DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE LEFT’S WAR ON SCIENCE ****
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“We did not come to ask for mercy from nature,” Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, the Lysenko of Soviet agriculture, once declared. “We must wrest it from her.”
Communist science was guided not by the journey from hypothesis to fact but by the dusty
proclamations of Marxist theorists. Soviet scientists were expected to reject capitalist science and formulate a science that matched the Communist worldview.
The Communist worldview insisted that every living creature could be completely transformed into anything. It rejected natural selection as having a competitive capitalist bent that suspiciously resembled a biological version of free market competition. And pseudo-scientists like Lysenko and Michurin matched bad science to bad ideology laying out an official dogma in which transforming the environment could transform any creature and in which intraspecies struggle did not lead to evolution.
The USSR’s politicization of biology crippled its agriculture. Its leaders rejected free market competition on the human level and in the plant and animal kingdoms. They insisted that nature had to follow Marxist dialectical materialism and locked up and murdered the scientists who disagreed. By the time the USSR fell, a land which had once exported wheat to the world had gone deep into debt to buy wheat from the United States.
But bad ideology driving bad science didn’t die with Lysenko and Michurin. The new Lysenkos are Warmunists like Michael Mann and James Hansen. The environmentalists, like the Communists, believe that human beings have total control over the environment and that the environment determines all. Where they differ is the perceived effect of that influence. Warmunism, like Communism, originates not from science, but from ideology. The Communists divided industry into two types by ideological classification; the good cooperative Socialist industry and the bad competitive Capitalist industry. The Warmunists similarly ideologically classify two types of industry; environmentally conscious green technology and dirty non-socially conscious brown technology.
The Warmunists, like the Communists, classify science and industry not by outcome, but by ideology, and then paper over that classification with bad science. Green technology is often dirtier and less efficient than the so-called brown technology, but like the collective farms and the idiotic ramblings of Michurin and Lysenko, it’s better because it more closely fits the Socialist vision of how things ought to work.
Scientists debate, but ideologues delegitimize. The Communists did not debate science. They declared dogma and locked up anyone who disagreed. The Warmunists don’t have the power to sentence their critics to prison, though some among them have broached the notion, instead they plot campaigns of character assassination against those who question the theories that they try to pass off as final facts.
The Warmunists, like the Communists, are not interested in learning how the world works, but in using their notions of how the world ought to work to develop a model of how human beings ought to behave.
The Communists rejected the free market and natural human competition. They extended that metaphor to all living things because they feared the dissonance between how the world worked and how their ideal society was meant to work. The Warmunists reject the free market and human industry because, like the Communists, they seek to use science to impose a centralized model of human society as a dangerously fragile existence in which unguided individual efforts are dangerously disruptive and only ideological compliance can lead to a better life for the collective planet.
While the left rejects the pseudo-science of Lysenko and Michurin when it comes to the plant and animal kingdoms, it still argues that people can be remade into any political identity without regard to biology. Lysenkoists believed that just as animals and plants could be transformed over short periods of time by altering their environment, human beings could also be transformed from their greedy and competitive selves by living under Socialism.
The new Lysenkoists place mind over biology. If a man wants to be a woman, then all he has to do is think that he is and he will be. The latest civil rights initiatives protect the rights of men to dress up as women and have the same legal status. A man by the name of Calliope Wong applied to Smith College, a top Ivy League all-girls college. Smith had not gone to the trouble of getting his genitals medically mutilated, a pseudo-medical ritual which is misleadingly referred to as a “Sex Change Operation”, but the media insisted that if he identified as a woman, then he was a woman.
Even the worst Soviet science didn’t insist that biology was so malleable that a man could click his heels three times and think himself a woman, but behind the push for the transgender dogma is that same idea that biology must be more malleable than politics and that in a conflict between the two, science must conform to ideology.
Like Lysenkoist science, the postmodern assertion that the choice of male or female sexual partners is rigidly fixed at a genetic level, but that gender is infinitely transformative, that gay men cannot turn back to straight, but that men can become women and women can become men, makes no logical sense. It makes even less scientific sense. But it makes perfect political sense.
The left’s version of the old racist “one-drop rule” that treated anyone with even one drop of black blood as black is to treat anyone with even the loosest claim to minority status as a minority and to mandate the irrevocable nature of that minority status. That is why Obama is black, rather than half- white, why Elizabeth Warren can be a Cherokee and why a straight man can become gay, but a gay man cannot become straight. It is why a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man and gain an entirely new transgender minority status.
The scientific principle at work here is the conservation of minority status. The left’s policies are meant to diminish the size of the majority and enlarge the size and number of minorities.
Political diversity when applied to science logically leads to immutable homosexuality and mutable gender. It leads to a construct of race governed by a politically correct version of the one-drop rule in which racial identification always trends toward minority status, rather than majority status. The science is bad, but the political calculation is impeccable. Biology is just as irrelevant in 2013 America as it was in 1923 Russia. How the human body works doesn’t matter. How the body politic ought to work is of obsessive importance. The individual is a metaphor for the collective. The power of the state to transform the individual from male to female is a metaphor for its power to transform the entire nation through the transformation of language.
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it,” George Orwell wrote in 1984. “It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”
Compelling people to believe irrational things is the ultimate triumph of a totalitarian ideology. It is the achievement of a state that transcends reality and manufactures its own reality. The ultimate power of the state depends on the malleability of man. Even if the state cannot make 2 + 2 = 5 or transform a man into a woman, it can more importantly compel everyone to believe that it is so.
The left cannot change global temperatures, human biology, plant growth or basic mathematics. But it can change the mind of man to think that its spending sprees and deep debts, its bizarre notions of agriculture and even more bizarre notions of human biology are absolute verified facts. It can replace a science of facts with a science of ideologies with hardly anyone being the wiser.
In California, a bill has been put forward mandating that insurance companies have to provide infertility treatments to homosexuals. While normal industry practice is to provide infertility treatments only to natural couples, the modern Marxist Michurins refuse to be at the mercy of mere biology. They did not come to ask mercy of nature. Instead they are here to tell nature what latest developments in lefty thinking it is expected to conform to.
“Coverage for the treatment of infertility shall be offered and provided without discrimination on the basis of… gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information… sexual orientation,” the bill states.
While infertility treatments can be offered without regard to gender, fertility cannot exist without regard to gender. A man can claim that his marriage to another man is just like a marriage to a woman, but no amount of empty words or lawsuits will wrest a child from his body. A man can claim that he is now a woman, but no amount of mandated fertility treatments will enable him to conceive life.
The Lysenkoism of attempting to force science to conform to politics always leads to a biological dead end. Homosexuals are not infertile. They are not in the class of relationships that are biologically capable of conceiving life. It makes as much sense to speak of infertility between a man and another man as it does between a sheep and a cow.
Since every homosexual couple is infertile, every such couple would be entitled to infertility treatments. But no amount of such treatments will enable them to conceive a child without the biological intervention of a member of the opposite sex at some point in the process. And no law can mandate otherwise. All the law can do is mandate an expensive policy whose only purpose is to burden the public with the high cost of pretending to defy biology in the name of politics.
Toward the end, the Soviet Union was running low on wheat. The United States and Europe are running low on children and on industry.
The Western left declared war on science and science is winning. The Warmunists demand that the West cut off its industrial nose to spite its environmental face. And while the factories of China boom, Americans and Europeans go jobless and hungry. The left insisted that family and gender don’t matter, that the ideal society is full of unmarried men and women, men pretending to be women and men shacking up with other men. And the elderly hippies of the establishment are running out of children to pay for their post-gender, post-sexual and post-family paradise. To make up for the gap their countries are filling up with Muslim immigrants whose families are patriarchal and polygamous.
Ideologies have consequences. The Soviet Union found that out the hard way. Now the Socialist republics of what used to be the free world are finding out the same thing. You can replace science with political pseudo-science, and you can convince or compel everyone to pay fealty to its false claims, but you cannot escape the consequences of your actions.
You can declare war on science… but science will always win.
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