“This is what decolonisation looks like!” yelled a gleeful online activist the day after the October 7th Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis. He was not alone and he was right: horror and suffering very often are what ‘decolonisation’ looks like. The decolonisation and subsequent partition of India in 1947, for example, led to excess mortality of around one million says the occasionally reliable Wikipedia. Other sources put the number much higher. The African Gold Coast’s (Ghana’s) independence from Britain in 1949 produced a riot and various shortages, a decline but less costly than India’s. Independence in S. Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), at that time the second most prosperous nation in sub-Saharan Africa, soon led to the one-party rule of Robert Mugabe and a descent into hyperinflation, poverty and starvation. The effects of decolonisation were severe.
There are similar stories about the transitions of many other colonies: the decades before independence usually look much more stable and prosperous that the decades that follow. Bruce Gilley and Nigel Biggar describe many examples of the benefits of colonisation and the bad effects of decolonisation.
Britain’s exit from the colonies was several decades ago. Since then a grotesque new form of civilisational cancellation has appeared: the so-called decolonisation of science. The current scientific establishment in the U.S. and the U.K. seems to have forgotten what science is. Executive editors of major scientific journals like Nature and Science, the major scientific societies from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to the British Royal Society, all are dedicated to the decolonisation of science. Now truth is less important than social justice.
For example, the U.S. National Science Foundation devotes millions of dollars to getting more women into computer science. There is a similar bias in all other government science agencies. Why? Are women discriminated against in computer science? No, nor is this issue even raised. It’s not about discrimination; it has just become imperative that the proportion of women, blacks and other supposedly disadvantaged groups in every discipline, especially prestigious disciplines, should match their proportion in the population (no problem with too few male nurses or too many male convicts). Again, why?
This movement reflects two things. First, a weakening of the Establishment’s commitment to science which, as David Hume pointed out several centuries ago, is just concerned with measurable facts. Charles Darwin famously wrote: “A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone.” Passion, other than a passionate curiosity, is incompatible with objective science. The scientific motive is incompatible with a push for social justice. And second, a belief that everyone is basically the same; men, women, different ethnic and racial groups, all are really identical. Hence, any disparities in the representation of different groups in different fields must reflect bias and discrimination.
Social justice is very different from individual justice because it deals with groups not individuals: “social determinants like the racial wealth gap or inequitable access to health care feature heavily in social justice analysis” according to one definition. This obsession with group disparities is nonsensical and pernicious since group disparities by themselves never justify a conclusion. The identitarian assumption that people are the same – have the same interests and abilities – means that disparities must reflect environmental causes like racism or sexism. But this assumption is obviously false: men as a group are not the same as women as a group, nor are ethnic and racial groups identical. Since differences are disallowed, fools or frauds can see prejudice behind every disparity. “When I see disparities I see racism,” said an eminent black scholar, quoted approvingly in the New York Times five years ago and frequently repeated since.
It is hard to overemphasise both the immorality of this largely successful attempt to inject social justice into the scientific bureaucracy and the damage it will do not just to science but to Western civilisation itself. For example, Ute Deichman has described in compelling detail the effects of forcing political doctrine on scientific research in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. What is happening in America and elsewhere is less cruel but in some ways even more effective. Somehow, social pressure pushing identity politics over meritocracy has been building over the years, to the point that an article on the virtues of merit in science, co-authored by many eminent scientists, could only be published in the Journal of Controversial ideas.
The scientific establishment seems to want identity politics to be an integral part of what used to be, and should be, an activity in which truth is the primary value. Using the benevolent-sounding language that has become familiar from DEI statements, Nature magazine, one of the top two general-science journals in the world, offers a Decolonising science toolkit that lists no fewer than nineteen other editorials which “provide examples of how institutions and scientific departments are recasting curricula and addressing racism’s influence”.
Some titles of these editorials are ‘Facing racism in science, “I decided to prove them wrong”’ and ‘What it means to practice values-based research’, which features a sexually ambiguous and well-tattooed person (pronouns ‘they/them’) who has developed “a feminist, anti-colonial approach to science” (anyone remember Trofim Lysenko’s “environment is everything”, communist-aligned agricultural practice which led to the deaths of millions?). Their lab promises to practice “accountability, humility and good land relations at its core”. We learn that the author is “Red River Métis”, as if this should make any difference. They tell Nature how this approach shapes the lab’s work and why collective, respectful and thoughtful collaborations are a step towards better science. And, lest we forget, another editorial reminds us ‘Why Juneteenth matters for science’ which links to an editorial on ‘RACISM: Overcoming science’s toxic legacy’. Apparently, science has a legacy of “excluding people of color… and scientists have used research to underpin discriminatory thinking”.
It seems to be characteristic of contemporary flights from reason that the more absurd the contention, the more readily it gains acceptance.
In my six decades of work as scientist I have never seen a student discriminated against on account of their race. Indeed, in one rather dramatic case a black student at another university was physically brought to my attention by a white colleague in another discipline just because of the kid’s ability (he went on to publish a couple of important first-author papers and got his PhD). I have no reason to think my experience was unusual. To say that “science is systemically racist” is nonsense, both because it isn’t and because ‘systemic racism’ isn’t a thing anyway. Science must be liberated from poisonous social-justice doctrines if it is to survive.
It is time for science to recolonise!
John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology emeritus at Duke University.
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Thanks; good article.
Twas ever thus, and again we are powerless to do anything. They falsely blacken the names of anyone who opposes their view, call them deniers (of what), or accuse them of being in the pay of vested interests (have you got to be one to know one?) like big oil or the Russians/Chinese.
A pox on the lot of them, except they would exploit the pox, lock us all down and try to feed us untested drugs to destroy our spirit.
Perhaps “incestuous,” is a bit harsh. Just friends helping each other out.
At our expense.
Lovely people.
“A bit harsh”?? There is nothing too harsh for the charlatans. The friends “helping each other out” are sending millions in the wealthy west into energy poverty and causing those in the third world to stay dying young of preventable diseases and back breaking labour because they are denied fossil fuels and fobbed off with phony renewables to “save the planet”.
I was of course extracting the urine. My dry, northern humour clearly doesn’t travel well.
AHH Yes——————–I have tried my dour Scots humour a few times and it hasn’t worked. People got the wrong idea and thought I was being serious and then I had to go and explain. It’s never good when you have to explain your jokes. —But actually I kind of knew you were taking the piss. I just never let a good opportunity for a rant about the climate hoax to pass.
I think the term “renewables” is deliberately misleading. Solar panels and turbine blades are not renewable or recyclable and have to be replaced. We should have energy definitions around the common denominator of “fuels”, viz:
fossil fuels
nuclear fuels
biomass fuels
imported fuels &
*weather fuels*
That’s much more honest!
They mean the fuel itself is “renewable”, but ofcourse there is nothing “honest” when it comes to anything remotely connected to climate change dogma. The whole thing is a pseudo scientific fraud with all manner of people and businesses feeding at the subsidy trough filled with taxpayers misspent money.
Intermittent (weather) and non intermittent (everything else). Non intermittent could usefully be subdivided into “easily ramped up” (e.g. gas) which is good for meeting peak demand and not easily ramped up (e.g. nuclear, possibly coal) more suitable for base load. You could also usefully subdivide between sources that are under our control (we have the fuel and the technology) and sources where we rely on other countries.
We get roughly 10% of actual generated electricity from abroad (mainly France and Norway)
To some extent it’s a question of time. The only one on the list that is not renewable is nuclear; the rest are produced by plants in the longer term. After all, they claim that “biomass” such as wood fuel for Drax is kind of renewable in the medium term, whereas so-called “fossil fuels” are longer term storage mechanisms.
Is Uranium not naturally occurring / created in the ground around the world? Highly reprocessable fuel as well. Take your general point though. Biomass through growing weed trees etc could be sustainable,
trouble is you need a lot of land
They didn’t get it wrong. The figures were changed, or to use a previously used term, sexed up to support a pre determined policy.
The system doesn’t work how it’s supposed to work or how people are made to believe it works.
We.live in a completely corrupt system.
I challenge anyone to show me otherwise.
Yet how often do we hear that anyone who questions Climate change orthodoxy or the green technologies that are supposedly going to fix all of that (whatever all of that is supposed to be) must be “in the pay of big oil”. They are “stooges for the fossil fuel companies”. The implication being that fossil fuels are the devil incarnate despite providing 85% of the worlds energy and bringing billions out of a miserable life of abject poverty, and renewables are all sweetness and light despite providing about 1% and forcing poorer people in developed countries into energy poverty and adversely affecting economies. Those champions of these niche technologies then insist that poor people living on a dollar a day in the third world should not use their fossil fuels to “fight climate change”——-Yes Green Politics is a nasty old business.
Well, here’s an example of natural long-term energy storage (NLES). A picture’s worth a thousand words.
If even a little bit of the astronomical sums spent on renewables had been put into clean coal development we would not be seeing the enormous electricity bills we currently have, crippling the economy and leaving people unable to afford energy.
It’s blatant corruption and grifting. But since the corrupt grifters are in the House of Frauds or protected by the other corrupt grifters in Government, they’re untouchable.
As ever, follow the money. It was funny when the last offshore auction attracted zero bids – say what you like about the private sector, they tend not to invest in loss making ventures if they can help it, unlike our lovely government