The Political Hat

     One of the common ways those on the radical Left avoid explaining things or to even avoid any objective truth, is to declare that due to “different lived experiences” different people and/or genders have their own “ways of knowing” that is impossible for people of other groups to understand and that completely contradictory things can exist at the same time because each is true to their respective groups.   This is how we get the declaration that gravity is a social construct while witches can throw magical lightning bolts, or that science itself is sexist and thus wrong for countering the anti-Patriarchy™ narrative. Even the simple truth that we are a sexually dimorphic species can be rejected due to it running against the received truth of wokeness.

     Thus we can see that this is a faith that considers science to be a “received truth” that contradicts the “received truth” of radical Leftist ideology.

     However, the treating of science as “received truth”, and not a means of gaining a greater understanding, is not limited to the Left. The belief that “science” is a false faith and that learned scientists are akin to snake-oil salesmen is not usually as pronounced as when it comes from the Right, but the Right will reject science and scientists that is contrary to their “different lived experiences” and “ways of knowing”.

     One such unfortunate example comes from Richard Fernandez who typically is insightful and informative, who was prompted by an article from City Journal, which is also typically insightful and informative. Corona-chan, unsurprisingly, was what led to his rejection of the scientific faith, due to imperfect or lacking information and lack of a body of tests to support a “correct” answer. But Mr. Fernandez’s lack of faith goes beyond the usual bemoaning of “politicized science” to a decrial of a “way of knowing” that he and others don’t understand.

“What the public calls ‘science’ ‘began with Francis Bacon moving the study of Nature from haphazard experience to designed experiments, and Galileo placing scientific knowledge within the frame of mathematics, not requiring explanation in terms of human physical categories.’ For so long as a phenomenon could be mathematically modeled and predicted, it was valid even if could not be expressed in common-sense terms. Hence the expression ‘trust the science.’ This epistemology was so successful it seemed the scientific method had reached its final form even if purchased at the price of incomprehensibility.

“‘The advent of quantum mechanics in the first part of the Twentieth Century brought it to light: a theory may be preposterous from the perspective of human intelligibility but lead to predictions that agree with empirical observation—and therefore be scientifically valid. Man can possess knowledge beyond the limits of his physical understanding.’

“You just had to ‘trust the science,’ even if you could not explain it. The Galilean-Newtonian paradigm shift made the modern bureaucratic state and secular millennial movements possible by seemingly guaranteeing that scientifically informed authority could control events and thereby human destiny. It was the foundation of authority and legitimacy.”

     This isn’t just not right, it isn’t even wrong.

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