Wierd Science: A New Way of Knowing

What is happening in the culture of the U. S. today that makes so much room for the kind of thinking and speech that emanates from the Whitehouse and Congress? I’ve been puzzling for some time over how Bush and company get away with blatant use of newspeak. While Iraq, by every measure is in decline, Bush recently said he was encouraged by the significant progress being made there. No one calls for a psychiatric exam for the President even though that is crazy talk. In fact, the manner of speaking is now pervasive in other areas of government and, of course, has been pervasive in the corporate world since the turn of the 20th century and the invention of public relations.
Something about how we think and know has changed.

Prior to the Enlightenment, the narratives of scripture and myth and the testimony of people served as acceptable sources of knowledge. Talking about the nature of the world entailed making connections between the grand stories and the experience of people and their communities. Aristotle was a scientific authority, but he never conducted an experiment. Even as we headed toward the Enlightenment, fantastic accounts of the nature of the earth were accepted a true from sailors and traders who had traveled far and wide. Those stories were elaborated, embellished and, through commentary, connected to other accounts and to grander narratives of creation, for example, in the Old Testament. That is, people made sense of their own lives by seeing similarities in the lives of others (e.g. one’s troubles were like those of Job). Continuity of human experience made sense of it.

After Bacon and Descartes, how we knew the world changed considerably. Rather than similarity, our knowledge grew from perception of differences. Science is the measurement of difference and analytical thinking is grounded in articulating with precision differences in observations or experiences in controlled environments (which are different from everyday environments). Knowing by identification/similarity was replaced by interpretation of differences. A whole new way of knowing and talking about the nature of the world was constructed. It was a powerful tool for scientific and technological development (and related economic benefits of such progress) and thus became entrenched as our “stance” as beings apart from nature and even from others.

But, today, things have seemingly changed again. We are now encountering a new orthodoxy in politics and religion. The spread of conservativism seems to be global. The French, who recently said, “Non,” to the EU’s Darwinian, capitalist constitution are now considered out of step, frightened or old fashioned because they want to preserve workers’ rights, the collective power of unions, and a moderate standard of living. Much of the world seems determined to combine a new conservative religious motif with a capitalist, privatized, deregulated, “scientifically” designed economic model. What we are left with is a decontexutalized, disconnected commentary which is offered to the public. It is free of any deeply embedded mythology and is disconnected from lived experience of the larger public. Language now has no clear referent; hence no truth to carry and no point of critique by which such talk can be checked. Bush can claim to be a godly man, a believer in Jesus as his personal savior while lying repeated to the public about the actions and intentions of his administration without fear of critique. The lies told about WMD to get us into a war that been in the planning since the mid-1990s; the lies told about how tax-cuts would benefit all; the lies about the state of the environment to mitigate regulation of hydrocarbon pollution function as explanation at the moment and have no long-term negative effects on the administration.

The ghosts of religious certitude are taking a new form in the “certitudes” of capitalist globalization and “democracy” as unstoppable principles of good. The new narratives are being parlayed through the media of public relations and think tank white papers. A new way of knowing has been constructed by synthesizing mythical and scientific ways of knowing. It is weird science.