The communist rulers in the old Soviet Union gradually came to believe that opposition to them was more than a different point of view but symptomatic of mental illness. Dissent from Karl Marx’s mental prism was tantamount to being emotionally disturbed. They developed a form of pseudo-scientific psychiatry to suppress disagreement, and the same thing is germinating in the United States: the distortion of science to pursue political ends.
In the USSR of the 1960’s-80’s, a pseudo-scientific jargon was invented to give The Science the sound of legitimacy. An entire fake science was cobbled together by a professor of Soviet psychiatry, Andrei Snezhnevsky of the impressive sounding USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. His diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia” and “delusion of reformism” was applied to anyone whose beliefs led them to renounce their atheism, attempt to immigrate, engage in protests, or practice a faith. If you think that it’s not happening here, think again.
Let’s be clear, “The Science” must not be confused with science. It’s an institutionalized variant of science that carries with it all the norms of organizational man/woman/whatever. People in organizations don’t behave like man/woman/whatever in their natural and private settings. A group personality coalesces around shared expectations and norms and frequently morphs into shared opinions. Once a shared attachment to collectivism takes root, for instance, the organizational politicization of science will soon follow. It’s happened, and is happening.
Our science is increasingly politicized to promote highly contentious opinions. Disagreement is persecuted as ignorance and bigotry, and maybe even attributed to a disturbed emotional comportment. Ideologically partisan journalists such as Chris Mooney in his books “The Republican War on Science” (2005) and the follow-up “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality” come close to imitating Andrei Snezhnevsky when they hide their glaring political opinions under the cloak of “The Science”.
The tactic of branding your political opponents with dementia isn’t limited to Mooney. Express some skepticism about the extravagant and ideologically tinged claims on highly debatable issues from climate change to transgenderism to systemic racism and you’ll face a fusillade of abuse and threats to your livelihood, and maybe jail time if they can get away with it. Having these forbidden thoughts isn’t a career enhancer. You’ll be erased off the ledger of respectable humanity. The word “denier” serves the same purpose as “sluggish schizophrenia”.
Zeks (gulag prisoners) in Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” often referred to “beyond the wire” (or something like it) for the world outside the camp. In today’s politics masquerading as science, the equivalent of zeks, or “deniers”, are accused of straying “beyond the wire” of the approved mental prison – synonymous with “scientific consensus”. Straying beyond the wire is the excuse for the gatekeepers – er, mental prison guards – to put The Science at the service of a particular political party, the Democratic Party, who helps keep the fence electrified, and at the disservice of the other who questions the very existence of the camp in the first place. Political endorsements by science figureheads, organizations, and their publications have followed, and to the detriment of their reputations as they come to be viewed as just another collection of political hacks.
It hasn’t occurred to the guards that naturally non-political organizations and their participants – think professional sports: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc. – alienate half, maybe more, of their clientele when they identify with one side in the country’s political divide. It’s a no-brainer: endorse Democrats, anger Republicans. At least half the public, maybe more, begins to see them as little different from a super-PAC. Buying a ticket or product of the compromised enterprise is perceived as the equivalent of a political donation. The same political self-labeling occurs when scientists step into partisan battles and the culture war.
Phil Jackson, the famous coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, doesn’t watch the NBA because it’s too political (see below). When players were allowed to festoon their jerseys with political slogans and obscuring their names, his grandkids recounted a particular play with “Justice went to the basket and Equal Opportunity knocked him down.” It’s funny if it wasn’t so tragic to the sport. And now The Science is turning off people in like manner.
The culture war, or revolution, has a clear partisan flavor to it. The high-stakes contest is one of revolution and counterrevolution with the D’s in the vanguard of the revolution and R’s trying to put the brakes on it. The journal “Nature” in 2020 jumped with both feet into the cultural and partisan war in a ringing endorsement of Joe Biden. In an editorial that could have come from Biden’s campaign staff – or Stalin’s chief prosecutor in the show trials, Andrei Vyshinsky – they branded the R’s candidate as “accelerating climate change, razing wilderness, fouling air and killing more wildlife — as well as people.” Trump may be a lot of things, but singlehandedly obliterating the planet is a bit of a stretch. This is the language of the zealot, not a lab scientist grappling with a hypothesis.
Not to be outdone, as if on cue, “Scientific American”, the sister magazine to “Nature” (same publisher, Springer Nature), issued a partisan clarion call in an October 2020 editorial titled “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden” (see below). Their hyperbole descends into the same political septic tank: “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science.” The hubris is astounding. They claim to own The Science and the zeks must be kept from straying “beyond the wire”.
But they don’t own the science; they own a collection of political opinions. At the root of these opinions is an affection for collectivism. It’s the one thing that unites the denizens of The Science. Somehow, in their mind, collectivism became the thinking man’s (or woman’s/whatever) ideology. They were perhaps blinkered by an academic marination in it without knowing it. It was embedded in their insular classroom instruction as undergrads. Hayek’s freedom-based spontaneous order, or anything like it, was never allowed to grace their intellects.
A constrained education is woven with an endemic apocalypse-mongering which turns all issues into calls for collectivist action: it’s existential and therefore we can’t afford free markets, freedom of conscience, capitalism, or anyone practicing real science which is based on a healthy skepticism of extravagant claims. A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at hysterical calls to eliminate an entire car fleet and transportation system in the span of twenty years. A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at burdening an already overstretched grid with electric-everything and radically shifting it to low-density energy after banning high-density. This isn’t science. It’s ideology on the march.
Not unlike The Science in the Soviet Union. The gambit is the same: make the science an adjunct of the politics and then weaponize it against your political opponents. It’s a very dangerous thing to do for a country in an increasingly perilous time. It’ll ruin us. Khruschev did say, after all, “We’ll bury you.” Well, we’ll bury ourselves.
RogerG
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* Much thanks to the work of Christine Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute in “The Folly of Nature’s Biden Endorsement”, 3/30/2023, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/04/17/the-folly-of-natures-biden-endorsement/
* “NBA champion coach Phil Jackson says he doesn’t watch basketball anymore because it got too political”, Lauren Sforza, The Hill, 4/23/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/nba-champion-coach-phil-jackson-says-he-doesn-t-watch-basketball-anymore-because-it-got-too-political/ar-AA1aeBfW
* “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden”, Editors, The Scientific American, 10/1/2020, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-american-endorses-joe-biden1/
