I’m getting tired of virtue-flaunting miscreants who yammer about our anthology The War on Science (Lawrence Krauss, ed.). Their beef? By and large, the 32 chapters by 39 authors discuss the negative effects of woke ideology on science, effects that come largely from inside science: scientists themselves, journals, publishers, university programs, and so on. And, of course, nearly all these people are on the left, with many being authoritarian “progressives.” And it just won’t do to criticize science from the left. Don’t you know that Trump, who is bullying many universities and threatening to withdraw science funding unless they meet his agenda, is a far greater danger to science than is the left? Ergo, the left should simply shut up, or use its energies attacking Trump.
As if we haven’t already! Nearly all the authors are liberals who freely admit the damage Trump is doing to science. But we also argue that the “progressive” wing of our ideology is damaging science, and in a way that will last a long time. Further, the book was organized before Trump began his series of orders and bullying of colleges. But never mind, the critics are, in effect, going after us because, after all only one side at a time should be criticized. And a lot of people who criticized the book hadn’t even read it: they were going after it based solely on the title and the table of contents, saying that the book is “right wing.” ”
Well, that’s palpably stupid. And it’s hypcritical. Did you hear these critics raising hell when Obama and Biden threatened to punish colleges that didn’t let trans-identified men compete in women’s sports, or, especially, when these Democrats tried to enforce the clearly unfair rules used by colleges under title IX in adjudicating cases of sexual harassment or assault? Nope, not much noise came from the “progressives”. That’s because the improvement in those standards were mandated by Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education, and we can never, ever admit that anybody in a Trump administration did anything good. Such is the divisiveness in American politics, in which each side totally demonizes the other.
But I digress, for one of my readers has made the points above far more eloquently than I could. You may have read this reader’s arguments already, but I thought they deserved a standalone post. It involves a pair of comments on a recent post containing the video “A panel of authors from the anthology ‘The War on Science”, Sure enough, Paul Torek weighed in with a comment like the ones I mention above:
OK, I’m not trained in military strategy. But it seems to me that when an army comes after your science funding with tanks and jets, you don’t worry too much about a few boy scouts with pea shooters coming from the opposite direction. Even if they’ve got girl scouts and nonbinary scouts too. Priorities do matter.
Here, it seems, Torek seems to mean that we shouldn’t have been worrying about what the woke left was doing to science instead of worrying about Trump. (Alternatively, the authors could be interpreted as the ones with pea shooters.) Either way, I thought it was misguided, but even misguided comments get posted if they advance a discussion.
And this was followed by an eloquent response to Torek from one “Doug”:
I am trained in military strategy, but the field isn’t essential to grasp the point. I would suggest that insurgency can pose a far more difficult fight than an external adversary—no matter how well the latter is armed. It’s rather unpleasant to fight your neighbor, your family, your colleagues, your [former] friends. Who can you trust? Who will betray you? Nor is it clear how to do so without destroying the very things and places you seek to defend. But rallying against those despised people outside your tribe is rather simple. And framing the current war in terms of former wars is an ever-present temptation and often a road to defeat.
The battle for academia is on two fronts. There is no shortage of either courage or effort in countering Trump—nor is there a lack of weapons to do so. But the internal attacks on science, merit, and academic freedom are insidious and began long before Trump became part of the national political conversation—and they will continue when he is gone. You belittle that threat. Fair enough. I’ll let your colleagues either side with you, wring their hands, or disagree. But universities aren’t country clubs for their current inhabitants. Those of us outside who value what they once were—and hope they can be again—also get a vote. We know you want to fight Trump. Do you have any interest in fighting the illiberal elements in your own committees, departments, and administration? What’s your plan to succeed?
Academia has not corrected itself over the last decade. Why? Self-satisfaction? Confusion? Lack of courage? The latter would make it difficult to distinguish friend from foe, hampering reform. Your illiberal insurgents push on, gaining significant ground. Your “peashooters” dictate the culture and rules across much of elite academia—the proving ground for future national leadership. They control many professional associations, academic publishers, credentialing agencies, and the media. An influential swath of the legal profession is theirs. And they largely control one major political party, populated with “leaders” who brook little internal dissent and offer none. Concomitant with the advance of your peashooting brigade is an increased willingness to tolerate violence, to silence speech with which one disagrees, to ruin the lives and reputations of those who dissent to the new and everchanging rules for polite society. Ask Carole Hooven and Joshua Katz why they cried so much from being pelted with mere peas.
It is now entirely unclear whether lost ground in academia can be recaptured without substantial outside assistance. Many of us would greatly prefer an Administration of either party that empowers academic reformers, but who are the mythical people in the universities who would welcome the assistance of the much-hated Right wing? Where are the mythical Democrats in national leadership who would insist on reform? Unfortunately, those now in federal power decided that firebombing is to be preferred over precision strikes. And I must admit, despite the destruction, I am not confident that they are wrong. What I am confident of is that the battle will not be waged at all should the insurgents get a final supportive push from a new Democratic administration. Oh, certainly, you would retain your vaunted academic freedom—in much the same way that wings are legs, too.
Another way to put it is that it is silly to worry about an antibiotic-treatable infection, no matter how unpleasant, if you have a cancer metastasizing within. But one of these is easier to ignore—especially if the patient is blind to the symptoms, avoids personal pain, and has no interest in being screened.
I’ll add “QED”.
Bravo to the interlocutors – bravo for making your best, clear points, and “letting the chips fall where they may” – and all that good stuff. Thanks to PCC(E)’s principled and fearless concept for this as well.
… you know, I just checked my local libraries and could not find the book. I’ll look again later – might need to request a purchase…
Yep. That was a helluva comment.
Paul Torek is a treasure. The comments section on WEIT is one of the best.
I’m just finishing my copy of The War on Science. There are so many excellent essays making so many relevant points that I can see why critics want to abandon the old standbys “but that’s superficial!” and “that never happened!” for “here’s what we SHOULD be talking about INSTEAD!”
I read Jordan Peterson’s essay first. To get it over and done with.
The remaining essays were enlightening
I think you mean Doug is a treasure?
Oh dear, yes.
DOUG IS A TREASURE!
I need to proofread. I know Doug. Jeez
Paul Torek was the guy playing the deflection game. Doug is the treasure.
You’re right, mea culpa.
As I’ve said a few times, those who think that The War on Science should also have attacked the right should write their own book.
Some biblical passage regarding motes and beams comes to mind when discussing this topic. While it is true that the motes of the right are not small, the beams of the left are pretty big too.
Virtually all of the social sciences, anthropology, sociology, and similar sciences have been destroyed and replaced by ideology (complete with heresy hunters to enforce the orthodoxy) and we’re expected to think this was all done by a few boy scouts with pea shooters who pose no threat and are so inconsequential that we shouldn’t criticise them?
Perhaps some of the people not worrying about the internal threat are learned in the sciences only.
For example, I studied physics (and math). I’m not sure wokeness has affected those areas, even today. The TEACHING of physics and math—I’ve seen wokeness there.
But I know little about the arts, apart from what I’ve read on my own and I wouldn’t select “woke” books.
The “in” term that I cannot stand and refuse to use is “pregnant person.” As only biological females can gestate, regardless of gender preference, the term is nonsense. I also don’t care for using the plural pronoun “they” for a singular individual as a courtesy because I don’t know their gender preference if the person involved is clearly male or female. However, professional style manuals require it. I had an Aunt by marriage who was a grammarian. She is rolling over in her grave presently at how we are torturing language for liberal correctness.
100% agree. Terms like “pregnant people” are an abomination.
Shakespeare and the OED support using 3rd person plural for neuter singular. It’s not a neologism.
English uses “it” for neuter singular. I think you mean “they/them” has a provenance as an indefinite reference when the sex of the antecedent noun is not known, except that it can’t be neuter because it’s a human. (Not for a specific person whose sex is known, though.) “I saw someone climbing in through the darkened window. I couldn’t tell if they had a gun.” — OK.
(But not, “Tom Jessop was elected chair of the book club. Tom uses they/them pronouns. They thanked their wife for baking the brownies that convinced the club to elect them.”)
I think “everyone” can take “them”. “Everyone was considered undesirable and so the judge deported them all.” Nothing is gained by trying to make “everyone” take “him” or even “him or her” in that sentence as some grammarians used to insist here: “When everyone has taken his seat we’ll give him popcorn.
Yes, I miswrote; should have said gender neutral singular. And for the record I completely agree that using “they/them” to signify 3rd-person-singular multiple or variable or confused gender is recent and unwelcome.
“Pregnant people” was invented by women (not men) in Birthing Units so as not to exclude or give offence to those pregnant humans who don’t identify as women. These non-women don’t have women’s vaginas or breasts (obviously) and so plan to deliver through the “front hole” rather than by Cæsarian section and want to “chest-feed.” Woe betide any male (or female) medical student or other ingenue who wandered into a progressive birthing unit and made any reference to a pregnant woman admitted in labour planning for vaginal delivery. S/He would be set upon by the all-female staff of the unit and remonstrated with for non-progressive language that erased pregnant men, whom the unit didn’t dare antagonize. This is one of those rare abominations that women, who are the Supreme Law in birthing units as any doctor knows, have visited entirely on themselves.
Please forgive me for maybe missing the point, but how does a pregnant male-identifying female have a “front hole” that is not a vagina? If they have endured a phalloplasty then how do they have any hole at all?
That’s what they call it. Referring to their anatomical female parts by their anatomical female names exacerbates their distressing gender dysphoria, especially if health professionals so refer to them. Calling the canal through which the baby will come a front hole avoids reminding them that they have these “wrong” female body parts like vaginas. They pretend it’s not a vagina and that the breasts, which they wish to amputate, remember, aren’t theirs. I wish I was making this up but I’m not. (Few women actually get $150,000-worth of forearm skin fashioned into a phalloplasty, but yes, those who go the full Monty won’t have vaginas anymore.)
In most cases, it’s not pregnant women themselves who want to be called pregnant persons with front holes. Rather what happened was that FtM trans activists, most of whom aren’t themselves the slightest bit interested in pregnancy or lactation, engaged birthing units and women’s health organizations more generally in struggle sessions to call out “misgendering language” and respect their “lived experience.” (Transgendered men — “transwomen” — do this too but they don’t pay attention to birthing units. Their prizes lie elsewhere.) Once they use the M-word, the T-word (transphobia) is not far behind. The activists have the power to make trouble for the organization. Ordinary pregnant women might be offended by these neologisms but they don’t have any power to push back, not being oppressed the way “trans men” are. Besides, new mothers just want to go home and fit mothering into everything else they have to do, not fight language wars with the hospital that delivered them. The activists, like squirrels figuring out how to defeat your squirrel-proof bird feeders, are highly motivated and have nothing else to do. It’s how the Left does its long march through the institutions.
This Quillette podcast featuring Dr. Karleen Gribble discusses this in more detail.
I knew the metaphorical lunatics were running the asylums, but this is just too stupid. How does a “man” somehow give birth in the first place? How does avoiding the V-word magically cause one’s menstruating and birthing orifice to not actually be a you-know-what? This is beyond bizarre. What could they possibly think that orifice is, an illusion? This not metaphorical lunacy, it’s real rubber-room psychotic delusion; or else it’s just a very very stupid performance. I don’t know which is worse.
Right. I feel somewhat better now.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” (commonly attributed to Einstein)
“The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.” (Harlan Ellison)
Jerry et.al are criticizing stupidity from those who should know a lot better than most of what science means and doesn’t mean.
In this war let them have it with both barrels, never surrender!
Largely repeating what I said in response to the original comment, the people objecting to it also ignore that the corruption of science by wokism is a worldwide (or at least firstworldwide) problem, whereas Trump is (at present) a purely US problem. Some of the authors are not in the US, why should they be expected to write about purely US problems?
(Feel free to throw this back at me if and when Farage comes to power….).
Way to go Doug! That was a great read. Feels silly to post a comment just to congratulate Doug, so I’ll add this too.
The far left, woke, infiltration of academia simply weakens the trust in science. And from what I get from average people, it really is at an all time low. Trump and Republicans may damage academia’s ability to do science. But even with the recent Tylenol thing, it doesn’t seem to affect people’s trust in the scientific method. People who accepted Trump’s recommendation have looked to the studies he and RFK cited, and the words the company itself posted on Twitter years ago; and people who rejected Trump’s message looked to other studies explaining why the find is faulty. In other words, both parties looked to people with scientific authority to try to get answers.
But when the gender ideology is being discussed, people on the right simply see the field as being completely corupt and unable to do unbiased work so it ignores it and goes back to religion and gut instinct, and the left treats the thing as a religion anyway. The left will pretend to cite studies, but time and time again I’ve seen them either cherry pick and/or twist the interpretation of results they reference, or simply cite ridiculously biased sources, like a gender clinic reporting their patients are 100% happy, cause there clearly couldn’t be an incentive to advertise your own effectiveness. And if you present them with a study they don’t like, then they’ll go back to “transphobe”, “trans genocide” and “do you want children to kill themselves”.
Even I’ve reached the point where I’m unable to, in good conscience, argue with someone that climate change is real. How could I argue against them if they say “climate science is biased and corrupt”? When I can see it clearly happening in other fields of science, how could I argue without lying that it simply couldn’t have happened here too? I don’t believe it did, but the only evidence I have is basically a lack of evidence of the contrary. And any skilled debater could just say that I didn’t look close enough into the field to see the evidence of corruption, like I’ve seen it in sociology and transgender science. And then I’d have to concede. Oops.
So this political influence in science needs to be rooted out ASAP, because it simply undermines any authoritative standing the scientific method has, and leaves it vulnerable to being treated as just another ideological world view, instead of a spring of objective truth. That’s far worse than Trump cutting NASA’s budget, or Bush banning stem cell research. Such actions slow scientific research and the discovery of new truths, but at least what is found is still considered truth by the majority of people.
Political infiltration has the ability to undermine the scientific method in it’s entirety, to where even if something newly found happens to be objective truth, it will be distrusted by the majority of people.
Excellent rebuttal – especially like the comment “antibiotic-treatable infection, no matter how unpleasant, if you have a cancer metastasizing within”
Academics either has integrity or it does not. Once we go down the road of saying – but there are also political/social considerations and a targeted sacrificing of academic integrity on behalf of promoting those additional concerns has priority – we need to ask are we doing more harm than good? Where does this sacrificing of academic integrity stop? Can it stop? There are always going to be competing political/social considerations, there is no end to activist agendas, they change over time like the seasons of a year.
And where are the boundaries? Isn’t the goal of the self-described social justice activists ultimately to penalize, silence, and purge dissent? To infiltrate all institutions (not just academic institutions) and to demand the same conformity of expression everywhere that they can? Does it really make sense to declare their narrowly intolerant self-righteous authoritarianism to be harmless? What about the innocent victims of their zealotry? What about the undermined, damaged, and compromised institutions?
And why, why in the world, would right wing people simply roll over and silently accept being ostracized and disenfranchised by left wing mobs? Why wouldn’t they counter-react by seeking to crush the left wing authoritarians with their own narrowly intolerant self-righteous authoritarianism? How can this partisan hyper-, over- politicization hijacking of every institution possibly be a path to national success?