WHY GOPs USE PHILOSOPHY

This article was published in French by L'Encyclopedie de l'Agora. https://agora.qc.ca/nicole-morgan/trump-contre-la-science

NICOLE MORGAN

In Carson City, two years ago ?Donald Trump brandished the supreme threat: if you elect Joe Biden, science will come to power.

The usual flurry of indignant thinkers flooded the net. Has the president have to be crazy to be so openly anti-science? Is he suicidal?

Let’s not focus on the message which is intended to agitate, nor his state of mind which is his great asset. The president is mad but the anti-science sentiment had been cleverly built up in the years before he entered the track. Just before Obama's re-election in 2011, a distraught Paul Krugman had already confessed his dismay and concern in an article published in the New York Times : " Today, we don't know who will win the presidential election of next year. But the odds are that one of these years, the greatest country in the world will find itself governed by a party that is aggressively anti-science, anti-knowledge. And, at a time of grave hardship – environmental, economic, and otherwise – it is a terrifying prospect. ?

The apparent irony is that it was understood that the ultra-Republicans who financed the movement were believers – I would say fanatics believer– in science. But only one: a ?pseudo science named economics, transformed into a dogma of laissez-faire around a law: that of the market. We must reread Harvey Cox's analysis of the deified market to fully understand the strength of this new ideology which does not say its name [1]

Economism believes in science, technologies and their teaching. The Chicago Boys of the Chicago School of Economics have received numerous awards (including the Nobel) for their macro-economic research that proves that laissez-faire and growth will solve all the ills of the earth.

However, carelessness does not support the word "limit" and all the talk about global warming, the greenhouse effect, the loss of the water table, the effects of hydraulic fracturing, in short, anything that would slow down growth.. As the environmental movement gained momentum, market ideologues took the lead. I documented how, as early as the 1960s, Ayn Rand, the muse of the market, had cast anathema on this retrograde movement. She was violent in her harangues (Donald Trump did not invent anything) and the very academic Chicago School used less garish philosophers to cast doubt on environmental science.

It's quirky, I admit, but by following donations, scholarships and other associative windfalls, we can better see all the pulleys, ropes and strings of the great circus of magic.

The mission: cast doubt on science in general when possible, then bring the logic of evidence (or lack of evidence) to bear on environmentalism.

And so eyes turned to Darwin and his theory of evolution. The icing on the cake was that all fanatical religious groups saw in Darwin a henchman of Satan. The so-called creationist movement is much more vigorous in the United States than one might think. The Young-Earth movement asserts that the Earth was created in six days by God approximately 6,000 years ago, that the evolution of species is a myth, that Adam and Eve literally lived and sinned in the garden of 'Eden, and that the fossils found are objects created by God or the Devil to deceive human beings. It is associated with another movement which asserts that the earth is flat according to an interpretation of the Bible. For the Flat Earth Society, NASA, in league with the aviation companies, is part of a vast anti-Bible conspiracy. According to them everyone knows that the moon landing was filmed on a Hollywood set.

The market freaks aren't that crazy. They therefore encouraged and financed another form of creationism: that of “intelligent design”. It is, they say, a “scientific theory” whose conclusions are as valid as those of Darwinism. One of the great scientific theories thus questioned, we can easily pass through the same sift of thought many other meta-theories, such as those of the environment. You had to think about it.

Intelligent design is creationism “dressed in a cheap suit”, according to British biologist Richard Dawkins. In fact, it is based on the assumption that “certain observations of the universe and the living world are better explained by an intelligent cause than by undirected processes such as natural selection”. Intelligent design applies only to the field of biology, and does not deal with the origin of the universe. It differs from creationism by accepting a universe over 13 billion years old and the Big Bang theory. He does not pronounce on God but rejects the mechanism of random mutation coupled with natural selection as the driving force behind the appearance of new species. Its followers readily quote Socrates, Plato, Aristotle who thought that the appearance of the natural world required a mind, or Cicero who saw in the stars and the adaptation of animals the proof of a rational design. Recent philosophers are not forgotten. In his book The Design Revolution , William A. Dembski will even use the criteria developed by Karl Popper to cast doubt on Darwinism. Which would probably not be to the taste of the great epistemologist.

Other philosophers, very much alive and very happy with this renewed interest in metaphysics, “offered” their services against large remuneration. This was one of the few times when the reading of philosophy was so generously funded. Because the funds flowed. According to Above-topsecret, a forum for discussion and research on beliefs: "Funding for the Discovery Institute (Center for Science and Culture) and intelligent design campaigns go through the Hudson Institute which redistributes what given to it by major companies working in biotechnology, genetic engineering, agricultural research, pharmacies and others: Monsanto, DuPont, Dow-Elanco, Sandoz,

Their sudden enthusiasm for philosophy may be better understood from reading the Centre's 1988 document, The Intelligent Design Wedge Strategy : "The strategy of intelligent design reframes creationism, redirects the evolution of strategic: neutralizing Christian scholars who assert that believing in God does not preclude acceptance of evolutionary science; maintaining and consolidating support from the religious right; create the illusion of a scientific basis in order to circumvent tax laws that prohibit the use of public funds to finance religious activities; and, above all, to confuse the minds of those who believe in environmental science and seek to understand the effects of industrial activity on the life of the planet and the biosphere. ?

Make no mistake, says Samantha Smoot, who runs the Texas Freedom Network, and who opposes teaching in schools of intelligent design, this is not a small group fringe of the religious right which only exists in Texas. “This is a national program. But the religious right has changed tack. It drapes itself in the banner of creationism. We are now dealing with think tanks and pseudo-scientific information whose goal is to destroy real science. ?

“Intelligent design” makes life easier for all those who repeat that the greenhouse effect is only a hypothesis if not a conspiracy fomented by interest groups. Let's listen to what the Republican Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, said on this subject: “I think that there is a significant number of scientists who have manipulated the data in order to finance their projects. And I believe that every week, if not every day, scientists come to question the hypothesis that man is responsible for the greenhouse effect. ?

We forgot the “intelligent design”, reserved in a certain way for an intellectual elite who could understand the concept and who were already prepared by the situationism which prevailed during these important decades. An absolute demagogue such as Trump will rather play on the visceral anti-intellectualism that plagues part of American culture, which is coupled with a religious fanaticism which I will discuss later.

Today was a simple visit outside the marquee. The anti-science movement does not start with Donald Trump and will not end with him. Not that we're going back to magic. Science will continue but we risk the loss of awareness of science because in the sense of the one who understood the circus so well: Fran?ois Rabelais. And science without conscience is but ruin of the soul . We must give the word science a greater scope than that given to it today. But whatever, the quote is too good to ignore at the right time.