Voodoo Child: ‘Unite Behind the … European Colonialism, Imperialism, Patriarchy, and Racism!’
Climate activists often highlight the slogan: “Unite Behind the Science”. In doing so, these high-minded compassionate souls are unwittingly — and innocently — welcoming the wolf of fascism into the henhouse. That’s because “Science”, in the sense understood through the slogan above, is now known to be rooted in the following grand buffet of historical evils:
“The underlying ontological assumptions that made the modern Western worldview and project are increasingly recognized as the roots of European colonialism/imperialism, patriarchy, racism and the ecological crisis, while ethnic/religious/political fundamentalisms in Europe and North America harden against the loss of ontological security (Stein, Hunt, Susa & Andreotti, 2017; Davutoglu, 2014a, 2014b). “
There’s “science” for you. Science is the Western worldview and ‘way of knowing’. It’s driving us straight into the waiting arms of the SS and herding humanity onto the cattle cars — next stop Auschwitz. So, no matter how well-meaning, don’t proudly emblazon that dirty word on your windbreakers. It’s tantamount to stenciling a swastika on your forehead. Didn’t “science” (and it’s bastard stepchild technology) crucially enable this climate inferno in the first place?
And look who’s behind the ‘science.’ What exactly is the ‘I’ lurking like a serpent in the otherwise unimpeachable ‘IPCC’? That ‘I’ stands for “Intergovernmental”! Government is just another brutal jackboot on the throat of the people. Your slogan should be: Become unintergovernable!
Science is now passé anyway:
“Our Western understanding of humanity, inherited from the Renaissance to the present, and providing the foundation for the social sciences and humanities, is now seen as a provincial enclosure of the qualities and possibilities of human existence (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). The modern subject is now seen as the mask behind patriarchy, racism and interrelated practices of capitalist and colonial forms of domination and oppression. The violent and destructive consequences of the nature/culture dualism, for example, call for post-dualist understandings of the human condition and its symbiotic intersections with nature, society and technology.”(Baker, 2019)
Got that? Science is rooted in dualism. And dualism is the butane fueling the blowtorch that’s incinerating the future of all generations to come (if any), right now, as we speak. Climate scientists may appear to be temporarily useful idiots in the struggle for climate justice. But you shouldn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Feel the heat on your own skin, just out the door. Don’t climb in bed with class enemies.
Alt-right Nazis frequently prattle about George Orwell’s potboiler novel ‘1984’, in relation to their supposed reverence for preservation of ‘free speech’ and ‘free thought’. Those elements of the book are Orwell’s streaks of stinking reactionary stain that he was unable to hide. But what the Nazis and Klansmen never dare highlight is where Orwell actually got it right (accidentally no doubt) and where we post moderns can really learn from him. The politically correct view of ‘science’ was laid out succinctly by Orwell (although, to safeguard his miserable reputation in his own parasitic social class, he cunningly spoke the truth through the mouth of the “villain” — the torturer O’Brien):
‘The world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny — helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.’
‘Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.’
‘But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals — mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.’
‘Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.’
‘But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.’
‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometers away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the center of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’
Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:
‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometers away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?’
That is the correct view of ‘science’. At some point, the perhaps regrettable but inevitable arrests, trials and final sanctions of climate change deniers will begin. And you may feel that’s all well and good, quite as it should be. But as that phase wraps up, the search for those who’ve waved the banner of ‘science’ will commence. And it won’t be pretty.
(In the sequence below, the center boy in panel 1 has signaled indifference to the teacher’s call for climate action, necessitating her application of a terminal sanction)
