That last post reminded me of something I read a week or two ago from Chris Smaje. About midway through the the book, he is retracing some of Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument in the opening pages of After Virtue.
At the start of the book, Macintyre invites his readers to imagine a world in which a series of environmental disasters are blamed by the public on science. Scientists are persecuted, books and instruments destroyed, and a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and represses scientific learning. Later, people try to reconstruct scientific knowledge from surviving fragments, but lacking the deeper structures of understanding that have been lost, science becomes little more than a set of apparently arbitrary and contradictory precepts!
For MacIntyre, this is an analogy for what he proposed, in 1981, was the condition of moral philosophy. Smaje knows this, but he does imagine scientific knowledge actually meeting this fate.
Now, if you’re like me, who so viscerally despises the cultish way that the Right took to RFK Jr. like a gaggle of goddamn parrots, you might be reading that and thinking, This is no longer an analogy. And you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But you would necessarily be missing something vital.
Keep reading; keep listening.
Smaje goes on:
Already, many educated liberals see themselves as engaged in a high-stakes battle for the truth against the first battalions of the Know-Nothings.
Much as I want to stand with them on the side of STEM truth, I’d suggest they should take a look at themselves to understand how we got here. In relation to agriculture, for example, there have been endless premature epitaphs for small-scale, low-input, local farming over the last century that vaunt romanticized views of ‘scientific’ agriculture as saviour technologies. The concept of science they invoke has less to do with any underlying science and works more as a kind of cultural metaphor for social progress.
Meanwhile, the remaining farmers who haven’t been parted from their land to swell the numbers of the precariously underemployed have increasingly become deskilled peons of top-down proprietary technologies — patented seeds, patented software, rising input prices and an ever-increasing thicket of often weakly validated regulation over which they have no control. If such people form part of a Know-Nothing revolt against science, it may be because they know something.
This is anything but a straight forward story, but that’s the point. Pointing directly at the insanity on the Right, I could repeat to you forty times, You don’t have to excuse it… You don’t have to excuse it… Because, well, we should not excuse it. But you absolutely should have a political, civic space in your dome for this: “They” may know, have known, something you don’t.
I’ll try to return to this with Wendell Berry’s 2010 “Paragraphs from a Notebook,” and something from The New Atlantis if memory serves.