The omnipresence of ideology, and the aborted flight because someone was doing math

  

Althusser’s starting point is the

omnipresence of ideology, of ideological abstractions which always

structure our approach to everyday life and reality; this ideology has two

levels, the “spontaneous” everyday texture of implicit meanings, and the

organized religion or mythology which initiated a systematic system of

these meanings. Then, in ancient Greece, something new and unexpected

happened: the rise of science in the guise of mathematics. Mathematics

deals with pure, abstract numbers deprived of all mythic reference, it is a

game of axioms and rule in which no cosmic meaning resonates, there are

no sacred, lucky or damned numbers. Precisely as such, mathematics is

subversive; it threatens the universe of cosmic meaning, its homogeneity

and stability. A weird incident that happened on a departing American

Airlines flight from Philadelphia to Syracuse on May 7, 2016, shows that

this fear of mathematics persists even today. An economics professor was

solving a differential equation on a piece of paper, and a lady passenger

seated at his side thought he might be a terrorist because of what he was

writing, so she passed a note to a flight attendant, claiming that she was

too ill to take the flight. The plane returned to the gate, the lady was taken

 from the plane and voiced her suspicion to ground staff; security

members then removed the economics professor from the plane and

questioned him. ...