A friend of mine sent me this meme the other day with a text that read, "thought this might brighten your day":
I've now renounced our friendship, blocked his number, and am in the process of filing a civil lawsuit against him. There are, after all, few things in this world that get me as irrationally aggravated as the thoroughly unscientific appeal to "science" as some philosophical framework of beliefs, or "scientists" as our intellectual and ethical betters.
Just take a handful of those meme-proposed rulers:
- Richard Dawkins admits to being a determinist, meaning someone who doesn't believe any of us are ultimately responsible for anything that we do. We are all products of chemical reactions that we have no control over – the rapist isn't culpably evil, he's a slave to a chain of chemical processes and thus can't truly be accountable.
- Neil deGrasse Tyson famously fantasized about a civilization where, "All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence," as if there was some obvious "right" answer out there and we all have just missed it somehow. You know who else believed policymaking was so simplistic? Marx. And the Jacobins. And Stalin.
- Sam Harris was just in the news for his public admission that there was a Democrat-media conspiracy to hide damaging information about Hunter Biden so as not to impact Joe's chances of winning election. Harris said that the dishonesty was justified because Trump was worse.
And while we're at it, though he didn't make the meme collage, if we're talking about being governed by scientists, shouldn't we mention the man who has governed us all since late 2019? The man who declared, "I am the science?"
The truth is we've lived in a world ruled by scientists, so before we go signing up for more, let's remember what it looked like. This:
And this:
And this:
Of course, not every scientist agreed with those travesties. There are plenty of excellent scientists who understand both the nature, as well as the limitations of their field. They grasp that science is a method of attaining information that can and will be interpreted as we make decisions based on a multitude of factors. It is not a set of policy prescriptions in and of itself. But given that such an awareness requires one to choose humility over hubris, those respectable voices are diminished and dismissed in the false name of consensus.
Nobel winning physicist Steven Weinberg explained why, stating, "Even though a scientific theory is in a sense a social consensus, it is unlike any other sort of consensus in that it is culture-free and permanent." Got it? They're smarter, wiser, and less prone to passion, prejudice, or politics.
But of course, they're not.
Imagine if we were governed by those who so proudly clung to their "permanent" consensus that we all were forced to still believe the earth was the center of the universe, or that the continents were immovable, or that the universe was static, or that disease originated from poisonous "bad air" rather than germs.
Remember, we are currently living through an American regime that boasts of how it "listens to the science," is "governed by the science," even as it pursues climate policy that locks those in the unindustrialized third world in grinding poverty, and harms the economic and physical well-being of us all.
Be governed by that? I think I'll pass.
