viernes, febrero 08, 2008

Intellectual blasphemy

Trough Barcepundit I read an article about how scepticism about anthropogenic climate change causes "self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy".

Among the many silencing mechanism applied to non believers, is the peer-reviewing censorship:

One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the intellectual argument.

The more Occident is secularized, the more the sciences are being used and conducted as religions. It seems like the roots of religion are shaped by darwinian evolution and are so intense that people can not live without strong beliefs, moral rules, priests and strict obedience. The magazines of science behave more and more as medieval publications ruled by guardians of the orthodoxy. It is not like the good old times, when debates were about pure scientific discrepancies. Now it is more like pure believers of the true Faith against deniers.

When the left enforces his personal worldview in scientific magazines and universities for every non experimental disciplines that have political implications, such are global climate, sociology, psychology and, in general, human sciences, and even the quality control mechanisms are coopted for enforcing such control, then it is normal that the intellectual debate is translated outside.


Scientific magazines and universities are more and more on the risk of being discarded as centres of scientific production.

1 comentario:

Váitovek dijo...

The left as Voegelin put out many years ago, is wht social theorists call "The Political Religions".