Science Ignoramus

The following letter sent to Norfolk & Norwich's Eastern Evening News is a priceless gem of science illiteracy. I don't have the date of the paper: I just happened to stumble across the letter  recently already in clipped form. 

As is the way with this kind of thing I did at first wonder if the letter originated from some mischievous journalist wanting to stir up a big mail bag for the letters page, but that we appear to have a name and address counts against that.

I'm sure 1930s schooling couldn't have been that bad, so it's likely that Fred has forgotten some very basic lessons and is also failing to put 2 and 2 together: "CO2 is most definitely not emitted from vehicle or aircraft exhausts et alia....." *GASP*!

The above letter isn't worth critiquing. In any case I'm sure the Evening News got their big post bag (& email box) of intelligent critics teaching Fred a thing or two about elementary science - at least I hope they did; it would restore my faith in Norwich people's grasp of reality! 

In spite of picking up at least some (if not enough!) lessons from the educational establishment in the 1930s Fred now effectively dismisses that establishment and writes them off as "learned" pundits telling us "squit". Paranoid delusions about a government plot to make money have filled in the spaces of his ignorance. If he's still alive today and a web user then he would be fertile ground for covid 19 conspiracy theorism!

Certainly, the establishment isn't exactly angelic (one need only think of Boris Johnson); that establishment is, after all, populated with sinners like the rest of us. But those who perceive the machinations of Machiavellian motives driving a baroque Agatha Christie style plot behind every government move are a nutritious seed bed for conspiracy stories. When the intuitions and feelings tell one that something is wrong and that one is otherwise unable to discover or articulate what is wrong, the "left brain", or what Steven Pinker has called the "baloney generator", gets to work to rationalise one's fears and invents an explanatory story; perhaps a story of conspiracy. Failure to see that one could be part of the problem need not enter into this story, for one may well be suffering from what Kenneth Clark calls that most fatal of delusions - one sees oneself as virtuous! This is what far-right popularism looks like at grass roots level. If exploited by a would-be-dictator self-righteous popularism is a ready tool for an opportunist to attempt to overthrow the argumentative, messy & factious democratic status quo. It's ironic that establishment overthrow is exactly what the far left also seeks. Marx, however, did correctly perceive that alienation is an aspect of even democratic societies and in fact are part and parcel with a democratic society; that's because democracy must (by definition) give space to dissention.