Science in an Age of Unreason by John Staddon

Author:John Staddon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Gateway
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Social Pressure

The authority of a king is purely physical, and it controls the actions of the subject without subduing his private will; but the majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy.

—Alexis de Tocqueville6

The most effective way to suppress inquiry is not violence but self-censorship, enforced by social pressure. In the contemporary West, research in certain directions is blocked not by the brutal methods of a totalitarian dictator urged on by a wrongheaded scientist, but by an ideological consensus that has been growing since the 1960s.7

Petitions, facilitated now by social media, are a popular way to enforce the preferences of an activist group. Here is one example, from many. In March 2021, The Times headlined, “Academics Led the Campaign to Silence Genetics Professor Gregory Clark on Race.”8 Clark, a Scottish-born visiting professor from the University of California at Davis, was to give a talk at Glasgow University’s Adam Smith Business School. (Clark’s talk was in effect an updated version of Francis Galton’s 1869 book Hereditary Genius.) Clark tentatively entitled it “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 Individuals 1750–2020 Shows Genetics Determines Most Social Outcomes.”

The “Bell Curve” allusion was a trigger for both students and faculty, leading to a collective letter which concluded:

We firmly oppose the circulation of genetically-determined ideas of any aspect of social worlds. Not only because those ideas have been overwhelmingly discredited by reputable and rigorous research, but because due to their history, their circulation as legitimate science has political implications that pose a danger to the mission of the university and the wellbeing of its community [emphasis added].9

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