Intellectualism and Science – a dangerous correlation?

As a historian, I have to take information from a wide variety of sources.  You will find any social scientist doing much the same thing.  I studied history both from an arts and a social science perspective, so I do a little of both, although I have to say I err on the side of social sciences.  I simply find the arts side of an intellectual pursuit of history a bit flowery and a little bit too much like guesswork.

In the last few years, I have seen more and more posts saying that ‘if it isn’t scientific, it isn’t true.’  I think this is just as dangerous as saying that creativity is insanity.  It is a very dangerous precedent.  Where, I wonder, do people imagine knowledge comes from, if not from testing a ‘mad’ idea that popped into your head?

The vast majority of new science is funded – someone paid for the pursuit of the knowledge.  As such, it seems to me, that it is very much tied up with our corporatist future.  If the public are led to believe that only a wo/man in a white coat can tell you the truth, then no alternative knowledge is to be respected, and you are automatically a crank, even when you are right.

Not to denigrate the strides made in the pursuit of scientific research in relation to health, but we are seeing more and more previously discredited knowledge being hijacked in the name of science.  Only yesterday, I was reading that a company had ‘discovered’ that inflammation had an impact on health, and were researching it.  Anyone who has ever been involved with natural health has this as basic knowledge.

Therefore, the scenario I described in Best Scandal Ever is swiftly coming true.  It is a very difficult thing to combat, without making an impact on culture.  I see more and more advertising reminiscent of the 1950s, ‘scientific’ replacing ‘natural’ as being highly desirable.  Sooner or later, in our march towards our genetically engineered and very unhealthy, both economically and literally, future, we will be told that natural is dirty and not good for us.

Having dealt with a lot of jealous middle-aged men over the last few years, who all kept telling me that my new found health was invisible to them, that my diet was a disorder, and that eating properly was unscientific because it did not fit in with what they had been told by our corrupt board of nutrition, I have direct experience of how dangerous this is, and how narrow minded it makes people.  Therefore, when I see articles suggesting that anyone arguing against commonly accepted ‘science’  I feel quite sorry for the person who has mistaken science for intellectualism, and who is no longer capable of free thinking research or objective testing.

The example of my mother is a case in point – if I had not had the experience of the last ten years, with my father having been starved to death by the NHS under the Liverpool care plan, to make life more convenient, a common practice, (deaths from Alzheimers in Scotland leapt up by a whopping 31% in one year, for example)followed by my own spectacular recovery from a condition regarded by the NHS as not worth bothering with not once but twice now, I would not have had the confidence to stand up and fight them off when they began the process of drugging my mother to death.  As it is, I did, and she is doing very well and has made a good recovery from her stay in hospital.  The point is, that the possession of authority does not translate to correct or morally right.  The point is also that low denomination understanding of centuries of knowledge is likely to be pretty damned basic.

The real question is – why are these so-called intellectuals rejecting knowledge that has been acquired over centuries for corporate-sponsored information delivered by a man in a coat?  Have they lost their capacity for imagination or open mindedness?  The hostility is astonishing.  At one point, my aging friend was drinking a product entirely composed of chemicals just because it looked more ‘scientific’ than my highly technical natural diet.  He sat and watched me reverse my age by at least ten years, and still fought me every step of the way.

There has to be some way of stopping this rot and encouraging imagination, open-mindedness and selective information gathering before it is too late.  All that this current climate of science worship is fostering is a lack of enquiry.  This is not good for the future of science, never mind the future of humanity because without imagination, without independent thought, and without alternative knowledge sources, the pool from which to draw will become very narrow indeed.