Tom Friedman, who's usually far too forgiving of Bush's Iraq policy and too blasé about outsourcing for my taste, today dips a toe into the water of the implications of the Bush Administration's science policies and comes up with THE must-read op-ed piece of the year thus far.
One aspect of the Administration's kowtowing to the Christian Right that no one wants to talk about is the kind of impact the hostility to science that is an inevitable outcome of the particular flavor of Christian "faith" that regards only the contents of a book written thousands of years ago as containing truth.
A few years ago, Bush made a lot of noise about Mars, but has since been silent; perhaps because if something resembling Earth-style carbon-based life once appeared on Mars, what does it do to the Biblical account of creation?
The biggest fallacy in Biblical literalism is its presupposition that what God does, and the scope of what God can do (assuming for the time being that "God" is the big white alpha male in the sky that is at the center of the Judeo-Christian tradition), is even fathomable by humans. You'd think a deity would have a lot more dimensions than we're capable of giving h/im/er. But anthropomorphosing God is at the heart of today's breed of Bible-thumpers, and therefore, anything that conflicts with the Bible is a threat to their view of reality. This is how you get, as Friedman says,
...an administration that won't lift a finger to prevent the expensing of stock options, which is going to inhibit the ability of U.S. high-tech firms to attract talent - at a time when China encourages its start-ups to grant stock options to young innovators. And we have movie theaters in certain U.S. towns afraid to show science films because they are based on evolution and not creationism.
We have an administration that wants to expand religious education based on unthinking belief in the Bible over education based on thought and reason and exploration. We have an administration that "is proposing cutting the Pentagon's budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year - after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million." The United States is the only industrialized state without an explicit national policy for promoting broadband. South Korea has a higher percentage of people with broadband internet access than the U.S. does.
This Administration, and the political party it represents, aren't about progress. They aren't about change. They aren't about learning. What they are about is essentially turning the U.S. into Taliban Afghanistan -- a backwards nation, full of uneducated people coerced into mindless belief in the literal truth of a book. It's hard to imagine the U.S. if it had been led by people like this in its pre-20th century history. From Thomas Jefferson, down into the Industrial Revolution, to the initial development of the assembly line, to the creation of the first mainframe computer, to the development of personal computers for home use, to microelectronics, to the internet, the U.S. is what it is today because of science and learning and knowledge and the human quest to know, to reach, and to understand.
If we allow this country to descend into religious superstition, all the stockpiles of bombs in the world won't save us.
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