The attack on modern natural science has come from a number of sources... [I]t starts ...on the left with a series of intellectual developments... Fr… - Francis Fukuyama

" "

The attack on modern natural science has come from a number of sources... [I]t starts ...on the left with a series of intellectual developments... French structuralism that then develops into post-structuralism, postmodernism and ultimately into different varieties of contemporary critical theory, the premise of which is that there's... a subjectivity in the way that we perceive the world. We don't so much perceive an objective reality, as impose reality on the world through the words that we use. This... culminates... in the thought of Michel Foucault, who's a very brilliant philosophical observer, but he began to argue that... modern science is not an objective cognitive technique, it is really something that elites use to manipulate people... [I]n previous years they could simply order the death of one of their subjects, but now they use science and the authority that science carries, to convince people of certain things that are essentially a way of holding power over them... [H]e applies this to things like incarceration, homosexuality, mental illness and the like, but by the end of his career had... broadened the idea of to... include much of what we understand to be modern natural science, and so the skepticism of science really starts on the progressive left. It has now completely moved over to the nationalist populist right. So during the COVID epidemic and... to the present... there are many people on the extreme right around the world that... argue, just like Foucault, that what the public health authorities are telling you about vaccines or about masking is... not based on objective science. It's based on... the elite desire to manipulate you, and it's really a game about power, rather than about the truth. You combine that with the internet and the new digital technologies that have wiped away all of the former gatekeepers, like the traditional media or... other credible sources of scientific information that used to certify information. You combine that with a principled belief that there really is no such thing as objective truth, and you get the situation... we now face, in which, at least in the United States... we can't agree on whether vaccines are safe, ...who is the winner of the 2020 presidential election and the like...