By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
George
Orwell famously said that “there are some ideas so absurd that only an
intellectual could believe them.”
His adage now
applies to anyone associated with academia in any capacity.
The New
York Times ran a report the other day on the canceling of University
of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot for his dissenting views on affirmative
action. The paper quoted a Williams College geosciences professor, Phoebe A.
Cohen, who supports Abbot’s shunning. She explained her dim view of academic
freedom thusly: “This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of
intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.”
Ah, yes, that
poisoned fruit of the patriarchy — intellectual debate and rigor.
This idea
isn’t new, even if Cohen expressed it in a memorably pithy and direct way. Of
all the faddish notions blighting college campuses and the broader culture, it
is among the most indefensible and self-destructive.
Start with the
fact that to reason is deeply human.
Steven Pinker
points out in his latest book, Rationality, that one of the world’s
oldest people, the San of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, don’t survive
by happenstance. These hunter-gatherers make closely reasoned, evidence-based
judgments about their prey; without the use of logic, they wouldn’t be
successful. If someone told them they needed to give up all this reasoning and
cede it to white males, they’d presumably react with fury and incomprehension.
Needless to
say, other cultures and civilizations are capable of great intellectual rigor.
It doesn’t require endorsing the fashionable theories that the West invented
nothing and rose to preeminence through colonialism and theft to acknowledge the
historic achievements of China, India, and the Islamic world.
It was Muslims
who transmitted Arabic numerals and various important mathematical concepts to
the West and played an outsized part in preserving the legacy of the classic
Greeks.
The West did
indeed forge the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, along with the
Enlightenment, that shaped the modern world, and it did so at a time when white
males occupied a privileged position in society through law and custom.
Still, there
wasn’t a “white male” opinion on the high-stakes questions roiling Western
society at that time. When Galileo encountered resistance to his defense of
heliocentrism in the early 1600s, he didn’t find trans people of color arrayed
against him, but other white males.
The beauty of
reason is that it is open to everyone, and it’s a powerful tool of truth and
justice. What would Frederick Douglass — whose career was based on using facts
and logic to convince people they were wrong — make of the idea that
intellectual rigor is a white male thing?
The
implication that women and minorities somehow aren’t as capable of rigorous
thought as white males, or shouldn’t be as interested in it, is deeply
insulting. This is taking one of the worst beliefs of the Western past,
dressing it up in the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion, and pretending it’s
somehow a blow for progress.
Certainly, the
work of Phoebe Cohen herself gives every indication of reflecting rigor. She’s
a paleontologist after all, not a sociologist or women’s-studies professor. And
she went to the trouble of getting a Ph.D. from Harvard that, one assumes,
wasn’t earned on the basis of her feelings.
In 2019, for
example, she co-authored a paper titled “Biogeochemical controls on black shale
deposition during the Frasnian-Famennian biotic crisis in the Illinois and
Appalachian Basins, USA, inferred from stable isotopes of nitrogen and carbon.”
The paper, naturally enough, rests on a foundation of evidence and careful
reasoning, without a hint of guilt at using what are allegedly tools of a racist
patriarchy.
What’s the
alternative to intellectual debate and rigor? Superstition, personal
preference, and, ultimately, sheer power. It’s the latter that the woke critics
of Western reason believe they can wield to crush their enemies, facts and
logic be damned.
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