The times when scholars were persecuted for doing research, advancing the cause of knowledge and contradicting all kinds of ignorant orthodoxy are far from over, as Alice Dreger demonstrates in her brilliant book Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science.
Dreger investigated some of the most notorious controversies surrounding dissident academics in recent years and discovered that a scholar who happens to publish research that departs, even by half an inch, from the rigid formulations that the ignorant public is comfortable with should prepare for the most vicious persecution imaginable.
The scholars Dreger met in the course of writing the book received death threats, saw their minor children persecuted and abused, were accused of the most egregious crimes (including child rape and genocide) without a shred of proof, and saw their relatives viciously harassed and their careers destroyed for no other reason than publishing (or trying to publish) their academic research.
The saddest part of this story of persecution are the kinds of research that merited this horrible backlash. When you look at what the dissident scholars tried to argue, the most striking thing is how bland and I’d even say vapid their ideas are. Some examples of these supposedly scary controversial ideas are under the fold.
- an anthropologist who worked with an indigenous community in the Amazon described the violence, ritual drug use, infanticide and ecological indifference common among the indigenous. (This is considered a huge transgression in anthropology because the indigenous can only be described as ultra-feminist, gentle, enlightened and ecological.)
- two scholars demonstrated that there is a sexual component in the crime of rape. (The orthodoxy denies that rapists seek sexual gratification and insists that “rape is about power and control”, making it very hard to prosecute cases of rape where the “power and control” motivation cannot be proven.)
- a scientist argued that there are gradations in the degree of harm suffered by victims of pedophilia based on the circumstances of their victimization. For instance, a 5-year-old raped by a 60-year-old might suffer greater harm than a 16-year-old who had relations with a 20-year-old. (The orthodoxy is that if you say that some cases of sexual abuse are less damaging than others, you support pedophilia).
I almost died of boredom even listing these “controversial” ideas that are so lacking in shock value that they wouldn’t scare a bunch of kindergartners. Still, the scholars proposing them were vilified and persecuted not only by their fellow academics but by the mainstream media and politicians of both political camps. (One of these research pieces was even condemned by an Act of Congress.)
The greatest transgression of the persecuted academics described by Dreger lies in not repeating verbatim the comforting formulas the majority sees as gospel truth. And this is in no way a politically partisan problem. People are equally disturbed by hearing anything even remotely new irrespective of their political beliefs.
[To be continued. . .]
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