Red Baron Farms
Philosopher
OK so maybe she isn't the greatest communicator? Let's try this from a different angle?
"Science is bad and must be destroyed"
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jaydeehess
Penultimate Amazing
I did not get that from her comments.
How does her invocation of witch doctors calling down lightning, and subsequent brow beating of a heckler who denied it was true, apply to Mollison's quote?
Disjointed and false reasoning aside, I think she communicated her disdain for science quite sufficiently.
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Red Baron Farms
Philosopher
Think about what she is really saying though. Try and forget for one second that we can all agree to scoff at witch doctors as a ridiculously primitive religious/superstitious cultural holdover.
It is culture that is to inform science, not the other way around. Think about it. Remember how almost universally the medical science done by the Japanese and Germans in WWII was rejected simply due to the horrendously unethical way it was performed? Some of course could have been rejected anyway as junk science, but even certain results that could have been useful were rejected. The culture informed science this was unacceptable. IMHO rightly so.
So this lady has an obvious chip on her shoulder, but I would ask why? Maybe she feels that science did not get the mandate from her culture, but was rather used to subject her culture?
One simply can't ignore this. It is a very real phenomenon.
Speaking for the ideal, science is what happens before you apply what you know. It's the process of finding out.
Once you've found things out, you're into another field, and yes, obviously ethics should come into that application, as it should come into all the things that we do.
While there certainly should be (and are) limits on how we go about finding things out, do you think there should be limits on the things that we attempt to find out?
The former is limiting how science is done, the latter is limiting what science is done, and I think there's no justification for the latter, and very good reasons to avoid creating such limits.
Donn
Philosopher
What's happening in universities all over SA right now is a confusing mess. The video in the OP is part of this. Young black people are in a phase where enough time has elapsed since Apartheid for them to begin questioning everything about the last 50 to 100 years.
What they are finding is a system that excludes them. This is not a normal society, it is still suffering terrible pain from the recent past. Not only did Apartheid crush the spirits of their them, their parents and grandparents, but the last two decades of ANC rule has proved that something about power really does corrupt.
These youth are angry that they do not have safe homes. They do not have toilets! They do not have a tap for water in their shack. They do not eat properly, and many suffer the effects of malnutrition from childhood.
Think about that. You can't even go to the toilet in privacy and safety. You have to hike through little alleyways between shacks, over excrement, corpses and muck, to get to open pit toilets where you do your business without paper or water, in full view of others. As a bonus, you probably get raped on the way there and back.
The very minimum that you'd expect for a dignified life is a mile over their heads; and they are angry.
An early victim in all this is education.
What they are doing is trying to find their place in a country, in a world, that has amply evidenced its hostility towards black people.
In the light of this I find it irrational to castigate them for their mistakes and fallacies as if they are white middle class students in safe campuses in Europe or America.
It's much less about the punctilio of science than it is about the basics of human rights and dignity.
TL;DR: Pouring reason on an emotional fire is worse than gasoline.
What they are finding is a system that excludes them. This is not a normal society, it is still suffering terrible pain from the recent past. Not only did Apartheid crush the spirits of their them, their parents and grandparents, but the last two decades of ANC rule has proved that something about power really does corrupt.
These youth are angry that they do not have safe homes. They do not have toilets! They do not have a tap for water in their shack. They do not eat properly, and many suffer the effects of malnutrition from childhood.
Think about that. You can't even go to the toilet in privacy and safety. You have to hike through little alleyways between shacks, over excrement, corpses and muck, to get to open pit toilets where you do your business without paper or water, in full view of others. As a bonus, you probably get raped on the way there and back.
The very minimum that you'd expect for a dignified life is a mile over their heads; and they are angry.
An early victim in all this is education.
What they are doing is trying to find their place in a country, in a world, that has amply evidenced its hostility towards black people.
In the light of this I find it irrational to castigate them for their mistakes and fallacies as if they are white middle class students in safe campuses in Europe or America.
It's much less about the punctilio of science than it is about the basics of human rights and dignity.
TL;DR: Pouring reason on an emotional fire is worse than gasoline.
asydhouse
Master Poster
All that is just some technology enabled through some of the discoveries and developments arising from the use of "science".
Blaming science (which is more properly and suitably expressed as "the use of the scientific method") for the behaviour of politicians and businessmen is a perverse failure of conceptual modelling, and a politically inept failure of analysis. She literally has not got a clue.
She's lucky not to be living where Ebola broke out last year. It was science that rescued the situation. And thanks to the scientifically minded grownups that refused permission to homeopathists when they tried to wade in with their bs amateur stomping around, the people there were protected from our western version of witch doctors. If the wielders of science were not there, the African witch doctors would have been responsible for a festering sore in the body of Africa, which might very well have spread much further and consumed this poorly educated, wilfully ignorant, arrogant and privileged fool… along with her family and friends.
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asydhouse
Master Poster
That's a very astute analysis, but excusing the bs political conclusion that science is the problem by saying that it's irrational to castigate them for that mistake is ultimately a pretty patronising attitude.
If they get the problem so wrong, they have no chance of finding a solution.
Truth and reality are not social constructs. Culture is the social construct: culture is art, and psychological charge. Science is universal.
Politics is where the cultural baggage needs to be dealt with, and only science can help clear away the delusions that feed the ossification of the cultural mind. Until she and her compatriots get that, they will be barking up the wrong tree: a tree put in place by obfuscating manipulators who miseducated her, enemies masquerading as friends, like the current leader of the ANC.
jaydeehess
Penultimate Amazing
All agreed
ah-ah-ah, applied science, technology saved the day. Do not abandon your own first sentence above so quickly.
Yes, that would be a distinct possibility.
jaydeehess
Penultimate Amazing
What path do you suggest for correcting these mistakes?
Yet her attack IS against science. The same science that gave rise to the various technologies she is quite willing to make use of, even technologies that were used to subjugate her race in the past.
Homo Sapiens.
John Nowak
Graduate Poster
That's a good explanation, but in my opinion it's not an excuse. Only children and the mentally handicapped get a complete pass.
Donn
Philosopher
I wish I knew. I feel like Isherwood in Earth Abides watching the heights of the past seep away, incapable of staunching the flow.
I can't see any way to open a dialogue with that angry young woman in any way that would not set her off again. It's sad. The whole thing is sad.
Yes, you are right; everyone here is right on the dots and the t's. I'm adding to the background. She's a signal of the basic rage against the "west" and "colonialism". There is too much pain to make an impression.
What I say is: let the young reinvent the process of social systems behind science, in Africa, for Africans, but don't step off the shoulders' of giants.
I mention the Red Guard earlier. The tone is very much anti-intellectual here. Reason itself is seen as suspicious, as a trick to keep people in bondage to the past. Ruthless politicians play on this.
It's scary, but not hopeless. There are many counter examples and the local criticism from black people (on Twitter) about that same video has been good to see.
As always, the sides are complex and the problem keeps morphing.
Donn
Philosopher
The degree of pain is impossible for you and I to imagine. In a way these are children who are mentally injured.
That sounds condescending to them. I don't know how else to say it.
I, myself, am mentally injured by my life that began in a fake white bubble of a country which mocked some ideal 50's America. The journey out of that illusion and into an Africa that presses ever harder against my window panes is traumatic.
So, yes, it is an explanation and an excuse. I will not presume and I have no right to speak to or for them. I have hope that they are clever, young and keen; they will see the problem and work on it.
Think of a way to describe the advantages, the riches and joys of science and find some way to cross the gulf between perceptions and situations; between the middle class and the gutter-shacks; between white and black lived experience; between the past and the now; do this and you will be useful.
Donn
Philosopher
I agree. I don't know how to talk about these issues without tripping some land mine. I guess I am saying: let them police themselves.
I know what you mean, but reality as a perception is also real. These young people are reacting to what they live.
This is why I mentioned power corrupting the ANC. Government appears to be utterly broken. The ANC is not one thing, it's a myriad of shards all vying for control. Some seem legitimately concerned for citizens, while others simply want to eat everything in sight.
The chances of the current crowd accepting anything said by science is a non-sequitur. They seem specifically interested in damage and theft.
The previous president (Mbeki, a different shard) was famously brain-washed by HIV woo and alt med. He caused so many deaths by his arrogance and selective attention to science.
And he was the bright spark, the "renaissance" politician, Mandela's pick!
Anyway, I hope I'm making sense.
Of course. The opinions of a few posters on an obscure skeptic's board hardly amount to a hill of jack-didley ****. However . . . sculpting a future cannot possibly include casual ignorance and dismissal of earned knowledge just because you misinterpret the basic framework of that source.
Donn
Philosopher
Well, naturally. That's trivially true. All the pro-science points are correct, as I've said. The problem lies with how to communicate that to students like her who are not listening.
I suppose I am over-reacting to the thread. It's been a rough few months down here.
jaydeehess
Penultimate Amazing
Chinese Red Guard, or Pol Pot's attempt at an agrarian society, and probably more that just don't come to mind immediately. All disastrous for those countries and their inhabitants.
There is a remote possibility of a similar backlash in my country by Native Canadians.
I too do not know what the solution is but I do know that simply allowing it to blossom without correction is not the solution.
Not sure I heard correctly, but an interesting idea anyway ...
What if a group of people were to have the freedom to develop explanations for natural phenomena (assuming that isn't a colonialist construct) on their own, as free from 'western science' (or whatever) as possible?
What would they come up with, after a decade? a century? How would they record the natural phenomena they were aiming to explain?
Of course, they would not have available to them any of the products of the science they were seeking to overthrow/replace/re-discover/whatever, but any pre-1500s technology (to pick an arbitrary breakpoint) would be OK.
There are, of course, several historical examples of something like this, the astronomy of various South/Central Americans for example, and various Asian cultures, so we already know how several 'alternatives' fared ...
What if a group of people were to have the freedom to develop explanations for natural phenomena (assuming that isn't a colonialist construct) on their own, as free from 'western science' (or whatever) as possible?
What would they come up with, after a decade? a century? How would they record the natural phenomena they were aiming to explain?
Of course, they would not have available to them any of the products of the science they were seeking to overthrow/replace/re-discover/whatever, but any pre-1500s technology (to pick an arbitrary breakpoint) would be OK.
There are, of course, several historical examples of something like this, the astronomy of various South/Central Americans for example, and various Asian cultures, so we already know how several 'alternatives' fared ...
