My, how we all laughed. Thirty years ago the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a social science journal into publishing a paper ‘liberally salted with nonsense’ (in his own words) that ‘flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions’. Its title alone gave away the joke: ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.’
Little did we in the truth-seeking enterprise which is real science realise that verbose and vapid social deconstruction was coming for us too. In a new book, The War on Science, edited by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, 31 scientists and scholars lament the corruption of their field by left-wing ideological nonsense. Whereas once a book with this title would have raged at the conservative right pushing creationism and sexism in the teeth of truth, now it is exposing the woke left pushing identity ideology and intersectionality at the expense of reason.
In 2022, Nature, at the pinnacle of the scientific establishment, published an editorial stating that it would refuse or retract papers that ‘could reasonably be perceived to undermine the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings’. The editors went on to reassure readers that they would consult ‘advocacy groups’ before doing this, just as they once had to consult popes before denying that the Earth circles the sun. This was an open invitation to activists to censor science they did not like. Sure, scientists always had their prejudices, ideological biases and blind spots, but almost by definition regarded those as bad things to be minimised. Here now was a manifesto for deliberately injecting bias into science.
As I said, back in the 1990s we laughed off this threat. The structure of DNA, the charge of an electron, the distance to Andromeda – these were neutral facts, not social constructs, and always would be. Foucauldian gobbledygook could be ignored as a disorder of the humanities and sociology.
Then the ramparts of anthropology were overrun by those who insisted that science must come second to cultural hypersensitivity when discussing indigenous peoples. Then much of psychology went the same way, the sensible compromises between nature and nurture that every sane person had accepted thrown out in favour of the outdated fable of blank-slate social construction.
But surely biology was safe, let alone chemistry and physics? How naive we were! Gender became the new front line. Journals were falling over themselves to declare sex a spectrum, despite the fact that all animals divide neatly into a sex with large, immobile gametes and a sex with small, mobile gametes – and there are no other sexes, just some rare developmental anomalies. Deviate from this new Lysenkoism by saying there are two sexes and you will be excommunicated.
Richard Dawkins once pointed out in a tweet that a mostly white woman had been pilloried for ‘identifying as black’, which seemed puzzling given that race is a spectrum in a way that sex is not. Why is it all right for a man to identify as a woman but not for a white person to identify as black? Just for raising the issue, he was retrospectively stripped of his humanist of the year award by the American Humanist Association. They accused him of implying ‘that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while simultaneously attacking black identity’.
So biology fell, but physics, and maths? Incredibly, yes, they too are battlefields. In 2023, a physics journal published an article on ‘observing whiteness in introductory physics, a case study’ and a maths conference heard a talk on ‘undergraduate mathematics education as a white cisheteropatriarchal space and opportunities for structural disruptions to advance queer of colour justice’.
Papers are being retracted, scientists sanctioned, hiring practices altered and peer reviews corrupted
Hilariously, the ideologues have painted themselves into an awkward corner in their attempts to decolonise mathematics. They demand non-western slants on algebra and algorithms, which are words of Arabic origin, while rewriting exam problems to replace adding up grocery bills (which ‘carry the ideological message that paying for food is natural’) with calculating how many aboriginal people can fit in a tipi, which is patronising to the point of racism. One right-on mathematician admitted this change was insulting, but only ‘because indigenous people would not divide themselves in the way stated in the word problem. Relational and spiritual factors would dominate’. Meanwhile, New Zealand now requires schools to teach indigenous Maori ‘ways of knowing’ as equivalent to scientific ones. So creationism is fine if brown people do it?
Many scientists continue to do good work unperturbed by this revolt against critical thinking. But the sheer volume of funding, publishing and attention that is being siphoned off into this pathology represents a massive opportunity cost. Grants are being spent, papers retracted, scientists sanctioned, hiring practices altered and peer reviews corrupted, while scientists are self-censoring to prevent their cancellation. Four-fifths of students say they self-censor, many more than at the height of McCarthyism.
It is now clear that embracing ideology over truth directly led to scientists misleading us during the pandemic. ‘I hate when politics is injected into science, but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstance,’ wrote Kristian Andersen, a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research, to a colleague in March 2020, justifying his premature and wrong conclusion that a lab leak could be ruled out as the origin of Covid.
In an open letter in 2020 more than 1,200 academics argued that mass-protesting George Floyd’s death during lockdown was safe, while visiting a dying relative in hospital was not. This helped torpedo the reputation of science. A prominent left-leaning scientist told me recently: ‘The pandemic has destroyed my trust in scientific experts.’
Science has always behaved like a cult to some extent, enforcing dogma and persecuting heretics, but it has grown far worse with wokery. Science as a philosophy is still great, but science as an institution is about as true to its philosophy as the church was under the Borgias, and as ripe for reformation.
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