New Age drivel

New Age drivel and superstition posing as science are threatening our progress, wrote Johann Hari in the Independent on 25 May 2005.

For an example of pseudo-science, check out the new movie 'What the Bleep Do We Know?' … over the past few decades, the enemies of science have evolved (oh, the irony). Rather than attacking the Enlightenment from the front, pedlars of irrationalist and superstitious theories have begun to claim that their beliefs are simply alternative and equally valid scientific theories. They have adopted the style (but not the techniques) of scientific discourse. Now, they construct fake evidence to meet their preordained religious conclusions – and demand scientific respect for it.

The full text is available here. He writes:

Science under siege: How relativism is threatening progress – and the poorest suffer

The South African President Thabo Mbeki has enthusiastically picked up this rhetoric, attacking the "hegemony" of Western science and claiming it is "colonialist" to argue HIV causes Aids. … Similarly, the Hindu fundamentalist BJP party that governed India from 1998 to 2004 aggressively promoted something called "Vedic science". … fewer and fewer people seem able to spot the difference between science and pseudo-science. The people who stuff their faces with "alternative medicines" (now available on the NHS in some parts of Britain) are no more scientific than Thabo Mbeki or the BJP. Science-sapping postmodernists have popularised a false equality between sense and nonsense. This has replaced the real equality of all people before the rigours of the scientific method, which is not "Western"- just ask the Arabs who pioneered it, or the tens of millions of people in Africa whose lives have been saved by the scientific eradication of smallpox.

But if we in the developed world cannot resist the rise of New Age drivel and neo-creationism, if even we say it's all relative, what hope do people in more desperate circumstances have against their own anti-scientific charlatans?

Posted by Peter Astwood