Leftists Have ALWAYS Been This Way!

If I told you that a bunch of college students shouted at a scientist whose name was Wilson, "Racist Wilson, you can't hide! We charge you with genocide!" you would probably assume this was in recent years. Well, no, this was before most of you were born. It seems there has always been that mean-spirited, stupid and insane politically partisan people and this is the first of a mini-series to demonstrate that.

In The Righteous Mind - Why Good People are Divided by Politic and Religion, Jonathan Haidt, a P.hD in social psychology, among other things, writes about…

…“social Darwinism” - the idea (raised but not endorsed by Darwin) that the richest and most successful nations, races, and individuals are the fittest. Therefore, giving charity to the poor interferes with the natural progress of evolution: it allows the poor to breed. The claim that some races were innately superior to others was later championed by Hitler, and so if Hitler was a nativist, then all nativists were Nazis. (That conclusion is illogical, but it makes sense emotionally if you dislike nativism.)

The second wave of moralism was the radical politics that washed over universities in America, Europe, and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. Radical reformers usually want to believe that human nature is a blank slate on which any utopian vision can be sketched. If evolution gave men and women different sets of desires and skills, for example, that would be an obstacle to achieving gender equality in many professions. If nativism could be used to justify existing power structures, then nativism must be wrong. (Again, that is a logical error, but this is the way righteous minds work.)

The cognitive scientist Steven pinker was a graduate student at Harvard in the 1970s. In his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker describes the ways scientists betrayed the values of science to maintain loyalty to the progressive movement. Scientists became “moral exhibitionists” in the lecture hall as they demonized fellow scientists and urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality.

With regard to concerns about scientific institutions being corrupted by political ideology, please see my written piece or video called MIT Admits Anti-Maskers are Right (& Complains About Independent-Minded & Rational Americans)! Is This a Truth-Troll? Returning to Haidt’s book…

Nowhere was the betrayal of science more evident than in the attacks on Edward O. Wilson, a life long student of ants and ecosystems. In 1975 Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. This book explored how natural selection which indisputably shaped animal bodies, also shaped animal behavior. That wasn't controversial, but Wilson had the audacity to suggest in his final chapter that natural selection also influence human behavior. Wilson believed that there is such a thing as human behavior, and that human nature constrains the range of what we can achieve when raising our children or designing new social institutions.

Wilson used ethics to illustrate his point. He was a professor at Harvard, along with Lawrence Kohlberg and philosopher John Rawls, so he was well acquainted with their brand of rationalist thinking about rights and justice. It seemed clear to Wilson that what the rationalists were really doing was generating clever justifications for moral intuitions that were best explained by evolution. Do people believe in human rights because such rights actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theorem just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify heir feelings?

Wilson sided with Hume. He charged that what moral philosophers were really doing was fabricating justifications after “consulting the emotive centers” of their own brains. He predicted that the study of ethics would soon be taken out of the hands of philosophers and “biologicized,” or made to fit with the emerging science of human nature. Such a linkage of philosophy, biology, and evolution would be an example of the “new synthesis” that Wilson dreamed of, and that he later referred to as consilence - the “jumping together” of ideas to create a unified body of knowledge.

Prophets challenge the status quo, often earning the hatred of those in power. Wilson therefore deserves to be called a prophet of moral psychology. He was harassed and excoriated in print and in public. Protesters who tried to disrupt one of his scientific talks rushed the stage and chanted, "Racist Wilson, you can't hide! We charge you with genocide!"¹

In the near future I hope to quote from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier wherein he describes a lot of today’s bigoted leftists by describing middle/upper class socialists in England in the 1930s.

~ Justin Trouble, May 28, 2021

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∴ Liberty ∴ Strength ∴ Honor ∴ Justice ∴ Truth ∴ Love ∴

1. Pages 36-38 of The Righteous Mind - Why Good People are Divided by Politic and Religion by Jonathan Haidt, copywrite 2012, published 2013, Vintage Books