Anyone who blatherskites that ‘The Science’ is a pure, holy, pursuit of the untarnished knowledge knows nothing about the history of science. Even real science, as distinct from ‘The Science’, has a very far from a blameless history. Because, while science in the abstract is supposed to be an objective, universalist worldview, in the real world it’s practiced by human beings. Flawed, biased, imperfect human beings.
As an inevitable result, science is littered with not just remarkable discoveries and progress, but fraud, self-deceptions and horrors on a scale that would make the most swivel-eyed mediaeval inquisitor blanch. From the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, to Josef Mengele or Japan’s Unit 731. The Marxist ‘science’ of Trofim Lysenko helped unleash appalling famines on two continents, within years of each other, which killed tens of millions. The Behaviourists, with all the lab-coated dispassion of ‘true’ scientists, carried out a range of experiments, on humans and animals, which were literal torture.
The Behaviourists’ reign of torture came to an abrupt end when a young Noam Chomsky launched a devastating critique of the essential hollowness of their theories. This is a crucial point in the history of science: it only truly flourishes when it is open to unfettered criticism. If the instant critics of a scientific claim are censored, science withers and dies.
There’s been a whole lot of censorship going on these past few decades. It’s not coming from, as the ‘IFL Science’ crowd would have us believe, the churches. It’s coming almost entirely from the Long March left.
When Bruce Gilley’s paper, The Case for Colonialism, was pulled from the peer-reviewed literature, it marked the first time in centuries that a scientific paper had been scrubbed from the literature under the threat of violence. This shocking precedent cannot be overstated: Gilley’s paper was removed – not rectracted – not because it was methodologically flawed or sloppy research: the paper was memory holed for the sole reason that it ‘offended’ many people on the left.
Where is the outrage? The thundering op-eds in scientific journals? Nowhere. Nothing. Silence. The same scientists who fell over themselves to fawn at the feet of a racist ideology and march like robots in BLM parades, have nothing to say when science is under direct attack. No doubt, had it been a church who demanded the removal of a paper, they’d be screaming the roof down.
Gilley is not the only scientist whose work is under attack for daring to cross the left’s new religion of wokery.
When it comes to investigations of the human brain, for instance, certain findings are clearly considered admissible, and others are not. Last year, Greek researchers examined MRI scans of the brains of 928 Dutch citizens, before asking patients their political allegiances. Supposedly, this showed conservatives tended to have a larger amygdala than liberals, this being a part of the brain that helps regulate emotions like fear. Thus, the scientists were able to conclude such people would naturally “have higher needs for security,” so making them lean rightward.
Such novel findings are deemed scientifically acceptable, as they lend themselves toward the following, politically satisfactory interpretation: Dutch conservatives are mentally disabled and only vote for anti-immigration politicians with equally oddly shaped skulls like Geert Wilders because their spazzy, amygdala-warped brains make them irrationally dread being stabbed to death by nearby Moroccans.
Note, first, the scientifically unjustified leap from what the evidence shows – that conservatives tend to have a larger amygdala – to the scientists’ biased conclusion, that this means conservatives are more fearful. There are other conclusions that could just as ‘justifiably’ have been made: for instance, the amygdala regulating emotions means that conservatives are able to control their emotions better. Anyone who’s watched leftists have tantrums, crying and screaming and lashing out, would take the research as validating their suspicion that the left are emotional toddlers.
Then there is the work of US-born Cambridge academic, Nathan Cofnas. Cofnas has the temerity to write ‘controversial’ (that is, truthful) essays on the social implications of the utterly proven fact that average IQs differ among different races.
This has led Cofnas to develop some brutally honest, if rather non-PC, hypotheses about what Western society would look like if these realities were actually acknowledged, rather than systematically ignored in a wholly nonscientific fashion, as is actually the case.
As he put it in the above paper, without positive discrimination at top universities like Harvard, “the number of black professors would approach zero percent,” unless Thomas Sowell somehow managed to develop the ability to bilocate. In a truly color-blind and scientifically meritocratic society, Cofnas said, “blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile fields outside of sports and entertainment.” And reruns of America’s Most Wanted, of course.
A lot of liberal people – including liberal scientists – may find this idea uncomfortable, Cofnas said, but it was backed up by actual data, and “since truth is intrinsically valuable,” it was the moral duty of scientists to demonstrate such realities even when uncomfortable to received public wisdom.
Of course, you’ve already guess what happened.
For presenting mankind with the Forbidden Fruit of Knowledge, like apple-thieving Eve before him, the honest academic was faced with compulsory exile from the Edenic lawns of Cambridge, after being subject to an attempted cancellation. Even though the IQ data Cofnas was referring to was real and accurate, the director of his college’s Centre of African Studies declared that having someone like Cofnas working there was “like having a flat earther in the physics faculty.” If said flat earther happened to be Candace Owens, that would be just another DEI hire.
Talking of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, one of the chief complaints about Cofnas’ statements of pure physical fact was that they contradicted Cambridge’s DEI policies: A more realistic assessment of the matter might be that Cambridge’s DEI policies contradicted pure physical fact.
Well, as we all know, facts are kryptonite to the Long March left.
