wokedom infiltrates, co-opts and corrupts STEM; Installment #328

By A Colleague

Fri, Jul 22, 2022 2:04 p.m.

wokedom infiltrates, co-opts and corrupts STEM; Installment #328

Absolutely!

Some years ago, I was walking on an empty dirt road outside of the village of Panajachel, Guatemala, beside the spectacular Lake Atitlan, surrounded by lofty volcanoes in the Guatemalan Highlands.  Writer Aldous Huxley once called this lake setting the most beautiful in the world. 

Well, as circumstance would have it, I bumped into an Indian man walking the other way, carrying a large bundle of firewood (leña).  He set down his bundle and we stopped to chat with each other. This fellow was a descendant of Mayas, and still spoke one of the 20 or so Mayan dialects that survive.  Spanish was his second language, as it was for me, so that's what we used to communicate. 

Soon I found myself with a stick in hand, tracing a simple diagram of the solar system on the dirt road at our feet, as we crouched down. Sun in the center, surrounded by concentric circles (well, OK Paul, ellipses) of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto (this was before Pluto was ejected from the family of planets and demoted to dwarf planet status).  

This fellow had a beautiful, childlike curiosity and was utterly fascinated by my diagram and information, and eagerly asked question after question.  He was very grateful to receive this impromptu, informal lesson about the world around him, since he probably had had little or no formal schooling. 

The wokesters would denounce this delightful, chance, cross-cultural encounter as yet another sordid instance of "White colonization" and "White saviorism." And would treat ancient mayan cosmology and origin myths, whatever they were, as equally valid alongside our understanding of the universe as revealed by centuries of modern scientific investigation, as opposed to superstition and myth. 

Yet these same wokesters, I suspect, would not cut the same slack to, say, Judeo-Christian origin or Biblical myths in Genesis ("Garden of Eden" and all that) and they would smirk at the "Creation Science" that fundamentalist anti-evolutionists were attempting to foist on high school science classes on a par with Darwinian evolution.

Here's Lake Atitlan: