How did it come to this?

he crowd we once ridiculed for being so annoyingly phony, who kept telling us their only goal was to “be nice” to each other, is now lined up like penguins ready to dive into some of the darkest waters the world has seen in 78 years.

How did it come to this? All of today's wackiness started in the 1980s with political correctness. Its essential nature was pretense: pretending that things are the way one would like them to be will make them so. Pretense can only be sustained when those around you share the same delusion.

This is the Tinkerbell theory, after the fictional fairy creature who said that only if everyone believes can something happen. In the story, the fairy told the audience if they all clapped, Tinkerbell (who had just drunk poison) would magically recover. In a Journal of Consciousness Studies article, Frank Durgin hypothe­sized that the Tinkerbell effect, where the brain cells in the visual cortex all start ‘clapping’ together, explains how the brain can fill in missing pieces of a pattern. Sadly it didn't catch on as a model for the brain, but it's a good description of how statements like “Islam is a religion of peace” were supposed to work: only if everybody (including the Islamists) believes, will it become one. It also brings dispensation from one's deeds, liberating the believer to indulge in hate and discrimination without fear of criticism.

Tinkerbell ideology also gave them an excuse for failure: whenever a policy failed, the reason was that not enough people believed in it. Their enemy, therefore, was those troglodytes who refused to believe just because someone told them they must.

It is, of course, possible to be too much of anything, as my firearm-happy neighbor found out when he started discharging his shotgun and AR-15 at 7:30 on a Sunday morning, a time when people in this part of the country are sleeping it off or going to church (or both). To me it was a way of calculating the sound pressure level (using the formula ΔL_p = 20 log(r₂/r₁), that guy would have gotten at least 126.4 dBA—enough to cause instant hearing loss—if he was 2 feet away). One neighbor, much closer than I was, had enough, and I could hear the swearing from a quarter mile away. Regardless, the firearm-friendly crowd makes a good point when they say ‘diversity’ is just old racism in a new bottle and fanatical puritanism is killing what we Americans call ‘culture’ and making everyone miserable.

Science

Scientists have an important role to play in all this. When religious conservatives started demanding that creationism be taught in biology classes as an alternative to evolution, scientists took a hard stand and defended science. They insisted that the claim that the Earth was created 6000 years ago was false—not just an alternative viewpoint—and that creationism was religion, not science. Yet most are oddly silent about claims that sex is a continuum or that the world is on fire.

Scientists need not opine on whether something is cis­hetero­norm­ative or not, but they need to defend scientific nuance and truth. When somebody says that sex is “assigned at birth,” as if the obstetrician flips a coin and transforms a sexless baby into one or the other at random, scientists should point out that sex is determined at the moment of fertilization and can be measured well before birth in a variety of ways. They could even point out, if they wished, that claiming sex is “assigned” is no different from saying a person's species and number of heads are assigned at birth—in other words, a lie.

A recent article in PNAS ^[1] discussing why scientists censor themselves shows how it could be done. Despite the authors' academic credentials, they try very hard to avoid disparaging one side or the other. True, they end up sounding like ChatGPT and saying little of substance, but they deserve credit for trying.

We no longer have to ask where this leads. Everyone can now see the dark path that identity politics leads to. Certainly neither government nor non-STEM academics can handle it. Government is a blind elephant at an antique show, and non-STEM academia is a lost cause. Hard science is the last man standing. It's no exaggeration to say that if we have a future, it will depend on scientists finding the courage to defend the truth. If they don't, they will suffer the same fate as historians, who refused to fight back and woke up to find that nobody believes anything they say.

What is shocking is how slippery the slope was from false beliefs to supporting a terrorist group that tried to start a genocidal war. But at least we now know that Tinkerbell was not really a harmless fairy but a dangerous radical. Not to mention a really bad toxicologist.

nov 27 2023, 4:24 am