Luke Lea, you wrote: 
 
"One further comment: I think it is probably a mistake for razib to think of science as the virtuous maiden and capitalism as the whore, unless you think there's no merit in the whore's paying the maiden's rent. I would argue that science and capitalism are correlative social phenomenon -- or, rather, that together with democracy, they are part of a tri-relative complex which can exist either all together or not at all.  
 
As for how to keep these three balls in the air over any significant historical interval, our best hope, at least in my tortured judgment, is by keeping alive the memory in our collective conciousness (via public education) of the terrible price that was paid by our forbears to get them launched in the first place, and of the hell-hole of under-development that awaits us if, God help us, we ever let them fall to the ground." 
 
In the first place, democracy has existed without either science or capitalism, in the city of Athens, to name one among many of the cities of Greece. 
 
Second, although systematic capitalism requires science to grow to the bloated proportions which it possesses today, something similar has existed for quite some time to render peoples dissolute, docile, and easier to tyrannize. When Cyrus conquered Lydia, he planned to kill all the Lydians. The Lydian king, Croesus, dissuaded Cyrus. He told him to compel the Lydians to hold public markets; this would make them effeminate and no threat to him. Within a generation, the great Lydia was a nation of shopkeepers; few remember the name of that nation. 
 
Science does seem to be a properly modern innovation, but the wisdom of cultivating a discipline that serves indiffirently as the means to any end whatsoever with the illibarality (that is, vulgarity, ignorance, and vice) inculcated by democracy and capitalism is a project that has been frequently and prudently questioned.

Anonymous, 
 
"Ideas should have to compete on their own merits." 
 
If we're going to compare ideas to biological organisms than I would like to suggest that isolated cultivation of ideas would be a better idea than an indiscriminate sowing of scientific oats. 
 
But I think that making all human beings equally the judge of what is right and wrong is not the tactic most likely to produce a consensus that settles on the truth. 
 
"I?m in favor of breeding contempt for the wise. I?ve never liked authority figures or arguments based on authority." 
 
'Ni dieu ni maitre' is not an admirable slogan.

"Would Post-Modern thinking have any traction without support from popular culture?" 
 
Post-modernism, historicism, and relativism seem to be vulgarized and internally inconsistent combinations of several consistent and powerful insights. Could the vulgar be persuaded to think differently? Certainly. Can vulgarity be abolished? I doubt it. Is technology the way to abolish vulgarity? You say yourself that the propogation of technology serves to obcure natural inequality, breeding contempt among the vulgar for the wise. 
 
Civilization and the Sims are great ambassadors of modern thought; they purvey the ideas of inevitable historical progress and Smithian capitalism to the many. But is this education?

"the tigers are loose, they either eat us, or we ride them onward into the future, i don't think those who argue that we need to turn the tide back are worth addressing in detail because their vision won't come about unless oour civilization collapses, in which case, talk is cheap and moot" 
 
Does the denial of modernity have to take the radical form of the destruction of civilization? Only if one approaches the problems of modernity in that peculiarly modern spirit that demands the total resolution of any problem to which it applies itself. 
 
The classical philosophy and political philosophy, unlike the modern, does not demand that its ideals become concrete. You don't take Abita hostage and implement the virtuous state at gunpoint. Rather, you educate people to be open-minded to the criticism of modern natural science and modernity, you try to promote the kind of environment that will nurture rulers who are virtuous and respect thoughtful reflection, and you try to make people take more care for the worth of their own souls than for political movements. And so on...

razib, 
 
After reading your responses and rereading my questions, I think I asked them rather poorly and obliquely. 
 
I'm afraid I simply fail to understand the desire to master nature that seems to lie at the heart of science. What is the aim of science? 
 
If the aim of science is identical with the professed aim of Descartes and Bacon, namely, to work a certain change in the way human beings are, then, well: Is that change desirable? 
 
I brought up classical philosophy simply to suggest that modern science is not the only alternative to uneducated opinion. Perhaps it is not the best alternative, either; Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, and Machiavelli gave up a lot...

razib, 
 
What do you think of Nietzsche's suggestion that modern natural science is esentially animated by motivations other than the will to truth? 
 
And, to take another tactic: 
 
In what sense were, for instance, the writings of Plato, Xenophon, and (perhaps) Aristotle "flawed and futile in execution, but inspiring in vision?" 
 
The latter question is not intended as a reproach; it's in earnest.