Without Qualification?

Various comments which were far too abusive to put up, and which defamed several third parties, have demanded to know whether I was, variously, "a scientist" or "an economist".

Time was when scientists understood that science only arose, and can only function, within a much wider intellectual and cultural framework, to which scientists, as such, have no more privileged access than anyone else. That, for the most part (and there are certainly exceptions), they no longer do understand this is why we are subjected to widespread hypochondria about potential food supplies, to quackery at public expense, to the superstitious drivel that deprives us of nuclear power, and so on. If scientism were only damaging to its proponents, then things might be less urgent. But it is not.

Scientists can be barefaced liars, as were that lot at UEA over climate change, and as are those who advocate utterly useless embryonic stem cell "research". But they screech "We are scientists! We are scientists!" when challenged. So what? Yet on that basis, we all suffer as climate change is used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages and working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

And we all suffer as funding is denied to truly effective, ethically unproblematic research into adult and cord blood stem cells, being diverted instead into junk motivated by nothing except the desire to annoy the Catholic Church that educated many of the junk-mongers. Note that the results from church schools are better in the natural sciences as pointedly as in everything else. But people can fall in with the wrong crowd at university.

People whose specialisation had not been at the expense of their general education would no more succumb to the tautologous creation myth of Nazism, Marxism and liberal capitalism than they would call those same undeniable biological processes by a name rich with teleological, ethical and aesthetic meaning yet claim that no such meaning attached to that word "when we use it". As a comment here yesterday pointed out, how ruinous of science is the Postmodernism of that?

Then there is the most forthright advocate of their position, who routinely appeals to teleogical and aesthetic arguments for his proposition that the only objective truth is that obtained by the application of the natural-scientific method. As I said, specialisation at the expense of general education. To put it at its very, very politest. And as I said, if this sort of rubbish were only damaging to its proponents, then things might be less urgent. But it is not.

Speaking of Nazism, Marxism and liberal capitalism, if any historian behaved in relation to Nazi Germany as the UEA climate change fabricators behaved in relation their data, or as the embryonic stem cell "researchers" behave in relation to theirs, then he would be drummed out. Think of David Irving. They are in that league. But they expect to be beyond question. There are still a few aged historians defending the Soviet Union, and some defenders of liberal capitalism will probably live as long as I do, although their number will have dwindled to almost none by the time that I attain even my Biblical three score years and ten. But that does not make them any better. Nor does it make those equally politicised scientists who are directly comparable to them any better.

Bringing us to economists. Economists are almost invariably referred to as "brilliant". How brilliant have they proved themselves to be over the last few years? It is very high time to look into how many of them are really City or Wall Street boys who do a bit of academia or upper-end journalism on the side, but who, in this country, spend most of their time around the City boys who do a bit of Ministering on the side. Even their institutional homes for academic, never mind journalistic, purposes are largely or entirely funded by whom, exactly? A lesson to the Michael Goves and David Milibands of the world who want for-profit universities, pernicious vanity projects to rank with their beloved "free" schools.

Like population control, like "climatology" as set out above, like the organisation of political science on a spectrum devised by Continental Marxists and not really applicable in practice even to their own countries, like the entire sex education industry going back to Kinsey and his gang of psychopaths, like embryonic stem cell "research", like the historiography of science assumed by the likes of Richard Dawkins, like Biblical criticism, like its underlying liberal theology, and like that theology's underlying concept of the rational or empirical method as somehow existing apart from Augustinian illuminism as a whole, to name but a few, almost all economics at least as taught to Sixth Formers and undergraduates or given media attention (the "free" market) is an example of an academic discipline constructed to "prove" highly politicised presuppositions, so that it cannot come to any other conclusion, and so that no one who doubts that predetermined conclusion can ever have any part in the peer review process.

But once the practitioners of all these and more are out on their ears, what should we do with vast sums of money saved, and why?