- How America is becoming anti-science and anti-intellectual, with a comment by David Brin;
- Adam Serwer on Trump’s attack on knowledge itself, with my comments about how most people won’t notice, but the world and history will;
- How Americans venerate ancestors who were, in fact, religious fanatics, with seven Puritan credos that reflect base human nature;
- And ideas for a secular story of existence, which, I suspect is probably not possible.
NY Times, TheUpshot, 22 May 2025: Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades [gift link]
The National Science Foundation, which funds much of the fundamental scientific research at American universities, is awarding new grants at the slowest pace in at least 35 years.
The funding decreases touch virtually every area of science — extending far beyond the diversity programs and other “woke” targets that the Trump administration says it wants to cut.
That is, the administration isn’t bothering to use wokeness as an excuse — they’re cutting science anyway. Why would that be?
Saw this via David Brin on Facebook, who comments:
Nothing more purely describes what unites the MAGA/confederate masses with their oligarch overlords. The former hate all fact professions as smartypants know-it-alls. Especially science but also civil servants, FBI/intel and even the US military officer corps. The latter (oligarchs) know that fact people are the only clades left, standing in the way of a return to 6000 years of feudalism.
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And this.
The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 27 May 2025: The New Dark Age, subtitled “The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself.”
From the author of The Cruelty Is the Point.
The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.
Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.
Long essay, each paragraph somehow more grim than the previous.
These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.
By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.
Going on with attacks against institutions of higher education.
I’m of two minds about these matters. One is that, as I’ve said about broad historical changes, *most people won’t notice.* They will carry on their day-to-day lives and they don’t pay attention the accumulated knowledge of humankind over the past hundreds or thousands of years. If challenged, most would dismiss such knowledge in favor of their religion, or whatever else makes them feel comfortable. They use the technology that’s resulted from this accumulated knowledge by rote, as if it were magic.
On the other hand, these matters will change America’s status in the world. Other nations, especially China, *will* keep investing in science, and they will make the breakthrough discoveries in, say, cancer prevention, that the US might have made. But, as a secondary effect, most Americans will not understand or appreciate this. The US scientists who fled to Europe, or even China, will.
And furthermore on this other hand — history will be the judge. It will record the deliberate self-sabotage of American science, and its surrender to the base tribal forces that gave its license to our moron authoritarian president.
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Americans, all peoples I suppose, venerate their ancestors, or founders, whether or not those old folks were crazy by modern standards. Pilgrims and Puritans. But if you look back honestly, America was founded by religious fanatics. And perhaps this explains America’s current culture.
Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 26 May 2025: How America got so weird: The Pilgrims made us do it, subtitled “Those guys who landed at Plymouth Rock were a doomsday cult, says Jane Borden — and we’ve emulated them ever since”
This is an interview…
Jane Borden’s “Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America” develops a simple thesis: The English Pilgrims who famously landed at Plymouth Rock were essentially a doomsday cult — even if they lacked a charismatic leader — and together with the Puritans who followed them passed on seven key elements of belief that have shaped America ever since. Even as some aspects of their beliefs have faded, these key elements survive in multiple different forms and settings, from pop culture to multilevel marketing schemes and a wide range of spiritual practices and beliefs that migh otherwise seem to have little in common.
I’m going to skim through and compile those seven key elements, but first, the interview begins this way:
You begin your book with a brief description of the Pilgrims as a doomsday cult, and go on to say, “We’ve been iterating on its prototype since. We can’t stop re-creating our first trauma,” although it remains “largely unacknowledged.” What led you to see the Pilgrims as America’s foundational cult?
Well, around 2018 I became very preoccupied by the division in our nation, the cultural and political division. I’d been reporting on cults at the time, and I knew that cults feed off division and that division is fueled by cults in turn. I started to see cultic thinking in America everywhere in pop culture, entertainment and politics, and I just started pulling on the thread. How long have we had this knee-jerk anti-intellectualism? Why are we so obsessed with the illusion of perfection? I just kept pulling that thread and it took me all the way back to the 1620s and 1630s.
The interview questions then follow those seven key elements, or Puritan credos, which I will bullet list:
- our innate desire for a strongman to fix our problems and punish those who aggrieve us
- the temptation to feel chosen, which justifies acting on our base desires
- knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism
- our impulse to buy and sell salvation on the open market
- hard work is holy, while idleness is a sin
- how quickly and easily we fall into us-versus-them thinking
- an innate need for order, which makes us vulnerable to anyone screaming, ‘Chaos!’ and then offering control
Each of these points leads to examples from history.
On the fifth point, Brownoski identified this as a key element of the industrial revolution…
On the sixth point, the interviewer says this:
But this chapter seems to get at the underlying dynamic behind the whole book: That thinking has origins in our evolutionary past, but our cultural evolution has produced a distinctive Western mindset, expressed most fully in America, which is in tension with that past, and the inclination to join cults reflects a reaction to that. I think that sums it up, but I’d like to hear you elaborate on that.
And there’s a recommendation of that Henrich book, which I have but have not yet read.
And the interview ends:
Cults are situations where there are no checks on power. The reason America has been so successful is because of checks and balances. We learn that in second grade. When you don’t have checks on power, that’s when everything goes to s**t. Whether you’re talking about corporate governance or our current flirtation with autocracy or about a cult who have moved off the radar onto an island somewhere, what you’re dealing with is the danger of unchecked power.
Comments: These are all elements of base human nature, a running theme here, just not expressed in those terms. Also: this fits neatly into the stories about suppression of education.
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Finally for today, an essay about understanding existence that does not rely on the ancient, supernatural, religions. Is such a thing possible?
OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 26 May 2025: Seeking a secular story of existence, subtitled “All worldviews need to address the deepest questions.”
Offhand, I would say, of course it’s possible. But not for most people. It takes some education to understand that humans do not live at the center of creation. That our drives for beliefs in an afterlife are driven by wishful thinking, and are not consistent with humanity’s understanding of the actual world as built up over the past few centuries. The “deepest questions” are the wrong questions.
In the early years of the 21st century, the New Atheist wave, headed by Christopher Hitchens, gleefully anticipated the decline of religion, which they considered a malign influence in the world. While they were not uniformly anti-spiritual—Sam Harris was especially spiritually oriented—they were largely cheerful materialists. Undirected forces and matter were the stuff of existence. Mark Lilla described this materialist orientation in political terms: secularists had no truths worth killing over, unlike religious believers.
Only one member of the New Atheist wave—Philip Kitcher in Living with Darwin—expressed the concern that this materialist worldview might prove demoralizing for ordinary people.
How do things look now, approaching 20 years later?
In America and much of the West, the decline in religious affiliation accelerated in the new century. Today, approximately 30% of American adults identify themselves as “nones”—reporting that they are unaffiliated with any religious tradition. Many former houses of worship stand empty. No American religious figure today captures the attention of the culture the way that Reinhold Niebuhr did in the 1950s and Billy Graham did in the 1960s.
Religion is definitely in decline.
And this:
The materialist story favored by the New Atheists asserts that the universe is a dark and lonely place. Random forces and matter lead to unpredictable outcomes, like the emergence of life, but do not yield any meaningful pattern. Humans have evolved a need for meaning and purpose and a fundamentally moral orientation to existence. But these feelings do not reflect anything in reality. They are an evolutionary spandrel, arising out of the need for social organization without constant coercion. In other words, our feelings are illusory.
This story is brisk, a little tragic, but it is bracing. Science has certainly advanced following it.
Well, yes. This is what systematic investigation of reality (i.e. science) has revealed about the world.
The other story is more difficult to describe but it better coheres with human yearning. In this story, the universe is ordered and rational and can be said to lead naturally to complex organization, life, consciousness, self-consciousness, empathy, generosity and love. This is the universe as understood by Alfred North Whitehead, classically, and recently by Bobby Azarian in his book, The Romance of Reality. In this story, human needs reflect reality.
I have that Azarian book, have read 75 pages, and decided to backtrack to some earlier books before returning. I’ll get back to it.
