Bathwater

[degringolade]

 

Neo-Impressionism / Albert Dubois-Pillet/ Le Puy in the Snow

Monday Morning and I just finished my cuppa joe.  I think I’ll survive.

Spent yesterday running around taking inventory of my helplessness and other people’s foolishness.  I am just plain tired currently.  Not an existential tired, just a plain vanilla, pooped old man tired.

Been thinking about the whole science thing that Michael elaborated on so eloquently.  I suppose that this is an oversimplification, but since I tend to that anyway, I will run with it.

As Michael stated.  Science isn’t the problem.  Science is merely a method of focusing questions to come up with what is hoped to be reproducible answers.  

Nope the problem is that society seems to need some type of shaman to give it ideas and to be blamed when shit goes south.  This plays upon the all too human desire for a packleader to follow and a scapegoat to punish when shit goes wrong (yes Mike, I know this isn’t scapegoat à la Girard, but work with me here).  

But it also plays into a sick trait of most humans that they want to have authority with as little accountability as possible.  Hence the rise of the various priesthoods encountered through the years.  

But priesthoods are just as venal as the rest of us.  They fuck up and hide it, they do things for their own benefit or for the benefit of their guild and hope to reap the rewards of those decisions while avoiding the consequences should they be counterproductive.

I think that this period of time is unique because of all the benefits that this priesthood has conferred in the past 100 years.  This priesthood has delivered some pretty amazing benefits.  But what is happening now is that the underlying conditions allowing this manna to fall from heaven is drying up, and the nature of the manna itself is being revealed as what it always was, robbing Peter to pay Paul.

I am thinking that right now a major portion of the world’s population (I tend to think of it as a 49-51 split with me not being certain who is in the majority or if that majority is in fact meaningful) has lost faith in science.  There are any number of reasons for that loss of faith.  The biggest reason is that they don’t see science as what it is, they see science as folks in the priesthood rather than the simple method of asking questions.

Truthfully what has happened is that folks have lost faith in scientists.  Science itself is unintelligible to most.  Right now what we are seeing is a none-too-well-informed decision process as to the merits of tossing out the baby with the bathwater.