I was raised by an anthropologist to be an anthropologist*, with all that entails.

She also raised me to be christian, I suppose, though never with much enthusiasm. And though she tried, disability and intermittent poverty meant that what science education she was able to provide was spotty.

I never told her I was an atheist. I think it's possible she was one, too.

When I was a young college student in the 1990s, I encountered postmodernism. I flirted with it. It was seductive. A professor I respected warned me to be careful with it. I was.

When I was a young mother in the 1990s and into the new millennium, I scoured every children's book purporting to be about science before I brought it home. Creationism was seeping into the world my children inhabited.

The resurgence of creationism in education in the 2000s—and the resistance to it—became one of the defining cultural battles to play out during my young adulthood.

I thought I understood where the resurgence came from. I had, to my horror, brushed up against reactionary christianity as a teenager. I had seen these people in their own environment. So I thought I could see the bulk of the iceberg under the wedge at the surface.

But what I was able to see didn't quite explain the anti-vaxxers.

That particular branch of anti-science sentiment was as likely to be embraced by "progressive" hippy homesteaders as reactionary christian natalists. Where did the anti-vaxxers come from?

What lead to denial of reality across the political spectra?

I did not know about the science wars in the 1990s. I did not know the role postmodernism played in driving anti-science sentiment on the right. I want to understand.

I'm reading Did the Science Wars Take Place? by William Gillis @rechelon . There are pieces missing in my understanding, and I want to slot them in. I want to understand the whole. Reading this book is part of that.

I'm going to share quotes and thoughts as I make my way through the book. You're welcome to join me. Scroll down in the linked thread. Let's try to work this one out.

Here's the thread: https://kolektiva.social/@calendsofapril/115169983053251178

*I am not an anthropologist. By the standards of the academy, I am not anything. I am an anarchist.

#realism #postmodernism #creationism #anthropology #anarchism #theory#amReading #reflections