"I have learned two ways to tie my shoes. One way is only good for lying down. The other way is good for walking."
Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Primitivists, religious apologists, Rousseauists, conflict theorists and other simpletons will often point to misapplications of scientific principles (scientific racism, social darwinism, etc.) as proof of technocracy and rationalism's evil. A trite little insult. We already know any new technology can be used in a smart or stupid way. You can use your automobile to drive to work or to drive over your neighbour's dog. One is generally considered better than the other (depending on the dog) and we don't need fifty pages of circular deconstructionist masturbation to arrive at that conclusion. Nuclear fission can make bombs or power plants. Why should it surprise us then that science itself, when it was a new invention, was also subject to the same test of applicability?
Moreover, why do we not apply the same distinction to social critique? Why not admit that mindsets adopted for dissecting fiction novels in the 1960s lack the same relevance to geopolitics or mammalian sexuality? Why not admit that the test of applicability was already applied to postmodernism... and the stupids won. We are now stuck cleaning up fifty years' worth of radioactive anti-intellectual fallout.
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