Green Mountain Ruminations

Recently I had the pleasure of reading Was it Something I Said? by Dan Collins, a Vermontian who has long been a favorite blogger of mine, first when he was a contributor at Jeff Goldstein's Protein Wisdom and now as the proprietor of his own blog, Piece of Work in Progress. Collins's book is a collection of some of his best blog posts over the years, covering such topics as the rise of the blogosphere, literary theory, politics, and the lamentable state of contemporary academia. On that final matter, Collins reproduces a post he originally wrote for Protein Wisdom titled "The Death of Literary Studies" wherein he writes:

There was a time in literary studies in the not-too-distant past when it was still possible to speak of the “pleasure of the text,” and when the pleasure derived from the act of reading (and all the concommitant questions of deriving meaning) was considered important enough to justify the study of literature in and of itself. In fact, it’s likely that most people are still recruited to the study of literature in large part by their own experience of that pleasure. Somewhere along the line, though, the academy decided that that in itself was not sufficiently relevant. It became necessary to justify the project of literary criticism with respect to its efficacy as a motivator of social change.

Regrettably, the agenda of pursuing "social change" has taken root throughout academia, such as in my own academic field - history - as well as in the hard sciences. As Collins wrote yesterday, the notion of "post-normal science" is spreading.

What is post-normal science? It is, according to Silvio O. Funtowicz and Jerome R. Ravetz, an approach to science that is "emerging…in contrast to traditional problem-solving strategies, including core science, applied science, and professional consultancy," that "can provide a path to the democratization of science, and also a response to the current tendencies to post-modernity." Collins explains: "In other words, truth is a preterite bourgeois construction that has been superseded by the fierce political urgencies of now. It is the rhetorical handmaiden of socialist political rhetoric." Indeed, and it is rather ironic that this concept is spreading at a time when we have a president whose supporters claimed would restore science to its rightful place following the "anti-science" theocratic hegemony of the "fundamentalist" George W. Bush.

Certainly readers of this blog will recall the endless telephonic squeals of those who claimed the existence of a "Republican War on Science" during the past decade - there was even a book published with that title - even as President Bush was funding NASA's most ambitious project in decades, the Constellation program, which the "enlightened" Obama recently canceled. You cannot get any more anti-science than that: terminating a space exploration project that would have provided a multitude of benefits in terms of scientific inquiry and research in favor of directing NASA's attention to the non-existent crisis of anthropogenic global warming.

I swear, November 2012 cannot come soon enough. In the meantime, read Dan Collins's book. You won't regret it.