> In all fairness to the religious (and it pains me to be fair), this
> electoral revolt against rationalism tends to confirm a suspicion I've
> had for many years, that the Enlightenment has proved very
> unenlightening. In other words, people are reverting to a
> pre-scientific understanding of the world because science -- now the
> exclusion dominion of specialists -- fails to make the world
> intelligible to them.
I don't completely agree with this, I'm afraid. One rather minor point is that I don't think the "red state," "Bush supporter" kind of person is *reverting* to a pre-scientific understanding, because I don't think they ever got away from that understanding. Of course, I haven't done a thorough study of this, nor have I read one, but I would suspect that most of these folks never had a real secularist worldview in their family's backgrounds. This is not a case in which they or their ancestors understood and accepted the scientific worldview when it was "simpler," but have dropped away because they can't dig quantum physics or relativity, etc. Their worldviews were not particularly ever influenced by scientific thought, I would guess.
> I believe this was the argument raised in something I read many years
> ago in college, _The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century
> Philosophers_ by historian Carl Becker (1873-1945). One web source
> sums up that book saying: "Here Becker advanced the paradox that the
> philosophes who had undermined the traditional intellectual world in
> the name of science were themselves dominated by a nonscientific faith
> in a rational universal order (a secular version of the Heavenly
> City)."
Well, most medieval philosophers (as far as I can recall what I learned of them some time ago) held that God created a rational universal order (with a few miracles thrown in to make things interesting), so the idea of such an order is not necessarily secular or atheist. In fact, there is a whole school of thought in the history of science which argues that modern science developed in Europe precisely as an outgrowth of the idea that the natural laws laid down by God are rationally understandable, as opposed to matters of faith such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, which are not. And a lot of those scientists who have some sort of religious faith today (granted that the majority of scientists today are probably pretty secular) would probably agree with that general idea. The secular scientists would probably side with "I don't need that hypothesis."
> By this argument, today's high-tech world -- for all the material
> benefits it brings -- is as incomprehensible and terrifying to its
> denizens as the world of nature was to the cave people. In an eerie
> approximation of the Tower of Babel myth, even understanding *within*
> the scientific world seems to be breaking down because of the every
> more specialized nature of scientific advance. People crave personal
> understanding that science can't provide them, and they want some
> assurance that their existence as individuals really matters,
> something that science definitely can't offer.
I would be interested in seeing an empirical study which showed that the "fundie" Bush voters were terrified by high tech; somehow I sort of doubt that this is generally the case. I expect, in fact, that quite a few of them are software engineers, etc., who are quite comfortable with high tech. I am just speculating here, but I think that their quarrel with science is limited to certain specific areas. They are not against science as such, or high tech as such (they include the Amish and the like, but that's only a small part of this group). That is, they're not Unabombers.
But they are inalterably opposed to the use of technology to "kill unborn babies," to show that gays and lesbians are healthy, normal folks with as much right to marry, get jobs as teachers, and generally live normal, ordinary lives as straights have, and (for at least some of them) to the accepted scientific account of the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of human beings. In fact, many or perhaps most of the creationists are not opposed to the idea of a scientific theory of these origins -- they just think that the account which is accepted by "established" science is wrong science, and the account in the Bible is right science.
In other words, they have very strong moral/theological convictions that they will stick with no matter what anyone says; they're just absolutely bull-headed on these matters. And the problem arises when they draw political conclusions from these convictions. If it were only possible to convince them that they shouldn't draw those conclusions, they would not be a political threat, and we on the Left wouldn't have to worry about them. In fact, a good many of them would probably be open to what people like Frank call "true populism." (Of course, one would still have to do an awful lot of arguing to make the final sale.) Unfortunately, I don't see any way that that disconnection between their faith and their politics can be performed at this point.
> If you let that toxic stew simmer for decades, it's really no wonder
> that holy rollers are running the country now. The electorate will be
> baying at the moon next.
I think it's a gross exaggeration to say that holy rollers are running the country. I think that the statistics will show that the majority of Bush's voters were in fact not "holy rollers" (whatever you mean by that), and of course nearly half the electorate, and a lot of the non-voters, don't support Bush. The holy rollers have more political clout than they did some decades ago, but they are far from being in complete charge of the country.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________________________ It isn’t that we believe in God, or don’t believe in God, or have suspended judgment about God, or consider that the God of theism is an inadequate symbol of our ultimate concern; it is just that we wish we didn’t have to have a view about God. It isn’t that we know that “God” is a cognitively meaningless expression, or that it has its role in a language-game other than fact-stating, or whatever. We just regret the fact that the word is used so much.
— Richard Rorty