The New Inquisitors:
Heretical Scientists Purged from Academia
Kerry Bolton
3,527 words
The Stalin and Hitler regimes were both noted for their repression of scientists and intellectuals who did not toe their respective party lines.
Many Left-wing academics, centered on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, were sponsored to leave Germany and emigrate to the US, where they took over the social sciences and created a virtual totalitarianism of their own in American academia.[1] This has often been referred to as “cultural Marxism” but has come to be popularly termed “Political Correctness.”[2] Ironically, those who fled a totalitarian regime laid the foundations for a system that is intolerant of views that do not accord with their central dogma, namely that man is shaped by environment rather than genes and is thus infinitely malleable; therefore, all men are potentially equal.
Essentially the same position was insisted upon in the USSR, to the extent that Mendelian genetics was banned as heretical and replaced by the neo-Lamarckian doctrine of a charlatan, Trofim Lysenko, an obscure plant breeder from Odessa who almost brought Soviet agriculture to collapse by his insistence that new stains of crops could be created by environmental conditioning. Lysenko claimed that one species of wheat could be converted to another by subjecting it to external influences, a process he called “vernalization.” Thereby, winter wheat could be transformed into spring wheat by subjecting it to cold, which would shock it into germinating another variety. Those Soviet scientists who rejected Lysenko’s ideas were removed from their positions. In 1940 N. I. Vavilov, first president of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, whose team proved that Lysenko’s notions on wheat breeding were fallacious, was arrested, and he died of a heart attack in solitary confinement in 1943. Mendelian genetics was smeared as “Nazi,” and the Seventh International Congress of Genetics, which was to be held in Moscow in 1937, was cancelled.[3]
Western Repression
Nonetheless, while the USSR eventually freed itself from the Lysenko dogma, its Western equivalent, the cultural anthropology of Franz Boas[4] et al., and the sociology of the Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno, et al.[5] has remained dominant in Western academia. Those who challenge these dogmas are smeared and purged.
Repression of heretical scientists in the West might be more subtle (but not invariably so), such as the denial of funds if research does not accord with orthodoxy. It was the imposition of such biases in funding that prompted the formation of the Pioneer Fund in New York in 1937, “to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences,” by providing grants to institutions for specific studies that are unable to obtain money from “‘government sources or from larger foundations.” Recipients have included H. J. Eysenck, Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, Ernest van der Haag, and J. Philippe Rushton.[6] Most or all of these scientists have been subjected to verbal and physical assaults for their research in a situation that shows that the bounds of scholarly inquiry in the West are very limited. The Pioneer Fund comments on this situation:
Some of those who strongly oppose behavior genetic and psychometric research have sometimes made bizarre and false charges against scientists who conduct these studies, subjecting them to harassment, including dismissal and threats of dismissal, stalled promotions, mob demonstrations, and threats of physical violence, even death. Some physical attacks have actually occurred. These politically motivated attacks on the Pioneer Fund and its grantees are documented in The New Know-Nothings by Morton Hunt, and Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe by Roger Pearson.[7]
The following are some examples of scientists who have endured the stigma of heresy.
William Shockley
Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, applied science to the question of Negro and Caucasian IQ discrepancies and supported eugenics. Hence the great scientist suddenly became a “broken genius.”[8] Dr. Shockley was reduced to appearing at lectures holding a placard upon which he wrote a couple of basic points about race and IQ, or writing a few points on a blackboard, as frenzied Leftists did not give him the opportunity to speak.[9] Ed Brayton,[10] a liberal commentator who agreed that Shockley should have been opposed, yet was troubled by some of the methods, wrote:
After he won the Nobel Prize he became interested in eugenics and became one of the leading voices of racism in the US. Wherever he went, he was the object of fierce protests – as well he should have been.
But in many places those protests did not merely register their disagreement and disgust with Shockley’s views, they also tried – and often succeeded – in preventing him from speaking. They did this in a variety of ways, from drowning him out with bullhorns to storming the stage to intimidating the groups that invited him to withdraw their invitation. This was especially true on college campuses.
. . . In 1973, Shockley was invited to speak at Staten Island Community College but was unable to do so because a group of students, predominately white, made it impossible for him to be heard.
. . . The following year, Shockley was scheduled to debate Roy Innis of the Congress on Racial Equality at Yale. Once again, protesters managed to prevent the event from being held. The head of the Progressive Labor Party at Yale declared freedom of speech to be a “nice abstract idea used to enable people like Shockley to spread racism.” A local minister in New Haven called for a demonstration to take place that would be “as peaceful as possible and as violent as necessary” to prevent Shockley from speaking.
With such threats of violence and disruption, the Yale Political Union decided to withdraw the invitation to take part in the debate. A second campus group stepped in to extend an invitation, but they too ended up withdrawing under the intimidation of threats of violence from those on campus. A third potential sponsor likewise withdrew under pressure, and the debate never took place.[11]
Frank Ellis
A lecturer in Russian and Slavic studies at Leeds University, Ellis was pushed into early retirement in 2006 after being suspended earlier that year, pending disciplinary proceedings. He had opined that Black IQ scores are lower, surely a matter that is not in contention, regardless of the reasons. Ellis’ heresy is that he had stated in a BBC 5 Live interview[12] that he supported the views in the book The Bell Curve,[13] by eminent American psychologists Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray.[14] Ellis had expressed private views that had not been associated with Leeds University, stating that he had become interested in the way issues are suppressed after studying Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.
Leeds University Secretary Roger Gair said that Ellis had the right to express his opinions but not the right to discriminate against students and colleagues, although the latter was never in question. Ellis’ harassment by the University seems to have been a matter of acceding to Left-wing troglodytes.
James Watson
The co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, for which he jointly won a Nobel Prize in 1962, Watson was, at the age of 79, harassed into a publicly humiliating retraction after stating that Black Africans lack creative intelligence. In an apology reminiscent of Galileo’s apology to the Inquisition for his comments about heliocentricity, Watson stated:
I am mortified about what has happened. More importantly, I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways they have. To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.[15]
Despite his back-pedalling, London Science Museum cancelled a sold-out lecture Watson was to give. The Federation of American Scientists said it was outraged that Watson “chose to use his unique stature to promote personal prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science.” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, New York, removed Watson as Chancellor.
Yet while Dr. Watson took fright and claimed he could not understand how he made such a statement, he had not long previously written in his autobiography:
There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.[16]
His latter views are consistent with Watson’s political evolution. Starting as a Leftist professor at Harvard, where he was among the faculty who declared themselves for America’s withdrawal from Vietnam,[17] Watson rejected the Left because of its fundamental opposition to the genetic foundations of human behaviour. He stated in 2007: “I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.”[18]
Francis Crick, another of the three Nobel Laureates who discovered the DNA double-helix, had expressed views similar to those of Watson. Crick was combative, and during the controversy of American psychologist Arthur Jensen’s paper in the Harvard Educational Review on IQ differences among races, Crick threatened to resign as a Foreign Associate of the American National Academy of Sciences if steps were taken to “suppress reputable scientific research for political reasons.” He supported the research of both Shockley and Jensen.[19] Crick’s correspondence[20] shows he had a significant interest in eugenics and the question of IQ hereditability. For example he wrote to Dr. John T. Edsall of the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, in discussing Shockley and Jensen, that:
As to your point about the I. Q. results on American Indians being mainly due to their cultural tradition, this may be so, but personally I doubt it. How do you explain the relatively poor I. Q. performance of the children of middle-class American Negroes?[21]
In particular in 1969 in a talk on the “Social Impact of Biology,” broadcast in shorted version by the BBC, Crick stated, as he described it to Lord Snow:
As far as I remember I said that the biological evidence was that all men were not created equal, and it would not only be difficult to try to do this, but biologically undesirable. As an aide I said that the evidence for the equality of different races did not really exist. In fact, what little evidence there was suggested racial differences.[22]
Hence, when poor old Watson was stating that he did not know of anything in science that would induce him to believe that IQ differences were inherited, we may read this in the same light as Galileo’s retraction to Inquisition.
Chris Brand
Brand lectured in psychology at Edinburgh University for nearly thirty years (1970–1997). During the 1980s he served on the UK’s Council for National Academic Awards. His book The g Factor was published in 1996 where he stated that there are inherited differences in IQ between races.
As a result of his views in The g Factor, Brand’s lectures were disrupted by the Trotskyite-run Anti-Nazi League, in typical Trotsky-Troglodyte manner, and his book was withdrawn by John Wiley and Sons. Hence the merits of scholarship were – again – determined by thuggery.
After a complaint from the Chaplain of Edinburgh University, who was a supporter of the riotous Anti-Nazi League, Brand was suspended then dismissed for bringing the university into “disrepute,” that is, discussing issues that fall outside the de facto limitations of inquiry imposed on academia by intellectually-questionable, politically-motivated, self-serving “elites.”
After his removal from Edinburgh University, Brand ended up working as a waiter during 1998–1999 (while he was also Director of the California-based Institute for the Study of Educational Differences), which seems reminiscent of the way Germany’s intelligentsia became menial laborers under the post-1945 process of “de-Nazification.” Brand writes in summation:
The case was to go before a Scottish Employment Tribunal in 1999; but Edinburgh University offered a settlement of the maximum that any UK court could have offered for “unfair dismissal,” saying it was paying out “to prevent the airing of Brand’s opinions and views at public expense” (Times Higher 5 xi ‘99, p. 2) – a surprising attitude for a university. I accepted this settlement since to have proceeded to a trial would probably have been deemed “frivolous” by the Tribunal and put me at risk of paying what would have been the University’s enormous costs.[23]
The real reason for Brand’s removal from Edinburgh was his book The g Factor. The circumstances include the following:
Despite very favourable reviews (e.g. in ‘Nature’), “The ‘g’ Factor” fell foul of “political correctness” about race and IQ. In press interviews, Brand freely agreed there was a Black-White IQ difference, that the difference was substantially genetic, and that he was (qua supporter of the London School) what Kamin et al. had for years been allowed to call a “scientific racist” — or a “race realist.” On April 17, 1996, “The ‘g’ Factor” was withdrawn as ‘repellent’ by Wiley & Sons (New York and Chichester). Wiley followed up their modern version of censorship by refusing to publish a new book on ‘g’ by Berkeley’s Emeritus Professor Arthur Jensen — a proposal which Wiley had had under consideration for nine months.[24]
So much for the credibility of Wiley as a scholarly publisher. As for Edinburgh University, Principal Sir Stewart Sutherland felt obliged to emphasize to the media that he regarded Brand’s research as “false and personally obnoxious.”[25] The methodology of the inquisitors in academia is to meet any challenge with moral outrage not counter-evidence. They are often backed up by inane commentary from the news media and the delirious antics of the Western equivalents of Mao’s Red Guards.
Andrew Fraser
A lecturer in law at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, Fraser was prevented from teaching after having written a letter to the local press criticising immigration from Black Africa.[26] For this crime against humanity, “University vice-chancellor Professor Di Yerbury responded with a three-page memo to staff announcing that Professor Fraser would not teach until further notice . . .”[27] A report in The Weekend Australian stated:
Professor Fraser yesterday rejected an offer by the university to buy out his contract and launched a bitter attack on Vice-Chancellor Di Yerbury, describing her as an “intellectual coward.” Professor Yerbury responded by suspending Professor Fraser from teaching, citing a report in The Australian yesterday in which he claimed a group called Smash Racism was planning to disrupt his classes. . . . “We have a duty to act decisively to protect his safety and that of others on campus,” she said. Professor Yerbury told The Weekend Australian late yesterday that she would seek legal advice if he made further unauthorized public statements. . . . Yerbury said she was not bothered by Professor Fraser’s personal attack on her. “I will wear that as a badge of honour,” she said. “I made the apology because I was distressed and ashamed he had associated the university with views which so fundamentally contravened its position.”[28]
Two points here: (1) Apparently writing the letter to a suburban newspaper should have first been approved by the university; (2) Again the inquisitors in academia work in tandem with sociopathic Marxist rioters to repress freedom of expression and inquiry.
In September 2005, the law journal of Deakin University was directed not to publish Professor Fraser’s peer-reviewed paper “Rethinking the White Australia Policy.”[29]
Nicholas Kollerstrom
A physicist and historian of science specialising in astronomy, Kollerstrom was an honorary research fellow in Science and Technology Studies at University College London (UCL). In 2008 his fellowship was terminated after he had written articles for the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) critiquing aspects of Auschwitz the previous year. Dr. Kollerstrom appears to be a left-liberal belonging to the Green and Respect parties and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but that did not save him. A press release from UCL curtly stated:
UCL has been made aware of views expressed by Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom, an Honorary Research Fellow in UCL Science & Technology Studies.
The position of Honorary Research Fellow is a privilege bestowed by departments within UCL on researchers with whom it wishes to have an association. It is not an employed position.
The views expressed by Dr. Kollerstrom are diametrically opposed to the aims, objectives and ethos of UCL, such that we wish to have absolutely no association with them or with their originator.
We therefore have no choice but to terminate Dr. Kollerstrom’s Honorary Research Fellowship with immediate effect.[30]
According to The London Jewish Chronicle, there had also been disquiet at UCL regarding Kollerstrom’s “conspiracy theories” involving the 9/11 attacks, and other issues.[31] How these views impacted on Kollerstrom’s credibility as a physicist has not been explained.
Greg Clydesdale
Greg Clydesdale of Massey University,[32] New Zealand, was declared heretical in 2008 by Members of Parliament, the news media, the Race Relations Conciliator, and academia for having written a paper that documented the blatantly obvious: Polynesians are an economic underclass in an economy whose manufacturing base has long since been wrecked.
Pointing out with statistical data the continuing underachievement of Polynesians educationally and professionally is analogous to the boy who cried out “the emperor has no clothes.” Yet, the head of the “Pasifika” department, Sione Tu’itahi, at Clydesdale’s own university, castigated his colleague. The banal reaction was featured on Massey’s website lest the university be mistaken as having endorsed empirical evidence rather than emotion-laden dogma on such matters.
Furthermore, the university demonstrated its malice against Dr. Clydesdale, commenting: “Massey University has welcomed the announcement by Race Relations Conciliator Joris de Bres that he will investigate Dr. Clydesdale’s report. It is expected that several Massey academics and other staff will be pleased to participate in any review.”[33]
Dr. Clydesdale was obliged to forego the presentation of his paper to an academic conference on economic development in Brazil: New Zealand’s false image as a multicultural utopia could not be exposed to the outside world, any more than negative aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain could be exposed to outside scrutiny.
* * *
Several decades ago Wilmot Robertson, a scholar of the Right and author of The Dispossessed Majority, had a regular feature in his magazine, Instauration, entitled “Cultural Catacombs.” In the dark age of this civilization the catacombs seem to be where real scholars will be increasingly driven.
An alternative was offered by another genuine scholar, Dr. Clyde N. Wilson:
I fear that the academic situation is here the same as you describe it there–corrupt and substandard. It is normal to complain about the reign of Political Correctness, but not enough attention has been given to the sheer incompetence and lack of genuine scholarly vocation among the professoriate today. I see no remedy for the universities except unlikely revolution. The fact is that all genuine intellectual life for the foreseeable future will have to take place outside the formal institutions.[34]
Notes
[1] Gary Bullert, “Franz Boas as Citizen-Scientists: Gramscian-Marxist Influence on American Anthropology,” The Journal of Social, Political & Economic Studies, Washington, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2009.
[2] Frank Ellis, Political Correctness and the Theoretical Struggle: From Lenin and Mao to Marcuse and Foucault (Auckland, New Zealand: Maxim Institute, 2004).
[3] Zhores A. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), inter alia.
[4] Bullert.
[5] K. R. Bolton, “‘Sex Pol’: The Influence of the Freudian-Marxian Synthesis on Politics and Society,” Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall 2010.
[6] The Pioneer Fund, “About Us,” http://www.pioneerfund.org/
[7] “Controversies: Setting the Record Straight,” http://www.pioneerfund.org/Controversies.html
[8] Joel N. Shurkin, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age (Macsci, 2006).
[9] “Students Protest Shockley’s Racist Theory,” NBC News, 20 November 1973, http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/5112773857_s01.do
[11] Ed Brayton, “William Shockley and Free Speech,” 5 February 2008, http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2008/02/05/william-shockley-and-free-spee/
[12] “Tutor Defends ‘Racist’ Stance,” BBC News, March 8, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4785574.stm
[13] R. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
[14] “Racism Row Lecturer Retires Early,” BBC News, 21 July 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/west_yorkshire/5174010.stm
[15] “DNA Discoverer Apologizes for Racist Remarks,” Fox News, October 19 2007, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,303432,00.html
[16] J. Watson, Avoid Boring People: Lessons in a Life of Science, cited by Fox News, ibid.
[17] “Faculty Support Grows For Anti-War Proposal,” The Harvard Crimson, October 3, 1969.
[18] Esquire Magazine, October 19 2007, http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/ESQ0107jameswatson
[19] Jensen letter to Shockley, April 18 1969.
[21] Crick to Edsall, March 29, 1971.
[22] Crick to Lord Charles Percy Snow, April 17, 1969.
[23] C. Brand, “Brief Curriculum Vitae,” 2004, http://bussorah.tripod.com/brandbio.html
[24] “Christopher Brand: Race, Sex, Psychology and Censorship,” http://www.cycad.com/site/Brand/index.html
[25] Ibid., http://www.cycad.com/site/Brand/index.html
[26] Andrew Fraser, “The Path to National Suicide,” letter, Parramatta Sun, July 29 2005, http://www.ironbarkresources.com/articles/fraser2005pathtonationalsuicide.htm
[27] Tamara Mclean, “Outspoken Academic banned from teaching,” News.com.au, July 29, 2005.
[28] Greg Roberts, “Lecture ban for ‘racist’ professor,” The Weekend Australian, July 30 2005.
[29] “Professor Drew Fraser: A Short Biography,” http://www.ironbarkresources.com/articles/fraserbio.htm
[30] “Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom,” UCL News, April 22 2008, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0804/08042202
[31] Daniella Peled, “College Rejects Shoah Denier,” The Jewish Chronicle, April 24 2008, http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/college-rejects-shoah-denier
[32] Clydesdale is with the faculty of Management and Business at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.
[33] “Massey’s Pasifika,” Massey University, 2008.
[34] Clyde N. Wilson to K. R. Bolton, May 30, 2009.
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24 comments
Greg,
There is a display problem with this article in which the first few lines are not displayed when the “read more” button is pressed.
Thanks. It is fixed.
Ok, what’s the solution to this problem?
Three comments on the ideas underlying this essay.
1) In fact, something like “political correctness” seems to attach itself to every major social or political rebellion or revolution. Consider how the ideas of Islam sought to overthrow older thinking in Persia & North Africa, and via the state institutions created by Genghis Khan all the way through to his great-great-granddaughter, the wife of Tamerlane, and then all the way to the creation of the Mughal Empire in India, established by the great-great-grandson of Tamerlane.
Even in my youth in the 1940s, it was clear that there was a sexual PC and a religious PC in the Midwest. And it was enforced by social sanctions of very high order. In the late 1960s, that sexual PC was flipped on its head and the religious PC underwent an abrasive attack that is still underway. It may be that we will always have PC with us and, if so, it is imperative to understand how it works and to have our own.
2) Attention needs to be paid to the notion that the contemporary PC adopts its exaggerated ideas about demographic affinity group equality (not individual equality, but group equality) and its other assorted baggage not because its enforcers believe in the PC concepts themselves, but because they can be consciously used to batter a pre-existing PC and cement the authority of the new PC enforcers. I don’t believe for a second that the high-level promoters of contemporary PC actually subscribe to the concepts they enforce, much as a corrupt evangelical from years ago failed to believe the doctrines he advanced. The followers for various reasons may believe contemporary PC, but even that is suspect. For most, it appears that a witch trial is loads of fun.
3) Rather than moan the exclusion and witch trials surrounding the victims of contemporary PC, every effort should be made to lay the groundwork for a new PC, one that favors the existence of what we think of as traditional Constitutional government and traditional religion. But it has to be a forward leaning body of ideas about the Twenty-First Century. When a witch is hanged to enforce conformity, he cannot be unhanged. All we the living can do is to fashion a new PC and find ways to enforce it.
Sometimes old PC ways (like the supremacy of monarchy…see the Mayflower Compact) can pass from fashion as it did in the USA in the 1770s, then re-assert its validity as it did in the USA in the 1860s, the 1940s, and the 2010s. The various PCs go in and out of fashion in accordance with social protocols that we have yet to discover, but the contemporary PC we live in will devour itself in an ouroboros-style orgy of self-destruction. What do we insert in its place?
The left and in particular the academic left has long proclaimed its support of free speech even to the point of extreme behavior but that is only for speech they agree with. Step outside the leftist ideology and they will support shutting down speech and even the use of violence against the speaker.
And it does not matter what the person says in relation to other subjects, they can be 100% leftist in everything else but one wrong step and the ‘hate speech” label is applied. That is why for example it does not matter if someone goes along with the holocaust story or the every race is equal story, if you say anything they disagree with then you are the enemy so hiding you beliefs in one area does you no good unless you hide all your non-leftist beliefs.
Chris Brand received unfavorable publicity on publication of his book and there was a campaign against him at Edinburgh, with a public meeting held. However, he was only sacked by the university after remarks he reportedly made about paedophilia some months afterwards were reported in the Scotsman newspaper.
From what I gather, when Brand urged leniency for a specific case this was used as a pretext to get rid of his bothersome research on genetics and IQ.
James Dewey Watson is a tricky one. While he refuses to be associated by any measure to racialism or racial consciousness, and has made numerous statements in this regard to journalists, he has consistently defended an ultradeterministic vision of the human brain, an ambiguous attitude that can be explained by his strong philo-Semitism (and subsequent distrust of national-socialism, “neo-nazis”, etc.) and a desire to safeguard his persona of an apolitical scientist and discoverer.
I’ve read his Oxford-published 2007 memoirs, and it is noteworthy that they end precisely on the topic of DNA and the brain, as if he wanted to make a statement to posterity. He basically says that schizophrenia is 100% genetic (and therefore destroys in one shot the very basis of psychiatry as a curative body of medicine), intelligence also, and that only a few years will be needed for a growing body of evidence to destroy the social taboo surrounding genes.
I did not know that Crick too was a determinist. How long till the very idea of “DNA” is outlawed by PC as dangerous? The Jews have already started their attack on it via their “epigenetics” theory.
Frankly, I was hoping the author would offer solutions to combat this problem of shutting down of important scientific discussions that sorely needs to be aired publicly. All he did was to describe how our potential science allies gets shut down by the Left without offering solutions to combat this tactic.
The final paragraph quoting Clyde Wilson does offer an alternative, but this and all else require more than anonymous individuals making inane quips on internet forums.
I would like to question the idea that intolerance is wrong, which seems implicit in this article. A real belief system, such as Cultural Marxism or Islam, is necessarily totalitarian, as it is right, and anything opposing it must therefore be wrong, and what is wrong should be stamped out. Humans are primarily emotional creatures, and emotion/irrationality/ideology is far more powerful than reason in motivating and organizing humankind. Viewed from a Darwinian perspective, emotion-driven ideologies such as these are formidable, powerful forces, much stronger than “casual” belief systems imbued with tolerance, rationality and impartiality, such as our contemporary value of “freedom of speech”. The suggestion that “in the marketplace of ideas, the truth will always eventually win out” is laughable. In fact, there is a battlefield of ideas, and the strongest side will arise victorious in a Darwinian struggle (ideas are not strong in themselves, their strength derives from their adherents’ motivation and ability to spread and enforce them).
How devoted are adherents of “freedom of speech/opinion” and scientific inquiry to those principles? Generally, its lukewarm at best, and most swiftly abandon them if there is any real price to pay for upholding them. Look at Watson, who was “mortified” that his scientifically-supported views would upset others, “harassed into a publicly humiliating retraction,” with almost no real penalties for a wealthy man near retirement. Contrast that to the passion and fire shown by followers of emotion-filled ideologies, willing to riot, burn down cities and suffer real harm for their beliefs.
Another poster made a good point that there has always been a brand of “Political Correctness”, a prevailing belief system that ruled human behavior that was generally not open to being questioned. Certainly the Puritans had such, and a light version existed in pre-Semitic America. European history is generally marked by intolerance, fanaticism and strong defense against foreign beliefs, with religion as a major component of this.
“Ironically, those who fled a totalitarian regime laid the foundations for a system that is intolerant of views that do not accord with their central dogma”
This is ironic in a sense, but I would view the situation as the colonization of a warlike idea in a land ripe for conquest, similar to the invasion of a species of plant coming in from abroad, that is intent on becoming the dominant flora, displacing the native species. The concept of “freedom of speech”, openness to new ideas and tolerance of others’ views creates a pitifully weak social structure, that almost begs for something stronger to come along to replace it. There are numerous dynamic ideologies that are happy to do so, just as there are numerous foreign species quite willing and able to conquer new land areas.
I find myself in agreement with the academic that, freedom of speech is a “nice abstract idea used to enable people like Shockley to spread [a new idea].” Public discourse is not an enjoyable “gentleman’s game.” Rather, it should be viewed as a type of warfare, as it results in policies that determine the course of a nation, literally involving life and death for entire peoples. A nation without an emotion-based ideology, without fanaticism, which allows competing ideas is disarmed, and dangerously open to conquest.
I did not read such a claim in Kerry Bolton’s piece, but I am indeed under the impression that he regards intolerance and obscurantism as bad things, something debatable.
I used to be a libertarian prometheist, which I still am to a certain extent, and as such was opposed to the very idea of State censorship. I have come to revise my position in the last months, because I progressively understood that the great masses of people are happy to conform, not to choose. Most housewives secretly dream of having only one brand of a certain product in supermarkets instead of ten. Choosing is for smart people. When dumb people need to choose between complex directions, it only makes them miserable, and they end up following the loudest and coolest voice instead of the most rational.
A reason why mass media should be under total state control. One more thing NS Germany did right. The Goebbels-Ufa-Amman complex was a masterpiece of social engineering.
How very well said. Essentially a reflection of the will to power and the will to live. ‘To be, or not to be’, as so often quoted. When I read your comments, all I could think of is how Anglo America was infiltrated, plundered, subverted and suborned. A weak willed ship-of-fools, who have been masochistically guilt tripped, brow beaten, and reduced to being a domesticated milk herd and clueless Golem of Jewry/Israel.
I wonder why Bolton begins by saying that the “Hitler regime” was “noted” for “repression of scientists”
I don’t see any examples of such scientists in the essay.
Starting an essay by saying something negative about Hitler seems a lot like saying, “I’m not racist but …”
Well there’s the example of the Frankfurt School in the very next sentence.
I saw that, but the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt was not shut down for being scientific but for being Communist.
It was not at all “ironically” that these refugee Communist Jews “laid the foundations for a system that is intolerant….”
Hadding, I am banning you as a commentator for this kind of dishonest sophistic quibbling.
Hadding can’t help but quibble. . . .
He’s a meercat.
The only question is whose meercat?
How many times does the left have to demonstrate their vileness, their lack of civility, their utter willingness to become violent even, until dimwitted conservatives get it through their fat heads that the left doesn’t believe in debate, they believe in being right and silencing their opponents in any way they can.
Here in California, we had prop. 8, the gay marriage thing. It passed, most Californians voting convincingly against gay marriage. What did the leftists do? They physically attacked people, they defaced churches, they cried and lobbied until a leftist judge gave them another chance to overrule the will of the majority. The same thing happened in California with prop.187 in 1994 which tried to eliminate social services for illegal aliens. Again the leftist courts overruled the will of the majority.
I believe the banning of the Frankfurt School in Germany was an act of genius more than any real suppression of science.
Assuming Hitler could have delayed war for longer, while the Germans got busy developing medicine, tanks, aircraft, computers and other technologies, the American academic and scientific communities would have been paralyzed by a crew of pseudointellectual “social scientists”.
Educational institutions would be so taken over that careers are made and broken by which bigwig’s revolutionary politics a scientist agrees with. Scientific advancement reduced to vague research papers for fear of upsetting a minority.
While the West would be fighting the heteronormative cispatriarchy or to abolish implicit white privilege, the Nazis would have been taking over the world from aboard their flying saucers, all the while saying “just as planned.”
This query is a bit beside the point, but can Kerry Bolton or someone else shed a bit more light on C. P. Snow’s views on the matters in question? Knowing that Snow had been a man of the Left his whole life—as other surviving readers, if indeed there are any, of Strangers and Brothers will attest—I was somewhat surprised to learn that Crick had written to him, presumably expecting a sympathetic hearing.
The communcations seem to have involved science in general, not political implications:
http://www.livescience.com/10142-lost-letters-reveal-twists-discovery-double-helix.html
As an aside, geneticist H J Mueller was a Leftist who tried to get Stalin to pursue a eugenics program, on the basis that the USSR was a society based on science. While Stalin reversed much of the original Bolshevik nonsense, he rejected Mueller’s appeal to him in favour of Lysenko. The geneticist J B S Haldane was also a Communist who nontheless considered inequality to be innate.
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