When Bob Butts and I
discuss college football each week in the fall, we are just deciding which
teams we are against. He’s always FOR one team, MSU [the one in Mississippi]
and I’m always FOR one team, IU. Beyond that, we look at each upcoming game not
in terms of which team we want to win, but which team we want to lose.
He’s especially in favor of Notre Dame and Louisiana State losing, and I’m
especially in favor of Michigan and Ohio State losing. But we don’t stop there;
we can pick a preferred loser for every game that week.
There is something
intriguing about being “against.” That’s the appeal of the political/religious
right, I think. They are defined by what they are against.
They, of course, will tell
you they are defined by what they are for. “We are for making America great
against.” But their great America is identified by all the things they are
against—foreigners, non-Christians, socialists, and… especially… science.
They would probably not
name science as their main bugaboo, but as I try to come up with one category
that explains all their againsts, it is science.
I had a conversation with
a neighbor about climate change. It wasn’t a long conversation, because he was
sure of the final truth of his pronouncement that climate change is a hoax, and
even if it is real, human activity has nothing to do with it. Since we live in
a university community, I thought it was reasonable to appeal to science, which
says the opposite of what he believes about climate change.
He replied, “As an
engineer, I’m well aware of the limits of science.”
That is not a totally
stupid statement. Science does have limits, and it doesn’t take an engineer to
recognize them.
On the other hand, it’s a
ludicrous statement, to think that an engineer knows more about climate change
than climate scientists do.
And it’s clear that the
political/religious right is willing to accept the benefits of science. They
like automobiles and computers and TVs… oh, but wait. Those are not from
science, they are the results of engineering.
To the right, political or
religious or both together, there is a great difference between science and
engineering.
Of course, all
engineering, from Galileo and Ford and Edison on, all inventions, are based on
science, on Euclid and Newton and their ilk. But to the right, science is
different.
Scientists are the ones
who deny God because they believe in quantum fields and evolution and big
bangs. They are the ones who believe in human equality, who think people who
are not Americans or Christians or white or capitalists are just as good
because we all come from the same original gene pool. [You’d think Christians
would have no problem with that one, because of the Garden of Eden story, but
scientists claim our common ancestor was black, so…] They’re the ones who
believe in stem cell research. They’re the ones who don’t accept “it’s the will
of God” each time something bad happens.
Engineers can provide us
with flush toilets and aerosol hair spray without believing in evolution.
Engineering is capitalism.
Science is an equalizer.
That’s why the religious
right has sold its soul so completely to the political right. It can have the
benefits of engineering and still be against science. It can even use
engineering to deny science.
Elections are like
football games. We don’t vote for someone to win, we vote for someone to lose.
I know who I’m against in 2020…
John Robert McFarland
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