“Passion governs, and she never governs wisely,” warned Benjamin Franklin in 1775. This apparently has been forgotten — so thoroughly, in fact, that now emotion is sometimes prescribed as a governing factor in the most obviously objective of realms: science.
Just consider the Washington state Department of Health’s climate curriculum, which counsels teachers to emphasize “emotions” over “rational thinking.” The appeal is in “Climate Change & Pregnancy,” the second phase of the five-part curriculum that purports to aid students in learning the “intersections of biological, societal, and environmental issues.”
The curriculum reads, “As teachers and students consider the impacts of climate change, we should be mindful of the emotional dimensions of the human experience. For too long, science and science education have prioritized … rational thinking. As we delve more deeply into the impacts of climate change using the data [from the Washington Tracking Network] and the practices of the Next Generation Science Standards, we must learn to pay attention to our own emotions and those of other people.”
Emotions “signal alignment or discord between cultural values and technical assertions,” the curriculum further states. It also claims that not acknowledging emotion suggests “arrogance” and can “weaken important relationships for getting things done.”
Stating the obvious, Todd Myers, environmental director of the free-market-oriented Washington Policy Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) that disregarding “‘rational thinking’ in a science curriculum can be disadvantageous to students and society.” That’s putting it mildly. Diminishing rational thinking in anything can be downright disastrous for society. Why, wise theologians inform that even faith itself is “an act of the will informed by reason.”
Elaborating, Myers also stated, “Saying that we have overemphasized ‘rational thinking’ in what is supposed to be a scientific curriculum is not only foolish, it is harmful to people and the environment,’” the DCNF further relates.
We’ve now seen these harms, too. Environmentalists told us in the 1970s that we had to transition away from paper supermarket bags because we were “cutting down too many trees.” Preserving forest is a true conservationist imperative, too (though lumber companies do, mind you, replant their tracts; trees are essentially a “crop”). Yet as The New American reported earlier this year, part of the North Maine Woods — our largest forest east of the Pacific Northwest — and a rare pre-Columbian forest in Germany are slated to be decimated to make way for today’s environmentalists’ greentopian schemes. Is this rational?
But Myers explained well the method to this madness. “Ultimately, attacking rational thinking is just a way to justify policies that are irrational and unscientific,” the DCNF further quotes him as saying. “When the science doesn’t support a policy, advocates can simply claim that we shouldn’t be bound by rationality and should go with our feelings. It is a recipe for policy based on tantrums rather than data.”
In other words, when you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with bushwa. Note here that these “educators” are prescribing demagoguery, which, Dictionary.com informs, is the process of gaining “power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people.”
In reality, this is just another stop on the relativistic cultural trajectory we long ago embarked upon and which deifies emotion. As I often explain, when people cease believing in Truth (objective by definition) and thus no longer have it to reference when making decisions, the most compelling yardstick they have left is emotion; ergo the modern credo “If it feels good, do it.” And as we proceed on this trajectory, it’s not surprising that this emotion-based decision-making has infected ever more arenas, moving from being applied to only morality/philosophy to “hard” disciplines themselves such as science and math (e.g., the recent claim that 2+2 can equal 5).
Yet since we aren’t Mr. Spock and do have emotions, it’s important to understand their legitimate role. It’s as if the intellect is the engine and emotion the fuel. An engine alone is an impressive mechanism with great potential, but without fuel has nothing to animate it, rendering it impotent; fuel alone is powerful and explosive, but without an engine has nothing to channel its power, so it can only be destructive. It’s only when you have both together, each performing its proper role, that the desired effect is achieved.
Literally put, the emotions’ role is to provide the impetus to act (the passion) once the intellect has determined what that action should be.
And Washington state’s climate curriculum appears all fuel — and is burning up rationality. Among other things, it tells students “to consider ‘sexism in science’ which includes ‘subtle discussion dynamics’ and ‘abuse of power,’” the DCNF also reports. “Students are asked to raise their hand if they have experienced any sexism such as ‘unwilling to learn about issues important to women’ and ‘eye rolling and jokes.’”
The curriculum goes even further, however, prescribing a feminocracy. The “Climate Change & Pregnancy” section instructs teachers to conclude “the module with Alice Walker’s poem, ‘Calling All Grand Mothers,’” whose ending reads thus:
“I call on all the Grand Mothers of Earth & every person who possesses the Grand Mother spirit of respect for life & protection of the young to rise & lead. The life of our species depends on it. & I call on all men of Earth to gracefully and gratefully stand aside & let them (let us) do so.”
The irony? Alice Walker (The Color Purple author) disowned her own daughter — after the latter made her a grandmother. You see, explained Rebecca Walker in 2008, Alice, an ice-cold, derelict mother herself, believes that children enslave women and was unhappy upon learning that Rebecca was pregnant. In fact, it ended their relationship.
But, hey, Alice Walker is an apropos role model for the kids. After all, in her hatred, she’d dispensed with rationality and was running on pure emotion.
