Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Dipping the non-economic oar in: James Hogan's "Kicking the Sacred Cow"

You can see excerpts of this book, Kicking the Sacred Cow by James P. Hogan, online, and for that reason I will, with one exception, only seriously discuss the excerpted chapters. I feel it's largely subsumed in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science by Tom Bethell, but since Chris Mooney and John Farrell are already analyzing that book, I will make the beginnings of an analysis of Hogan's book, since his only claim to fame is as a relatively popular and successful science fiction author (known mainly for the Giants series), and hence, falls into the area this specialty weblog encompasses.

Both the author's starting statement:
Science really doesn't exist. Scientific beliefs are either proved wrong, or else they quickly become engineering. Everything else is untested speculation.
And the contents:
  1. Humanistic Religion: The Rush to Embrace Darwinism
  2. Of Bangs and Braids: Cosmology's Mathematical Abstractions
  3. Drifting in the Ether: Did Relativity Take A Wrong Turn?
  4. Catastrophe of Ethics: The Case for Taking Velikovsky Seriously
  5. Environmentalist Fantasies: Politics and Ideology Masquerading As Science
  6. Closing Ranks: AIDS Heresy In The Viricentric Universe
tell you a great deal.

My summary would be quite different from Hogan's wannabe aphorism* above. I would say his two actual epistemological rules are (1) The more Biblical theory is always right and (2) the crank is always right. Nothing much else could really explain such a tendentious and one-sided analysis of science.

How this fits into this weblog's specialty: Both Ecco (commenting on 14 signs of fascism in general) and Britt (trying them on for size in the United States of the current era) note the assault on science by the fascist system in favor of traditionalism, theocracy, and corporate interests. Most of my emphasis will be on the "corporate interests" part, but I thought I would start off with one that's mostly traditional and theocratic.

As a background, recently the author has written fiction defending and retelling Velikovsky's "worlds in collision" theory, so I will start with Hogan's defense of Velikovsky, in my very next post. It's not excerpted in the online preview, but it is in his fiction books, and his comments in various places on the internet.

*The construction of which is a trait he shares with Robert Heinlein, who's the patron saint of science fiction conservatives.

Much as Orson Scott Card has done with Mormon theology and cosmology. But Card is much more open about promoting Scriptural beliefs about reality as he sees them than Hogan is. Hogan is a committed "back-door" attacker of science, more like the people in the Discovery Institute.

2 comments:

Marion Delgado said...

tom:

If you look at my 2nd footnote, you'll see you and I are on exactly the same page here.

Thanks for being my first commenter!

Marion Delgado said...

lars, that's something i absolutely never thought of. Reminds me of James Watt (sec. of Interior under Reagan) who combined millenarianism with market fundamentalism, and also of how the Gaia Hypothesis of Lovelock and Margulis, for some, entailed the idea that anything that was under ice during the glaciation must not be important to the ecology anyway.

(Herman Kahn, author of Thinking the Unthinkable said the same thing, that it was okay to irradiate the far north if need be - where the radiation from a nuclear exchange would go - because obviously the Earth didn't need it.)