The Left’s War on Science

Daniel Greenfield Front Page

“We did not come to ask for mercy from nature,” Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, the Lysenko of Soviet agriculture, once declared. “We must wrest it from her.”

Communist science was guided not by the journey from hypothesis to fact but by the dusty proclamations of Marxist theorists. Soviet scientists were expected to reject capitalist science and formulate a science that matched the Communist worldview.

The Communist worldview insisted that every living creature could be completely transformed into anything. It rejected natural selection as having a competitive capitalist bent that suspiciously resembled a biological version of free market competition. And pseudo-scientists like Lysenko and Michurin matched bad science to bad ideology laying out an official dogma in which transforming the environment could transform any creature and in which intraspecies struggle did not lead to evolution.

The USSR’s politicization of biology crippled its agriculture. Its leaders rejected free market competition on the human level and in the plant and animal kingdoms. They insisted that nature had to follow Marxist dialectical materialism and locked up and murdered the scientists who disagreed. By the time the USSR fell, a land which had once exported wheat to the world had gone deep into debt to buy wheat from the United States.

But bad ideology driving bad science didn’t die with Lysenko and Michurin. The new Lysenkos are Warmunists like Michael Mann and James Hansen. The environmentalists, like the Communists, believe that human beings have total control over the environment and that the environment determines all.

Warmunism, like Communism, originates not from science, but from ideology. The Communists divided industry into two types by ideological classification; the good cooperative Socialist industry and the bad competitive Capitalist industry. The Warmunists similarly ideologically classify two types of industry; environmentally conscious green technology and dirty non-socially conscious brown technology.

The Warmunists, like the Communists, classify science and industry not by outcome, but by ideology, and then paper over that classification with bad science. Green technology is often dirtier and less efficient than the so-called brown technology, but like the collective farms and the idiotic ramblings of Michurin and Lysenko, it’s better because it more closely fits the Socialist vision of how things ought to work.

The Warmunists reject the free market and human industry because, like the Communists, they seek to use science to impose a centralized model of human society as a dangerously fragile existence in which unguided individual efforts are dangerously disruptive and only ideological compliance can lead to a better life for the collective planet.

While the left rejects the pseudo-science of Lysenko and Michurin when it comes to the plant and animal kingdoms, it still argues that people can be remade into any political identity without regard to biology. Lysenkoists believed that just as animals and plants could be transformed over short periods of time by altering their environment, human beings could also be transformed from their greedy and competitive selves by living under Socialism.

The new Lysenkoists place mind over biology. If a man wants to be a woman, then all he has to do is think that he is and he will be. Even the worst Soviet science didn’t insist that biology was so malleable that a man could click his heels three times and think himself a woman.

Like Lysenkoist science, the assertion that the choice of male or female sexual partners is rigidly fixed at a genetic level, but that gender is infinitely transformative, that gay men cannot turn back to straight, but that men can become women and women can become men, makes no logical sense. It makes even less scientific sense. But it makes perfect political sense.

The left’s version of the old racist “one-drop rule” that treated anyone with even one drop of black blood as black is to treat anyone with even the loosest claim to minority status as a minority and to mandate the irrevocable nature of that minority status. That is why Obama is black, rather than half-white, why Elizabeth Warren can be a Cherokee and why a straight man can become gay, but a gay man cannot become straight. It is why a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man and gain an entirely new transgender minority status.

The scientific principle at work here is the conservation of minority status. The left’s policies are meant to diminish the size of the majority and enlarge the size and number of minorities.

Political diversity when applied to science logically leads to immutable homosexuality and mutable gender. It leads to a construct of race governed by a politically correct version of the one-drop rule in which racial identification always trends toward minority status, rather than majority status. The science is bad, but the political calculation is impeccable. (Continue reading here)