Imagine if someone with a decent platform got on Youtube or Twitter and said, “I think we’re overly focused on a rational approach to COVID-19 issues and vaccines. We should pay more attention to our emotions about these things.”
What sort of response would there be? “Anti-science!” is what you’d hear, and rightfully so. We heard this ad nauseum when people disagreed over COVID-19 issues with scientists who, in the words of Dr. Anthony Fauci, had “an air of authority.”
Well, the appeal to emotions over rational thinking is the very MO of a new high school curriculum adopted by the State of Washington. Module 2 of the curriculum entitled Climate Change & Pregnancy: Exploring Risks & Impacts states that we have a problem in science education: “For too long, science and science education have prioritized my rational thinking.” Imagine that! Rational thinking is a problem in science education.
What’s the solution? The curriculum states, “we must learn to pay attention to our own emotions and those of other people” (emphasis added). Why? Because they “can signal alignment or discord between cultural values and technical assertions.”
Wow! An advocation for emotions to replace rational thinking in the driver’s seat of science? That, my friends, is real “anti-science!” Appealing to scientists who disagree with other scientists is not anti-science. But letting emotions drive scientific research is.
So much for the “Thou shalt not be Anti-science” command.
For other ways in which that command has been violated by those who are fond of touting it, see my new book The New Relativism: Unmasking the Philosophy of Today’s Woke Moralists.