When Civilization Goes UndergroundSoviet emigre and chemist Anna Krylov warns that wokeness is destroying science -- and even civilization
Rod Dreher
Dec 5, 2022
That image above is of the USC chemist Anna Krylov. She is an emigre from the USSR, a scientist, and a prophet. More on her later in this post.
But first, this is going around on Twitter again. If you didn't see it the first time, watch it now. It's only two minutes long. It's the death of a civilization, in the form of a kind of prayer:
https://youtu.be/g_OVOUzU8YAWhy is this an example of the death of a civilization? Because it marks the surrender of an entire way of doing science and practicing medicine, sacrificed for the sake of ideological belief. This is craziness -- but it also reveals why wokeness is no mere irritant. It is a direct threat to the foundations of our civilization. All of those people a decade or so ago who thought the hard sciences would be immune to this disease that has fatally corrupted study of the humanities were wrong.
Don't believe me? Here is Nature magazine -- Nature, one of the world's pre-eminent science journals -- running a short piece demanding the suicide of science in the name of "decolonization". Excerpts:
I’ve studied rain-fed cropping systems alongside colleagues in sub-Saharan Africa, notably Malawi, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, throughout my career. Those colleagues are not invited by their white, Western collaborators to speak at big conferences or to co-author high-profile papers in agriculture. My colleagues at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and I hope to reverse this trend by advocating for decolonization through authorship. As a start, my team of researchers will include a paragraph about what each author did, and how the team paid attention to gender and global-south inclusivity in publications.
Most of the 13 agricultural gene banks and research centres in the global research partnership CGIAR, including CIMMYT, use the h-index for performance evaluations. It is a metric of a scientist’s productivity and influence, prioritizing top publications. Alternative indices, such as Google Scholar, which includes outputs such as book chapters, can be less elitist and include a wider range of viewpoints.
Now, I find it easy to believe that Western scientists have been unfairly and foolishly dismissive of what local farmers say around the world. I also believe that a science that focuses only on higher crop yields, but does not pay attention to the broader system in which crops are grown (e.g., soil health, the relationship of agriculture to community traditions), is an incomplete science. But you can fix those mistakes without having to import an anti-intellectual ideology wholesale into the practice of science! The fact that you have "paid attention to gender and global-south inclusivity" does not mean that you have done better science, any more than the University of Minnesota medical school oath-takers' promise to bring indigenous ways of healing into their practices means they are practicing better medicine.
If you do nothing else today, take a look at this paper by Anna Krylov, a Soviet-born research chemist at USC. She delivered it last year. In it, Krylov talks about how the Soviets politicized science, and issues a warning to the West. Excerpts:
My everyday experiences as a chemistry professor at an American university in 2021 bring back memories from my school and university time in the USSR. Not good memories—more like Orwellian nightmares. I will compare my past and present experiences to illustrate the following parallels between the USSR and the US today: (i) the atmosphere of fear and self-censorship; (ii) the omnipresence of ideology (focusing on examples from science); (iii) an intolerance of dissenting opinions (i.e., suppression of ideas and people, censorship, and Newspeak); (iv) the use of social engineering to solve real and imagined problems.
More:
In the USSR, everything and everyone was scrutinized through the lens of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Everything was critically analyzed in terms of class struggle, the struggle between the oppressors and oppressed.
I literally mean everything—from hairstyle and fashion to novels and philosophy. I once got a notice for “advancing an imperialistic agenda” for showing up in jeans to an informal school event. In literature classes, we analyzed images of the oppressed people in Leo Tolstoy’s novels and the depiction of class struggle in Pushkin’s romantic poems. And the signs of corruption and decadent decay of the West in Hemingway’s books.
Science was not spared from this ideological control. Every institution had a department charged with executing this control and ensuring that the science and the scientists were in strict compliance with Marxism-Leninism. Scientific theories and ideas were scrutinized by the Party to determine whether or not they were aligned with Marxist-Leninist philosophy and whether they advanced the interests of the proletariat. Whether they belonged to wholesome Soviet science or rotten Western influences.
Sometimes entire disciplines were declared “bourgeois pseudoscience” and research was banned for years. Examples include cybernetics and genetics. Sometimes the Party would single out specific theories, such as resonance theory in chemistry, and execute a purge.
This created lasting damage and had direct economic impact.
Sound familiar? Krylov said this is now everywhere in academia, including in STEM fields. She cites research showing that the self-censorship in the McCarthy era was nothing compared to today's:
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/when-civilization-goes-underground/
