The Fresh Wave of Anti-intellectualism

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.