Chapter 1: What Is Science and Why Should We Care?

*This essay was originally published in Logos 12, no. 2 (Spring 2013) and is used here with permission. The essay is an expanded version of a talk given at the third Sense About Science Annual Lecture, University College, London, February 27, 2008.

1. It is crucial, in order to avoid misunderstandings, that the word “scientific” here be understood in the broad sense to be explained below, namely as “investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences.” Alternatively, one could use the phrase “evidence-based worldview.”

2. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” [1946] in A Collection of Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953), pp. 156–71.

3. Jean Bricmont, “Préface,” in Alan Sokal, Pseudosciences et postmodernisme: Adversaires ou compagnons de route? (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005), pp. 7–38.

4. Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993); Susan Haack, Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003); Susan Haack; Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

5. If you, by contrast, prefer to restrict the term “science” to the natural sciences only, then it suffices to replace the word “science” everywhere in my text by the phrase “investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences.”

6. Haack, Evidence and Inquiry; Haack, Defending Science; Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate.

7. Kenneth J. Gergen, “Feminist Critique of Science and the Challenge of Social Epistemology,” in Feminist Thought and the Structure of Knowledge, ed. Mary McCanney Gergen (New York: New York University Press, 1988), pp. 27–48.

8. Harry M. Collins, “Stages in the Empirical Programme of Relativism,” Social Studies of Science 11, no. 1 (February 1981): 3; Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal, “Science and Sociology of Science: Beyond War and Peace,” in The One Culture? A Conversation about Science, ed. Jay Labinger and Harry Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 27–47, 179–83, and 243–54 [also available online at http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/collins_v4b_clean.pdf]; Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal, “Reply to Gabriel Stolzenberg,” Social Studies of Science 34, no. 1 (February 2004): 107–13 [also available online at http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/reply_to_stolzenberg_v2.pdf].

9. Barry Barnes and David Bloor, “Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge,” in Rationality and Relativism, ed. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 21–47.

10. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 99.

11. Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 204.

12. N. Katherine Hayles, “Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics: Masculine Channels and Feminine Flows,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (1992): 16–44.

13. Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 413; Eugene P. Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, no. 1 (February 1960): 1–14.

14. James Robert Brown, Who Rules in Science? An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

15. And don't even get me started on Trump and his friends.

16. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979).

17. Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

18. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 225–48.

19. Noam Chomsky, “Rationality/Science,” Z Papers Special Issue on Postmodernism and Rationality, 1992, https://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/ScienceWars/sciencechomreply.htm; Michael Albert, “Not All Stories Are Equal,” Z Papers Special Issue on Postmodernism and Rationality, 1992, https://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/ScienceWars/notallstories.htm; Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End Press, 1993); Barbara Ehrenreich, “For the Rationality Debate,” Z Papers Special Issue on Post-Modernism and Rationality, 1992, https://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/ScienceWars/ehrenscience.htm.

20. Alan Sokal, “Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?” in Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public, ed. Garrett G. Fagan (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006), pp. 286–361 [also available online at http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/pseudoscience_rev.pdf]; Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

21. Jos Kleijnen, Paul Knipschild, and Gerben ter Riet, “Clinical Trials of Homoeopathy,” British Medical Journal 302 (February 9, 1991): 316–23, and “Correction: Clinical Trials of Homoeopathy,” British Medical Journal 302 (April 6, 1991): 818; Klaus Linde, Nicola Clausius, Gilbert Ramirez, et al., “Are the Clinical Effects of Homoeopathy Placebo Effects? A Meta-Analysis of Placebo-Controlled Trials,” Lancet 350, no. 9081 (September 20, 1997): 834–43; Klaus Linde, Michael Scholz, Gilbert Ramirez, et al., “Impact of Study Quality on Outcome in Placebo-Controlled Trials of Homeopathy,” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 52, no. 7 (July 1999): 631–36; Klaus Linde and Dieter Melchart, “Randomized Controlled Trials of Individualized Homeopathy: A State-of-the-Art Review,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 4, no. 4 (December 1998): 371–88; Michel Cucherat, Margaret C. Haugh, Mary Gooch, et al., “Evidence of Clinical Efficacy of Homeopathy: A Meta-Analysis of Clinical Trials,” European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 56, no. 1 (April 2000): 27–33; Aijing Shang, Karin Huwiler-Müntener, Linda Nartey, et al., “Are the Clinical Effects of Homoeopathy Placebo Effects? Comparative Study of Placebo-Controlled Trials of Homoeopathy and Allopathy,” Lancet 366, no. 9487 (August 27, 2005): 726–32; Edzard Ernst, “A Systematic Review of Systematic Reviews of Homeopathy,” British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 54, no. 6 (December 2002): 577–82; Kenneth F. Schulz, Iain Chalmers, Richard J. Hayes, et al., “Empirical Evidence of Bias: Dimensions of Methodological Quality Associated with Estimates of Treatment Effects in Controlled Trials,” Journal of the American Medical Association 273, no. 5 (February 1, 1995): 408–12; Khalid S. Khan, Salim Daya, and Alejandro R. Jadad, “The Importance of Quality of Primary Studies in Producing Unbiased Systematic Reviews,” Archives of Internal Medicine 156, no. 6 (March 25, 1996): 661–66; David Moher, Ba’ Pham, Alison Jones, et al., “Does Quality of Reports of Randomised Trials Affect Estimates of Intervention Efficacy Reported in Meta-Analyses?” Lancet 352, no. 9128 (August 22, 1998): 609–13; Rudolf W. Poolman, Peter A. A. Struijs, Rover Krips, et al., “Reporting of Outcomes in Orthopaedic Randomized Trials: Does Blinding of Outcome Assessors Matter?” Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery 89, no. 3 (March 2007): 550–58; Kenneth F. Schulz, “Assessing Allocation Concealment and Blinding in Randomised Controlled Trials: Why Bother?” Evidence-Based Medicine 5, no. 2 (March 2000): 36–38.

22. Linde, Clausius, Ramirez, et al., “Are the Clinical Effects of Homoeopathy Placebo Effects?”; Linde, Scholz, Ramirez, et al., “Impact of Study Quality”; Paul Seed, “Correspondence: Meta-Analysis of Homoeopathy Trials,” Lancet 351, no. 9099 (January 31, 1998): 365; Klaus Linde and Wayne B. Jonas, “Meta-Analysis of Homoeopathy Trials: Authors’ Reply,” Lancet 351, no. 9099 (January 31, 1998): 367–68; Ernst, “Systematic Review of Systematic Reviews”; Shang, Huwiler-Müntener, Nartey, et al., “Are the Clinical Effects of Homoeopathy Placebo Effects?” (see also letters to the editor in the Lancet 366, no. 9503 (December 17, 2005): 2081–86, along with a reply from the authors that gives information that was unfortunately omitted from the original report).

23. Select Committee on Science and Technology, “Minutes of Evidence: Examination of Witnesses (Questions 520–39)” (testimony of Jonathan Brostoff, Kate Chatfield, Chris Corrigan, and Edzard Ernst), UK House of Lords, February 21, 2007, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200607/ldselect/ldsctech/166/7022105.htm.

24. US Food and Drug Administration, Compliance Policy Guide Section 400.400: Conditions under Which Homeopathic Drugs May Be Marketed (Silver Spring, MD: US Department of Health and Human Services, 2010), http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/ComplianceManuals/CompliancePolicyGuidanceManual/ucm074360.htm.

25. “Explanatory Memorandum to the Medicines for Human Use (National Rules for Homoeopathic Products) Regulations 2006,” UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, July 19, 2006, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2006/1952/memorandum/contents; “The Medicines for Human Use (National Rules for Homoeopathic Products) Regulations 2006,” UK Secretary of State for Health, Statutory Instrument 2006, no. 1952, July 19, 2006, came into force September 1, 2006, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2006/1952/contents/made.

26. Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution,” American Biology Teacher 35, no. 3 (March 1973): 125–29.

27. Pardon the pun.

28. Anita Miller, ed., George W. Bush versus the US Constitution (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 2006).

29. Pius XII, Humani Generis: Encyclical of Pope Pius XII Concerning Some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the Foundations of Catholic Doctrine, August 12, 1950, http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html; Salman Hameed, “Bracing for Islamic Creationism,” Science 322, no. 5908 (December 12, 2008): 1637–38; Riaz Hassan, “On Being Religious: Patterns of Religious Commitment in Muslim Societies,” Muslim World 97, no. 3 (July 2007): 437–78.

30. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999).

31. Sokal, “Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers,” chapter 8 in Beyond the Hoax, pp. 263–370.

32. Jean Bricmont, “Science et religion: l'irréductible antagonism,” in Ou va Dieu? ed. Antoine Pickels and Jacques Sojcher (Brussels: Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles, Editions Complexe, 1999), pp. 247–64; reprinted in Agone 23 (2000): 131–51, and in Jean Dubessy and Guillaume Lecointre, eds., Intrusions spiritualistes et impostures intellectuelles en sciences (Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2001), pp. 121–38.; also available online at http://www.dogma.lu/txt/JB-Science01.htm.

33. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).

34. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Relationship between Faith and Reason (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, September 14, 1998), http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio.html.

35. Sokal, “Pseudoscience and Postmodernism,” in Beyond the Hoax.

36. Norman Levitt, “Response to Freudenberg,” Technoscience: Newsletter of the Society for Social Studies of Science 9, no. 2 (Spring 1996).

37. John Prados, Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (New York: New Press, 2004); Miller, ed., George W. Bush versus the US Constitution; Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America (New York: Penguin, 2007); Michael Smith, “Blair Planned Iraq War from Start,” Sunday Times (London), May 1, 2005, [The complete texts of the publicly available Downing Street Memos that Smith discusses in the Sunday Times article can be found at http://downingstreetmemo.com/]; US House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, “Iraq on the Record: The Bush Administration's Public Statements on Iraq,” prepared for Representative Henry A. Waxman by the Special Investigations Division of the Minority Staff of the Committee on Government Reform (Washington, DC: Minority Staff Special Investigations Division, 2004), https://www.hsdl.org?abstract&did=445160.

38. The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume I: A-O (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 1073. See also Henry Campbell Black, A Treatise on the Rescission of Contracts and Cancellation of Written Instruments, vol. 1 (Kansas City, MO: Vernon Law, 1916); Henry Campbell Black, Black's Law Dictionary: Definitions of the Terms and Phrases of American and English Jurisprudence, Ancient and Modern, ed. Joseph R. Nolan and Michael J. Connolly, 5th ed. (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1979); Denis Lane McDonnell and John George Monroe, Kerr on the Law of Fraud and Mistake, 7th ed. (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1952).

39. See George Spencer Bower and K. R. Handley, Actionable Misrepresentation, 4th ed. (London: Butterworths, 2000).

40. R. F. V. Heuston and R. A. Buckley, Salmond and Heuston on the Law of Torts, 21st ed. (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1996); Iraq Family Health Survey Study Group [Amir H. Alkhuzai et al.], “Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006,” New England Journal of Medicine 358, no. 5 (January 31, 2008): 484–93.

41. “[For there to be fraud] there must be a misstatement of an existing fact: but the state of a man's mind is as much a fact as the state of his digestion. It is true that it is very difficult to prove what the state of a man's mind at a particular time is, but if it can be ascertained it is as much a fact as anything else. A misrepresentation as to the state of a man's mind is, therefore, a misstatement of fact” [Edgington v. Fitzmaurice (1885) 29 Ch D 459 at 483, CA, per Bowen LJ].

42. “If the facts are not equally known to both sides, then a statement of opinion by the one who knows the facts best involves very often a statement of a material fact, for he impliedly states that he knows facts which justify his opinion” [Smith v. Land and House Property Corporation (1885) 28 Ch D 7 at 15, per Bowen LJ]; American Law Institute, Restatement of the Law, Second, Torts 2d, vol. 3 (St. Paul, MN: American Law Institute, 1986); William Lloyd Prosser, Handbook of the Law of Torts, 4th ed. (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1971).

43. Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-Sectional Cluster Sample Survey,” Lancet 368, no. 9545 (October 21, 2006): 1421–28. See also letters to the editor and authors’ reply, in the Lancet 369, no. 9556 (January 13, 2007): 101–105.

44. Amy Belasco, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, December 8, 2014), http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf; Peter Orszag, Estimated Costs of US Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Other Activities Related to the War on Terrorism (testimony before the Committee on the Budget, US House of Representatives; Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, October 24, 2007), http://www.cbo.gov/publication/19202; Scott Wallsten and Katrina Kosec, “The Economic Costs of the War in Iraq” (working paper 05-19, AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, Washington, DC, September 2005), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=848408; Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); David Leonhardt, “What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy,” New York Times, January 17, 2007.

45. American Law Institute, Restatement of the Law, Second, Torts 2d, vol. 3, as adopted and promulgated by the American Law Institute in Washington, DC, May 19, 1976 (St. Paul, MN: American Law Institute, 1977); Prosser, Handbook of the Law of Torts.

46. Prados, Hoodwinked; Miller, ed., George W. Bush; Rich, Greatest Story Ever Sold; Smith, “Blair Planned Iraq War”; US House of Representatives, “Iraq on the Record.”

47. One of the additional corrupting effects of cynicism is that it undermines our ability to properly appreciate those politicians who do have the courage to tell us the truth—even when it is unsettling, and even when it contradicts our (and their own) preconceptions.

48. Haack, Manifesto.

49. Many postmodernists reject the fact-value distinction, but I strongly uphold it.

50. Bricmont, “Préface,” in Sokal, Pseudosciences et postmodernisme.

Chapter 2: Science and the Democratic Mind

1. Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 6.

2. John Kurt Jacobsen, Technical Fouls: Democratic Dilemmas and Technological Change (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), p. 5.

3. See the important study by Diana Judd, Questioning Authority: Political Resistance and the Ethic of Natural Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009).

4. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (London: W. T. Sherwin, 1817), p. 114.

5. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Richmond, VA: J. W. Randolph, 1853), p. 178.

6. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), p. 416.

7. Gunnar Myrdal, Objectivity in Social Research (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), p. 29.

8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 135.

9. Aristotle, Politics, 1277^bIII: 10–15, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press., 1932).

10. Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1960), p. 40. Also see the more philosophical discussion by David Weissman, Truth's Debt to Value (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 101ff.

11. Plato, Republic, 533^d, Oxford Classical Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press., 1934).

12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 272.

13. Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (London: Verso, 1978), p. 9.

14. See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 129–56.

15. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 132.

16. Stanley Aronowitz, “Postmodernism and Politics,” in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 50–51.

17. See the discussion by Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), pp. 79ff.

18. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 55.

Chapter 3: The Synthesis of Science and Democracy: A Deweyan Appraisal

1. The evolution of illiberal trends in various dimensions of American society is subject to a burgeoning literature in recent years. Representative is Why the Rights Went Wrong: Conservatism—From Goldwater to Trump and Beyond, by journalist E. J. Dione (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), which chronicles the spiraling extremism in the Republican Party since the candidacy of Barry Goldwater. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, by Kurt Andersen (New York: Random House, 2017), is an extensive compendium documenting the evolution of the slide into irrationalism evident in America since its founding.

2. Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 400.

3. Joseph Chuman, Speaking of Ethics: Living a Humanist Life (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2014), p. 219.

4. Ibid., p. 222.

5. This view, consistent with his naturalism, situates Dewey firmly among the empiricists and in opposition to the idealist philosophic tradition as well as to absolutism. Clearly, Darwin was a major influence in this regard. “For Dewey, moral relativism was a direct consequence of Darwinian evolutionary theory. As he interpreted it, Darwinian thought rejects all ideas of first and final causes and emphasizes the pervasive presence of change.” (Rockefeller, John Dewey, p. 284.)

6. Rockefeller, John Dewey, p. 284.

7. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1929), pp. 204–205.

8. Ibid., p. 213.

9. Joseph Ratner, ed., Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey's Philosophy (New York: Modern Library, 1939), p. 632.

10. Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 141.

11. John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1939), p. 145.

12. Ibid., p. 146.

13. Ibid., p. 148.

14. James Gouinlock, John Dewey's Philosophy of Value (New York: Humanities Press 1972), p. 348.

15. Rockefeller, John Dewey, p. 4. Dewey reconstructs religion within a non-supernatural framework by emphasizing “the religious” as opposed to “religion.” See John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971).

16. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 18.

17. Ibid.

18. Dewey's philosophy of the individual bears a striking parallel to his part-time colleague at Columbia Felix Adler, who was also the founder of the Ethical Culture movement. Metaphysically, Adler was a neo-Kantian idealist, while Dewey was the foremost proponent of naturalism. But their social and political philosophies were very similar. Adler envisioned individuals as members of an infinite spiritual organism, which contained all other members joined in mutually reciprocal relations. Remarking on the nature of individualism, Adler once stated that individuals are “monads with windows,” and thereby affirmed the self as both individual and social simultaneously.

19. Westbrook, John Dewey, pp. 445–47.

20. Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), p. 19.

21. Rockefeller, John Dewey, p. 240.

22. Sarah Jaffee, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2016).

23. Westbrook, John Dewey, p. 552.

Chapter 4: The Philosophy of the Open Future

1. This essay has been in progress since 2002. Parts of it have served as first drafts of talks at TED, ideacity, and elsewhere, as well as in the epilogue of Time Reborn, but the whole, showing the relationship between the different concerns, has not so far been published.

2. This economic notion of equilibrium has more in common with an equilibrium of forces in statics than it does with thermodynamic equilibrium.

3. Pia Nandini Malaney and Eric Weinstein, “Welfare Implications of Divisia Indices,” chap. 2 in “The Index Number Problem: A Differential Geometric Approach,” by Pia Malaney (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1996), http://leesmolin.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/MalaneyThesis.pdf.

See also Eric Weinstein, “Neo-Classical Economics and Gauge Theory,” Eric-Weinstein.net, http://www.eric-weinstein.net/economictheory.html; Eric Weinstein, “Gauge Theory and Inflation: Enlarging the Wu-Yang Dictionary to a Unifying Rosetta Stone for Geometry in Application” (seminar, Perimeter Institute, May 24, 2006), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5gnATQMtPg; and Eric Weinstein, “The Practical Side of ‘Pure Mathematics’: How Differential Geometry Can Save the US Government 40 Billion Dollars a Year,” abstract, September 25, 1997, http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~colloq/f97/weinstein.html.

4. Samuel E. Vázquez, “Scale Invariance, Bounded Rationality, and Non-Equilibrium Economics” (paper, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, February 23, 2009), arXiv:0902.3840v1, available at http://arxiv.org/pdf/0902.3840.pdf.

5. Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 6, Scientific Metaphysics, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1934), p. 15.

6. See Robert Mangabeira Unger, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

7. Evidence that anyone may see or examine, i.e., not private revelations.

8. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (New York: Atlantic Books, 2010).

Chapter 5: The Scientific Revolution and Individual Inquiry

1. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 118.

2. Ibid., p. 126.

3. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, no. 10 (New York: Penguin, 1961), p. 76.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., p. 75.

6. Ibid., no. 51, p. 319.

7. Ibid.

8. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605: Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 1994), p. 12.

9. Ibid., p. 17.

10. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Aphorism 89 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), p. 87.

11. Ibid., p. 43.

12. Francis Bacon, Essays, or Councils, Civic and Moral (Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), pp. 5–6.

13. Scholars agree that this piece was probably written between the years 1622–33. It was published posthumously by Bacon's chaplain in 1629.

14. Bacon, New Organon, p. 39.

15. Ibid., p. 29.

16. Ibid., p. 13.

17. Ibid., pp. 20–21.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., pp. 48–49.

20. Ibid.

21. Bacon, Essays, p. 6.

22. Bacon, New Organon, p. 52.

23. Ibid., p. 88.

24. Ibid., p. 74.

25. John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government,” in Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), paragraph 3.

26. Ibid., paragraph 6.

27. Ibid., paragraph 61.

28. Ibid., paragraph 4.

29. Ibid., paragraph 22.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., paragraph 57 (emphasis in the original).

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., paragraph 132.

34. Ibid., paragraph 134.

35. Ibid., paragraph 99.

36. Ibid., and for more, see Locke's discussion in Aphorism XIX.

37. Ibid., paragraph 220.

38. Ibid., paragraph 240.

39. Ibid., paragraph 225.

40. Ibid., paragraph 199.

Chapter 6: The Left, Science Studies, and Global Warming

1. Sir Isaac Newton, De Gravitatione et Aequipondio Fluidorum, trans. W. B. Allen, http://williambarclayallen.com/translations/De_Gravitatione_et_Aequipondio_Fluidorum_translation.pdf: “If we say with Descartes (that) extension is body, do we not rather manifestly spread the way to atheism, for then that extension is not being created but was from eternity, whereupon we have an absolute idea of it without any relation to God, and thus we are able to conceive existence for the time being as if at that time we would suppose God not to be. And no distinction of mind from body, according to this philosophy, is understandable, lest simultaneously we say that mind is by no means extension, and thus is substantially present in no extension, or is no place; and so too if we say it is not that by means of which it is seen; however, I have plainly restored its minimum understandable union with body, not saying (it is) impossible. Moreover, if the distinction of substances into thinking and extended is lawful and perfect, then God does not eminently contain, and hence he cannot create, extension within himself; but God and extension are two substances severally called absolutely complete and singular.”

2. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

3. Bruno Latour, “One More Turn after the Social Turn: Easing Science Studies into the Non-Modern World,” in The Social Dimensions of Science, ed. Ernan McMullin (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), p. 289. These points are discussed in greater detail in Margaret C. Jacob, “Reflections on Bruno Latour's Version of the Seventeenth Century,” in A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science, ed. Noretta Koertge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 240–54.

4. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 227: “Entire PhD programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can't I simply say that the argument is closed for good? Should I reassure myself by simply saying that bad guys can use any weapon at hand, naturalized facts when it suits them and social construction when it suits them? Should we apologize for having been wrong all along? Or should we rather bring the sword of criticism to criticism itself and do a bit of soul-searching here: what were we really after when we were so intent on showing the social construction of scientific facts?”

For the history of science studies at one of its founding centers see, “Science Studies Unit,” Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, 2017, http://www.stis.ed.ac.uk/about/history/science_studies_unit.

5. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”, pp. 231–32.

6. Bruno Latour, “Two Bubbles of Unrealism: Learning from the Tragedy of Trump,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 17, 2016.

7. Ibid.

8. Steve Paulson, “The Critical Zone of Science and Politics: An Interview with Bruno Latour,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 23, 2018.

9. See Graham Harman, The Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne, Australia: Re.Press, 2009), pp. 58–61. For a different perspective, see Jacob, “Reflections on Bruno Latour's Version of the Seventeenth Century”; Paulson, “Critical Zone of Science and Politics.”

10. Spencer Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming, February 2018, https://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm.

11. Peter Baker and Peter Slevin, “Bush Remarks on ‘Intelligent Design’ Theory Fuel Debate,” Washington Post, August 3, 2005:

President Bush invigorated proponents of teaching alternatives to evolution in public schools with remarks saying that schoolchildren should be taught about “intelligent design,” a view of creation that challenges established scientific thinking and promotes the idea that an unseen force is behind the development of humanity. Although he said that curriculum decisions should be made by school districts rather than the federal government, Bush told Texas newspaper reporters in a group interview at the White House on Monday that he believes that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution as competing theories.

Chapter 7: Betraying the Founders’ Legacy: Democracy as a Weapon against Science

*A version of this chapter was published as “Rejecting the Founders’ Legacy: Democracy as a Weapon against Science,” in Logos 12, no. 2 (2013).

1. Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p. 35.

2. Ibid., p. 5.

3. Tanya Lewis, “A Year of Trump: Science Is a Major Casualty in the New Politics of Disruption,” Scientific American, December 14, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-year-of-trump-science-is-a-major-casualty-in-the-new-politics-of-disruption/. See also Jacob Carter, Gretchen Goldman, Genna Reed, et al., Sidelining Science Since Day One: How the Trump Administration Has Harmed Public Health and Safety in Its First Six Months (Cambridge, MA: Center for Science and Democracy, Union of Concerned Scientists, July 2017), https://www.ucsusa.org/center-science-and-democracy/promoting-scientific-integrity/sidelining-science-from-day-one#.WpMmmZPwZ24.

4. I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), p. 60.

5. Ibid., pp. 22–27.

6. Benjamin Franklin, A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British Plantations in America (1743; Research Triangle Park, NC: National Humanities Center, 2009), p. 1, http://www.nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/becomingamer/ideas/text4/amerphilsociety.pdf.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., pp. 1–2.

9. I. Bernard Cohen, Benjamin Franklin's Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 7.

10. “George Washington Timeline,” Washington Papers, University of Virginia, 2018, http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/history/biography-of-george-washington/.

11. George Washington, Circular Letter of Farewell to the Army, June 8, 1783, George Washington Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/amrev/peace/circular.html.

12. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 274.

13. George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp.

14. Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers, p. 196.

15. Ibid., p. 197.

16. John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-03-02-0258.

17. “History,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018, https://www.amacad.org/content.aspx?i=7.

18. “Charter of Incorporation of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences, May 4, 1780, https://www.amacad.org/content/about/about.aspx?d=23.

19. Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers, p. 63.

20. Ibid., p. 97.

21. Ibid., p. 67.

22. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: John Stockdale, 1787); available online on Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=UO0OAAAAQAAJ&pg=PP5#v=onepage&q&f=false.

23. Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers, p. 121.

24. Ibid., p. 132.

25. Ibid., pp. 262–70.

26. Ibid., p. 60.

27. Barry Goldwater, “Quote for the Day,” Atlantic, November 24, 2006, http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2006/11/quote-for-the-day/232168/.

28. Mooney, Republican War on Science, p. 36.

29. “Blurred Lines,” Nature 545 (May 11, 2017): 134, https://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/1.21956!/menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/545133b.pdf.

30. Michael D. Shear, “Huntsman on Evolution? ‘Call Me Crazy,’” Caucus (blog), New York Times, August 18, 2011, https://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/huntsman-on-evolution-call-me-crazy/. See also Karoun Demirjian, “Senate Confirms Jon Huntsman as Russia Ambassador,” Washington Post, September 28, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/senate-confirms-jon-huntsman-as-russia-ambassador/2017/09/28/5bc2a6a4-a495-11e7-ade1-76d061d56efa_story.html.

31. Matt Williams, “Republican Congressman Paul Broun Dismisses Evolution and Other Theories,” Guardian, October 6, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/06/republican-congressman-paul-broun-evolution-video.

32. Jeffrey Mervis, “At House Science Panel Hearing, Sarcasm Rules,” Science, March 28, 2014, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/house-science-panel-hearing-sarcasm-rules.

33. “Early Life,” Governor Bobby Jindal, September 4, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20120904133312/http://www.bobbyjindal.com:80/news/about-bobby/88-early-life.

34. “RGA Announces New Leadership,” Republican Governors Association, November 15, 2012, http://www.rga.org/homepage/rga-announces-new-leadership-2/.

35. Ray Nothstine, “6 Interesting Facts about Bobby Jindal's Christian Faith,” Christian Post, July 7, 2015, https://www.christianpost.com/news/6-interesting-facts-about-bobby-jindals-christian-faith-141270/; Bill Barrow, “Science Law Could Set Tone for Jindal,” Times-Picayune, June 26, 2008, http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/06/science_law_could_set_tone_for.html; Xerxes A. Wilson, “Louisiana Outlaws Creation of Animal-Human Hybrids,” LSU Now, July 16, 2009, http://www.lsunow.com/news/louisiana-outlaws-creation-of-animal-human-hybrids/article_93057c89-0a94-5aa8-8cb2-f3bb389c06ee.html.

36. Kenneth R. Miller, “Bobby Jindal's Science Problem,” Slate, July 30, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/07/bobby_jindal_possible_vice_presidential_pick_but_has_a_creationism_problem_.html.

37. Encyclopedia of Religion, s.v. “Theocracy,” (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005), p. 9110.

38. John Timmer, “Louisiana Passes First Antievolution ‘Academic Freedom’ Law,” Ars Technica, June 27, 2008, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/06/louisiana-passes-first-antievolution-academic-freedom-law/.

39. Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987), http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0482_0578_ZO.html.

40. Louisiana Science Education Act (Act No. 473), S.B. 733, La. Rev. Stat. 17:285.1 (signed June 25, 2008), http://legis.la.gov/Legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=503483.

41. “One on One with Governor Bobby Jindal,” interview by Hoda Kotb, NBC News, April 12, 2013, video, 12:08, http://www.nbcnews.com/video/one-on-one-with-governor-bobby-jindal-26006595578, at 10:00–10:43.

42. Zack Kopplin, “Stop Governor Jindal's Creationist Voucher Program,” OpEd News, July 16, 2012, http://www.opednews.com/Diary/Stop-Governor-Jindal-s-Cre-by-Zack-Kopplin-120716-764.html. See also Stephanie Simon, “Taxpayers Fund Teaching Creationism,” Politico, March 24, 2014, https://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/education-creationism-104934; Stephanie Mencimer, “Mike Pence's Voucher Program in Indiana Was a Windfall for Religious Schools,” Mother Jones, December 2, 2016, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/mike-pence-voucher-program-religious-schools/.

43. Joshua Youngkin, “Dear Bill Moyers: An Open Letter,” Evolution News & Science Today, March 8, 2013, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/03/dear_bill_moyer069921.html.

44. Ed Anderson, “Human-Animal Hybrid Ban Sought at Louisiana Session,” Times-Picayune, April 17, 2009, http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/04/humananimal_hybrid_ban_sought.html.

45. S.B. 115 (Act 108), La. Rev. Stat. 14:89.6 (signed June 19, 2009), http://legis.la.gov/Legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=664992.

46. “Green Light for Hybrid Research,” BBC News, January 17, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7193820.stm; Fergus Walsh, “UK's First Hybrid Embryos Created,” BBC News, April 1, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7323298.stm.

47. Daniel J. Loar and Robert M. Tasman, Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops Legislative Update 2, June 26, 2009, p. 2, http://www.laccb.org/files/2009_legislative-update_web.pdf.

48. Gene Mills, “2009 Session Finished!” End of Week, June 26, 2009 (on file with Barbara Forrest).

49. Rob Boston, “Perry Prayer-A-Palooza Panned,” Church & State, September 2011, https://www.au.org/church-state/september-2011-church-state/featured/perry-prayer-a-palooza-panned.

50. Margaret Johnson, Louisiana Right to Life, “State Rankings Place Louisiana as #1 Pro-Life State,” news release, 2012, http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs076/1101796400807/archive/1109106289423.html.

51. Charles Colson et al., “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium,” First Things, May 1994, https://www.firstthings.com/article/1994/05/evangelicals-catholics-together-the-christian-mission-in-the-third-millennium; Robert George, Timothy George, and Chuck Colson, Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience, November 20, 2009, http://www.manhattandeclaration.org/. See also Frederick Clarkson, “Christian Right Seeks Renewal in Deepening Catholic-Protestant Alliance,” Political Research Associates, July 23, 2013, https://www.politicalresearch.org/2013/07/23/christian-right-seeks-renewal-in-deepening-catholic-protestant-alliance/.

52. Colson et al., “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.”

53. Ibid.

54. George et al., Manhattan Declaration, p. 3.

55. Ibid., pp. 8–9.

56. Colson et al., “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.”

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid.

59. See Barbara Forrest, “A Defense of Naturalism as a Defense of Secularism,” in Sidney Hook Reconsidered, ed. Matthew J. Cotter (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004); available at Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20110709203119/http://www.creationismstrojanhorse.com/Forrest_Defense_of_Naturalism.pdf.

60. Colson et al., “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.”

61. George et al., Manhattan Declaration, p. 1.

62. Ibid., p. 7.

63. Ibid., p. 8.

64. Clarkson, “Christian Right Seeks Renewal.”

65. Frederick Clarkson, “Dominionism Rising: A Theocratic Movement Hiding in Plain Sight,” Public Eye, Summer 2016, p. 12, https://www.politicalresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/PE_Summer2016_Clarkson.pdf.

66. Frederick Clarkson, “Remaking America as a Christian Nation,” Political Research Associates, December 5, 2005, http://www.politicalresearch.org/2005/12/05/the-rise-of-dominionismremaking-america-as-a-christian-nation/#sthash.pPJrIqqH.dpbs.

67. Ibid.

68. Adam Nossiter, “In Louisiana, Inklings of a New (True) Champion of the Right,” New York Times, June 2, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/us/02jindal.html.

69. “Mr. Theogene Anthony Mills,” Lobbyist Registration Form, Louisiana Board of Ethics, 2017, http://ethics.la.gov/Lobbyist/upload/367/20161213_143409_367Year2017.pdf.

70. Articles of Incorporation of Louisiana Family Forum, September 15, 1997, Louisiana Secretary of State, on file with Barbara Forrest; “Tony Perkins, President,” FRC Staff, Family Research Council, http://www.frc.org/tony-perkins. See also Jeremy Alford, “Holy Warriors,” Independent, May 26, 2010, http://theind.com/article-6004-holy-warriors.html.

71. Kyle Mantyla, “Bobby Jindal's Prayer Rally Advocates Putting Christians in Control of Government and All Aspects of Society,” Right Wing Watch, January 26, 2015, http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/bobby-jindals-prayer-rally-advocates-putting-christians-in-control-of-government-and-all-aspects-of-society/; “RWW News: Gene Mills Preaches Seven Mountains Dominionism at Gov. Jindal's Prayer Rally,” Right Wing Watch Blog, January 26, 2015, YouTube video, 2:47, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbofEu2lFrg.

72. Clarkson, “Dominionism Rising,” p. 13.

73. “RWW News: Gene Mills Preaches.”

74. Kyle Mantyla, “Bobby Jindal Gets a Jump-Start on His Right-Wing Prayer Rally,” Right Wing Watch, January 7, 2015, http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/bobby-jindal-gets-a-jump-start-on-his-right-wing-prayer-rally/.

75. “US Public Becoming Less Religious,” Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, November 3, 2015, p. 97, http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2015/11/201.11.03_RLS_II_full_report.pdf; Gregory A. Smith and Jessica Martinez, “How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis,” Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, November 9, 2016, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis/; “Religious Landscape Study: Party Affiliation,” Pew Research Center, Washington, DC, 2014, http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/party-affiliation/.

76. Alford, “Holy Warriors.”

77. “Louisiana Governor Signs Creationist Bill,” National Center for Science Education, June 27, 2008, https://ncse.com/news/2008/06/louisiana-governor-signs-creationist-bill-001437; Wallis Watkins, “Senator Ben Nevers Will Bring Legislative Experience to Chief of Staff,” WRKF, November 25, 2015, http://wrkf.org/post/senator-ben-nevers-will-bring-legislative-experience-chief-staff; Melinda Deslatte, “Conservative Group Seeks to Sway La. Lawmakers,” Real Clear Politics, July 30, 2011, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/news/ap/politics/2011/Jul/30/conservative_group_seeks_to_sway_la__lawmakers.html.

78. “Partisan Composition of State Legislatures 2002–2014,” National Conference of State Legislatures, http://www.ncsl.org/documents/statevote/legiscontrol_2002_2014.pdf.

79. “2007 Governors’ Christmas Gala,” Louisiana Family Forum, video, December 2007, on file with Barbara Forrest.

80. “2017 Legislative Pastors’ Briefing,” Louisiana Family Forum, April 11, 2017, http://www.lafamilyforum.org/2017pastorsbriefing/.

81. “18th Annual Gala, 2017 LFF Legislative Awards,” Louisiana Family Forum, 2017, http://www.lafamilyforum.org/2017gala/.

82. 2016 Louisiana Runoff Voter Guide, Louisiana Family Forum, December 10, 2016, http://www.lafamilyforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/2016runoffguide-vFINAL.pdf; 2017 Legislative Scorecard, Louisiana Family Forum Action Center, http://www.lafamilyforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2017Scorecard-1pgr-14in-corrected1.pdf.

83. Gene Mills, “Louisiana Family Forum 17th Annual Legislative Awards Gala—a Huge Success!” End of Week, Louisiana Family Forum, September 16, 2016, on file with Barbara Forrest. See also Gene Mills, “ULL LGBT…To Be Continued?” End of Week, Louisiana Family Forum, August 10, 2012, http://www.lafamilyforum.org/ull-lgbt-to-be-continued/.

84. Pearson Cross, “Cross Wise: Boxed In,” Independent, September 2, 2016, http://theind.com/article-23851-cross-wise-boxed-in.html.

85. Gene Mills, “A Night of Honor,” End of Week, Louisiana Family Forum, September 22, 2017, on file with Barbara Forrest; Congressman Steve Scalise, “Family Values,” United States House of Representatives, https://scalise.house.gov/issues/family-values.

86. “Confirm Kyle Duncan to 5th Circuit!” Family Facts, Louisiana Family Forum, October 2017, on file with Barbara Forrest; Jeff Landry, “Trump Court Pick Kyle Duncan Is the Neil Gorsuch of Louisiana,” The Hill, November 29, 2017, http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/362276-trump-circuit-court-pick-kyle-duncan-is-the-neil-gorsuch-of-louisiana.

87. Drew Broach, “Kyle Duncan Confirmed in Tight Senate Vote for 5th Circuit Judgeship,” Times-Picayune, April 25, 2018, https://www.nola.com/national_politics/2018/04/kyle_duncan_judge_confirmed_senat.html.

88. Gene Mills, “National Prayer Breakfast—Washington, DC,” End of Week, Louisiana Family Forum, February 9, 2018, on file with Barbara Forrest.

89. Gene Mills, “Kingdom Implications,” Solutions, October 22, 2012, http://mysolutionsmagazine.com/kingdom-implications/.

90. “2007 Governors’ Christmas Gala.”

91. I am indebted to Louisiana resident and former Pentecostal pastor Jerry DeWitt, who explained the significance of this procedure. See Robert F. Worth, “From Bible Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader,” New York Times, August 22, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/magazine/from-bible-belt-pastor-to-atheist-leader.html.

92. “About: Our Mission,” Louisiana Family Forum, http://www.lafamilyforum.org/about/.

93. Gene Mills, “The New Louisiana,” End of Week, newsletter, January 18, 2013, http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=20dc9be01946aff7364f31092&id=2d3bb540f6&e=92108e1465; Governor Bobby Jindal, “Governor Jindal Orders June 27th as Statewide Day of Prayer for Perseverance Through Oil Spill Crisis,” press release, June 24, 2010, http://emergency.louisiana.gov/Releases/06242010-prayer.html; Governor Bobby Jindal, State of Louisiana Proclamation, December 18, 2012, http://gallery.mailchimp.com/20dc9be01946aff7364f31092/files/JindalProclamation.pdf.

94. Clancy DuBos, “Da Winnas and da Loozas,” Gambit, June 26, 2009, http://www.bestofneworleans.com/blogofneworleans/archives/2012/06/08/da-winnas-and-da-loozas.

95. Mills, “Kingdom Implications.”

96. Ibid.

97. Ibid.

98. Sue Lincoln, “Take Me to Church: Gene Mills’ Legislative Influence,” WRKF, June 30, 2015, http://wrkf.org/post/take-me-church-gene-mills-legislative-influence.

99. Will Sentell, “New Science Standards Win Tentative State Approval, after Arguments over Evolution,” Advocate, March 7, 2017, http://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/education/article_1ff63ff0-02ab-11e7-9cdc-8b666e0646c4.html.

100. James Madison, “Detached Memoranda,” William and Mary Quarterly 3, no. 4 (October 1946): 534, 554, 556, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1921903.

101. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, “Let's Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem,” Washington Post, April 27, 2012, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-04-27/opinions/35453898_1_republican-party-party-moves-democratic-party.

Chapter 8: The Return of Determinism: Science, Power, and Sirens in Distress

1. The literal-minded miss Bierce's irony. For a good start on philosophy of science debates, see Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

2. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1975). The book title should have been, “Against the Rule of Dogmatic Method,” for he had nothing against methods—the more the merrier—just against the use of a single method or of methods unaccompanied by realistic humility. See Kurt Jacobsen, Dead Reckonings: Ideas, Interests, and Politics in the “Information Age” (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), pp. 3–20.

3. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009), pp. 69–70.

4. Quoted in ibid., p. 69. Feyerabend (Against Method) made a similar point.

5. As exemplified in the realm of public policy analysis, see John Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984) and Kurt Jacobsen, Chasing Progress in the Irish Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

6. The examples are legion. One is Robert Jervis's book on alleged Intelligence failure leading to the Iraq invasion: Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). See also the retort by Fulton Armstrong, “The Damning Evidence: The CIA and WMDs,” New York Review of Books, August 19, 2010.

7. Jane Mayer, Dark Money (London: Scribe, 2016), p. 6.

8. Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

9. See Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Lauren Langman and George Lundskow, God, Guns, Gold, and Glory: American Character and Its Discontents (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains (New York: Viking, 2017); and Mayer, Dark Money.

10. The logic of business is coercion, monopoly, and destruction of the weak, not “choice” or “service” or “universal affluence.” Thomas Franks, One Market Under God (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), p. 87.

11. A nod here to Neil Sheehan's splendid A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Van and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988).

12. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

13. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

14. Robert M. Young, “Science, Ideology, and Donna Haraway,” Science as Culture 3, no. 2 (1992): 168.

15. Ibid.

16. “Their vision was of a society wholly made over in the image of the new mechanics—technically rationalized in every detail, predictable in every activity, and hence brought under total scientific management.” Floyd Matson, The Broken Image: Man, Science, and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1966), p. 16.

17. Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Popular Science Monthly January 1878, p. 237. See Jurgen Habermas's critique in his Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon, 1972).

18. See David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (London: Penguin, 1999).

19. See Kurt Jacobsen, International Politics and Inner Worlds: Masks of Reason under Scrutiny (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), chap. 1.

20. Wendell Wallach, A Dangerous Master (New York: Basic Books, 2015), p. 28.

21. “Rational Knowledge does not controvert the tested findings of science; unlike empiricist philosophy however, it refuses to terminate with them.” Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 1972), p. 164.

22. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964).

23. Barry Richards, Images of Freud: Cultural Responses to Psychoanalysis (London: Dent, 1989), p. 3.

24. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1967–70); David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Knopf, 1990); Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977); Reinhard Skinner “Technological Determinism: A Critique of Convergence Theory,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18, no. 1 (January 1976); Horkheimer, Critical Theory; Siegfried Giedeon, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948); Robert Heilbroner, “Do Machines Make History?” Technology and Culture 8, no. 3 (1967); W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014); M. R. Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? Dilemmas of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Kurt Jacobsen, Technical Fouls: Democratic Dilemmas and Technological Change (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000); David Edgerton, “From Innovation to Use: Ten Eclectic Theses on the Historiography of Technology,” History and Technology 16 (1999); Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1969); and Jurgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as Ideology,” in Toward a Rational Society (London: Heinemann, 1971).

25. See Langdon Winner, “Where Technological Determinism Went,” in Visions of STS, ed. Stephen. H. Cutliffe and Carl Mitcham (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), p. 14; Paul Ceruzzi, “Moore's Law and Technological Determinism: Reflections on the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 46, no. 3 (July 2005); Sally Wyatt, “Technological Determinism Is Dead, Long Live Technological Determinism,” in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Edward J. Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wacjman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Cyrus C. M. Mody, “Small but Determined: Technological Determinism in Nanoscience,” International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry 10, no. 2 (2004); and Taylor Dotson, “Technological Determinism and Permissionless Innovation as Technocratic Governing Mentalities,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 1 (2015).

26. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Penguin, 1965).

27. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 322–23.

28. Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

29. Wallach, Dangerous Master, pp. 45, 50–51; and Eugene Schwartz, Overskill: The Decline of Technology in Modern Civilization (New York: Times Books, 1971).

30. George Monbiot, “The Corporate Stooges Who Nobble Serious Science,” Guardian, February 24, 2004; Sheila Jasanoff, “Science, Politics, and the Renegotiation of Expertise at EPA,” Osris 7 (1992): 194–217, found experts recruited to back politician cases, leading to a decline in public belief in the scientist ability to “speak truth to power.” Dorothy Nelkin, Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology, 2nd ed. (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1995); John P. Ioannidis, “Why Most Research Findings Are False,” PLoS Med 2, no. 8 (2005).

31. Mooney, Republican War on Science, p. 8.

32. Ibid. p. 9.

33. David Smail, Why Therapy Doesn't Work and What We Should Do About It (New York: Robinson, 2001), p. 97.

34. British Medical Association, Human Genetics: Choice and Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 3.

35. Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1971), p. 91. Also see Steven Weiss, The Nazi Symbiosis: Human Genetics and Politics in the Third Reich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Benno Muller-Hill, Murderous Science (Plainview, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1988).

36. Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 54.

37. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1930).

38. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 77.

39. Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2000), p. 112. “Just how many other players—including regulatory sequences found elsewhere on the genome, the products of many other structural and regulatory genes, the complex signaling network of the living cell—are organized into a well-functioning and reliable whole is the question that dominates the attention of molecular biologists today,” p. 72.

40. Time magazine in the 1990s noted that most people oppose human genetic engineering for any purpose except to cure diseases—which provides a huge exception. Philip Elmer-Dewitt, “The Genetic Revolution,” Time January 17, 1994.

41. Jeremy Gruber, “The Unfulfilled Promise of Genomics,” in Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense, ed. Sheldon Krimsky, and Jeremy Gruber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

42. Steve Jones, “Darwinism and Genes” in What Scientists Think, ed. Jeremy Stangroom (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 19.

43. Roar Fosse, Jay Joseph, and Mike Jones, “Schizophrenia: A Critical View on Genetic Effects,” Psychosis 8, no. 1 (2016): 9.

44. David Plomin, “Child Development and Molecular Genetics,” Child Development 84, no. 1 (January/February 2013): 104.

45. See Jonathan Leo, “The Search for Schizophrenia Genes,” Issues in Science & Technology (Winter 2016): 88.

46. Jay Joseph and Claudia Chaufan, “Missing Heritability of Common Disorders: Should Health Researchers Care?” International Journal of Health Services 43, no. 2 (2013): 285n3.

47. Ibid., p. 289.

48. Jo C. Phelan, “Geneticization of Deviant Behavior and Consequences for Stigma: The Case of Mental Illness,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 46 (2005).

49. Alvin A Rosenfeld, “Child and Adolescent Mental Disorders Research: Current Directions, Future Needs,” Archives of General Psychiatry 52, no. 9 (September 1995): 731.

50. David Bell, “The Power-Point Philosophe,” Nation, March 7, 2018.

51. Ruth Hubbard, “The Mismeasure of the Gene,” in Genetic Explanations, ed. Krimsky and Gruber, p. 19.

52. See Stuart Newman, “Evolution Is Not Mainly a Matter of Genes,” in Genetic Explanations, ed. Krimsky and Gruber, pp. 26–33.

53. David S. Moore, “Big B Little b: Myth No. 1 Is That Mendelian Genes Actually Exist,” in Genetic Explanations, ed. Krimsky and Gruber, pp. 43–50.

54. Katherine Hignett, “Scott Kelly: A NASA Twins Study Confirms Astronaut's DNA Actually Changed in Space,” Newsweek, March 9, 2018; Erin Brodwin, “NASA Sent an Astronaut into Space for a Year—and It May Have Permanently Changed 7% of His DNA,” Business Insider, March 8, 2018.

55. Evelyn Fox Keller, “Genes as Difference Makers,” in Genetic Explanations, ed. Krimsky and Gruber, p. 41.

56. Evan Charney, “Review Essay on Gruber and Krimsky,” Logos 12, no. 3 (Spring 2013). Also see Charney, “Politics, Genetics, and ‘Greedy Reductionism,’” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 2 (June 2008): 337–43; and Charney, “Behavior Genetics and Postgenomics,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2012): 35, 6.

57. Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); D. D. Jackson, “A Critique of the Literature on the Genetics of Schizophrenia,” in The Etiology of Schizophrenia, ed. D. D. Jackson (New York: Basic Books, 1960); and Jay Joseph, The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, and the Fruitless Search for Genes (New York: Algora, 2006).

58. Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Reinterpret the So-Called Psychopathic Personality (St. Louis: Mosby, 1941), p. 467.

59. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

60. Jonathan Leo, “Memo to the Newest Generation of Gene Hunters: Read Jay Joseph,” in Psychosis 10, no. 1 (January 2018): 2.

61. See the critique of these “echo chambers” in Kurt Jacobsen, “Much Ado about Ideas: The Cognitive Factor in Economic Policy,” World Politics 47, no. 2 (January 1995): 283–310.

62. Michael J. Joyner, Nigel Paneth, and John P. A. Ioannidis, “What Happens When Underperforming Big Ideas in Research Become Entrenched?” Journal of the American Medical Association 316, no. 13 (October 2016): 1355.

63. On Lysenkoism see David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

64. Sarah Boseley, “Pharmaceutical Adverts ‘Inadequately Policed,’” Guardian, September 23, 2003, p. 10.

65. See David I. Harvie, Limeys: The Conquest of Scurvy (London: Sutton Books, 2005).

66. Maya Salam, “The Opioid Epidemic: A Crisis in the Making,” New York Times, October 26, 2017.

67. Steve Connor, “Glaxo Chief: Our Drugs Do Not Work on Most Patients,” Independent, December 8, 2003.

68. Ibid.

69. Sidney Wolfe, “Worst Pills, Best Pills,” EXTRA 14, no. 2 (March/April 2001): 11.

70. John Read, Olga Runciman, and Jacqui Dillon, “In Search of an Evidence Based Role for Psychiatry,” Future Science OA 2, no. 1 (March 2016):. 1.

71. Ibid. See also John Read, Lorenza Magliano, and Vanessa Beavan, “Public Beliefs about the Causes of ‘Schizophrenia’: Bad Things Happen and Can Drive You Crazy,” in Models of Madness: Psychological, Social, and Biological Approaches to Psychosis, ed. John Read and Jacqui Dillon (London: Routledge, 2014).

72. Connor, “Glaxo Chief.”

73. “Prescription Drugs: 7 out of 10 Americans Take at Least One, Study Finds,” HuffPost, June 20, 2013.

74. Marcia Angell, The Truth about Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (New York: Random House, 2005).

75. Sara G. Miller, “Drug Use in America: What the Numbers Say,” Live Science September 8, 2016.

76. Peter Gay, Reading Freud: Explorations and Entertainments (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 83.

77. Lewis Lapham, “Bomb-o-Gram,” in Waiting for the Barbarians (London: Verso, 1997), p. 30.

78. Kurt Jacobsen, Pacification and Its Discontents (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009).

79. Zalin Grant, Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam (New York: Norton, 1991); Mark Moyar, Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA's Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997); Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999); and James S. Robbins, This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive (New York: Encounter Books, 2010).

80. General William DePuy, “Vietnam: What We Might Have Done and Why We Didn't Do It,” Army 36, no. 2 (February 1986): 81.

81. Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigations: An Inquiry into American War Crimes (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972; transcript of event held in Detroit, January 31–February 2 1971), pp. 3, 39.

82. William Colby, Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America's Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), p. 25.

83. David Elliott, “Parallel Wars? Can ‘Lessons of Vietnam’ Be Applied to Iraq?” in Iraq and The Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past, ed. Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young (New York: New Press, 2008).

84. George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam (Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 2001), pp. 260, 265.

85. Gabriel Kolko, “The Political Significance of the Center for Vietnamese Studies and Programs,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 3, no. 2 (February 1971): 42.

86. Stathis Kalyvas and Matthew Kocher, “Dynamics of Violence in Civil War: Evidence from Vietnam,” (working paper, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 2006), p. 9.

87. General Cao Van Vien and Lt. General Dong Van Khuyen, “Reflections on the Vietnam War” (Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1980), p. 68.

88. James C. Scott and Matthew Light, “The Misuse of Numbers: Audits, Quantification, and the Obfuscation of Politics,” in Reconsidering American Power, ed. John D. Kelly, Kurt Jacobsen and Marston Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

89. Ibid.

90. Anders Sweetland, Item Analysis of the HES (Hamlet Evaluation System) (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1968), p. 1. He cites one aggrieved critic saying, “The HES is no damn good, it didn't predict Tet.”

91. Austin Long, On “Other War”: Lessons from Five Decades of RAND Counterinsurgency Research (Santa Monica: RAND, 2006), p. 40.

92. David W. P. Elliot, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975, vol. 2 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003).

93. Ibid., p. 1211.

94. Ronald Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 293.

95. David F. Schmitz, The Tet Offensive: Politics, War, and Public Opinion (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), p. 37.

96. David Hunt, Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War, 1959–1968 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), p. 355.

97. Dave Young, “Computing War Narratives: The Hamlet Evaluation System in Vietnam,” APRJA (A Peer-Reviewed Journal About) 6, no. 1 (2017): 14, http://www.aprja.net/computing-war-narratives-the-hamlet-evaluation-system-in-vietnam/?pdf=3204.

98. In this vein behold Stathis N. Kalyvas and Matthew Adam Kocher, “The Dynamics of Violence in Vietnam: An Analysis of the Hamlet Evaluation System,” Journal of Peace Research 46, no. 3 (May 2009) and Matthew Kocher, Thomas B. Pepinsky, and Stathis Kalyvas, “Aerial Bombardment, Indiscriminate Violence, and Territorial Control in Unconventional Wars: Evidence from Vietnam,” American Journal of Political Science 55, no. 2 (April 2011).

99. See Hugh Gusterson, Drone: Remote Control Warfare (Cambridge: MIT Press 2016); Grigoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone (New York: New Press, 2013); Medea Benjamin, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control (New York: Verso, 2013); Andrew Cockburn, Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (New York: Verso, 2016); P. W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin, 2011); and Jeremy Scahill, The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

100. Gusterson, Drone, pp. 23–24.

101. Jon Boone, “US Drone Strikes Could Be Classified as War Crimes, Says Amnesty International,” Guardian, October 22, 2013.

102. Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), p. 31.

103. Brian Charlesworth and Deborah Charlesworth, “Geneticists Know There's More to Life,” Guardian March 11, 2018.

104. Nicholas Rescher, The Limits of Science, 2nd ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), p. 35.

105. Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: Pantheon, 1973), p. 42.

106. Curtis Bowman, “Odysseus and the Siren Call of Reason: The Frankfurt School Critique of Enlightenment,” Other Voices: The (e)journal of Cultural Criticism 1, no. 1 (March 1997).

107. Nancy Love, “Why Do the Sirens Sing? Figuring the Feminine in Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in Rethinking the Frankfurt School: Alternative Legacies of Cultural Critique, ed. Jeffrey T. Nealon and Carn Irr (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

108. Objective reason, which rejects stunted formal theories, means criticism and by “criticism, we mean the intellectual, and eventually practical effort which is not satisfied to accept the prevailing ideas, actions, and social conditions unthinkingly and from mere habit; effort which aims to coordinate the individual sides of social life with each other and with the general ideas and aims of the epoch, to deduce them genetically, to distinguish the appearance from essence, to examine the foundation of things, in short, really to know them.” Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, p. 270.

Chapter 9: Back to the Futurists: On Accelerationism Left and Right

1. Elizabeth Dias, “What You Missed While Not Watching the Bill Nye and Ken Ham Creation Debate,” Time, February 5, 2014, http://time.com/4511/bill-nye-ken-ham-debate/.

2. Mark C. Biedebach, “Atheism Comes into the Classroom through the Back Door,” chap. 3 in Evolution vs. Creation…a New Approach to Teaching How Life Began (manuscript in progress; California State University, Long Beach, CA), http://web.csulb.edu/~mbiedeba/ch3.html.

3. Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment,” Dark Enlightenment (blog), December 25, 2012, http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/; Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, 2nd ed. (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic Media, 2017), pp. 347–62; Laboria Cuboniks, “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation,” Xenofeminism, June 11, 2015, http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/qx8bq.txt; “#AltWoke Manifesto,” &&& Journal, February 5, 2017, http://tripleampersand.org/alt-woke-manifesto/; Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2015).

4. Andy Beckett, “Accelerationism: How a Fringe Philosophy Predicted the Future We Live in,” Guardian, May 11, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in.

5. It is true that many accelerationist writers embrace the rhetoric of modernity, and even the Enlightenment. See, for example, Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, p. 49. Nonetheless, these writers consistently eschew the major conceptual tenets of radical Enlightenment thought, namely, the existence of an intelligible, deterministic, universe governed by equally intelligible and stable natural laws.

6. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–9.

7. Manjit Kumar, Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality (repr.; New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), p. 331.

8. Alan Ramon Clinton, Mechanical Occult: Automatism, Modernism, and the Specter of Politics (New York: Peter Lang, International Academic Publishers, 2004), p. 193.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 181.

10. Robert C. Holub, Nietzsche's Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 166–203.

11. Don Dombowsky, Nietzsche's Machiavellian Politics (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 9–66.

12. Frank Cameron and Don Dombowsky, eds., Political Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche: An Edited Anthology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 236.

13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 10.

14. Certainly, there were other proponents of Italian futurism, some of whom even occupied the left wing of the political spectrum. However, at least in Italy, futurism did come to be dominated by a right-wing and nationalist ethos, and Marinetti himself was instrumental in this.

15. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “To My Pegasus,” in Selected Poems and Related Prose, ed. Luce Marinetti, trans. Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 38.

16. Filippo Marinetti, quoted in, Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 19–20.

17. Ernst Jünger, “Total Mobilization,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 126–27.

18. Ibid., p. 129.

19. Ibid., p. 128.

20. For the will is “world-forming,” rather than formed by a common world. See Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming, trans. Bogdan Costea and Laurence Paul Hemming (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), pp. 189–90. Commentators on Jünger have likewise pointed out the extent of his valorization of the particular will, and how this fundamental worldview could accommodate the anti-Semitism of his time. While opposing the alarmism of Nazi propaganda, Jünger did identify the liberal Jew as nonetheless “alien” to German culture, and so incapable of “playing a creative role” in German life.” See Thomas R. Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 74, 109.

21. Jünger, Worker, p. xv.

22. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (1932; New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 82.

23. Ibid.

24. Benjamin Noys, “Futures of Accelerationism” (seminar, Faster/Slower/Future, Towards Postcapitalism, Kaaitheater, Brussels, Belgium, October 22, 2016).

25. Spengler, Man and Technics, p. 87.

26. Ibid., p. 86.

27. Ibid.

28. C. L. R. James, Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece It's Meaning for Today, 2nd ed. (Detroit, MI: Bewick Editions, 1992).

29. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx & Engels Collected Works, vol. 6 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010), p. 487.

30. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 213.

31. Friedrich Hölderlin, as quoted in Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), p. 28.

32. Richard Wolin, ed., “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Der Spiegel's Interview with Martin Heidegger,” in Heidegger Controversy, p. 91.

33. This account of French accelerationism is heavily indebted to Benjamin Noys's two books on the subject, The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 5, and Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2014), p. xi. It was Noys who reintroduced the term “accelerationism” into the modern lexicon, and, further, identified accelerationist thought as bound up with the conditions of late capitalism.

34. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), as quoted in, Noys, Malign Velocities, pp. 8–10.

35. Marx, Capital, p. 959.

36. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 239–40; Noys, Malign Velocities, pp. 1–2.

37. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 240.

38. Noys, Malign Velocities, p. 4.

39. Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 111; cf. Noys, Malign Velocities, p. 3.

40. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, rev. ed. (London: SAGE Publications, 2017), p. 58.

41. Jean Baudrillard, “When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy,” trans. David James Miller, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 11, no. 3 (1987): 60.

42. Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed. Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay, 2nd ed. (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2012), p. 446.

43. Noys, Malign Velocities, p. 54.

44. Land, Fanged Noumena, p. 21.

45. Karl Popper, Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics: From the Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery, ed. W. W. Bartley III, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 175.

46. Eric Oberheim and Paul Hoyningen-Huene, “The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, last updated March 5, 2013, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/incommensurability/.

47. Land, Fanged Noumena, p. 591; cf. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, new ed. (London: Verso, 2010), p. 14.

48. Land, Fanged Noumena, p. 592.

49. Mike Riddle, “Doesn't Carbon-14 Dating Disprove the Bible?” in The New Answers Book: Over 25 Questions on Creation/Evolution and the Bible, ed. Ken Ham (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2006), pp. 77–87.

50. Paul Feyerabend, Knowledge, Science, and Relativism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 183.

51. In this way, science collapses into technology. There can be no sense of knowledge acquisition for its own sake, i.e., a pure theoretical attitude. Rather, all scientific pursuits are instrumentalized for specific ends and involve invention. Hence the rise of what is now termed “technoscience.”

52. Land, “Dark Enlightenment.”

53. Nick Land, “IQ Shredders,” Outside In: Involvements with Reality (blog), July 17, 2014, http://www.xenosystems.net/iq-shredders/.

54. See Land's critique of the “Labor Theory of Value,” in Fanged Noumena, pp. 346–47.

55. On the Left-Nietzscheanism of Russian futurism, see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism, 1st ed. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2002); on the contradictions of Russian futurism, see Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, ed. William Keach (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2005).

56. Many of these are anthologized by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, eds., #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, 2nd ed. (Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic Media, 2017); As for the art scene, one example of this is the LD50 Gallery, which was heavily criticized for promoting Far-Right figures. See “Why Is Nick Land Still Embraced by Segments of the British Art and Theory Scenes?” E-Flux Conversations (blog), March 17, 2017, https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/why-is-nick-land-still-embraced-by-segments-of-the-british-art-and-theory-scenes/6329.

57. Srnicek and Williams, “#Accelerate: Manifesto,” pp. 351–52.

58. Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, p. 57.

59. Ibid., p. 82.

60. Ibid., p. 83.

61. Ibid., p. 82.

62. Sadie Plant, “Binary Sexes, Binary Codes,” as quoted in, Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, p. 82.

63. Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, pp. 76, 83n74.

64. Ibid., p. 78.

65. Ibid., p. 82.

66. Jon Swaine, “Donald Trump's Team Defends ‘Alternative Facts’ after Widespread Protests,” Guardian, January 23, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/22/donald-trump-kellyanne-conway-inauguration-alternative-facts.

67. Donald J. Trump and Tony Schwartz, Trump: The Art of the Deal, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 58.

68. Norman Vincent Peale gave sermons at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Fred Trump would take his family on Sundays to listen to Peale's sermons on the “power of positive thinking.” Peale also officiated at Donald Trump's wedding to Ivana Zelníčková. See David Brody and Scott Lamb, The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A Spiritual Biography (New York: Broadside Books, 2018).

69. Michael D'Antonio, The Truth about Trump (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015), p. 39; Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (New York: Fireside, 2003), p. 2. Of course, Peale's phrase is taken from Philippians 4:13. However, in Peale's hands, these words are turned into a practical “formula” or means of “self-hypnosis” for overcoming all worldly obstacles, if only they are said out loud.

Chapter 10: The Myth of the Expert as Elite: Postmodern Theory, Right-Wing Populism, and the Assault on Truth

1. Donald Trump, quoted in Nick Gass, “Trump: ‘The Experts Are Terrible,’” Politico, April 4, 2016, https://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/04/donald-trump-foreign-policy-experts-221528.

2. Michael Gove quoted in Henry Mance, “Britain Has Had Enough of Experts, Says Gove,” Financial Times, June 3, 2016.

3. Wolfgang Streeck, “The Return of the Repressed as the Beginning of the End of Neoliberal Capitalism” in The Great Regression, ed. Heinrich Geiselberger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), pp. 159–60.

4. Daniel C. Dennett, “The Hoax of Intelligent Design and How It Was Perpetrated,” in Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement, ed. John Brockman (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), p. 34.

5. There is now a rich literature on the global rise of populism. Some of the best works include Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016); Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); and Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

6. The anthropologist Angela Nagle has made a similar point in her Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017), p. 62. Shawn Otto has made a somewhat similar claim about a connection between postmodern thought and neoconservatism. See Otto's The War on Science: Who's Waging It, What It Matters, What We Can Do about It (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2016), p. 199.

7. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 72–73.

8. Ibid., p. 70.

9. Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society (London: New Left Books, 1978), p. 86.

10. Ibid., p. 87.

11. As this volume was going to press, Mouffe released a small volume arguing for a leftist populism that presents her and, to a certain extent, Laclau's advocacy of populism in a more accessible form. See Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (New York: Verso, 2018).

12. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), p. 81.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., p. 154.

15. Jon Elster, “Hard and Soft Obscurantism in the Humanities and Social Sciences,” Diogenes 58, no. 1–2 (February–May 2011): 159–70.

16. Consider for example the attack on intellectuals in the conservative historian Paul Johnson's Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

17. Russell Kirk, “Cultural Debris: A Mordant Last Word,” in The Portable Conservative Reader, ed. Russell Kirk (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), p. 706.

18. See the debate from Buckley's Firing Line television show, “Firing Line Creation and Evolution Debate 1997,” ChristopherHitchslap, October 19, 2011, YouTube video, 1:18:13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XZDTsQaxw8.

19. For this history, see George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006).

20. See, for example, Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (New York: Verso Books, 2014). Angela Nagle has provided a similar criticism in her Kill All Normies.

21. For a discussion of right-wing internet culture, see Nagle, Kill All Normies. For an excellent, more general discussion of the effect of the internet on the notion of expertise, see Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 105–33.

22. For a discussion of “Red Pilling,” see Abigail Brooks, “Popping the Red Pill: Inside a Digital Alternate Reality,” CNNtech, November 10, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/10/technology/culture/divided-we-code-red-pill/index.html.

23. For a sampling of Peterson's diatribes, see “Jordan Peterson on Women's Studies (from the Joe Rogan Experience #877),” PowerfulJRE, December 1, 2016, YouTube Video, 7:51, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88KJ5rgCNmk. A brilliant critique of Peterson and the irrational sources of his claims has been offered by Pankaj Mishra in “Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism,” New York Review of Books, March 19, 2018, http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/.

24. For a discussion of the problem of “citizen journalism” and its right-wing practitioners, see Jesse Singal, “‘Citizen Journalism’ Is a Catastrophe Right Now, and It'll Only Get Worse,” New York Magazine, October 19, 2016, http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/10/citizen-journalism-is-a-catastrophe-itll-only-get-worse.html.

25. For example, see “Citizen Journalists Are the Future of the Truth,” Alex Jones, April 6, 2017, YouTube video, 5:09, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvIDKUSFfXE [YouTube account has been taken down].

26. Steve Lohr, “It's True: False News Spreads Faster and Wider. And Humans Are to Blame,” New York Times, March 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/technology/twitter-fake-news-research.html).

27. For a record of the debates and the efforts of creationists to make scientific arguments, see the sources collected in Robert T. Pennock and Michael Ruse, eds., But Is It Science? The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy, updated ed. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009).

28. For more on Paltrow's claims, see Nichols, Death of Expertise, pp. 115–17.

29. For an excellent case in which Richard Dawkins took Chopra to task for his incorrect usage of scientific concepts, see “Richard Dawkins Interviews Deepak Chopra (Enemies of Reason Uncut Interviews),” Bernard Segura, May 4, 2013, YouTube Video, 22:12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsH1U7zSp7k.

30. For information on McCarthy's anti-vaccination campaigns, see Harry Collins, Are We All Scientific Experts Now? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), pp. 111–12.

31. One of the best critiques of Žižek is Alan Johnson's “Slavoj Žižek's Linksfaschismus,” in Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics: The Betrayal of Politics, ed. Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 99–120.

32. For more on the right-wing assault on science, see Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005) and Dave Levitan, Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).

33. For a discussion, see Karen L. Cox, “The Whole Point of Confederate Monuments Is to Celebrate White Supremacy,” Washington Post, August 16, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/08/16/the-whole-point-of-confederate-monuments-is-to-celebrate-white-supremacy/?utm_term=.304729db4cec.

34. Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016), p. 53.

35. See Rebecca Leber, “Making America Toxic Again,” Mother Jones, March/April 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/scott-pruitt-profile-epa-trump/.

36. William Jennings Bryan, “Darwinism and the Schools,” in William Jennings Bryan: Selections, ed. Ray Ginger (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 237.

37. For video of Reagan's speech, see “James Robison: National Affairs Briefing (James Robison / LIFE Today),” Life Today TV, March 31, 2014, YouTube video, 25:57, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lH1e0xxRRbk.

38. Richard Feynman, “What Is Science?” in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman, ed. Jeffrey Robbins (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1999), p. 187.

39. Ibid., p. 186.

40. For a discussion of the relation between experts and the public, see Nichols, Death of Expertise, pp. 215–18. Nichols stresses the usefulness of experts. For a discussion of how experts in the natural sciences can serve as mediators between the public and policymakers, see Harry Collins and Robert Evans in their Why Democracies Need Science (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017).

41. Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Picador, 2017), p. 29.

42. Ibid., p. 39.

43. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963).

Chapter 11: Plato's Revenge: An Undemocratic Report from an Overheated Planet

*This essay was originally published in English in Logos 12, no. 2 (Spring 2013) and is used here with permission. Earlier, it had appeared in German as “Platons Rache: Undemokratische Nachrichten von einem überhitzten Planeten,” in Wissenschaft und Demokratie, ed. Michael Hagner (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), pp. 189–214.

1. The themes of many parts of this essay are developed at far greater length in my books Science in a Democratic Society (Amherst NY: Prometheus Books, 2011) and The Seasons Alter: How to Save our Planet in Six Acts (coauthored with Evelyn Fox Keller; New York: Norton/Liveright, 2017).

2. The professor was obviously thinking of the discussions in the Republic.

3. As I shall acknowledge later, even this is too optimistic. Virtually all climate scientists believe that, even if we act immediately, the global mean temperature will rise by 2–3°C by the end of the century.

4. For accessible presentations of their ideas, see James Hansen, Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009); Stephen Henry Schneider, Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth's Climate (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009); Michael E. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

5. Anthony Leiserowitz et al., Climate Change in the American Mind: March 2018 (New Haven, CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 2018), p. 3, http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Climate-Change-American-Mind-March-2018.pdf.

6. John Milton, Areopagitica (London: A. Millar, 1738); John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London: John W. Parker and Son, West Strand, 1859).

7. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), chap. XII.

8. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1944).

9. The ideal was originally introduced in my Science, Truth, and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). It is defended and developed much further in my Science in a Democratic Society.

10. The ideas of the following paragraphs are a radical compression of themes worked out far more extensively in my Science in a Democratic Society and in Kitcher and Keller The Seasons Alter. For the perspective on values, also see my book, The Ethical Project (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

Chapter 12: Democracy and the Problem of Pseudoscience

1. See Michael Ruse, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Michael Ruse, The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013); and, Michael Ruse, “Evolution: From Pseudoscience to Popular Science, from Popular Science to Professional Science,” in Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, ed. Mario Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 225–45.

2. Ruse, Monad to Man.

3. Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature (London: J. Johnson, 1803), pp. 26–28.

4. Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, vol. 1 (London: J. Johnson, 1794), p. 509.

5. Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979).

6. These things are comparative. Had it been to do with football, Florida State could have gotten away with it, but not Harvard. See Ruse, Gaia Hypothesis.

7. Michael Ruse, ed., But Is It Science? The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988).

8. See Michael Ruse, The Philosophy of Biology (London: Hutchinson, 1973); Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution: Why It Matters to Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

9. The definitive history is Ronald Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). The book that got the modern movement kick-started was Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1961) by biblical scholar John C. Whitcomb Jr. and hydraulic engineer Henry M. Morris. My contribution back then was Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies (Reading, MA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1982).

10. Henry Morris et al., Scientific Creationism (San Diego, CA: Creation-Life, 1974).

11. See Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

12. Bill Clinton, the future president, was governor from 1978 to 1980. For the first and last time in his political career, he was complacent and got thrown out after one term. He came blasting back in 1982 and stayed governor until 1992, when he was elected president.

13. I don't think a religion is necessarily a pseudoscience or conversely that a pseudoscience is necessarily religious. I do think, as here, a pseudoscience can be produced for a religious end. Technically, what mattered in the court case was showing that religion was at work here. The First Amendment does not bar the teaching of pseudoscience in publicly funded schools. It bars the teaching of religion in such schools.

14. William Overton, “United States District Court Opinion: McLean versus Arkansas,” in, Ruse, But Is It Science? pp. 307–31.

15. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1991).

16. Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross, Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). No one thinks the intelligence is a grad student on Andromeda, playing games down here on earth as part of the dissertation project.

17. Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996).

18. William Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); William Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology (Downer's Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1999).

19. William Dembski and Michael Ruse, eds., Debating Design: Darwin to DNA (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

20. Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1999).

21. Robert Pennock, Tower of Babel: Scientific Evidence and the New Creationism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

22. Robert T. Pennock and Michael Ruse, eds., But Is It Science? The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy, updated ed. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009). See especially, “Part III: Intelligent Design Creationism and the Kitzmiller Case.”

23. Michael Ruse, Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Ruse, Darwinian Revolution.

24. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 66.

25. Ibid.

26. James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

27. See Ruse, Gaia Hypothesis.

28. John Postgate, “Gaia Gets Too Big for Her Boots,” New Scientist, April 7, 1988, p. 60.

29. A question I am often asked is why I, a Brit working at an unfashionable university in Canada—we were, after all, the aggie college (still known as the “Cow College”) with arts and sciences added on—was chosen by the ACLU to speak up for history and philosophy of science. Part of it was that I alone was willing to do the job. Most of my fellow philosophers thought that one should not take the ethereal refinement of the seminar into the vulgar spotlight of a federal court. After the trial, many people (fellow philosophers) criticized me for having spoken up as an expert witness. Apart from anything else, at the time it was unfashionable to agree with Karl Popper that one can find a criterion of demarcation between science and nonscience. And yet, this was precisely what I was doing. Part of the reason for being there was that the lawyers for the ACLU saw that I would be a good witness. Years of teaching first-year undergraduates—something I still do with great joy and a sense of privilege—had honed my skills at speaking clearly and forcefully. Most importantly, I fully realized that a good joke is worth a thousand arguments. At some point, the assistant district attorney was badgering me about my religious beliefs. Finally, I blurted out, “Mr. Williams. Can't you see that I am not an expert witness on my religious beliefs?” Everyone burst into laughter and then, when Williams returned to the attack, the judge said, “Mr. Williams. Can't you see that he is not going to give you what you want? Just move on.”

30. Actually, I have touched on environmental issues in some of my recent writings, notably my book The Gaia Hypothesis, and a recent book on science and religion coauthored by the Pulitzer Prize winner, Edward J. Larson, On Faith and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).

31. Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case against Creationism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982).

32. Michael Ruse Darwinism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

33. Michael Ruse, The Evolution-Creation Struggle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

34. Michael Ruse, Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

35. Michael Ruse, The Problem of War: Darwinism, Christianity, and Their Battle to Understand Human Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

36. Michael Ruse, A Meaning to Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

37. Michael Ruse, On Purpose (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

38. If someone wants to make a religion out of Darwinian progress, as I think the eminent evolutionist Edward O. Wilson—On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Edward O. Wilson, The Creation: A Meeting of Science and Religion (New York: Norton, 2006); Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence (New York: Liveright, 2014)—attempts, then I don't want to go down that path, but I am not about to stop others. My worry is that, as happens too frequently, people start to think that this is a valid branch of science. It isn't.

39. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (Brooklyn, NY: Haskell House, 1977), p. 56.

40. Ibid., pp. 27–28.

41. Michael Ruse, The Philosophy of Human Evolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

42. Michael Ruse, Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).