I go into this here: 2001: A Space Odyssey: Shining Light on How Far We've Come.

In pointing this out, I do not call for complacency. These trends - expanding our horizons of worry, exploration, concern, inclusion and so on - are the core essence of my life, in activism, science and science fiction. But it is important to note that this progress was not achieved by radical polemicists and cynics, who deny that we have already made great progress. 

It was propelled by science, which examined and demolished old taken-for-granted assumptions. It was propelled by millions who mixed idealism with pragmatism... the realization of the stupidity of wasting human potential by limiting options for women and minorities, for example. 

 

Some claim that we must let our wisdom catch up with advances in technology, suggesting that we would be better off if we slowed or suppressed changes in technology. I disagree -- I believe that technology has not yet caught up with our wisdom..

Indeed, there is no greater enemy of further progress than the cynics who declare that great progress HAS NOT ALREADY HAPPENED. 

Political correctness is not the driver of progress, but an unpleasant waste product of progress, unavoidable but to be navigated with high boots, while helping the best civilization in human history to get... and note this phrase... even-better.

There are delightful moments when everything comes together: either you find a person who is right a lot and has expanded your horizons re: what’s possible… or you find the opposite extreme: a sublime rationalizer who induces stunned amazement at his universal wrongness, opening your eyes to the true diversity of the species we belong-to.

 

Here is an article  -- Why Do the Anarcho-Primitivists Want to Abolish Civilization -- about an anarcho-primitivist… once a confidant of the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski… who makes statement after statement that is not only retro-nostalgic, but absolutely, provably and universally false.

Dvorsky does a good job leading Zerzan onto limb after limb, where Zerzan then saws them himself. Alas, George does not ask “what is the carrying capacity of the Earth in hunter gatherers?" That would have exposed Zeran’s prescription for what it is — a call for the death of billions.

 

And yes, as a LONG RANGE goal, convincing billions to have so few children that we equilibrate at a few hundred thousand, or a few millions, who superficially are hunter-gatherers but are augmented by science and background tools so that they avoid the true tormented and horrific life that our pre-agriculture ancestors *actually* lived? Well, that at least is something that could be argued, in a science fictional sort of way. (See the final episode of Battlestar Galactica). Wrongheaded, but nowhere near as much as Zeran.

 

Indeed, in my Brightness Reef Trilogy, I posit a strong reason why several galactic races might deliberately choose this path, diving into every-more primitive states in order to achieve a type of redemption. I do not refuse to contemplate such ideas! I just like them to be contemplated well and with sincere willingness to tradeoff reality-grounded ideas… not bizarrely reality-detached wish fantasies.

 

The important lesson here is that the crazy far right may be our biggest problem, today, with its campaign to restore the feudalism that oppressed 99% of our ancestors since agriculture. (There is a sub-movement on that side that openly seeks a return to lordship-rule). But retro-troglodytic-nostalgism also includes some who might be called “leftist,” who want the other kinds of oppression that preceded agriculture.

 

Both retro movements are crazy. Their common theme is rejection of tomorrow. But the enlightenment civilization that brought us science and wealth and education and positive sum games... and especially the much-smarter-than-us kids who might weigh the evidence better than we can -- is still the only way that humanity might choose to navigate the difficult path ahead.

 

 

Continuing re the march of the paranoids... In Stop Pretending That Liberals are Just As Anti-Science as Conservatives, Chris Mooney does service by cataloging in great detail the gone-mad American right’s War on Science. Here, he (on Mother Jones) attempts to prove that the American left is not “just as bad as the right” in reviling science. Mooney both succeeds and fails. On his side of the ledger...

 

(1) Yes, the crazy-wing of the left is smaller (though it include examples like Mr. Zeran), and...

 

(2) The flakiest types on the left have only picked a few topics, for example, GMOs and anti-vaccination. Most have not joined an across-the-board hatred of science, and...

 

(3) In each of those campaigns, there appear to be just as many conservatives.

 

Where Mooney stumbles is in trying to soft-pedal the blatant fact that America’s far-left does contain some anti-science tendencies. You can find one root source in the left’s bastion — several hundred university soft-studies departments, where mutant versions of that intellectual disease -- post-modernism -- still metastacize and thrive. Sure, that's a small sliver of American life, but an important one and a realm wherein their cult is just as horrifically loony and anti-future and conspiratorial as any corporate boardroom or teaparty cult cell! If you have ever spent substantial time on campus, you know the lesson these infestations prove…

 

...that dogmatic bullies will gather, wherever they can get away with it. And then find rationalized incantations to justify their bullying.

 

(Especially irksome is the way so many (not all!) university literature and English departments have been reflexively hateful toward science fiction, the one branch of literature for which Americans should be most proud. This is starting to shift. But recent attempts to undermine a crown jewel — The University of California at Riverside’s Eaton SF Collection — serve as case in point.)

 

Two books that delve further into this subject: The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, as well as Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell (of the excellent science blogging site, Science 2.0)

 

Let me reiterate — there is no comparison of MAGNITUDE between the very-far-left’s little islands of cranky, highly specific, anti-future science hating… and the vastly, vastly larger and more deadly-to-us-all madness that has taken over the entire American right. Go ahead and read Chris Mooney’s article!

 

Just remember to keep a wary eye on your allies.