The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Author:Steven Sloman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-02-10T15:41:10+00:00

EIGHT

Thinking About Science

Acts of destruction are usually repellent. This makes it surprising that one young man’s act of destruction turned him into a folk hero. This man was an apprentice in a knitting factory in Leicester, England, in the late eighteenth century, at the dawn of the industrial revolution. When a supervisor chastised him for poor work, he flew into a rage and smashed his knitting machine into pieces with a hammer. (At least that’s how the story goes.) The young man’s name was Ned Ludd, and he would become the patron saint of a group of protesters called the Luddites.

The Luddites were disturbed by the fast pace of technological change in England at the time, which they saw as threatening their livelihoods and values. Their favorite tool of protest was the “Great Enoch,” a giant sledgehammer—crafted by a blacksmith named Enoch Taylor—and they used it to smash industrial machinery throughout England. They also clashed with police in scuffles that often turned deadly. The Luddites claimed to be led by a mysterious figure called King Ludd, Prince Ludd, or General Ludd. In reality, no such person existed. It was a merely a shout-out to Ned Ludd’s act of defiance in Leicester.

Protest movements based on political and economic grievances usually fade fairly quickly from the public imagination, and the details of Ned Ludd’s smashing of his machine are not that well known today, but the Luddites have been a cultural touchstone for centuries. The reason the Luddites made such a mark is because the act of smashing the most advanced technology of the day symbolizes a deep strain in human thinking. Some people have always looked upon science and technology with distrust and apprehension, and despite the astonishing scientific progress in the last century, antiscientific thought is still strong today. At the extreme are self-identified “neo-Luddites,” like the participants in the Second Luddite Congress of 1996, a meeting organized around opposition to the “increasingly bizarre and frightening technologies of the Computer Age.” But you don’t have to look hard to find numerous mainstream examples, examples that represent serious danger to our future well-being. A reasonable skepticism toward science and technology is probably healthy for society, but antiscientific thinking can be dangerous when it goes too far.

Perhaps the most important issue of our day is climate change, a debate suffused with antiscientific rhetoric. James Inhofe, a senator famous for bringing a snowball to the Senate in 2015 to argue against the reality of climate change, has been a leading antiscience voice for many years. In 2003 he took direct aim at seventeen of the most influential climate scientists, threatening them with criminal prosecution and calling them out for deceit: “With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.” Inhofe’s claims have been discredited, but his message continues to resonate. He’s been elected to the Senate by Oklahomans in four successive elections, most recently in 2014, with 68 percent of the vote.

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