Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Monday, July 1, 2024

Shutting down the Ontario Science Centre is Doug Ford’s nod to the far right

It is that simple.  Apparently, there are problems with a number of aging concrete roof panels, once the widespread product of an earlier era.  The immediate decision to shutter the landmark building, without consideration of any meaningful – and, in some cases, generous - alternative proposals, notably from the architectural firm which was behind the original design, tells us something is amiss.  No other public building with similar panel problems has been shuttered by the province.[1]  Why? Or, should we say: why not?

Democracy is a product of the Scientific Revolution.  Britain was at the forefront of this development, and we see it particularly in the mindful work of Francis Bacon.  In a nutshell, Bacon introduced the empirical method to a new way of thinking about politics: we see ‘evidence’ of this (another scientific notion) in England’s civil war period.  When Charles I lost his head in 1649, an event which was followed by the Republican rule of Oliver Cromwell, it indicated an experimental approach to politics.  Following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when many Protestant dissenters (Puritans among them), decided to leave England for America, their impulse was, again, guided by an experimental outlook.[2]

As scientific knowledge was gained, so too was overseas land, which leads us to the today’s vogue of “postcolonialism” and “postmodernism”.[3]  I have explained elsewhere that the Left in the present climate can also be a stranger to science, borrowing from Heidegger (through Derrida), but my purpose today is not to skewer all forms of anti-scientific ‘prejudice’.

The Right has long had an antipathy towards science, save perhaps for its love-hate relationship with Darwinism. Science is historically linked to ideas of Enlightenment, Progress, Universalism, Humanity (and its Emancipation), because, in a word, each person is supposed to ‘count’– in that empirical way of measuring the individual.

But as Democracy today craters across the globe, there is a retreat from science. We saw it during the pandemic: Poor Dr. Fauci, among all the other Chief Medical Officers. Truth matters even less nowadays, and to my mind we have borrowed polemics from the period of the Dreyfus Affair, when antisemitism (surprise, surprise) was especially virulent (before the Nazis industrialized it).  It did not matter that the Jewish Captain Dreyfus was innocent. Truth had to be sacrificed to life.[4]  Similarly, Trump’s lie that the election was stolen continues to motivate millions of his followers.  Again, there is no accountability for the attack on Congress on January 6th.   Constitutional justice, founded on Locke and the early Enlightenment, continues to be denied.

As science ebbs from the political scene, we see the emergence of political anti-humanism, which denigrates the value of the individual, also amplified by de-humanizing wars.  This is an epochal change. In effect, we are retreating to a period prior to the Renaissance, which was traditionally characterized by humanism, now regarded as Eurocentric (as is science) and insensitive to the Indigenous perspective.   Today I see a return to the Middle Ages – to dynasties, to Chieftains, and to the Divine Right of Kings, which Trump so clearly incarnates.

This is why members of Doug Ford’s Conservative government were falling over themselves to shutter – as quickly as possible - the perils of the Ontario Science Centre.  What better way is there to discredit science than to abandon a beloved building long devoted to the education of Science?

 



[1] “How much of the Ontario Science Centre roof is at risk of collapsing?  See for yourself.” CBC News, posted online June 28, 2024, updated June 30, 2024.

[2] Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: University Press, 2008), p. 16.

[3] Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge |University Press, 2001), p. 9.

[4] Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, tr. Walter D. Morris, et al., intro. by Mark Lilla (New York: New York Review of Books, 2021), p. 173.

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