Lawrence Krauss, a veteran American-Canadian theoretical physicist who has taught at Arizona State, Yale, and Case Western Reserve, rattled some cages yesterday with an article in the Wall Street Journal.

“The Ideological Corruption of Science” mourns and warns of the increasing substitution of politically correct ideology for objective, evidence-driven science in determining which scientific views get published and which don’t.

In the 1980s, when I was a young professor of physics and astronomy at Yale, deconstructionism was in vogue in the English Department. We in the science departments would scoff at the lack of objective intellectual standards in the humanities, epitomized by a movement that argued against the existence of objective truth itself, arguing that all such claims to knowledge were tainted by ideological biases due to race, sex or economic dominance.

It could never happen in the hard sciences, except perhaps under dictatorships, such as the Nazi condemnation of “Jewish” science, or the Stalinist campaign against genetics led by Trofim Lysenko, in which literally thousands of mainstream geneticists were dismissed in the effort to suppress any opposition to the prevailing political view of the state.

Or so we thought. In recent years, and especially since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, academic science leaders have adopted wholesale the language of dominance and oppression previously restricted to “cultural studies” journals to guide their disciplines, to censor dissenting views, to remove faculty from leadership positions if their research is claimed by opponents to support systemic oppression.

So Krauss begins. He proceeds to cite case after case in which legitimate scientists or their publications were blackballed because they didn’t adequately meet the demands of the politically correct crowd. Examples include the American Physical Society, various national laboratories and university science departments, the journal Nature, the Michigan State University, Princeton University, and others.

A distinguished chemist in Canada argued in favor of merit-based science and against hiring practices that aim at equality of outcome if they result “in discrimination against the most meritorious candidates.” For that he was censured by his university provost, his published review article on research and education in organic synthesis was removed from the journal website, and two editors involved in accepting it were suspended.

An Italian scientist at the international laboratory CERN, home to the Large Hadron Collider, had his scheduled seminar on statistical imbalances between the sexes in physics canceled and his position at the laboratory revoked because he suggested that apparent inequities might not be directly due to sexism. A group of linguistics students initiated a public petition asking that the psychologist Steven Pinker be stripped of his position as a Linguistics Society of America Fellow for such offenses as tweeting a New York Times article they disapproved of.

The phenomenon is a frontal assault on the legitimacy of science as a quest for truth that is supposed to be as objective as a human being can make it. One would expect many scientists to protest. Why don’t they?

… many academics are afraid, and for good reason. They are hesitant to disagree with scientific leadership groups, and they see what has happened to scientists who do. They see how researchers lose funding if they can’t justify how their research programs will explicitly combat claimed systemic racism or sexism, a requirement for scientific proposals now being applied by granting agencies.

That is bad news—for science, and for society. It will rob both of invaluable advances in understanding of the world and how to live in it. Ideological corruption has already crippled climate science and the science of human sexuality. In the past, it crippled genetics in Russia (think Lysenkoism) and contributed to the atrocities of eugenics in Nazi Germany and even in the United States, where forced sterilization was practiced even into the 1960s.

All of this is the fruit of ideology masquerading as science. Of ideology, the late political philosopher Russell Kirk, under whom I had the privilege of earning my master’s in economic ethics, wrote:

In France, at the close of the eighteenth century, the term [ideology] was employed by the disciples of Condillac, particularly Destutt de Tracy, whose Les éléments d’idéologie appeared in five volumes between 1801 and 1815. The original “ideologists” or “ideologues” believed that all knowledge is derived from sensation, and that a science of ideas could be developed upon this basis, describing the history and evolution of thought, and applicable to politics, ethics, and pedagogy. Thus originally “ideology” was a kind of climax of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, an attempt to systematize and apply knowledge obtained from sensory perception. …

Napoleon, in 1812, looking with disfavor upon the ideological school, ridiculed Destutt de Tracy and his associates as “ideologists,” men of hopelessly abstract and fanciful views, unacquainted with the realities of the civil social order. From an early date, accordingly, “ideology” and “idologist” or “idologue” became terms of derogation, implying misguided intellectuality as banefully applied to social concerns. Thus John Adams, in 1813, wrote of ideology:

“Our English words, Idiocy or Idiotism, express not the force or meaning of it. It is presumed its proper definition is the science of Idiocy. And a very profound, abstruse, and mysterious science it is. You must descend deeper than the divers in the Dunciad to make any discoveries, and after all you will find no bottom. It is the bathos, the theory, the art, the skill of diving and sinking in government. …”

It will be one of the great tragedies of mankind if the hard sciences fall prey to ideology as the social “sciences” already have done.

Featured image by Steve Harvey on Unsplash.