Anti-intellectualism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Intellectual and anti-intellectual: Political cartoonist Thomas Nast contrasts the reedy scholar with the bovine boxer, epitomizing the populist view of reading and study as antithetical to sport and athleticism. Note the disproportionate heads/bodies, with the size of the head representing "mental" ability and intelligence, and the size of the body representing kinesthetic talent and "physical" ability.

Anti-intellectualism is hostility towards and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectual pursuits, usually expressed as the derision of education, philosophy, literature, art, and science, as impractical and contemptible. Alternatively, self-described intellectuals who are alleged to fail to adhere to rigorous standards of scholarship may be described as anti-intellectuals although pseudo-intellectualism is a more commonly, and perhaps more accurately, used description for this phenomenon.

In public discourse, anti-intellectuals are usually perceived and publicly present themselves as champions of the common folk—populists against political elitism and academic elitism—proposing that the educated are a social class detached from the everyday concerns of the majority, and that they dominate political discourse and higher education.

Because "anti-intellectual" can be pejorative, defining specific cases of anti-intellectualism can be troublesome; one can object to specific facets of intellectualism or the application thereof without being dismissive of intellectual pursuits in general. Moreover, allegations of anti-intellectualism can constitute an appeal to authority or an appeal to ridicule that attempts to discredit an opponent rather than specifically addressing his or her arguments.^[1]

Anti-intellectualism is a common facet of totalitarian dictatorships to oppress political dissent. The Nazi party's populist rhetoric featured anti-intellectualism as a common motif, including Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.^{[citation needed]} Perhaps its most extreme political form was during the 1970s in Cambodia under the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, when people were killed for being academics or even for merely wearing eyeglasses (as it suggested literacy) in the Killing Fields.^[2]

During the Spanish Civil War and the following fascist dictatorship, General Francisco Franco's civilian repression, the White Terror campaign, killed an estimated 200,000 civilians, targeting heavily writers, artists, teachers and professors. These professionals were seen as probable enemies fostering the cultural and economic changes that Franco had risen in arms to stop, in contrast to Franco's natural ally: a very conservative and unenlightened Catholic Church.

Distrust of intellectuals

Economist Thomas Sowell argues for distinctions between unreasonable and reasonable wariness of intellectuals. Defining intellectuals as "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas" as distinct from those who apply ideas practically, Sowell argues that there can be good cause for distrust of intellectuals. When working in their fields of expertise, intellectuals have increased knowledge. However, when compared to other careers, Sowell suggests intellectuals have few disincentives for speaking outside their expertise, and are less likely to face the consequences of their errors. For example, a physician is judged by effective treatment, yet might face malpractice lawsuits if he harms a patient. In contrast, a university professor with tenure is less likely to be judged by the effectiveness of his ideas and less likely to face repercussions for his errors:

By encouraging, or even requiring, students to take stands where they have neither the knowledge nor the intellectual training to seriously examine complex issues, teachers promote the expression of unsubstantiated opinions, the venting of uninformed emotions, and the habit of acting on those opinions and emotions, while ignoring or dismissing opposing views, without having either the intellectual equipment or the personal experience to weigh one view against another in any serious way.^[3]

Sowell discusses intellectual influence, labeling schoolteachers as what he calls "intelligentsia" who recruit children, beginning in elementary school, to advocate for or against issues as part of "community service" projects, which will later assist them in the college application process. In this manner, intellectuals participate in other areas where they may possess no prior knowledge at all in order to influence public policy issues. The author argues that as a result, they encourage their students to formulate opinions "without any intellectual training or prior knowledge of those issues, making constraints against falsity few or non-existent."^[4]

Similar arguments have been made by others. Historian Paul Johnson^[5] argued that a close examination of 20th-century history reveals that intellectuals have championed innumerable disastrous public policies, writing, "beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice." Journalist Tom Wolfe^[6] described an intellectual as "a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others."

Such views form the basis of an episode of the American animation series The Simpsons, "They Saved Lisa's Brain", in which one of the protagonists joins the local branch of Mensa that through a bizarre series of events, subsequently finds itself in complete charge of the local town of Springfield. Considering themselves to be intellectually superior to the rest of the townsfolk, they high-handedly implement a series of ostensibly logical but socially disruptive public policies that antagonize the rest of the town, with disastrous consequences, and are eventually rebuked by Stephen Hawking who appeared as himself.^{[citation needed]}

Authoritarianism

In the 20th century, intellectuals were systematically demoted or expelled from the power structures, and, occasionally, assassinated. In Argentina in 1966, the military dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía intervened and dislodged many faculties, leading to a massive brain drain in an event which was called The Night of the Long Police Batons.^[7][8] The biochemist César Milstein reports that when the military usurped Argentine government, they declared: "our country would be put in order, as soon as all the intellectuals who were meddling in the region were expelled". In Brazil, the educator Paulo Freire was banished for being ignorant, according to the organizers of the coup d’ État of the moment.^[9]

Flag of Democratic Kampuchea.

Extreme ideological dictatorships, such as the Khmer Rouge regime in Kampuchea (1975–79), killed potential opponents with more than elementary education. In achieving their Year Zero social engineering of Cambodia, they assassinated anyone suspected of "involvement in free-market activities". The suspected Cambodian populace included professionals and almost every educated man and woman, city-dwellers, and people with connections to foreign governments. Doctrinally, the Maoist Khmer Rouge designated the farmers as the true proletariat, as the true representatives of the working class, hence the anti-intellectual purge (cf. Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966–76).

Governmental anti-intellectualism ranges from closing public libraries and public schools, to segregating intellectuals in an Ivory Tower ghetto, to official declarations that intellectuals tend to mental illness, thus facilitating psychiatric imprisonment, then scapegoating to divert popular discontent from the dictatorship (see the USSR and Fascist Italy, cf. Antonio Gramsci).

Moreover, anti-intellectualism is neither always violent, nor oppressive, because most any social group can exercise contempt for intellect, intellectualism, and education. To wit, the Uruguayan writer Jorge Majfud said that "this contempt, that arises from a power installed in the social institutions and from the inferiority complex of its actors, is not a property of "underdeveloped" countries. In fact, it is always the critical intellectuals, writers, or artists who head the top-ten lists of 'The Most Stupid of the Stupid' in the country."^[9]

Educational anti-intellectualism

In the English-speaking world, especially in the US, critics like David Horowitz (viz. the David Horowitz Freedom Center), William Bennett, an ex-US secretary of education, and paleoconservative activist Patrick Buchanan, criticize schools and universities as 'intellectualist'.^{[citation needed]}

In his book The Campus Wars^[10] about the widespread student protests of the late 1960s, philosopher John Searle wrote:

the two most salient traits of the radical movement are its anti-intellectualism and its hostility to the university as an institution. [...] Intellectuals by definition are people who take ideas seriously for their own sake. Whether or not a theory is true or false is important to them independently of any practical applications it may have. [Intellectuals] have, as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out, an attitude to ideas that is at once playful and pious. But in the radical movement, the intellectual ideal of knowledge for its own sake is rejected. Knowledge is seen as valuable only as a basis for action, and it is not even very valuable there. Far more important than what one knows is how one feels.

In 1972, sociologist Stanislav Andreski^[11] warned readers of academic works to be wary of appeals to authority when academics make questionable claims, writing, "do not be impressed by the imprint of a famous publishing house or the volume of an author's publications. [...] Remember that the publishers want to keep the printing presses busy and do not object to nonsense if it can be sold."

Critics have alleged that much of the prevailing philosophy in American academia (i.e., postmodernism, poststructuralism, relativism) are anti-intellectual: "The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is—second only to American political campaigns—the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time."^[12]

In the notorious Sokal Hoax of the 1990s, physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately preposterous paper to Duke University's Social Text journal to test if, as he later wrote, a leading "culture studies" periodical would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."^[13] Social Text published the paper, seemingly without noting any of the paper's abundant mathematical and scientific errors, leading Sokal to declare that "my little experiment demonstrate[s], at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy."

In a 1995 interview, social critic Camille Paglia^[14] described academics (including herself) as "a parasitic class," arguing that during widespread social disruption "the only thing holding this culture together will be masculine men of the working class. The cultural elite—women and men—will be pleading for the plumbers and the construction workers."

In America

John Cotton (1585–1652)

17th century

In The Powring Out of the Seven Vials (1642), the Puritan John Cotton wrote that 'the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee. ... Take off the fond doting ... upon the learning of the Jesuites, and the glorie of the Episcopacy, and the brave estates of the Prelates. I say bee not deceived by these pompes, empty shewes, and faire representations of goodly condition before the eyes of flesh and blood, bee not taken with the applause of these persons.'^[15] Not every Puritan concurred with Cotton's contempt for secular education; some founded universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth.

Economist Thomas Sowell^[16] argues that American anti-intellectualism can be traced to the early Colonial era, and that wariness of the educated upper-classes is understandable given that America was built, in large part, by people fleeing persecution and brutality at the hands of the educated upper classes. Additionally, rather few intellectuals possessed the practical hands-on skills required to survive in the New World, leading to a deeply rooted suspicion of those who may appear to specialize in "verbal virtuosity" rather than tangible, measurable products or services:

From its colonial beginnings, American society was a "decapitated" society—largely lacking the topmost social layers of European society. The highest elites and the titled aristocracies had little reason to risk their lives crossing the Atlantic and then face the perils of pioneering. Most of the white population of colonial America arrived as indentured servants and the black population as slaves. Later waves of immigrants were disproportionately peasants and proletarians, even when they came from Western Europe [...] The rise of American society to pre-eminence as an economic, political and military power was thus the triumph of the common man and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.

The source, Thomas Sowell, describes the effect the American Revolution had on the development of American government, as established by the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In his opinion, the tendency to "disregard" the impartiality of the law depending upon "who you are" rather than what the author describes as the impartiality of the "supremacy of the law" conflicts with the American creed of the common man. According to Sowell, this fundamental right uniquely distinguishes the American character, forged by "the beaten men of beaten races," from that of the arrogant and privileged elites of the European aristocracy.^[17]

19th century

In the history of American anti-intellectualism, modern scholars^{[citation needed]} suggest that 19th-century popular culture is important, because, when most of the populace lived a rural life of manual labour and agricultural work, a 'bookish' education, concerned with the Græco-Roman classics, was perceived as of impractical value, ergo unprofitable—yet Americans, generally, were literate and read Shakespeare for pleasure—thus, the ideal "American" man was technically skilled and successful in his trade, ergo a productive member of society.^{[citation needed]} Culturally, the ideal American was a self-made man whose knowledge derived from life-experience, not an intellectual man, whose knowledge derived from books, formal education, and academic study; thus, in The New Purchase, or Seven and a Half Years in the Far West (1843), the Reverend Bayard R. Hall, A.M., said about frontier Indiana:

"We always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one, and, hence, attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since, unhappily, smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and [like-wise] incompetence and goodness."^[15]

Yet, the egghead's worldly redemption was possible if he embraced mainstream mores; thus, in the fiction of O. Henry, a character noted that once an East Coast university graduate 'gets over' his intellectual vanity—no longer thinks himself better than others—he makes just as good a cowboy as any other young man, despite his counterpart being the slow-witted naïf of good heart, a pop culture stereotype from stage shows.

In Europe

Soviet Union

In the first decade after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks suspected the Tsarist intelligentsia as potentially traitorous of the proletariat, thus, the initial Soviet government comprised men and women without much formal education. Vladimir Lenin derided the old intelligentsia with the expression (roughly translated): 'We have completed no academies' (мы академиев не кончали).^[18] Moreover, the deposed propertied classes were termed Lishentsy ("the disenfranchised"), whose children were excluded from education; eventually, some 200 Tsarist intellectuals such as writers, philosophers, scientists, and engineers were deported to Germany on Philosophers' ships in 1922; others were deported to Latvia and to Turkey in 1923.

During the revolutionary period, the pragmatic Bolsheviks employed "bourgeois experts" to manage the economy, industry, and agriculture, and so learn from them. After the Russian Civil War (1917–22), to achieve socialism, the USSR (1922–91) emphasised literacy and education in service to modernising the country via an educated working class intelligentsia, rather than an Ivory Tower intelligentsia. During the 1930s and the 1950s, Joseph Stalin replaced Lenin's intelligentsia with a "communist" intelligentsia, loyal to him and with a specifically Soviet world view, thereby producing the most egregious examples of Soviet anti-intellectualism—the pseudoscientific theories of Lysenkoism and Japhetic theory, most damaging to biology and linguistics in that country, by subordinating science to a dogmatic interpretation of Marxism.

Fascism

Active philosopher: Giovanni Gentile, intellectual father of Italian Fascism.

The idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile established the intellectual basis of Fascist ideology with the autoctisi (self-realisation) via concrete thinking that distinguished between the good (active) intellectual and the bad (passive) intellectual:

Fascism combats ... not intelligence, but intellectualism... which is... a sickness of the intellect... not a consequence of its abuse, because the intellect cannot be used too much... it derives from the false belief that one can segregate oneself from life.

—Giovanni Gentile, addressing a Congress of Fascist Culture, Bologna, 30 March 1925

To counter the "passive intellectual" who used his or her intellect abstractly, and therefore was "decadent", he proposed the "concrete thinking" of the active intellectual who applied intellect as praxis—a "man of action", like Fascist Benito Mussolini, versus the decadent Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. The passive intellectual stagnates intellect by objectifying ideas, thus establishing them as objects. Hence the Fascist rejection of materialist logic, because it relies upon a priori principles improperly counter-changed with a posteriori ones that are irrelevant to the matter-in-hand in deciding whether or not to act.

In the praxis of Gentile's concrete thinking criteria, such consideration of the a priori toward the properly a posteriori constitutes impractical, decadent intellectualism. Moreover, this fascist philosophy occurred parallel to Actual Idealism, his philosophic system; he opposed intellectualism for its being disconnected from the active intelligence that gets things done, i.e. thought is killed when its constituent parts are labelled, and thus rendered as discrete entities.^[19][20]

Related to this, is the confrontation between the Spanish franquist General, Millán Astray, and the writer Miguel de Unamuno during the Dia de la Raza celebration at the University of Salamanca, in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War. The General exclaimed: ¡Muera la inteligencia! ¡Viva la Muerte! ("Death to intelligence! Long live death!"); the Falangists applauded.^{[citation needed]}

In Asia

Chairman Mao Zedong

China

Imperial China

Qin Shi Huang (246–210 BC), the first Emperor of unified China, consolidated political thought, and power, by suppressing freedom of speech at the suggestion of Chancellor Li Si, who justified such anti-intellectualism by accusing the intelligentsia of falsely praising the emperor, and of dissenting through libel. From 213 to 206 BC, it was generally thought that the works of the Hundred Schools of Thought were incinerated, especially the Shi Jing (Classic of Poetry, c. 1000 BC) and the Shujing (Classic of History, c. 6th century BC). The exceptions were books by Qin historians, and books of Legalism, an early type of totalitarianism—and the Chancellor's philosophic school. (see the Burning of books and burying of scholars). However, upon further inspection of Chinese historical annals such as Shi Ji and Han Shu, this was found not to be the case. The Qin Empire privately kept one copy of each these books in the Imperial Library but publicly ordered that the books should be banned. Those who owned copies were ordered to surrender the books to be burned; those who refused were executed. This eventually led to the loss of most ancient works of literature and philosophy when Xiang Yu burned down the Qin palace in 208BC.

People's Republic of China

The Cultural Revolution was a politically violent decade (1966–76) of wide-ranging social engineering of the People's Republic of China by its leader Chairman Mao. After several national policy failures, Mao, to regain public prestige and control of the Communist Party of China (CCP), on 16 May, announced that the Party and Chinese society were permeated with liberal bourgeois elements who meant to restore capitalism to China, and that said people could only be removed with post–Revolutionary class struggle. To that effect, China's youth nationally organised into Red Guards, paramilitaries hunting the liberal bourgeois elements subverting the CCP and Chinese society. The Red Guards acted nationally, purging the country, the military, urban workers, and the leaders of the CCP, until there remained no one politically dangerous to Mao. The Red Guards were particularly brutal in attacking their teachers and professors, causing most schools and universities to be shut down once the Cultural Revolution began. Three years later, in 1969, Mao declared the Cultural Revolution ended; yet the political intrigues continued until 1976, concluding with the arrest of the Gang of Four, the de facto end of the Cultural Revolution.

Democratic Kampuchea

When the Communist Party of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge (1951–81), established their regime as Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979) in Cambodia, their anti-intellectualism idealised the country and demonised the cities to establish agrarian socialism, thus, they emptied cities to purge the Khmer nation of every traitor, enemy of the state, and intellectual, often symbolised by eyeglasses (see the Killing Fields).

Ottoman Empire

Some of the Armenian intellectuals who were detained, deported, and killed in the Armenian Genocide of 1915

In the early stages of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, around 2,300 Armenian intellectuals were deported from Constantinople (Istanbul) and subsequently mostly murdered by the Ottoman government.^[21] The event has been described by historians as a decapitation strike,^[22][23] which intended to deprive the Armenian population of an intellectual leadership and a chance of resistance.^[24]

Antiscience

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Antiscience is a position that rejects science and the scientific method.^[1] People holding antiscientific views do not accept that science is an objective method, as it purports to be, or that it generates universal knowledge. They also contend that scientific reductionism in particular is an inherently limited means to reach understanding of the complex world we live in. Antiscience proponents also criticize what they perceive as the unquestioned privilege, power and influence science seems to wield in society, industry and politics; they object to what they regard as an arrogant or closed-minded attitude amongst scientists.^{[2][not in citation given]}

History

In the beginnings of the scientific revolution, scientists such as Robert Boyle found themselves in conflict with those such as Thomas Hobbes, who were skeptical of whether science was a satisfactory way to obtain genuine knowledge about the world.

Hobbes' stance is sometimes regarded as an antiscience position:

In his Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics,...[published in 1656, Hobbes] distinguished 'demonstrable' fields, as 'those the construction of the subject whereof is in the power of the artist himself,' from 'indemonstrable' ones 'where the causes are to seek for.' We can only know the causes of what we make. So geometry is demonstrable, because 'the lines and figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves' and 'civil philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth ourselves.' But we can only speculate about the natural world, because 'we know not the construction, but seek it from the effects.'^[3]

It was also Hobbes who "put forth the idea of the significance of the nonrational in human behaviour." ^[4] Jones goes on to group Hobbes along with others he classes as 'antireductionists' and 'individualists,' such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Karl Marx, Jeremy Bentham and J S Mill, and then he adds Karl Popper, John Rawls and E. O. Wilson.^[5]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, claimed that science can lead to immorality. "Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality" and his "critique of science has much to teach us about the dangers involved in our political commitment to scientific progress, and about the ways in which the future happiness of mankind might be secured".^[6] Nevertheless, Rousseau does not state in his Discourses that sciences are necessarily bad, and states that figures like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton should be held in high regard. In the conclusion to the Discourses, he says that these (aforementioned) can cultivate sciences to great benefit, and that morality's corruption is mostly because of society's bad influence on scientists.

William Blake reacted strongly against the work of Isaac Newton in his paintings and writings, and is seen as being perhaps the earliest (and almost certainly the most prominent and enduring) example of what is seen by historians as the aesthetic or romantic antiscience response. For example, in his 1795 poem Auguries of Innocence, Blake describes the beautiful and natural robin red-breast imprisoned by the materialistic cage of Newtonian mathematics and science.^[7] In Blake's painting of Newton, he is depicted "as a misguided hero whose gaze was directed only at sterile geometrical diagrams drawn on the ground".^[8] Blake thought that "Newton, Bacon, and Locke with their emphasis on reason were nothing more than 'the three great teachers of atheism, or Satan's Doctrine'...the picture progresses from exuberance and colour on the left, to sterility and blackness on the right. In Blake's view Newton brings not light, but night".^[9] In a poem, W.H. Auden summarises Blake's anti-scientific views by saying that he "[broke] off relations in a curse, with the Newtonian Universe".^[10]

One recent biographer of Newton^[11] considers him more as a renaissance alchemist, natural philosopher, and magician rather than a true representative of scientific illuminism, as popularized by Voltaire and other illuminist Newtonians.

Antiscience issues are seen as a fundamental consideration in the transition from 'pre-science' or 'protoscience' such as that evident in alchemy. Many disciplines that pre-date the widespread adoption and acceptance of the scientific method, such as geometry and astronomy, are not seen as anti-science. However, some of the orthodoxies within those disciplines that predate a scientific approach (such as those orthodoxies repudiated by the discoveries of Galileo) are seen as being a product of an anti-scientific stance.

The term 'scientism' derives from science studies and is a term spawned and used by sociologists and philosophers of science to describe the views, beliefs and behavior of strong supporters of science. It is commonly used in a pejorative sense, for individuals who seem to be treating science in a similar way to a religion. The term reductionism is occasionally used in a similarly pejorative way (as a more subtle attack on scientists). However, some scientists feel comfortable being labelled as reductionists, while agreeing that there might be conceptual and philosophical shortcomings of reductionism.^[12]

However, non-reductionist (see Emergentism) views of science have been formulated in varied forms in several scientific fields like statistical physics, chaos theory, complexity theory, cybernetics, systems theory, systems biology, ecology, information theory, etc. Such fields tend to assume that strong interaction between units produce new phenomena in higher levels that cannot be accounted for solely by reductionism. For example, it is not valuable (or currently possible) to describe a chess game or gene networks using quantum mechanics. The emergentist view of science ("More is Different", in the words of Nobel physicist Philip W. Anderson)^[13] has been inspired in its methodology by the European social sciences (Durkheim, Marx) which tend to reject methodological individualism.^{[citation needed]}

Political antiscience

Left-wing antiscience

One expression of antiscience is the "denial of universality and... legitimisation of alternatives",^{[citation needed]} and that the results of scientific findings do not always represent any underlying reality, but can merely reflect the ideology of dominant groups within society.^[14] In this view, science is associated with the political Right and is seen as a belief system that is conservative and conformist, that suppresses innovation, that resists change and that acts dictatorially. This includes the view, for example, that science has a "bourgeois and/or Eurocentric and/or masculinist world-view."^[15]

The anti-nuclear movement, often associated with the left,^[16][17][18] has been criticized for overstating the negative effects of nuclear power,^[19][20] and understating the environmental costs of non-nuclear sources that can be prevented through nuclear energy.^[21]

Right-wing antiscience

The origin of antiscience thinking may be traced back to the reaction of Romanticism to the Enlightenment, French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. This movement is often referred to as the 'counter-enlightenment'. Romanticism emphasizes that intuition, passion and organic links to Nature are primal values and that rational thinking is secondary to human life. There are many modern examples of conservative antiscience polemics. Primary among the latter are the polemics about evolutionary theory^[22] and modern cosmology teaching in high schools, and environmental issues related to global warming^[23][24] and energy crisis.

Characteristics of antiscience associated with the right include the appeal to conspiracy theories to explain why scientists believe what they believe,^[25] in an attempt to undermine the confidence or power usually associated to science (e.g. in global warming conspiracy theories).

Religious antiscience

In this context, antiscience may be considered dependent on religious, moral and cultural arguments. For this kind of religious antiscience philosophy, science is an anti-spiritual and materialistic force that undermines traditional values, ethnic identity and accumulated historical wisdom in favor of reason and cosmopolitanism. In particular, the traditional and ethnic values emphasized are similar to those of white supremacist Christian Identity theology, but similar right-wing views have been developed by radically conservative sects of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. New religious movements such as New Age thinking also criticize the scientific worldview as favouring a reductionist, atheist, or materialist philosophy.
A frequent basis of antiscientific sentiment is religious theism with literal interpretations of sacred text. Here, scientific theories that conflict with what is considered divinely-inspired knowledge are regarded as flawed. Over the centuries religious institutions have been hesitant to embrace such ideas as heliocentrism and planetary motion because they contradicted the dominant understanding of various passages of scripture. More recently the body of creation theologies known collectively as creationism, including the teleological theory of intelligent design, have been promoted by religious theists in response to the process of evolution by natural selection.^[26]

Three areas of antiscience

Historically, antiscience first arose as a reaction against scientific materialism. The 18th century Enlightenment had ushered in "the ideal of a unified system of all the sciences",^[27] but there were those fearful of this notion, who "felt that constrictions of reason and science, of a single all-embracing system... were in some way constricting, an obstacle to their vision of the world, chains on their imagination or feeling".^[27] Antiscience then is a rejection of "the scientific model [or paradigm]... with its strong implication that only that which was quantifiable, or at any rate, measurable... was real".^[27] In this sense, it comprises a "critical attack upon the total claim of the new scientific method to dominate the entire field of human knowledge".^[27] However, scientific positivism (logical positivism) does not deny the reality of non-measurable phenomena, only that those phenomena should not be adequate to scientific investigation. Morever, positivism, as a philosophical basis for the scientific method, is not consensual or even dominant in the scientific community (see philosophy of science).

Three major areas of antiscience can be seen in philosophy, sociology, and ecology. The following quotes explore this aspect of the subject.

Philosophy

Philosophical objections against science are often objections about the role of reductionism. For example, in the field of psychology, "both reductionists and antireductionists accept that... non-molecular explanations may not be improved, corrected or grounded in molecular ones".^[28] Further, "epistemological antireductionism holds that, given our finite mental capacities, we would not be able to grasp the ultimate physical explanation of many complex phenomena even if we knew the laws governing their ultimate constituents".^[29] Some see antiscience as "common...in academic settings...many people see that there are problems in demarcation between science, scientism, and pseudoscience resulting in an antiscience stance. Some argue that nothing can be known for sure".^[30]
Many philosophers are "divided as to whether reduction should be a central strategy for understanding the world".^[31] However, many agree that "there are, nevertheless, reasons why we want science to discover properties and explanations other than reductive physical ones".^[31] Such issues stem "from an antireductionist worry that there is no absolute conception of reality, that is, a characterization of reality such as... science claims to provide".^[32] This is close to the Kantian view that reality is ultimately unknowable and all models are just imperfect approximations to it.

Sociology

Sociologist Thomas Gieryn refers to "some sociologists who might appear to be antiscience".^[33] Some "philosophers and antiscience types", he contends, may have presented "unreal images of science that threaten the believability of scientific knowledge",^[33] or appear to have gone "too far in their antiscience deconstructions".^[33] The question often lies in how much scientists conform to the standard ideal of "communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, originality, and... skepticism".^[33] Unfortunately, "scientists don't always conform... scientists do get passionate about pet theories; they do rely on reputation in judging a scientist's work; they do pursue fame and gain via research".^[33] Thus, they may show inherent biases in their work. "[Many] scientists are not as rational and logical as the legend would have them, nor are they as illogical or irrational as some relativists might say".^[33]

Ecology and health sphere

Within the ecological and health spheres, Levins identifies a conflict "not between science and antiscience, but rather between different pathways for science and technology; between a commodified science-for-profit and a gentle science for humane goals; between the sciences of the smallest parts and the sciences of dynamic wholes... [he] offers proposals for a more holistic, integral approach to understanding and addressing environmental issues".^[34] These beliefs are also common within the scientific community, with for example, scientists being prominent in environmental campaigns warning of environmental dangers such as ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect. It can also be argued that this version of antiscience comes close to that found in the medical sphere, where patients and practitioners may choose to reject science and adopt a pseudoscientific approach to health problems. This can be both a practical and a conceptual shift and has attracted strong criticism: "therapeutic touch, a healing technique based upon the laying-on of hands, has found wide acceptance in the nursing profession despite its lack of scientific plausibility. Its acceptance is indicative of a broad antiscientific trend in nursing".^[35]
Glazer also criticises the therapists and patients, "for abandoning the biological underpinnings of nursing and for misreading philosophy in the service of an antiscientific world-view".^[35] In contrast, Brian Martin criticized Gross and Levitt by saying that "[their] basic approach is to attack constructivists for not being positivists,"^[36] and that science is "presented as a unitary object, usually identified with scientific knowledge. It is portrayed as neutral and objective. Second, science is claimed to be under attack by 'antiscience' which is composed essentially of ideologues who are threats to the neutrality and objectivity that are fundamental to science. Third, a highly selective attack is made on the arguments of 'antiscience'".^[36] Such people allegedly then "routinely equate critique of scientific knowledge with hostility to science, a jump that is logically unsupportable and empirically dubious".^[36] Having then "constructed two artificial entities, a unitary 'science' and a unitary 'academic left', each reduced to epistemological essences, Gross and Levitt proceed to attack. They pick out figures in each of several areas -- science studies, postmodernism, feminism, environmentalism, AIDS activism -- and criticise their critiques of science".^[36]

The writings of Young serve to illustrate more antiscientific views: "The strength of the antiscience movement and of alternative technology is that their advocates have managed to retain Utopian vision while still trying to create concrete instances of it".^[37] "The real social, ideological and economic forces shaping science...[have] been opposed to the point of suppression in many quarters. Most scientists hate it and label it 'antiscience'. But it is urgently needed, because it makes science self-conscious and hopefully self-critical and accountable with respect to the forces which shape research priorities, criteria, goals".^[37]

Genetically modified foods also bring about antiscience sentiment. The general public has recently become more aware of the dangers of a poor diet, as there have been numerous studies that show that the two are inextricably linked.^[38] Anti-science dictates that science is untrustworthy, because it is never complete and always being revised, which would be a probable cause for the fear that the general public has of genetically modified foods despite scientific reassurance that such foods are safe.

Antivacinationists rely on whatever comes to hand presenting some of their arguments as if scientific, however a strain of antiscience is part of their approach.^[39]

Opposition to reductionism and positivism

On the limitations of models

A common antiscientific point of contention arises from the fact that mathematical models do not capture the full reality of existence, as can be seen in this quote:

The formulas of mathematical models are "artificial constructions, logical figments with no necessary relation to the outside world". These models always "leave out the richest and most important part of human experience...daily life, history, human laws and institutions, the modes of human self- expression".^[40] A failure to appreciate the subtle complexity of social worlds, means they get excluded from the formulas, even though, "no easy reductionism will do justice to the material". This approach often fails to concentrate "on social structures, processes, and actions in a specific sense (inequality, mobility, classes, strata, ethnicity, gender relations, urbanization, work and life of different types of people, not just elites)", and so tends to generate mostly meaningless oversimplifications.

It is also a common antiscientific point to state that verbal (say, literary and non-mathematical) models are poor representations of reality. If it is clear that a particular statistical or psychological study about romantic love or religious ecstasy (see neurotheology), captures only a tiny fraction of such human experiences, literary accounts and simplified verbal models also cannot adequately convey their full complexity. Both verbal and mathematical models are (partial) maps of reality, providing different points of view, but inherently incomplete descriptions of the territory of human and universe existence (see map territory relation).^{[citation needed]}

Green politics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Green politics is a political ideology that aims to create an ecologically sustainable society rooted in environmentalism, non-violence, social justice, and grassroots democracy.^[1] It began taking shape in the western world in the 1970s; since then Green parties have developed and established themselves in many countries around the globe, and have achieved some electoral success.

The political term Green, a translation of the German Grün, was coined by die Grünen, a Green party formed in the late 1970s.^{[citation needed]} The term political ecology is sometimes used in Europe and in academic circles, but in the latter has come to represent an interdisciplinary field of study, including chemistry and chemical engineering.^{[citation needed]}

Supporters of Green politics, called Greens (with a capital 'G'), share many ideas with the ecology, conservation, environmentalism, feminism, and peace movements. In addition to democracy and ecological issues, green politics is concerned with civil liberties, social justice, nonviolence, sometimes variants of localism^[2] and tends to support social progressivism. The party's platform is largely considered left in the political spectrum.

The Green ideology has connections with various other ecocentric political ideologies, including ecosocialism, ecoanarchism, and ecofeminism, but to what extent these can be seen as forms of Green politics is a matter of debate.^[3]

As the left-wing 'Green' (i.e. capital 'G') political philosophy developed, there also came into separate existence unrelated and polar opposite movements on the right that include ecological components such as green conservatism, eco-capitalism and even ecofascism.

History

Influences

Adherents to green politics tend to consider it to be part of a 'higher' worldview and not simply a political ideology. Green politics draws its ethical stance from a variety of sources, from the values of indigenous peoples, to the ethics of Gandhi, Spinoza and Uexküll. These people influenced green thought in their advocacy of long-term "seventh generation" foresight, and on the personal responsibility of every individual to make moral choices.
Of course, unease about adverse consequences of human actions on nature predates the modern concept of “environmentalism". Social commentators as far apart as ancient Rome and China complained of air, water and noise pollution.^[4]

The philosophical roots of environmentalism can be traced back to enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau in France and, later, the author and naturalist Thoreau in America. Organised environmentalism began in late 19th Century Europe and the United States as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution with its emphasis on unbridled economic expansion.^[5]

“Green politics” first began as conservation and preservation movements, such as the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892.

Left-green platforms of the form that make up the green parties today draw terminology from the science of ecology, and policy from environmentalism, deep ecology, feminism, pacifism, anarchism, libertarian socialism, social democracy, eco-socialism, and/or social ecology. In the 1970s, as these movements grew in influence, green politics arose as a new philosophy which synthesized their goals. The Green Party political movement is not to be confused with the unrelated fact that in some far-right and fascist parties, nationalism has on occasion been tied into a sort of green politics which promotes environmentalism as a form of pride in the "motherland"^[6][7] according a minority of authors.^[8]

Early development

German Green Party co-founder, Petra Kelly, with former German cabinet member, Otto Schily, at press conference in 1983.

In June 1970 in the Netherlands a group called Kabouters won 5 of the 45 seats on the Amsterdam Gemeenteraad (City Council), as well as two seats each on councils in The Hague and Leeuwarden and one seat apiece in Arnhem, Alkmaar and Leiden. The Kabouters were an outgrowth of Provo’s environmental White Plans and they proposed “Groene Plannen” (“Green Plans”).^[9]

The first political party to be created with its basis in environmental issues was the United Tasmania Group, founded in Australia in March 1972 to fight against deforestation and the creation of a dam that would damage Lake Pedder; whilst it only gained three percent in state elections, it had, according to Derek Wall, "inspired the creation of Green parties all over the world."^[10] In May 1972, a meeting at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, launched the Values Party, the world's first countrywide green party to contest Parliamentary seats nationally.^[11] A year later in 1973, Europe's first green party, the UK's Ecology Party, came into existence.

The German Green Party was not the first Green Party in Europe to have members elected nationally but the impression was created that they had been, because they attracted the most media attention: The German Greens, contended in their first national election in 1980. They started as a provisional coalition of civic groups and political campaigns which, together, felt their interests were not expressed by the conventional parties. After contesting the 1979 Euro elections they held a conference which identified Four Pillars of the Green Party which all groups in the original alliance could agree as the basis of a common Party platform: welding these groups together as a single Party. This statement of principles has since been utilised by many Green Parties around the world. It was this party that first coined the term "Green" ("Grün" in German) and adopted the sunflower symbol. In the 1983 federal election, the Greens won 27 seats in the Bundestag.

Further developments

The first Canadian foray into green politics took place in the Maritimes when 11 independent candidates (including one in Montreal and one in Toronto) ran in the 1980 federal election under the banner of the Small Party. Inspired by Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, the Small Party candidates ran for the expressed purpose of putting forward an anti-nuclear platform in that election. It was not registered as an official party, but some participants in that effort went on to form the Green Party of Canada in 1983 (the Ontario Greens and British Columbia Greens were also formed that year). Current Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May was the instigator and one of the candidates and she was eventually elected in 2011 Canadian federal election.^[12]

In Finland, in 1995, the Green League became the first European Green Party to form part of a state-level Cabinet. The German Greens followed, forming a government with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (the "Red-Green Alliance") from 1998 to 2005. In 2001, they reached an agreement to end reliance on nuclear power in Germany, and agreed to remain in coalition and support the German government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in the 2001 Afghan War. This put them at odds with many Greens worldwide, but demonstrated that they were capable of difficult political tradeoffs.

In Latvia, Indulis Emsis, leader of the Green Party and part of the Union of Greens and Farmers, an alliance of a Nordic agrarian party and the Green Party, was Prime Minister of Latvia for ten months in 2004, making him the first Green politician to lead a country in the history of the world. In the German state of Baden-Württenburg, the Green Party is the leader of the coalition with the Social Democrats since the Baden-Württemberg state election, 2011.

Core tenets

According to Derek Wall, a prominent British Green proponent, there are four pillars that define Green politics: ecology, social justice, grassroots democracy and non-violence.^[1]

In 1984, the Green Committees of Correspondence in the United States expanded the Four Pillars into Ten Key Values which, in addition to the Four Pillars mentioned above, include:

• Decentralization
• Community-based economics
• Post-patriarchal values (later translated to Feminism)
• Respect for diversity
• Global responsibility
• Future focus

In 2001, the Global Greens were organized as an international Green movement. The Global Greens Charter identified six guiding principles:

• Ecological wisdom
• Social justice
• Participatory democracy
• Nonviolence
• Sustainability
• Respect for diversity

Ecology

Economics

Green economics focuses on the importance of the health of the biosphere to human well-being. Consequently, most Greens distrust conventional capitalism, as it tends to emphasize economic growth while ignoring ecological health; the "full cost" of economic growth often includes damage to the biosphere, which is unacceptable according to green politics. Green economics considers such growth to be "uneconomic growth"— material increase that nonetheless lowers overall quality of life.
Some Greens refer to productivism, consumerism and scientism^{[citation needed]} as "grey", as contrasted with "green", economic views. "Grey" implies age, concrete, and lifelessness.

Therefore, adherents to green politics advocate economic policies designed to safeguard the environment. Greens want governments to stop subsidizing companies that waste resources or pollute the natural world, subsidies that Greens refer to as "dirty subsidies". Some currents of green politics place automobile and agribusiness subsidies in this category, as they may harm human health. On the contrary, Greens look to a green tax shift that are seen to encourage both producers and consumers to make ecologically friendly choices.

Green economics is on the whole anti-globalist. According to Greens, economic globalization is considered a threat to well-being, which will replace natural environments and local cultures with a single trade economy, termed the global economic monoculture.

Since green economics emphasizes biospheric health, an issue outside the traditional left-right spectrum, different currents within green politics incorporate ideas from socialism and capitalism. Greens on the Left are often identified as Eco-socialists, who merge ecology and environmentalism with socialism and Marxism and blame the capitalist system for environmental degradation, social injustice, inequality and conflict. Eco-capitalists, on the other hand, believe that the free market system, with some modification, is capable of addressing ecological problems. This belief is documented in the business experiences of eco-capitalists in the book, The Gort Cloud that describes the gort cloud as the green community that supports eco-friendly businesses.

Participatory democracy

Since the beginning, green politics has emphasized local, grassroots-level political activity and decision-making. According to its adherents, it is crucial that citizens play a direct role in the decisions that influence their lives and their environment. Therefore, green politics seeks to increase the role of deliberative democracy, based on direct citizen involvement and consensus decision making, wherever it is feasible.

Green politics also encourages political action on the individual level, such as ethical consumerism, or buying things that are made according to environmentally ethical standards. Indeed, many green parties emphasize individual and grassroots action at the local and regional levels over electoral politics. Historically, green parties have grown at the local level, gradually gaining influence and spreading to regional or provincial politics, only entering the national arena when there is a strong network of local support.

In addition, many Greens believe that governments should not levy taxes against strictly local production and trade. Some Greens advocate new ways of organizing authority to increase local control, including urban secession and bioregional democracy.

Other issues

The sunflower is an internationally recognized symbol of Green politics.^[13]

Green politics on the whole is opposed to nuclear power and the buildup of persistent organic pollutants, supporting adherence to the precautionary principle, by which technologies are rejected unless they can be proven to not cause significant harm to the health of living things or the biosphere.

In the spirit of nonviolence, Green politics opposes the War on Terrorism and the curtailment of civil rights, focusing instead on nurturing deliberative democracy in war-torn regions and the construction of a civil society with an increased role for women.

In Europe, Green parties tend to support the creation of a democratic federal Europe.

Although Greens in the United States "call for an end to the 'War on Drugs'" and "for decriminalization of victimless crimes", they also call for developing "a firm approach to law enforcement that directly addresses violent crime, including trafficking in hard drugs".^[14]

Green platforms generally favor tariffs on fossil fuels, restricting genetically modified organisms, and protections for ecoregions or communities. In keeping with their commitment to the preservation of diversity, greens are often committed to the maintenance and protection of indigenous communities, languages, and traditions. An example of this is the Irish Green Party's commitment to the preservation of the Irish Language.^[15]

Organization

Local movements

Green ideology emphasizes participatory democracy and the principle of "thinking globally, acting locally". As such, the ideal Green Party is thought to grow from the bottom up, from neighborhood to municipal to (eco-)regional to national levels. The goal is rule by a consensus decision making process.

Strong local coalitions are considered a pre-requisite to higher-level electoral breakthroughs. Historically, the growth of Green parties has been sparked by a single issue where Greens can appeal to ordinary citizens' concerns. In Germany, for example, the Greens' early opposition to nuclear power won them their first successes in the federal elections.

Global organization

There is a growing level of global cooperation between Green parties. Global gatherings of Green Parties now happen. The first Planetary Meeting of Greens was held 30–31 May 1992, in Rio de Janeiro, immediately preceding the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held there. More than 200 Greens from 28 nations attended. The first formal Global Greens Gathering took place in Canberra, in 2001, with more than 800 Greens from 72 countries in attendance. The second Global Green Congress was held in São Paulo, Brazil, in May 2008, when 75 parties were represented.

Global Green networking dates back to 1990. Following the Planetary Meeting of Greens in Rio de Janeiro, a Global Green Steering Committee was created, consisting of two seats for each continent. In 1993 this Global Steering Committee met in Mexico City and authorized the creation of a Global Green Network including a Global Green Calendar, Global Green Bulletin, and Global Green Directory. The Directory was issued in several editions in the next years. In 1996, 69 Green Parties from around the world signed a common declaration opposing French nuclear testing in the South Pacific, the first statement of global greens on a current issue. A second statement was issued in December 1997, concerning the Kyoto climate change treaty.^[16]

At the 2001 Canberra Global Gathering delegates for Green Parties from 72 countries decided upon a Global Greens Charter which proposes six key principles. Over time, each Green Party can discuss this and organize itself to approve it, some by using it in the local press, some by translating it for their web site, some by incorporating it into their manifesto, some by incorporating it into their constitution.^[17] This process is taking place gradually, with online dialogue enabling parties to say where they are up to with this process.^[18]

The Gatherings also agree on organizational matters. The first Gathering voted unanimously to set up the Global Green Network (GGN). The GGN is composed of three representatives from each Green Party. A companion organization was set up by the same resolution: Global Green Coordination (GGC). This is composed of three representatives from each Federation (Africa, Europe, The Americas, Asia/Pacific, see below). Discussion of the planned organization took place in several Green Parties prior to the Canberra meeting.^[19] The GGC communicates chiefly by email. Any agreement by it has to be by unanimity of its members. It may identify possible global campaigns to propose to Green Parties worldwide. The GGC may endorse statements by individual Green Parties. For example, it endorsed a statement by the US Green Party on the Israel-Palestine conflict.^[20]

Thirdly, Global Green Gatherings are an opportunity for informal networking, from which joint campaigning may arise. For example, a campaign to protect the New Caledonian coral reef, by getting it nominated for World Heritage Status: a joint campaign by the New Caledonia Green Party, New Caldonian indigenous leaders, the French Green Party, and the Australian Greens.^[21] Another example concerns Ingrid Betancourt, the leader of the Green Party in Colombia, the Green Oxygen Party (Partido Verde Oxigeno). Ingrid Betancourt and the party's Campaign Manager, Claire Rojas, were kidnapped by a hard-line faction of FARC on 7 March 2002, while travelling in FARC-controlled territory. Betancourt had spoken at the Canberra Gathering, making many friends. As a result, Green Parties all over the world have organized, pressing their governments to bring pressure to bear. For example, Green Parties in African countries, Austria, Canada, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, France, Scotland, Sweden and other countries have launched campaigns calling for Betancourt's release. Bob Brown, the leader of the Australian Greens, went to Colombia, as did an envoy from the European Federation, Alain Lipietz, who issued a report.^[22] The four Federations of Green Parties issued a message to FARC.^[23] Ingrid Betancourt was rescued by the Colombian military in Operation Jaque in 2008.

Global Green meetings

Separately from the Global Green Gatherings, Global Green Meetings take place. For instance, one took place on the fringe of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Green Parties attended from Australia, Taiwan, Korea, South Africa, Mauritius, Uganda, Cameroon, Republic of Cyprus, Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the USA, Mexico and Chile.

The Global Green Meeting discussed the situation of Green Parties on the African continent; heard a report from Mike Feinstein, former Mayor of Santa Monica, about setting up a web site of the GGN; discussed procedures for the better working of the GGC; and decided two topics on which the Global Greens could issue statements in the near future: Iraq and the 2003 WTO meeting in Cancun.

Green federations

The member parties of the Global Greens are organised into four continental federations:

• Federation of Green Parties of Africa
• Federation of the Green Parties of the Americas / Federación de los Partidos Verdes de las Américas
• Asia-Pacific Green Network
• European Federation of Green Parties

The European Federation of Green Parties formed itself as the European Green Party on 22 February 2004, in the run-up to European Parliament elections in June 2004, a further step in trans-national integration.

Currents

Green politics is usually said to include the green anarchism, eco-anarchism, anti-nuclear and peace movements – although these often claim not to be aligned with any party. Some claim it also includes feminism, pacifism and the animal rights movements. Some Greens support policy measures to empower women, especially mothers; to oppose war and de-escalate conflicts and stop proliferating technologies useful in conflict or likely to lead to conflict, and Great Ape personhood.

Greens on the Left adhere to eco-socialism, an ideology that combines ecology, environmentalism, socialism and Marxism to criticise the capitalist system as the cause of ecological crises, social exclusion, inequality and conflict. Green Parties are not eco-socialist but some Green Parties around the world have or have had a significant Eco-socialist membership.^{[citation needed]}

Despite this stereotype, some centrist Greens follow more geo-libertarian views which emphasize natural capitalism – and shifting taxes away from value created by labor or service and charging instead for human consumption of the wealth created by the natural world. Greens may view the processes by which living beings compete for mates, homes, and food, ecology, and the cognitive and political sciences very differently. These differences tend to drive debate on ethics, formation of policy, and the public resolution of these differences in leadership races. There is no single Green Ethic.