The academic cum scientific consensus supporting eugenics was once as widespread as the academic cum scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change is today.
I point this out , despite the fact that I do personally believe human activity is altering the climate and I do not believe that the concepts fit and unfit can ever be anything other than temporary and relative labels in a particular circumstance.
Just as the concepts of "inevitably left wing universities" or "inevitably right wing universities" are equally fleeting when set against the breath of time and were highly dependent on particular circumstances to be accurate.
Once , in many cities the only polling precincts that FDR ever lost were the university precincts - whereas today the only precincts won by losing Democrats in many cities are the university precincts.
Politics in the UK before our current era of post-modernism revealed much the same thing - the weakest seats for Labor used to be the university ridings.
Widespread groupthink (consensus) , particularly one that finds favour among the powerful , can always benefit from a ton of criticism by misfits, the unfit, the non-conformist, the naysayer and doubter, the gadfly, iconoclast and the deviant.
And if that consensus has a core of merit it will survive --- and in an improved form.
But when the current academic cum scientific consensus was that all such critics are ipso facto 'useless mouths' and 'life unworthy of life', as in the case of attempts to criticize eugenic modernity, what we have here sir is global groupthink on bad acid and in spades.
Under such circumstances , genuine differences of opinion become genetic-ized and biological-ized such that anyone who does not agree that only heterosexual married families with kids are 'normal' is probably themself a genetic deviant homosexual and shouldn't be allowed to reproduce -- let alone argue their case.
Similarly, capitalists and racists removed any potential criticism from the poor and minorities in advance by regarding them all as biologically unfit and hence unworthy of life let alone the right to criticize.
Eugenic supporters described many - quite openly - as biologically 'unfit'.
But eugenic supporters failed to admit that they also regarded these biologically 'unfit' as 'unfitting-in' with white Anglo Saxon Protestant middle class values - of not being team players in the great groupthink....
Showing posts with label consensus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consensus. Show all posts
Friday, July 4, 2014
Thursday, June 28, 2012
97% consensus of climate scientists OPPOSED good evidence of climate change in 1892,1902,1922,1942 etc
If today's climate scientists are united in accepting evidence of climate change it is NOT because the evidence has changed that way.
It is because the scientists themselves have changed - no longer living in (and promoting) High Modernity with its rarified/reified views of the unlimited potential of Man to quickly solve any little problem He himself might create.
Now they live in post-hegemonic times and while most of the population still lives off the values of High Modernity, most scientists in the non-applied physical sciences now reflect the values of low postmodernity and global commensality, with their much more cautious assessment of what Humanity can do to reverse the problems it itself creates.
One can confidently claim that if the case for human climate change via excess carbon pollution of the atmosphere had been put forth forcefully,repeatedly and publicly by a determined but small body of climate scientists during the heyday of High Modernity, it would have been shot down with the same sort of mechanisms that today's modernist , denier, scientists are still using.
Inadequate sets of data, uncertainty of cause versus effect, contaminated data sets - on and on.
If worrying about being able to reverse carbon pollution in time is a pecularily postmodernist concern - and I hold that it is - then we can see how other postmodernist style concerns and beliefs were in fact harshly dealt with, back in the salad days of High Modernity.
The Missoula Floods, Tectonic Plates, bacteria in extreme environments like deep down oil wells, bacterial horizontal gene transfer / biofilms / molecular mimicry / quorum sensing. Bacterial Endosymbiosis leading to the development of all multi-celled life including humans.
All these were introduced by good scientists, using good evidence, to the general scientific world in the 1920s and shot down and often the scientist involved were hounded out of any chance of future advancement.
Later on, in the post-modern era and using the same evidence as was available in the 1920s, their theories were accepted into the general consensus ---- in fact forming the very foundation of it !
All had suffered scientific death earlier, because they crossed a forbidden line in the modernist sand : Modernity's core axiom : that the small building blocks of Reality were simple and stable at the bottom and got ever more complex and ever more unstable at they got bigger.
If I can switch from biology to physics, I need only add that holding that view today would get you thrown out of all grad seminars in any physics department world wide, thanks to the overwhelming experimental support for all the various quantum theories.
And need I add that the quantum theories were at best half-accepted in the 1920s on onward (half accepted until that white knight, Einstein, would return surely proving them wrong).
In any case, they were silently ignored in daily physics work, all through the apogee of High Modernity Science.
Today the modernists are no longer hegemonic dictators but mere 'deniers' and have been pushed into the vast, but academically less powerful worlds of applied and popular science.....
It is because the scientists themselves have changed - no longer living in (and promoting) High Modernity with its rarified/reified views of the unlimited potential of Man to quickly solve any little problem He himself might create.
Now they live in post-hegemonic times and while most of the population still lives off the values of High Modernity, most scientists in the non-applied physical sciences now reflect the values of low postmodernity and global commensality, with their much more cautious assessment of what Humanity can do to reverse the problems it itself creates.
One can confidently claim that if the case for human climate change via excess carbon pollution of the atmosphere had been put forth forcefully,repeatedly and publicly by a determined but small body of climate scientists during the heyday of High Modernity, it would have been shot down with the same sort of mechanisms that today's modernist , denier, scientists are still using.
Inadequate sets of data, uncertainty of cause versus effect, contaminated data sets - on and on.
If worrying about being able to reverse carbon pollution in time is a pecularily postmodernist concern - and I hold that it is - then we can see how other postmodernist style concerns and beliefs were in fact harshly dealt with, back in the salad days of High Modernity.
The Missoula Floods, Tectonic Plates, bacteria in extreme environments like deep down oil wells, bacterial horizontal gene transfer / biofilms / molecular mimicry / quorum sensing. Bacterial Endosymbiosis leading to the development of all multi-celled life including humans.
All these were introduced by good scientists, using good evidence, to the general scientific world in the 1920s and shot down and often the scientist involved were hounded out of any chance of future advancement.
Later on, in the post-modern era and using the same evidence as was available in the 1920s, their theories were accepted into the general consensus ---- in fact forming the very foundation of it !
All had suffered scientific death earlier, because they crossed a forbidden line in the modernist sand : Modernity's core axiom : that the small building blocks of Reality were simple and stable at the bottom and got ever more complex and ever more unstable at they got bigger.
If I can switch from biology to physics, I need only add that holding that view today would get you thrown out of all grad seminars in any physics department world wide, thanks to the overwhelming experimental support for all the various quantum theories.
And need I add that the quantum theories were at best half-accepted in the 1920s on onward (half accepted until that white knight, Einstein, would return surely proving them wrong).
In any case, they were silently ignored in daily physics work, all through the apogee of High Modernity Science.
Today the modernists are no longer hegemonic dictators but mere 'deniers' and have been pushed into the vast, but academically less powerful worlds of applied and popular science.....
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