The announcement of the Agreement on the Budgets of the Generalitat Valenciana has once again highlighted the militant anti -scientific condition of Carlos Mazón, and forces to remember the humiliation for the science that meant its active presence in the solemn act of delivery of the Rei Jaume I awards, which occurred on February 14 in the Lonja of Valencia. Mazón attended as the institutional president of the Foundation that promotes these awards, who recognize the work of scientists in various areas, and pronounced an opportunistic and insubstantial discourse, in which he spoke, without interest or empathy, of a science “that coexists naturally with doubts in search of certainties.” Many doubts, yes, are the ones that we have had to naturalize citizens around Mazón’s performance, given the certainty that he did not do what was in his hand to avoid an unassumable number of human losses on the day of October 29, 2024.
That Mazón speech was preceded by Dr. Luis Serrano Pubul, on behalf of all the winners (unfortunately, no woman this year). Dr. Serrano, awarded in the area of new technologies, is a world renowned expert in the field of systems biology and synthetic biology. As a historian of science, I was pleased to listen to Dr. Serrano when I remembered some referents of the Spanish past scientist who are the testimony that there have also been traditions of knowing. With this evocation, he claimed public visibility for science in Spain and a more determined support from institutions and society. Perhaps it was the time, however, to mention the threat of a movement that, with a lot of capacity to conquer power, aims to corner the practice and dissemination of science, by the hand of renewed forms of totalitarianism and supremacism. A movement that has supporters and accomplices in public institutions; Among them, who spoke his speech after Dr. Serrano.
Mazón is a conspicuous representative of an agnotologist ideology; Said, in a way of governing that incorporates ignorance as a fundamental factor for the calculation of opportunities and decision making. But, in addition, he is a character that insults science, its institutions and its practitioners. He did so when he talked about a “speech Fake of sustainability ”in March 2024, on the occasion of a meeting with Catalan businessmen. Thus, with their accusations against the Law of Coasts, which it considers promoter of an ecological extremism and fanaticism encouraged by the experts who intervened in their development and writing. Thus, with its strident amendment of the law of the garden of Valencia, which was born with the intention of protecting“ one of the most relevant agrarian landscapes and Singular of the Mediterranean world “, a condition” widely recognized by the scientific community “, as expressed in its preamble; the scientific consensus is, therefore, undermining and despised by those who blame that law of the catastrophe of October 29.
The most direct insults occur when Mazón is allowed to accuse, without evidence, or manufacturing them through manipulations, to the aemet meteorologists and the technicians of the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation of not fulfilling their obligations. Of course, rigorous investigation must see how each one acted. But it is that the accusation comes from someone who is able to make fun of the decision of the governing bodies of a scientific institution such as the Valencia University of suspending the classes to follow the notices of another scientific institution, the AEMET. Someone that is allowed, in their omniscience, to coin the new concepts of “meteorological revolution” and “hydrological revolution” to indicate that, in short, meteorologists and hydrographs had no idea what was going to happen and ended up happening. Someone so wise, who has introduced into epistemology the overwhelming “factual” pleonasm. Someone who knows everything and knows everything, although he had no idea how he got into the presidency of the Generalitat Valenciana, is the one who returns now shooting at “climate dogmatism.”
I missed that speech of Dr. Serrano an invocation of what also gives us the history of science: when an anti -scientific political power decides what science is good and what science is bad, the disaster is guaranteed. It would be enough to evoke Nazi crimes against “Jewish physics” or Stalin’s against “bourgeois genetics.” But, since Dr. Serrano got to Spain, it could be remembered that the CSIC foundation for the Franco regime of Minister Ibáñez Martín and his henchmen. The exile of Ignacio and Cándido Bolívar, Blas Cabrera, Odón de Buen or José Royo, figures of Spanish science with an international recognition similar to those evoked by Dr. Serrano, happened not only for their ideas, but because they represented an intolerable scientific action for Franco. As was the Valencian Juan Peset Aleixandre, Professor of Legal Medicine and former University of the University of which Mazón laughs, shot in 1941.
Anticientifics are as long as their pocket and health are not touched. The Franco that appeared portrayed in 1940 as “Caudillo de España and protector of scientific progress” in some magazines, or the mazón that has made the Valer program to consolidate research careers of the previous Valencian government, would not deny that science serves to do business or to improve and prolong lives such as their own, which reputed more valuable than those of their governed. But the Mazón agenda – like Franco’s – is based on distrust of science and its practitioners. That is why their photographs were intolerable next to the scientists awarded with the Jaume I, more than one of whom would want to see their budget partners away from Spain. Potential exiles that would no longer be well received in Argentina that welcomed Dr. Serrano’s maternal grandparents. It is good to remember the glorious moments of science, but in dark times, we must also evoke the perpetrated iniquities against it to be prepared to defend it. Because science, although we do not like to recognize those who practice it, also demands a political commitment.
#Commitment #antic
