There is such a large amount of bad information out there. Ever since I started looking into reality, things tend to be a lot different than they usually appear. Pretty much every single day now, I learn about things I’ve learned in elementary and high school classes that are pretty much untrue. Heat rising? Bunk. Space shuttles heating up on re-entry due to air friction? Absurdity. Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone? Perhaps not exactly. This information appears to just circulate without verification.
I have rather large problems with the education in this nation. The internet solves quite a bit of the problems surrounding the vacuum of information schools provided before, but I wonder how many kids would actually grow up and look into what is real? Subjects in the liberal arts are interpretive. You can do fine in those without any knowledge of science, but given the vast importance of science, how exactly do we trust the system when the majority of people are simply ignorant?
The issue is never as easy as it appears, I agree. But when the majority of your citizens have no idea on the basic facts of the universe, how does then a democracy function? It actually doesn’t even hold true just to science but to a wide variety of subjects. When you have a large citizenry that’s pretty much governing the nation and that body of people have no clue what they are talking about, then there’s a problem here.
As any scientist knows, not all opinions are worth the same. This holds very much true to the creationist/ID/evolution frenzy. In literary analysis, if you think Hamlet was crazy, you are quite entitled to your opinion; there’s absolutely no way to test any hypothesis you hold in the context of a book or other form of media. However, in the realm of reality, such things do not follow. This concept is not intellectual elitism. An expert in the field knows more than you. That’s just a fact. If you believe you can conduct surgery on yourself, go ahead, but I think I’d rather trust the doctor with his or her years of medical training and experience.
When you are an expert in the field, your words should hold much more sway than some white-collar worker off the street. That does not mean you may be wrong, but certainly there’s less of a chance of doing so. But the problem is that this kind of idea is held down in favor of political correctness. Does this mean then we should instead be an oligarchical society? I used to think so, but such a thing has its own problems. Certainly the best elixir for this problem is anything marvelous; it only requires better education for the masses, but indeed how difficult this simple idea is.
I think you’re taking needless swipes at the humanities. When you say that there is no way to test a hypothesis about a piece of literature, I think you’re off the mark. Literary criticism and its many underlying theories are robust fields, well-developed through the hard work of many smart people.
In fact, everything that creationists say would be rendered appropriate if they simply acknowledged that the Bible is a work of fiction. Their problem is not necessarily with textual analysis, it’s that empirical data from the world outside the text contradicts their interpretation.
You talk about scientific ignorance, but there is also plenty of cultural ignorance. I daresay one must be familiar with the narratives and imagery of the Bible in order to understand Western culture.
Religious people often hold up the teachings of their religions as appropriate answers to questions that science cannot address. I think this is usually a cop out, but there is some truth there, too. Science has yet to develop a meaningful way to understand and describe subjective experience. This may in fact be a definitional problem.
Science also does not do well with abstractions. Physics can tell you everything you’d ever want to know about both sonic frequencies and time, but it can’t tell you how to listen to John Cage or Bob Marley.
Also, I don’t understand the title of the post.
H&K,
b
By: Barry on December 31, 2009
at 9:04 AM