Barchan wrote:
jrjones9933 wrote:
As an actual skeptic, this seems fine to me. How is it not racist when animals don't exist until a white guy in a lab coat ticks them off on his clipboard? Science has earned a lot of this criticism, and has absolutely been used as a tool of colonialism.
I agree, and can think of many examples of science being used as a tool of oppression and prejudice.
To many scientists, black Africans were considered as a separate species. They weren't human, according to some. Charles Darwin was extremely racist; he considered the black African to be a separate
genus from white man. The Australian aborigines were almost completely wiped out by colonialism, simply because they didn't register as human to racist white anthropologists. Even in modern times, white supremecists will use arguments like "Australian aborigines don't have such-and-such gene, that means they're not human!"
When you look at historical oppression of gay people, most of the time it was justified by the scientific literature of the day. People use evolutionary psychology to rationalize sexist views about women; the transgendered face discrimination due to biology. I can't think of a single form of bigotry that isn't rooted in the ideas of scientists, other than religious intolerance (which, by its very nature, falls outside the scope of science).
Oppression of women, and gays, is "rooted in science"?
"Rooted"?
That particular sentence is objectively 100 percent false.
Woman and gays were oppressed around the world for thousands of years in many cultures (western and nonwestern alike) before the rise of modern science in Renaisance Europe in the last five centuries, and before European imperial expansion started in the same era.
Further-the oppression of women and gays was certainly codified and enforced (if not actually "rooted") not in the "science" of any culture, but largely in the religions, especially by the Abrahamic relgions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) that spread around western Eurasia in the last 20 centuries.
And pagan cultures oppressed women for centuries prior to the rise the modern monotheistic religions. So you could argue that oppression of women is not "rooted" even in living religions either, but religion certainly played the enforcing and justifying role a lot longer than did early modern science.
It is the historical case that the operative science of cultures has been used to support bigotries, and at times has produced bigoted ideas.
To say that these ideas were later proven false does not undo the fact that they were produced through scientific professions. Those ideas in the time they were garnering scientific support, were regarded as scientific and quite often arose by the same sort of available information and professional environments which other scientific claims were made. And that is because of some the flaws of science as it has been commonly practiced. The scientific professions have contributed to the production of bigoted ideas.
Now one can say that there are religions which have contributed to bigotries, but its not a dichotomy. There are a number of things which contribute to bigoted thinking and their have been elements of both religions and sciences which have contributed.
17 Oct 2016, 5:55 pm
