I don’t actually hate science. I mean, some of my friends are scientists, so believe me when I say I have nothing against it. However, there is a Facebook page that keeps popping up on my newsfeed called, “I Fucking Love Science” that always makes me cringe.
Don’t get me wrong; science can be a great tool. We have longer, more comfortable lives because of it, and for that I am grateful. However, the amount of mindless knob-slobbering that goes on whenever Science is mentioned irritates me to no end.
My biggest gripe with the salivation over science is how it always goes hand in hand with the dismissal of religious thought. Like they are somehow incompatible, and that only science and reason can save us from the certain doom that the path of faith, hope, and love would certainly lead us.
Yes, there are certainly those who believe that religion and ideology are our only possible salvation while science will lead us down the path of sin and degradation, so those choosing science could just be fostering a bit of petty rivalry which I guess is certainly one reason to blindly worship at the tabernacle of reason. But which is the more destructive practice? I’ve mentioned some reasons that science is dumb in a previous blog that I will go over again, so if you are an ardent follower of my every word, there might be some overlap.
First let’s look at how science probably isn’t actually going to save us.
You remember how SimCity 2000 promised us fusion power by the year 2050? Maybe that’s just me. Anyway, extraordinary amounts of clean, wasteless energy would go a long way to solving a good number of worldwide issues. How many folks do you think are working on it? How many do you think are working on an ever-so-slightly faster microchip? Or a more efficient means of extracting crude oil? Or specific kind of bomb that only kills people who have a subconscious distaste for Freedom?
We live in Capitalism Land, ladies and gentlemen. And those scientists are working on things that will make money, because they’re only going to get grants from companies or governments that see some kind of profit behind it. And apparently scientists need to eat too.
If you are actively working against somebody who is making money, there is a good chance that people will actively work against you. Here in Canada we have an epidemic of scientists being muzzled by the government for the environmental work that they are doing in regards to the tar sands in Alberta. There are global warming deniers everywhere, simply because of how people with money paid off their own scientists to claim that it isn’t man-made, or that it is a figment of Al Gore’s imagination.
But Dan, you might say, This isn’t our beloved Science fucking up the planet, it’s people bastardizing the use of science for their own personal gains! Yes, I might say, Just like how one might bastardize the use of religion for their own greedy purposes, perhaps?
But now to shut you up even further, let’s look at how science is basically going to murder our faces. Yeah, I said it.
Everyone seems to think that 9/11 was religion’s fault because the people that did it happened to believe that America was fucking up their homeland, and their religion saw that as a bad thing, and then were persuaded by somebody to do something pretty extreme about it. But it never would have happened if science hadn’t invented airplanes and high rises in the first place.
Gun reform gets brought up every time a school is redecorated with bullet holes from an unruly youth, and the heated topic always mentions that if the student tried doing something with a knife then he would be stopped with much fewer casualties. How is the progression of weaponry not a huge black eye on the smug face of science? I mean, the atomic bombs in Japan killed 150 000 – 246 000 people. That was 70 years ago. Progress has been made on that front as well, and to think that no one would ever use such a deadly scientific discovery (again) is naive.
People will always disagree. Sometimes violently. If that violence becomes excessive, blaming it on the disagreement rather than the unchecked progress of weaponry is myopic.
Hey remember that global warming thing I mentioned earlier? You know what’s causing that? Oh yeah baby, it’s science. The great industrialization of the world, the high mark of scientific progress, the evolution from the uncivilized medieval period to the age of glorious reason, has basically bent over the planet for imminent penetration. I don’t want to turn this into a climate change blog because that’s not my ranting forte, but we’re screwed. Dumping into our oceans, smogging up our skies, ripping out our forests: all of these things in the name of scientific progress. Not just the pollution that comes from science is destroying the planet, but everything we need to fuel our addiction we have to rip out of the earth. We’re using up all our finite resources in such a way that we are causing untold damage to our planet. Which sustains us, by the way, so when it is irreparably fucked, it’s not like we can whistle a jaunty tune and carry on with our lives. We dead, folks, we dead.
Know how else science is going to kill us? You like eating? Science has “improved” on food by a substantial margin over the last few decades. No longer content to let our food not have poisonous chemicals on it, we now let our agriculture be sprayed with toxic pesticides among other fun and zany chemicals in order to make sure that there is an abundant enough crop to sell. Or a cow is pumped full of hormones in order to make it bigger, so you can sell more steaks off of it. This isn’t “improving” food; it’s making more money off of it. And if a few people get sick along the way, well, fine. We have too many people on this planet anyway, right? (I’m adding an interjection here: I work in a butcher shop, and I know what dead animal parts are supposed to look like. Looking at processed foods that have been scienced all to hell, I can assure you that they look nothing like the original pieces. At all. Just sayin’.)
So science is murdering us and our planet, and guess what? It’s murdering us economically as well.
The progress of information technology has accelerated greatly since the invention of the computer lo those many years ago. And the price has plummeted, with its computing power growing exponentially. That’s pretty swell, right? Except with technology being able to do more and more, that leaves less and less for humans to do. Instagram was recently purchased for about a billion dollars and it employs 13 people, whereas Kodak went bankrupt and employed 17 000 people, down from 63 000 just a few years earlier.
There is a Taiwanese company called Foxconn that is coming to America, and it is bringing along with it one million robots to put together its products.
Big companies will crush smaller ones with their access to expensive technologies that can predict consumer habits based on collected data, leaving the mom and pop shops to fall to the wayside of obsoletion.
This trend will continue for decades, with manufacturing prices plummeting along with the need of human workers maintaining the factories.
Big businesses will profit massively from this. The income disparity across the globe is already at staggering proportions, and will only continue to increase as science progresses and those on top will be able to produce massive amounts of product with minimal costs and extraordinary profits, while those at the bottom will no longer have any sort of employment. All thanks to science.
I honestly could go on. There are privacy and spying issues that science has enabled authoritarian governments to use on their populace; there is the decline of face to face social bonding which has been shown to help people psychologically; there’s that damned auto-tune ruining music…
When you think of things most likely to actually kill us, religion is so far down the list it doesn’t even register. It’s a scapegoat that is so easy to point a finger at because it doesn’t agree with our current cultural paradigm. But what if it’s our cultural paradigm of relying on science for everything that is actually the problem? We are already on the tipping point of absolute destruction, and we’ve already fallen so far, and you know what’s to blame? That’s right. Science.
Part of this was inspired by a lecture given by Dr. William Raduchel, titled “Will Technology Save Us or Doom Us?” as well as: https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience
Also here are some links:
http://nypost.com/2013/12/05/global-warming-proof-is-evaporating/
compared to this part of the Telegraph dedicated solely to the effects of man-made global warming:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/
2 critically injured compared to 32 dead in the Virginia Tech Massacre: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/16/AR2007041600533.html
You can look up Foxconn and Kodak and Instagram on your own if you like if you want to check my numbers.
Blog for Chumps 
It’s the monetary system that’s destroying the earth, not science… Religion is also destroying the earth!!! People use religion to wage out wars in the world… Science if used in a good way will surely make our world a better place.
I am not going again your ideas but I think the only cause thats’ destroying our planet is the monetary system…
Capitalism, and the thirst for power in all its forms, is surely a driving factor for many of the sins I describe in this post. But its devastation is felt from all corners, from science and from religion. I just don’t like when people exonerate one evil and condemn another based off of their own biases.
Also the problem of evolving weaponry is strictly a scientific blunder, as is the drain on our finite resources and the warming of our planet (though I’ll admit it’s possible for science to save us on those ones). But I do agree with you that most of the faults I find in science are from within the capitalistic realm.
And thank you for reading!
I get really annoyed with ifls too. Can’t stand it. For many of the same reasons you listed. I wanted to point out one thing though: you mentioned how nobody is working on fusion energy, good clean energy. Not completely true. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of liquid-flouride thorium reactor, but you should look into it. Brief summary, a team of scientists were working on it in the states at the same time they were developing what we know now as nuclear energy(based on uranium and plutonium, solid fuel, very hot, very dangerous, lots of waste we can’t dispose of). basically, the thorium reactor was ditched, and they went ahead with conventional nuclear, and that proliferated all around the world.
The thorium reactor was buried and forgotten about. sort of. It has been slowly picking up steam over the past ten years as a potential future energy technology. Lots of academics talking about, lots of paper research, and canvassing for research funding…Until very recently, nobody made a commitment. China finally came in, said it looks crazy promising, and laid down a commitment, and a pile of cash, and it’s finally happening.
Not to go into too much detail, but basically, it doesn’t produce weapons grade material, the reactor can use nuclear waste from traditional reactors as part of the fuel, the “waste” it creates is “rare earth” materials that we have a massive shortage of(and china essentially has a global monopoly of already) that is needed for things like batteries, headphones, cell phones, computers, and solar cells.
Anyways, look into it…
Fusion energy was really just an example from a computer game I played when I was a kid. My point was that most contemporary scientific progress is based off of capitalistic purposes, rather than a philanthropic drive. You even mention in your example that China is developing this energy source on something it already has a monopoly on.
I’m not saying it won’t be useful. I looked into it and you’re right, it does look promising, but I have a hard time believing that it will be implemented in a purely altruistic fashion.
Anyway, thanks for reading and for your input. I hadn’t heard of Thorium reactors before, and in my less cynical moments I enjoy hoping for the future.