{"id":114477,"date":"2019-12-19T00:44:18","date_gmt":"2019-12-19T07:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=114477"},"modified":"2019-11-22T21:50:07","modified_gmt":"2019-11-23T04:50:07","slug":"the-rise-of-cleverdumb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2019\/12\/the-rise-of-cleverdumb.html","title":{"rendered":"The Rise of Cleverdumb"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"ImageOne of the fun things to contemplate is how little more than our ancient ancestors we laypeople know about the science and technology from which we benefit. As Michael Flynn once challenged his readers<\/a>, prove to me right now, without recourse to books or media resources that the earth is in motion orbiting the sun and turning on its axis.\u00a0 Good luck with that.<\/p>\n

Or, alternatively, as Milton Friedman used to love to challenge people, explain to me how a pencil is made or, better still, make one yourself. Not for nothing are most people eaten in first few months after The Change in S.M. Sterling\u2019s chipper and cheery fantasy Dies the Fire<\/em><\/a> (which basically thrusts us into a world where all technology depending on electricity or the internal combustion engine ceases to work). Most of us do not have the slightest idea what we would do if we we were suddenly thrown back on our own resources.\u00a0 We live in a vast web of technology that we trust works and that we trust somebody else to understand.\u00a0 Civilization would fall to pieces if we did not.<\/p>\n

A vast amount of what we unscientific laity \u201cknow\u201d is, in fact, received in exactly the same way Catholics receive revelation: from people in priestly garments called \u201clab coats\u201d who we ordinary people trust to be handing on a reliable Tradition and who, for the most part, we trust to know what they are talking about.<\/p>\n

If we had to really<\/em> satisfy for ourselves that every bit of scientific and technological knowledge we simply trust to be accurate and to work was not part of a vast conspiracy to fool us, we would be terrified to get out of bed.<\/p>\n

So: Describe how, beyond the vaguest hand waving and generality, this blog entry got from me to you. You can\u2019t and neither can I. Oh, sure, you have a vague image of something called \u201cbits\u201d bouncing off satellites and so forth, because you watched a Discovery Channel show and imagine that the CGI cartoon you saw is \u201cscience\u201d and not media experts dumbing the real science down so you can understand it. In the same way, Disney dumbed down the picture of the atom for your sixth grade science class<\/p>\n