The Insanity of Letting Scientists Off The Hook

Nearing the end of my toleration for things at a certain blog I used to frequent, I got into a big fight with several of the regulars, disagreeing with one of them when he said that mathematics was divorced from morality.  I think it was in the form of snark, something like what next, they're going to blame mathematics for (insert whatever appropriate moral atrocity you can think of).

I said that since mathematics was done by people and had no other existence that mathematics was as morally characterized by what they did with it as anything else they used in life.  I gave the example of those who did the calculations surrounding the construction of the Nazi death industry, going so far as to calculate the need for coal in incinerating enormous numbers of bodies, counting on the flammable adipose in the bodies, if some of my more soul searing memories serve me.

Well, you'd have thought I'd proposed eating third-world children, the reaction that got.  Or worse, considering the venue, that I'd said the Rolling Stones were untalented white covers who stole every thing they got from black musicians using it to peddle a racist, misogynistic message to white audiences.  I mean, they went on and on, some of them snarking about what I'd said for days.  I'd challenged them to show that mathematics had an independent existence, apart from the human intention that created it and used it for any kind of end, including some of the most depraved calculations of mega-deaths and other things that mathematicians are employed to do.

No, mathematics takes on the moral character of whatever use it is employed for, the teachers who teach it know that it has uses that are criminal and morally atrocious, they know that any class could contain students who will use the knowledge they impart to grease machinery of death and the suicide of the human species, the murder of species and entire biological systems, even all of it.   There is no double magisteria, there is only the one mind that contains both the mathematics and the intentions to which it is consciously put and the knowledge of its potential use. And yet the discussion of the morality of how  it can be used is considered a foul pollution of the pure and pristine vessel of mathematical knowledge.  This, to put it plainly, is insanely delusional thinking.

It is one of the stupidest things about modernism, the alleged enlightenment that has brought us to this hurtling pitch to extinction, that we allow scientists and mathematicians to divorce their extremely potent and effective professional products from the use which they know it will be put to.  It is especially absurd and ridiculous when materialists conveniently pretend that science is some disembodied benevolent god substitute, inevitably good and beyond questioning of the kind that any other human invention and institution should be subjected to.  And, all the while, denying that they have turned science into the equivalent of religion in a theocratic state.   It's is even more absurd than that, because science IS effective, it can produce results, it can magnify human power and potency, it can produce far greater evil than the most malicious of dictators unaided by the products that scientists produce for them.  Stalin without nuclear weapons was an extremely accomplished murderer, made unstoppable by the conventional weapons at his disposal.  Once scientists had given him atomic weapons, it was impossible to get rid of him.  The same thing is true for the North Korean government, perhaps the most evil in history.  Which is why its scientists produced the bomb, to protect the military dictators from the possibility of invasion or attack.

Scientists are the repository of science, it is an internal tool box at their disposal and put to the use they use it for.  It is a producer of tools. Quite often, I'd expect most often, scientists have no higher motive in what they do than they get paid to do it. They have been given permission to divorce the product they produce as effectively as a camp guard did from what he did at work in Poland in 1942.  No one should be made comfortable when they are producing evil, no one should be able to claim that they are merely scientists, impartially pushing forward the quest for knowledge, having no responsibility for the entirely known and intentional results of the science they are producing.   Scientists don't do their work without knowing the potential of it being put to the most evil use, in many cases that use is exactly what they are contracted to enable.

The superstition of the materialists that science is some pure, some chaste, pursuit is entirely more dangerous than people believing that Adam and Eve were the first human beings who got kicked out of the Garden of Eden for eating from the tree of knowledge.   It was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, something that the human species has obviously gorged itself on, especially the evil part.   The pretense that these atheists have about science is entirely more absurd, that it, somehow, has returned to the state of innocence that they don't even believe in to start with. Well, it hasn't, scientist's haven't, and the evidence disabusing anyone that is is that pure and innocent, Edenic state, is there to look at all around us.  It is the most ubiquitous evidence of depravity that there is today. Absolving scientists from having to at least live with which they choose, for good or evil, is the most absurd superstition among the self-congratulating, conceited, so-called educated class today