Contributed by Mark Morton...
The Tyranny of Pseudo-Science
By Bruce Walker, American Thinker
The hysterical reaction of the left to Scott Pruitt's plan to create two competing teams of scientists to study from opposite positions the left's pet myth, man-made global warming, shows just how anti-science the left has become. The left is a single, stupid collective mind that is utterly incapable of truly independent and free thought. The left is very much like the Inner Party in Orwell's classic, 1984, where party members believe things that are obviously not true and in which dissent is – quite literally – unthinkable.
All totalitarianism purports to rest upon "science," and all totalitarian science slavishly follows what the state and the party of statism desire. Institutions are inevitably infiltrated by leftists and used to rubber-stamp whatever the state wants. Ben Stein in his documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed showed how any academicians who question Darwin's increasingly silly theory of evolution by natural selection are hounded, denied tenure, and even fired for questioning authority and deviating from orthodoxy.
The drones turned out by academia who willingly put on blinders and indifferently accept as scientific dogma whatever the left wishes are not scientists, whatever credentials institutions may give them. They are simply cadres or hacks who reject scientific inquiry and embrace political correctness by blessing it as "science."
Global warming is a perfect example of how this works. Leftists parrot the line of "settled science," oblivious to the fact that "settled science" is murdered science. Science is a process, not a result, and science demands that conventional opinion be rigorously questioned. The true scientists are those who do just that, but institutions vomit these true scientists out and recoil in horror that anyone dare question the party line.
The history of science has often been the history of a Newton or Maxwell or Kelvin or Einstein or Heisenberg proposing new explanations for phenomena that turned "settled science" on its head. The consensus opinion of scientists has been wrong so often that it is a wonder that anyone who professes to be a "scientist" would ever present this sort of "majority rules" science as anything but comedy.
It is a sad commentary on life today that the will of the majority permeates almost everything we do as social creatures, including, now, the pseudo-science of institutionalized "science." As sad as that is – because it means the death of real science – it is frightening that so many political leaders have so suspended any critical thinking or independent reflection that they follow the herd mentality even in this area.
What conservatives ought to do is push hard for Scott Pruitt to produce two teams that critique seriously global warming. Conservatives also ought to push this approach for a whole raft of issues that have been presumably resolved by scientists dedicated to and beholden to institutions.
Why not have two teams of biologists and related disciplines each marshal the best arguments for and against evolution by Darwinian natural selection? Why not have the Department of Education create two opposing teams to study the relative merits of public education and homeschooling? Why not have two teams of economists, historians, and statisticians examine the success or failure of Keynesian economics?
So many things have been foisted on us without any real scientific method at all simply to conform to the party line of leftism. Homosexuality is deemed normal, though psychologists and psychiatrists several decades ago believed just the opposite. DDT was banned (and hundreds of millions of innocents in the Third World doomed) because the pop science of Rachel Carson went unchallenged – why not review that finding through competing arguments of teams of zoologists and related experts? Many other topics could be put on this list.
The real benefit of this that if it can be shown that again and again, "science" is simply the tyranny of pseudo-science, then the whole rotten structure of modern academia can be forced into contrition and reform, assuming that we even need academia any longer. All the awful and failed government policies based upon this pseudo-science could be thrown into the dustbin of history, along with the racial "science" of the Nazis and the bogus botany of the Soviet charlatan Lysenko.
At the federal level and at the state level, where Republicans dominate most states, this ought to be a high priority. The danger of going with the slothful, craven flow of pseudo-science is great, and the blessings of debunking it are profound.
