on Sunday evening the news editor deleted the offending user's account.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSee http://www.scientificamerican.com/page.cfm?section=register for the complete Terms of Service.
I'm all for democracy and science. But the connection between the two as the author suggested is not historically true.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere was no democratic society anywhere, except in ancient Athens, until the 17th century. But science flourished since the 3rd century BC in the Greek, Roman and Arab empires. Renaissance Italy where Galileo started the scientific revolution had city states ruled by princes. Nazi Germany was the technology leader in rocketry and aeronautics. World War 2 Japan was ruled by Emperor Hirohito and was more advanced in science and technology than Asian countries under democratic colonial rule. Communist Russia led in space exploration until 1969.
Btw the author suggested China's government is increasingly being ran by engineers and scientists. China is not democratic, it's still communist.
Science may lead to political power. After all, the military dominance of 16th century Europeans was due to their guns and ships. However, science does not always lead to democracy or vice versa.
Actually the correlation is very, very robust, but not in the way you suggest I am stating. I use many of your contrary examples in the book. In most of them, science did not continue to flourish under non-democratic, intolerant, authoritarian governments. In just one example, science in Germany started out very strong coming off the relatively liberal, tolerant Weimar era in which Berlin was considered by many to be the scientific and cultural capitol of the world. But as intolerance and Nazi authoritarianism took over, scientists began to leave and ultimately scientific progress in Germany stopped. In China, Mao's antiscience authoritarianism led to the greatest famine in world history. It is the the post-cultural revolution generation of engineers that had been denied an education for a decade and took to it hungrily when Mao finally relented and the universities reopened, that later moved into government and have liberalized it to the extent that they have. It is much, much less ideologically driven than in Maoist days. As to Galileo, I go into his story quite a bit in the book, and detail how science as "natural philosophy" emerged from the religious study of nature. It is this emergent science that led to the dominance of the Western countries and particularly the United States.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIMO the correlation between science and democracy is fairly weak. You may be suggesting an inverse correlation between science and ideological intolerance, whether religious or political. In that context, I will agree with you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn ancient Alexandria, science flourished for 700 years (300 BC - 400 AD) under a non-democracy (monarchy under the Ptolemies later under Roman empire). Science vanished when Catholism became the official religion of the Roman empire. The Church banned science as a pagan practice.
The Nazis supported research and development in rocketry and aeronautics. The Nazis built the first ballistic missile, the first jet aircraft and had the fastest non-jet airplane. Scientists left Nazi-occupied Europe because of atrocities and Jewish persecution. Many scientists in Europe were Jewish (Einstein, von Neumann, Teller, Szilard, Wigner, etc. The Manhattan Project scientists were mostly Jewish including Oppenheimer)
Post-Mao communist China was successful in their "green revolution" in agriculture. They also have a serious space program. Except for Japan, no Asian democratic country has that.
Renaissance Italy was open to science despite being non-democratic city states. It seems that non-democratic societies had been open and even supportive of science. It was religious and political intolerance that killed science in the past.
Again, you are speaking without having read the book. Your points are all good and interesting, I am aware of all of them, I don't disagree with them (though I think it's a stretch to compare Alexandrian science to Western science, which has been a more powerful engine); they are just off topic to my thesis. Read the book then we can talk some more.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI read your article. I hope your book makes the same points as your article. But just to be clear, what exactly is your thesis?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt isn't fair to compare Alexandrian science with Western science because the latter was standing on the shoulders of the former giant. (To use Newton's analogy) The Renaissance was a "reawakening" not just an awakening.
"As to Galileo, I go into his story quite a bit in the book, and detail how science as "natural philosophy" emerged from the religious study of nature."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Natural philosophy" and religious study of nature are an oxymoron. The former had its origin from the natural philosophers of ancient Greece. The whole point of natural philosophy was to come up with natural explanations of phenomena divorced from the superstition of religions. The whole point of the religious study of nature was to understand natural phenomena as manifestations of God or gods.
Modern science didn't emerge from the religious study of nature. Natural philosophy predated Christianity by over 500 years. The ancient Greeks had heliocentric astronomy, mechanics, hydraulics, optics, geography (unsurpassed in precision at the time of Columbus), biology, anatomy, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, mechanical computers and prototype steam engine before Jesus Christ was born.
The Renaissance scientists studied and continued the sciences founded by the ancient Greeks. Galileo didn't pursue the religious study of nature. He studied the works of Archimedes.
I'm not sure what the author is using to define his two-dimensional continuum. I have written several similar articles myself and have used what I think is a fairly simple pair of elements: Up and down to define, at the top, more power in the hands of fewer people and, at the bottom, power more broadly distributed. Left and right is defined by attitudes toward property. The left distrusts personal property. The right distrusts property held in common. So the extremes would be a left in which all property is communal and right in which the government has no power over property.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn my own chart it becomes clear that totalitarianism really has no left or right. It would not matter if the dictator of North Korea was a communist or a Nazi. He would occupy the whole of the top extreme. It is also clear that the right wing of any political system will have a greater tendency toward anarchy that the left, so it's a little tempting to present this chart as a triangle with anarchy at the bottom. I have done that in the past myself.
Even a casual examination of such a continuum will cause us to realize a couple of things. First, even a two-dimensional continuum is simplistic. In fact there are political dimensions involving religion, monetary policy, and even the application of sociology and psychology to the grand sweep of society, so the real challenge is not to represent the political continuum perfectly, but to do so in a way that is useful in helping the public to understand themselves- as simply as possible.
The enslavement has already started. Why are more planet eating jobs needed when there appears to be plenty to go around?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo Candide “what government wants a thinking population?”
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, Thinking is not taught. Why paragraph development methods that combine sentences/thoughts to produce ideas or feeling is not taught in schools (elite schools might be doing it)
“What are Jesus and his mother doing with earthly body in heaven? “asked my seven year-old son to his catholic mother about 20 years back and ‘humpty-dumpty’ (our family) had a great fall because my children started thinking. Till now, all the king’s horses and men have not put it together.
“How would you teach this in a class room? Everyone will think differently,” said a student at a teachers training college. How do we capture our fleeting thoughts without unifying or organizing them? We all learn since birth do we know how to organize it? School arithmetic teaches us to handle money. Is money more important that knowledge? Or knowledge is a weapon to power?
To Candide what government wants a thinking population?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, Thinking is not taught. Why paragraph development methods that combine sentences/thoughts to produce ideas or feeling is not taught in schools (elite schools might be doing it)
What are Jesus and his mother doing with earthly body in heaven? asked my seven year-old son to his catholic mother about 20 years back and humpty-dumpty (our family) had a great fall because my children started thinking. Till now, all the kings horses and men have not put it together.
How would you teach this in a class room? Everyone will think differently, said a student at a teachers training college. How do we capture our fleeting thoughts without unifying or organizing them? We all learn since birth do we know how to organize it? School arithmetic teaches us to handle money. Is money more important that knowledge? Or knowledge is a weapon to power?
To Lee Jamison
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this“So .. all property is communal and right in which the government has no power over property.”
How long before ‘Democracy’ or political power becomes the handmaid of Business Management?
Conquerors rule the world: from military might, to religion, to ‘democracy’. Political power uses mass media as their weapon. But now, modern management competes with one another to deliver better value to people. So who do people need? Will the world go back to some other systems of governance that existed?
Will a few multinationals own all the natural resources? If we see china as one – then the process is on.
Leave scientific interpretations of scientific data to the real science experts and leave religious interpretations of religious dogma to priests and pastors. Scientific theories can be subjected to multiple experiments to prove or disprove them while religious suppositions are just that, suppositions. Science and religion only dissect at a point, both of them need funding. That's where the politicians come in.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this