What do you think?
Rate this book
Anti-Science and the Assault on Democracy: Defending Reason in a Free Society
Defending the role that science must play in democratic society--science defined not just in terms of technology but as a way of approaching problems and viewing the world.
In this collection of original essays, experts in political science, the hard sciences, philosophy, history, and other disciplines examine contemporary anti-science trends, and make a strong case that respect for science is essential for a healthy democracy.
The editors note that a contradiction lies at the heart of modern society. On the one hand, we inhabit a world increasingly dominated by science and technology. On the other, opposition to science is prevalent in many forms--from arguments against the teaching of evolution and the denial of climate change to the promotion of alternative medicine and outlandish claims about the effects of vaccinations. Adding to this grass-roots hostility toward science are academics espousing postmodern relativism, which equates the methods of science with regimes of "power-knowledge."
While these cultural trends are sometimes marketed in the name of "democratic pluralism," the contributors contend that such views are actually destructive of a broader culture appropriate for a democratic society. This is especially true when facts are degraded as "fake news" and scientists are dismissed as elitists. Rather than enhancing the capacity for rational debate and critical discourse, the authors view such anti-science stances on either the right or the left as a return to premodern forms of subservience to authority and an unwillingness to submit beliefs to rational scrutiny.
Beyond critiquing attitudes hostile to science, the essays in this collection put forward a positive vision for how we might better articulate the relation between science and democracy and the benefits that accrue from cultivating this relationship.
In this collection of original essays, experts in political science, the hard sciences, philosophy, history, and other disciplines examine contemporary anti-science trends, and make a strong case that respect for science is essential for a healthy democracy.
The editors note that a contradiction lies at the heart of modern society. On the one hand, we inhabit a world increasingly dominated by science and technology. On the other, opposition to science is prevalent in many forms--from arguments against the teaching of evolution and the denial of climate change to the promotion of alternative medicine and outlandish claims about the effects of vaccinations. Adding to this grass-roots hostility toward science are academics espousing postmodern relativism, which equates the methods of science with regimes of "power-knowledge."
While these cultural trends are sometimes marketed in the name of "democratic pluralism," the contributors contend that such views are actually destructive of a broader culture appropriate for a democratic society. This is especially true when facts are degraded as "fake news" and scientists are dismissed as elitists. Rather than enhancing the capacity for rational debate and critical discourse, the authors view such anti-science stances on either the right or the left as a return to premodern forms of subservience to authority and an unwillingness to submit beliefs to rational scrutiny.
Beyond critiquing attitudes hostile to science, the essays in this collection put forward a positive vision for how we might better articulate the relation between science and democracy and the benefits that accrue from cultivating this relationship.
303 pages, Hardcover
Published December 11, 2018
8 people are currently reading
73 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 9, 2023
This is a curious book, ranging from +5 to -5 stars. By its title, one assumes it to be about the anti-science aspect of the Western world’s current irrationality movement, left and right. Some chapters are just that, and spectacularly so. In that category are a chapter by Michael J. Thompson and another by Diana M. Judd (fortunately, she writes a book about the subject, Questioning Authority: Political Resistance and the Ethic of Natural Science). Then something strange happened. One chapter ventured into quite interesting concepts of time in the cosmos and physical equilibrium states, complexity theory, and reductionism, all linked to a utopian view of perfect coherence between a new economic system in harmony with nature, but I kept wondering if this chapter was meant for another book. Other chapters are written with well-deserved opposition to the anti-science MAGA/alt-right, yet they end up supporting the anti-science movement with its inherently misandrist New Left views: “Men should not be allowed to go out and rape women at will…” Really? Such insight.
Then came Kurt Jacobsen and Alba Alexander’s piece that made the suspicion that chapters got mixed up between books a near certainty. Their piece seemed intended for the anti-science irrationality supporter of the postmodernist Left, all the while as they enunciated their scientific illiteracy, writing, “Absent a conscious emancipatory intent to ground rationality in a dynamic critical view of social relations, science easily shifts into and is subordinated to elite agendas of domination… Does the fellow in the white lab coat have anything in common with the yahoo beneath white sheets and hood?” The words “emancipatory,” “critical view of social relations,” “subordinated,” and “domination” are for postmodernists, like “Stop the Steal!” uttered by Steve Bannon is for Trump Davidians, meant to enunciate tribal affiliation, even if they believe none of it. For these two authors, there is hope that real science will succumb to the pseudo-science of the critical theory humanities departments. If you hadn’t heard, science was, they claim, “demystified” and “decolonized” back in the 1980s when “the naïve belief in objectivity was discredited [and the] ignoring of psychoanalysis and phenomenology… was fatally weakened.” And yet, there’s still work to be done because certitude still “arises among ardent defenders of science that rivals any televangelical con man working the crowd or the airwaves.” And yet, these two authors are said to be political “scientists” at major universities. Switch a few words, and they sound like Rush Limbaugh. Fortunately for the rest of us, what they label “con men” and women just made a vaccine to halt a worldwide pandemic, the last of which killed around 100 million people in 1918, while postmodern critical theorists like these—per Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition, having “lost the epistemological sweepstakes”—throw bombs from the campus basement to get attention. It’s a very mixed book.
Then came Kurt Jacobsen and Alba Alexander’s piece that made the suspicion that chapters got mixed up between books a near certainty. Their piece seemed intended for the anti-science irrationality supporter of the postmodernist Left, all the while as they enunciated their scientific illiteracy, writing, “Absent a conscious emancipatory intent to ground rationality in a dynamic critical view of social relations, science easily shifts into and is subordinated to elite agendas of domination… Does the fellow in the white lab coat have anything in common with the yahoo beneath white sheets and hood?” The words “emancipatory,” “critical view of social relations,” “subordinated,” and “domination” are for postmodernists, like “Stop the Steal!” uttered by Steve Bannon is for Trump Davidians, meant to enunciate tribal affiliation, even if they believe none of it. For these two authors, there is hope that real science will succumb to the pseudo-science of the critical theory humanities departments. If you hadn’t heard, science was, they claim, “demystified” and “decolonized” back in the 1980s when “the naïve belief in objectivity was discredited [and the] ignoring of psychoanalysis and phenomenology… was fatally weakened.” And yet, there’s still work to be done because certitude still “arises among ardent defenders of science that rivals any televangelical con man working the crowd or the airwaves.” And yet, these two authors are said to be political “scientists” at major universities. Switch a few words, and they sound like Rush Limbaugh. Fortunately for the rest of us, what they label “con men” and women just made a vaccine to halt a worldwide pandemic, the last of which killed around 100 million people in 1918, while postmodern critical theorists like these—per Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition, having “lost the epistemological sweepstakes”—throw bombs from the campus basement to get attention. It’s a very mixed book.
June 2, 2019
Essays from people who see science as the entrenched orthodoxy and democracy as "what I know these idiots really need".
July 29, 2020
A scholarly collection of essays, challenging in places, that aims to show that a healthy democracy goes hand in hand with a scientific mindset. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2019...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews