Twice now I’ve tried to make a simple point about evolution, science, and the environment, and, reading them over, twice I’ve failed.
Luckily (via Wolcott), the delightfully named blogger Kung Fu Monkey has done it for me:
Am I reading too much into this statement? Am I making too big a deal of this? In one word, fuckno. This is just a symptom of what is, to me, the most destructive thing to occur in America in twenty years.
Even if your kids aren’t directly taught ID or aren’t in one of the new Bible Class districts, the overarching cultural damage has already been done. Through this group of RadicalRighties’ constant rhetoric, they consistently strip away the idea that there is indeed a rigorous scientific process through which certain non-negotiable physical truths can be ascertained. They have suffused the country with with an intellectual laziness and a terrifying narcissism. Opinion has been enshrined as superior to fact. No longer need a person take into account the way the world works when forming their worldview — they can instead hunt down “facts” and “theories” which support their own comfort zone, and what’s worse, we can NO LONGER CALL BULLSHIT. Because if our leaders — pardon me, your leaders — don’t call bullshit, who will? They have undermined the very process by which we know WHEN to call bullshit!
…
Sure, it’s just my opinion. But this is bigger than budgets, or how to fight wars, or how to manage our environment or resources, because where we stand on facts, reason, science, that informs every other decision we make in all those fields and every other. This is what determines whether societies live or die.
Again, our motto at Kung Fu Monkey: “Everybody who wants to live in the 21st century over here. Everybody who wants to live in the 1800’s over there. Good. Thanks. Good luck with that.
