The homeopathic, vitamin and herbal supplement, Eastern medicine movement is a reaction to the high handed arrogance of the American medical establishment. As I do not know any vaccine deniers personally, I am not sure if they are part of the old medicine continuum. When my wife was pregnant, a co worker gave her an anti vaccine book, which I was curious about. After leafing through it I realized it contained no facts, only anecdotes and vague attempts to conflate correlation and causality. The anti science phenomenon is only one symptom of the irrationality phenomenon, that ugly child of American anti intellectualism.
Boys are conditioned to believe that it is un-manly to be smart. People of intelligence are sent clear signals to hide their gift, so the average people don't feel threatened. Later in life, nerds and eggheads are tolerated only insofar as they make the gadgets run and keep bringing advancements in standard of living. Evangelical Protestantism instructs us that simple minds are honest minds with Godly spirits. So nobody wants to be smart. We don't want, especially to be dumb, but surely not one of those Others. And so we come to a place where, as Stephen Colbert observed, everyone has their own set of facts.
In the particular case of science, most people don't have any meaningful exposure to it in schools. Modern science is intertwined with mathematics, a difficult discipline that is often taught poorly in primary schools. Lack of mathematical fluency is a barrier to much scientific understanding. In addition, the discipline of logic is not taught in primary schools. And it is an essential tool for evaluating what might or might not be true.
-- BSG-075
(To reply, click here)
I mostly agree. I grew up in an environment where intelligence was tantamount to a grotesque physical deformity. It was agonizing. I've since grown up, have overcome this, and left that part of America. It's a really odd phenomenon that seems to have a patchy distribution across the U.S. Also, it's not just restricted to the U.S. I've seen this sort of attitude in other parts of the world where Christianity has nothing to do with anything. How do we measure something like anti-intellectualism?
-- bksmell
(To reply, click here)
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The homeopathic, vitamin and herbal supplement, Eastern medicine movement is a reaction to the high handed arrogance of the American medical establishment. As I do not know any vaccine deniers personally, I am not sure if they are part of the old medicine continuum. When my wife was pregnant, a co worker gave her an anti vaccine book, which I was curious about. After leafing through it I realized it contained no facts, only anecdotes and vague attempts to conflate correlation and causality. The anti science phenomenon is only one symptom of the irrationality phenomenon, that ugly child of American anti intellectualism.
Boys are conditioned to believe that it is un-manly to be smart. People of intelligence are sent clear signals to hide their gift, so the average people don't feel threatened. Later in life, nerds and eggheads are tolerated only insofar as they make the gadgets run and keep bringing advancements in standard of living. Evangelical Protestantism instructs us that simple minds are honest minds with Godly spirits. So nobody wants to be smart. We don't want, especially to be dumb, but surely not one of those Others. And so we come to a place where, as Stephen Colbert observed, everyone has their own set of facts.
In the particular case of science, most people don't have any meaningful exposure to it in schools. Modern science is intertwined with mathematics, a difficult discipline that is often taught poorly in primary schools. Lack of mathematical fluency is a barrier to much scientific understanding. In addition, the discipline of logic is not taught in primary schools. And it is an essential tool for evaluating what might or might not be true.
-- BSG-075
(To reply, click here)
I mostly agree. I grew up in an environment where intelligence was tantamount to a grotesque physical deformity. It was agonizing. I've since grown up, have overcome this, and left that part of America. It's a really odd phenomenon that seems to have a patchy distribution across the U.S. Also, it's not just restricted to the U.S. I've seen this sort of attitude in other parts of the world where Christianity has nothing to do with anything. How do we measure something like anti-intellectualism?
-- bksmell
(To reply, click here)