Sentimentality and Ignorance

The word “science” has been emptied of all meaning. This gentleman positions himself as a clear-eyed supporter of the scientific method while in the same breath saying that men can mother children.

It’s a truly Soviet tradition of using words to say the exact opposite of what they mean. And also a truly Soviet tradition of banning real science and facts in favor of insane fantasies.

In Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel White Robes, set during Stalin’s purges of biological sciences, professors and scholars at a research facility are listening numbly to stories of one specie transforming into another, incapable of saying that this is all unscientific gobbledygook. It’s bizarrely similar to how we listen to stories about one sex transforming into another.

Dudintsev’s novel is about the immense courage of biologists who worked clandestinely to save real science from ideological obscurantism. Many of them died.

Today we don’t resist the ongoing war on science because our ideologues are smarter than Stalin. They don’t use our fear but our kindness to shut us up. We all know that “men who mother” are a myth. But we have been persuaded that pretending to agree is the kind thing to do. What would be kind to an infant doesn’t enter into our reasoning because we have a faulty understanding of human development.

The marriage of ignorance and mealy sentimentality produces monstrosities that even Stalin couldn’t manage to create.

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