Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The politics of milkshakes

Should we make it illegal to study the social sciences? Imagine the amount of tendentious rubbish we could erase from the world if we did. The economists who pretend on Newsnight that they know what’s going on, when they haven’t a clue. The sociologists fabricating evidence to support their inane and inevitably woke theses. The lies masquerading as fact and able to gull the public because of the spurious claim that they are ‘scientific’. There is no science in economics or sociology, interesting though those disciplines might be once they have been shorn of their pretensions.

Let me give you a recent example. A company called Civic Science, based in Pittsburgh, published the results of its latest research last week, and won some jubilant headlines in the perpetually credulous, unthinking liberal press over here. Apparently 56 per cent of Americans think that Arabic numerals should not be taught to schoolchildren. Ha! You morons! The numbers we use every day are Arabic. That’s where we got them from, the Arabs. You are thick and racist, you scumbags, so much so that you would deprive your children from learning the basis of western mathematics. That’s how the findings were reported, by Civic Science and the Independent and others.

And just to drive the point home still further: some 72 per cent of Republican voters said no to Arabic numerals. Civic Science suggested that this all showed both prevalence of and stupidity of blind prejudice among whiteys, especially conservative whiteys.

Except: we do not teach Arabic numerals in our schools at all. We teach a system of counting which is derived from India and was possibly brought to our shores by Arab traders, hence the misnomer Arabic numerals. The real Arabic symbols for the numbers one to ten do not remotely match our own, which owe as much to a Greek influence as anything emanating from some Middle East caliphate.

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