;-)
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine--
Unweave a rainbow.
-- John Keats, Lamia, 1820
;-) No, I am kidding about that. Actually, my first problem is the issue of what science is... I am not sure we all mean the same thing when we use that word. Its kind of like the way Republicans use words like "freedom", "values", and "liberal".
I do not of course hate science (what I understand as science). I do not even hate the scientistic. What worries me greatly is systems of elite power.
My aunt died last year at the age of about 83 (I am not sure we know her exact age). She lost her husband to cancer when she was in her early 30s and with a little help from her family and a lot of hard work she raised her two daughters quite successfully. She was a strong woman who played a vital role in raising the majority of us (her sisters' sons and daughters), to the point where some of my cousins referred to her as "mother". She knew all sorts of little things... how to give a bath to a baby. What to do when he won't stop crying in the middle of the night. What little concoction might relieve some annoying ailment. Stories short enough to keep our attention but full of mystery and virtue. She died with hardly a dollar in her possession and without any luxuries of retirement.
My father passed away 10 years ago. Even in his time, he was an anachronism. A devoted Gandhian, he not only participated in the movement, but adhered to its principles to the last day (only briefly considering wearing western clothes in order to visit me). He went to work at around the age of 17 and worked till a few years before his death. He put his older brothers through college and his younger brothers through school, helped build a house for the family of which he was later denied his share. He did not have the money or the time to go to college, yet his large library of books introduced me to Koestler, Isherwood, Dickens, Orwell, Tagore, Huxley, Shakespeare, even Homer. He managed the finances of my mothers' sisters but never cared for his own much.
There are a billion such stories. And they all end the same way. Under-appreciated and under-valued. There are forces that rob these stories of their value, rob these humans of their significance, enable us to not just treat them with disrespect and dismissal, but as irrelevant. This would be palatable if it were at least true that their contributions could be replaced with the alternatives. But the alternatives do not truly fulfil that function. All they do is provide the tools and most important the attitude to tear these things down, and tear down the things (tolerance, kindness, and so on) that nurture a community that contains and produces them.
I tend to be fairly repetitive, and here is something I might already have written about. The mathematician Doron Zeilberger, writing about Alan Sokal's prank on postmodern philosophy, recalls an episode (perhaps that never happened, but nonetheless is of use here) where Euler (at the behest of Catherine the Great) sneeringly "refutes" Diderot's atheism thus:
Sir, (a+b^n)/n=x, hence God exists; reply!
Well, at least he played a language game to back up his sneering attitude. Some, as Gabriel Stolzenberg (another mathematician) points out, just make do with the sneering alone:
> What’s this, Polus?
>
> Socrates: What’s this, Polus? You’re laughing?
> Is this yet another kind of refutation which has you laughing at
> ideas rather than proving them wrong? (Plato’s Gorgias 473e,
> Waterfield translation)
As seen on the discussion even here on LBO regarding alternate stories of 9/11, or even questions, it now suffices merely to label ("conspiracy theory") and laugh at others (or call them "fucking wackos").
How this answers your question, I hope, is obvious?
--ravi
P.S: In the case of Polus though, I think he was on the right track.
P.P.S: This is still not a response, much due, to Carrol's criticism of my use of 'scientism'.
-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/ If you have nothing better to do: http://platosbeard.org/