“…Bret Weinstein tweeted last week:
“We are witnessing the sabotage of the core principle of a free society
— rationalised as self-defence.” He is a left-wing former biology
professor at Evergreen College in Washington state, who objected to
white students and professors being asked to stay away from the
university for a day on the grounds that this was a form of racism. For
this he was confronted by a mob, and the university authorities told the
campus police to stand down rather than protect him.
Francis Crick
The statue-toppling mob has now
turned its wrath on Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of
DNA. In a display of “virtue signalling . . . written with the
sanctimonious purity of a Red Guard during China’s Cultural Revolution”,
as the biologist Jerry Coyne puts it, a Harvard academic has written in
The Guardian that Crick’s name should be removed from the Francis Crick
Institute because of some things he once said about eugenics.
The no-platforming, safe-space,
trigger-warning culture is no longer confined to academia, or to
America, but lies behind the judgmentalism of many social media
campaigns. Every writer I know feels that he or she is one remark away
from disgrace. A de facto blasphemy prohibition has re-emerged in
western society and is being enforced not just by the Islamists who
murder cartoonists, but, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the black, feminist victim
of female genital mutilation has experienced, by the Southern Poverty
Law Center, which called her an anti-Muslim extremist.
The enforcement of dogma is
happening everywhere. Members of a transgender campaign group have
refused to condemn an activist for punching a feminist. Anybody
questioning the idea that climate change is an imminent catastrophe,
however gently, is quickly labelled a “denier” (ie, blasphemer). How bad
is this spasm of intolerance going to get? Perhaps it is a brief hiatus
in rationalism, a dimming of the hard-won secular enlightenment, which
will soon re-brighten after doing little harm. Or perhaps it is like
China’s Cultural Revolution: a short-lived but vicious phenomenon
confined to one part of the world that will do terrible harm then cease.
I
am fairly certain that the Enlightenment is not over, that discovery
and reason will overwhelm dogma and superstition. Seven years ago my
book The Rational Optimist set out a positive vision of the world. But
the spread of fundamentalist Islam, the growth of Hindu nationalism and
Russian autocracy, the intolerance of dissent in western universities
and the puritanical hectoring of social media give grounds for concern
that the flowering of freedom in the past several centuries may come
under threat. We have a fight on our hands…” Is The Enlightenment Dimming