F–k Anti-Science
Last week was a really, really rough week. Worse than usual, even. Scary terrible things happening, and very suddenly and unexpectedly, as is usually the case with scary terrible things. Lots of complex and intense feelings I didn’t know how to handle. Lots of memories of really awful things that happened to me in the past deciding they’re not keen on being ignored right now. Lots of stuff that had been building up all Spring kind of arriving at a bit of tipping point into badness. And the terrifying realization that having spent almost my entire adult life as an addict means I never actually learned how to deal with rough patches like this. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, or how to get through this, or how to cope. Just kind of have to make it up as I go along.
On Tuesday I met up with my BFF at the comic book store, and we went to sit in the nearby park for a bit and talk. She noticed that my knuckles looked rather red, and asked if I’d been punching the wall or something. I hadn’t, but it kind of occurred to me that I totally did find a punching bag of sorts that morning on the internets in the form of a nice argument against someone promoting dodgy anti-science attitudes of the lefty-academic, post-structuralist vein. The idea that science is this nasty “Western” imperialist concept that pretend it knows everything and thinks it’s the One True Path and disrespects other “ways of knowing” and tries to colonize everyone’s minds and get us all to fit into some particular Western conceptual framework and blah blah blah.
I got a tad more aggressive than usual.
I’m not sure, however, that aggression is an inappropriate response to these attitudes.
When it’s come to confronting attitudes and beliefs I saw as damaging amongst the activist, “progressive” movements to which I belong, I’ve often been hesitant and timid. A lot less open in my opposition, and a lot more likely to simply “agree to disagree”, leave subjects alone and untouched. There’s a lot of fear in that. Perhaps I’m scared of being hated. Perhaps I’m scared of losing friends. Perhaps I’m scared of alienating my allies, scared of falling out of any wider movement and no longer having a community to belong to. Scared of belonging to nothing, to no one, no longer being a part of anything beyond myself. Scared of ending up an isolated misanthrope, fighting a lonely angry war, with no one left I’m actually fighting for. Standing for nothing except pride and a stubborn adherence to inflexible, abstracted principles.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/06/26/f-k-anti-science/
long, but wonderful
= new reply since forum marked as read
...bite our tongue...and not in the sense of being timid but a sense of not wanting to
denigrate other people's beliefs for fear (or kindness) of not hurting them.... especially
if you agree with them on 10's of other issues.
It's almost like the corny saying "Know when to hold them and when to fold um"
