The Fresh Wave of
Anti-intellectualism
Recently on the Internet I have
encountered people who take their facts their own way without regard for what
happened in the world. Apparently people have taken to making up new realities
and writing it down, but they don't bother to call it fiction. I realize that
is an ancient custom, but until recently the authors have claimed that one god
or another inspired them to write, so it must be true. Sometimes Bacchus
inspires me to write, but that only makes it drunken ramblings. No, these
recently examples of pseudo-science were not presented as anything except plain
fact. Fortunately, no one with any noticeable intelligence took them as
factual.
The first example was on a site that
dishes out ancient history. Someone posted on the associated forum ravings about
The Ancient Greeks having borrowed their stories from the Ancient Hebrews. That
wasn't completely impossible, but The Greeks were a widespread and numerous
people, while the Hebrews were a tiny tribe. I suggested that it might be more
likely that the Hebrews were influenced by the Greeks, but the poster wasn't
willing to accept that. Another post suggested that the Greek Gods were derived
from Hebrew sources. I replied that the Greek Gods went back to
Proto-Indo-European sources and got a reply to the effect that the
Proto-Indo-Europeans had nothing to do with the Ancient Greeks. At this point I
confessed that I had wondered for a long time that perhaps I had been
transported here from a different world, but that post made the matter certain,
because in the world were I am from the Ancient Greek culture and language were
derived from the earlier Indo-European culture and language. That person didn't post for several
days, when something about the "elohimic games" went up. I didn't
bother to respond, nor did anyone else.
While that was going on there were
posts on two separate forums to which I belong about the Earth being
"fixed" in space and the planets, Sun, and stars orbiting the Earth.
As with the Greeks the poster did not mention religion as a source for this
foolishness. While there was a suggestion of fundamentalist Christian influence
in regard to the Ancient Greeks, The people with the geocentric ideas didn't
give any suggestion of anything except their Medieval ideas, and like some
Medieval minds they were unwilling to accept that their ideas might be
mistaken. Most people find the concept of an accelerated frame of reference
easy to understand after things like a ride in a car are described, but that
made no impression on these people. I concluded that they were doing it for
fun, rather than believing their foolishness; but the expressions were of
extreme ignorance and unwillingness to accept facts. A number of good proofs
that the solar system is heliocentric were given, including the phases of the
Moon, Foucault's Pendulum, precession of artificial satellites, but the facts
were of no avail.
If the people who put forth those anti-scientific arguments had been ignorant children, then I would have ignored the whole thing, but the writing was intelligent and mature. The posters were clearly educated, and they were not children. I can't be sure, but I believe that they were Americans. I want to know how they managed to evade education so much that they had the belief that a geocentric universe. Even an elementary science course that touches upon the Solar System would provide enough information to show the geocentric universe to be impossible. A high school science course that included the math would make the idea of a geocentric universe completely absurd. Is it possible that someone could graduate from high school and still believe in geocentricism? I sure hope not. Even if there is some religious cult that teaches geocentricism, that shouldn't be able to outweigh the science.
But maybe there are religious
beliefs that strong, because a non-religious belief has some people believing
the canard of anthropogenic global warming. Apparently there are people who
think that CO2 is a strong greenhouse gas, and it appears that that leads them
to think that AGW is real. I suppose that I shouldn't expect that people would
have learned about greenhouse gases in high school, I didn't, but I did learn
how to learn. I learned that CO2 is barely a greenhouse gas at all, because the
amount of greenhouse potential (ability to hold infrared radiation) is
determined by the dipole moment of a gas. I won't go into what that means, but
molecules that are symmetrical have lower dipole moments than molecules that
are asymmetrical. CO2 is perfectly symmetrical. In addition, there are people
who think that humans have put enough CO2 into the atmosphere to do something
to the climate. That isn't an absurd idea, but it turns out that human
additions to atmospheric CO2 are less than the year-to-year variation, the
noise. Since humans are not adding anything that is beyond the
"noise", they are not actually adding anything to the atmosphere.
(There's an interesting argument there, but I won't go into it.)
The larger question is whether there
is a relationship among these examples. Is there a connection among beliefs in
AGW, the geocentric universe, and the Greeks deriving their culture from the
Hebrews? Well, there is a relationship. Those beliefs show all too clearly a
huge lack in education. No one should be able to complete a secondary education
anywhere with the concept of geocentricism as anything except an old and
disproven concept. No one should be able to complete a secondary education
without without a decent understanding of ancient history, along with Medieval
and Modern History. No one should be able to complete a secondary education
without knowing how to research scientific matters.
Unfortunately, there aren't many
people teaching in primary or secondary education who have much of an
understanding of science or history.
The effect of the lack of adequate
teachers is that anthropogenic golbal warming is being considered seriously by
Congress. I won't go any further than that now, but the lack of actual
scientific backing for such laws makes the consideration a waste of time.
The next thing you know, the feds
will be thinking that everyone is capable of being educated. That might lead to
people with IQ's of 50 getting BA's. What will that do to the value of a BA?
That's a little extreme, but the idea that everyone should be getting a high
school diploma is almost that bad. Intelligence is distributed in a bell curve,
and the people on the lower end are not capable of learning or understanding
complicated ideas, and at the extrmeity they are not capable of much at all. It
might be a beter idea to accept that everyone can learn and understand to his
or her own level and have education that would cater to the spectrum of
capabilities.
We shouldn't expect people with
small intellectual power to be certified as educated, but we should want most
people to have a good general education that would be well beyond the capacity
of the people at the bottom level of intelligence. Similarly, we don't need all
that many people to have college educations that add little to their general
educations but provide some vocational training.
