In Janet Stemwedel's latest infomercial for scientific orthodoxy, she makes a pregnant observation:
"… the grade-schooler’s ambition to be a scientist someday is significantly more attainable than the ambition to be a Grammy-winning recording artist, a pro-athlete, an astronaut, or the President of the United States."
No question about it. In fact, if anything Ms. Stemwedel is understating the current situation, for it seems to me that with scientific methodology so freely available and so effectively recruited for, we're practically standing on the doorstep of that promised land—the glorious day when everyone is a scientist. Just as Kierkegaard once remarked upon the warm, fuzzy convenience of being a nineteenth-century Dane, when everyone became a Christian merely by being born within the country's borders, today we can celebrate a further two centuries of warm, fuzzy progress by noting that everyone is becoming a scientist simply by being born at all. Ah, the sweet, communal utopia! All of us as warm, fuzzy members in the norm-of-universalism club.
Well, not quite all of us: I know of at least one individual who insists on opting out.
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