Ten days ago, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued this:
AAAS acknowledges and supports #ShutDownSTEM, a grassroots movement that aims to “transition to a lifelong commitment of actions to eradicate anti-Black racism in academia and STEM.” We are committed to education, action, and healing at AAAS, and we hope to encourage other institutions and individuals to get involved. This is not a moment that our community can let pass. It is time to stop what we’re doing, take time to listen to our friends and colleagues, and commit ourselves to taking the actions needed to bring about real and lasting change.
I have been re-reading The Secret of Our Success, by Joseph Henrich. Here is one passage:
Sometime in the 1820s an epidemic hit this population of hunters and selectively killed off many of its oldest and most knowledgeable members. With the sudden disappearance of the know-how carried by these individuals, the group collectively lost its ability to make some its most crucial and complex tools. . .these technological losses had a dramatic impact, leaving the group unable to hunt caribou (no bows) or harvest the plentiful Arctic char from local streams (no leisters).
The point of this passage is that it is possible for a culture to lose valuable knowledge and revert to a more primitive state. It strikes me that our academic leaders are attempting to do exactly that.
Typical feel-good, symbolism-over-substance garbage from the Left. Much easier than changing the incentives that corrupt the police departments and created and sustain the underclass. Get rid of civil asset forfeiture, get rid of public sector unions, reign in qualified immunity. Eliminate the government policies that create and sustain poverty.
By way of example,Prof. Stephen Hsu has just resigned.
In other words, the mob won, and science lost.
For those who hadn’t been following this affair, which began about a week ago, a relatively balanced summary is here.
My favorite Orwellian quote from that article is where one of Hsu’s detractors claims that “removing Hsu would not be a violation of academic freedom, but a fulfillment of it.”
Ugh.
“removing Hsu would not be a violation of academic freedom, but a fulfillment of it.”/i>
That’s why we have removed the Jews from their positions in the Reich’s universities.
Killing off the elders, reverting to a state of nature. Yup. I would give this process a name, “barratry.”
Barratry, the persistent incitement of litigation both formal and informal, is perhaps the greatest social problem facing the USA. Litigation is the lodging of a complaint against a person that compels that person to respond. The AAAS is engaging in barratry by calling for “a transition to a lifelong commitment of actions to eradicate anti-Black racism in academia and STEM.” In other words, 55 years of litigation under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is just a warm up, we want you, for the rest of your life, to be compelled to act in undefined ways to respond to the various ill-defined complaints of one racial identity group (i.e., “anti-Black racism”) based upon culpability presumed by your non-membership in the complainant’s identity group.
Normally barratry refers to the legal guild using its monopoly on the courts to drum up more billable hours: an appeals court judge tortures a legal doctrine to produce an unexpected result that in turn promotes new lawsuits and the guild gets richer. We see it every day. And this example gets emulated in the courts of social science academia with their genocidal pronouncements on racial guilt. Nothing will ever get resolved so long as there is a rich payoff for more complaints. And we are not even near reaching a point of diminishing returns.
Although they may be dead, the wisdom of some of elders lives on in their books. A silver lining to the virus, has been the expanded opportunity, taken advantage of by nearly everyone as far as I can tell, to read classic literature. However depressing the news may be, reading Schiller, Theodore Storm, Gottfried Keller, Thomas Paine, Joaquim Nabuco, and others is enough to inspire one to believe that it is still possible to lead a good life and that abject submission is not the answer.
How long before engineering and science students start heading overseas to get a real education?
In a military sense we are watching a panic. Our side has been panicked, the other side— Antifa nipping at the heels of panic-fleeing normies, big-city politicians, and most importantly, the people those groups work for, are cool as cucumbers.
The thing about panics is they can be reversed, but only by steadfast leaders, which we do not have.
The main question about this AAAS story is whether Sudip Parikh, CEO of AAAS, is a panic victim or a turncoat. My money is on the latter. Worse, he will come out of it fine. He is not a scientist but an apparatchik, and despite his title no leader. He will turn his phony lab coat to suit whichever side he fears at the moment.
The US may revert to a more primitive state but there are plenty of sane countries around who will be delighted to preserve the know-how as well as absorb the gifted scientists like Hsu who will be removed from their positions in the US due to the new systematic racism.
Cancelling Hsu is like the Nazi’s driving Albert Einstein into the hands of the Allies.
It’s particularly terrible with him as he’s a real cutting edge scientist trying to solve the problem they want to pretend doesn’t exist.
Something amazing could be in the offing if we are able to keep some of the best minds free of the damage done by the majority of American undergraduate colleges. In the 17th century, some were restricted from the state’s universities and those minds freed transformed the world.
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“Newcomen’s religion had consequences greater than absence from a local census. Dissenters, including Baptists, Presbyterians, and others, were as a class, excluded from universities after 1660, and either apprenticed, or learned their science from dissenting academies.”
“At the same time that he chartered the world’s first scientific society, Charles II had created an entire generation of dissenting intellectuals uncontrolled by his kingdom’s ever more technophobic universities.”
p29, Rosen, Willam, ‘The Most Powerful Idea in the World’