George, apropos of your new ankle-biter, no doubt you recall that we have witnessed effete, anti-intellectual assaults of the kind Vedder mentions, i.e., “simply attack them with ad hominem diatribes rather than a careful analysis of the underlying arguments.” One fun weakness of them, however, is that they are well situated for counterblasts on their shoddiness and vapidity (two examples).
I think Vedder‘s following paragraph bears repeating:
I am deeply worried that we are retreating from the spirit of fact-based scientific method that has categorized most of human inquiry since the Enlightenment, and returning to an earlier, less positive and more destructive approach to observing the world, reaching conclusions based on faith instead of facts and reason. The “faith” of today is not the religious faith of the Middle Ages or Renaissance, but rather an ideologically driven secular set of values that shows contempt for freedom, individual dignity, and for reaching conclusions on the basis of reasoned evidence. This problem can be found among persons on both the left and right of the political spectrum, although I think it is more intense among those on the left.
Vedder goes on to discuss academics allowing the politicization of science, especially with respect to climate change, a topic we’ve discussed here frequently.
