By Lynda Walsh
Why did an atheist like Carl Sagan speak a lot approximately God? Why does NASA climatologist James Hansen plead with us in his contemporary e-book to not waste "Our final likelihood to avoid wasting Humanity"? simply because technological know-how advisors are our new prophets, Lynda Walsh argues in Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy. She doesn't declare, as a few students have, that those public scientists push scientism instead for faith. really, she places forth the provocative argument that prophetic ethos is a versatile kind of charismatic authority whose functionality is to fabricate sure bet. Scientists usually are not our merely prophets, Walsh contends, yet technology advisors predictably practice prophetic ethos each time they should convince their publics to do so or fund uncomplicated learn.
Walsh first charts the family tree of this hybrid scientific-prophetic ethos again to its roots in old oracles earlier than exploring its flourishing in seventeenth century Europe. She then tracks its performances and mutations via numerous very important late-modern occasions in the US: Robert Oppenheimer's function within the commencing of the atomic age; Rachel Carson's interventions in pesticide use; the mass-media polemics of technological know-how popularizers reminiscent of Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Stephen Jay Gould; and at last the UN's weather swap panel and their function in Climategate. alongside the best way, Walsh highlights the distinct moral and political defects embedded within the family tree of the scientist-prophet, and he or she finishes through comparing proposed treatments. She concludes that with no radical shift in our type of deliberative policy-making, there's little probability of remedying the dysfunctions in our present science-advising process. A cogent rhetorical research of over 1,000 archival files from 10 historical instances, Scientists as Prophets engages students of medical rhetoric, historical past, and literacy, yet is usually available to readers drawn to the roots of present political debates concerning the atmosphere, nuclear strength, and technology schooling.
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Extra info for Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy
Sample text
Thus, the Greeks who consulted Delphi watched the Pythia’s behavior closely through the laurel smoke for strangenesses—strains of chaotic illegibility that demonstrated that Apollo had overwhelmed her rational mind and was speaking through her. 33 But if we look again at Plutarch’s account of the frenzy and death of the Pythia, we see that it provided a unique motivation that transcended the Greeks’ obsession with separating cosmos from chaos. For Delphi to function successfully as an oracle, petitioners had to bring more with them than money and goats: they had to bring a willingness to recognize chaotic events as ordered and significant.
13 Once this difference could be expressed in language and logic, it could be politicized. And from there, it was a short step to arguing that difference gave “us” rights that “they” were not entitled to, a step the West has since marched to over and over in its various imperialist projects. 15 This antinomy puts an ironic frame around the authority that the Pythia wielded in the drama of Cleisthenes’s petition. First, the Pythia herself was xena, a non-Athenian “stranger,” and, secondly, a woman—so, she represented the very groups who had been traumatized by nearly every name on Cleisthenes’s list.
I have neither sent them nor commanded them nor spoken to them; they are prophesying to you a false vision, divination, futility and the deception of their own minds. ” While this might seem at first blush to be a divine monologue (ventriloquized by the prophet), in fact, it frames a dialogue between Yahweh and the people, mediated by the prophet. During this dialogue, the symbolic actions each party takes condition the other parties’ responses. The Old Testament is full of passages in which the people repent in response to a jeremiad.