Cancel the Enlightenment – Science is to Become a “Feminist Institution”

 

Forget old dead white men and their cobwebby equations and quaint experiments. Science is about to get the full feminist, social justice, post-colonialist makeover.

If you care about science, and our ability to answer questions, steward public policy and improve public safety, then you must care about the people who make up the scientific community. Women, pregnant women, people of color, immigrants and refugees, disabled or LGBTQ, scientists are a diverse, intersectional galaxy of identities, histories and expertise. To advocate for science requires us to address and dismantle institutional misogyny and racism. Anything less is morally disingenuous.

Science should be a feminist institution, but we aren’t there yet. We have been silenced by a culture that tells us to divest ourselves from ourselves, for the sake of apolitical objectivity. Everywhere in our society, but doubly so in science, we are told to remain calm, play nice and keep our head down. As if our silence and complicity, indeed our docility, will be rewarded.

This is a lie. There is no reward in acquiescence, only subjugation. We deserve better, and we’ll get it.

The feminist reckoning is here, and it is coming for science.

I care about science. Do you know what though? I don’t give a flying f*** about those people who choose to go into science, whatever race, colour, creed, gender identity they happen to be – I only care about Science, its integrity, its honesty, its adherence to searching for the best approximation to the truth that it can. That quest should, naturally, attract people who share that ideal, but angry, axe-to-grind neo-Marxist feministas like Sarah Myhre and her bosom buddies don’t want that – they want to attract “minorities”, that being anybody who doesn’t fit the description male and pale – and the further the divergence from that despised identity, the better. You don’t need to be hungry for truth, you just need to be hungry for the confected post colonial, post modern approximation to the truth which neo-Marxist social justice warriors are busily concocting in their labs. This is the politics of hatred playing out in the field of the rational sciences and it can only lead to immense pain and the rapid devolution of scientific progress as we know it, which progress has been largely responsible for the development of civilised western society.

Sarah Myhre has no doubt experienced awfulness in her life.

He then left the field after just 10 days instead of the planned two months due to a mixture of, from what I could tell, my rejection of his advances and his own whims. I and two other women were left to complete our research projects in a village fueled by cocaine trafficking.

Working alone in coral reefs, my days passed underwater. But the nights were different. I became a target of sport for young men in the village. I was stalked, assaulted many times in public, physically hurt and most graphically of all—but not actually the most traumatic of the memories—raped silently in a strange bed, in a room that smelled like urine.

The problem with Sarah Myhre is that she externalises her personal grief and projects it onto the world stage, thinking that publicising her personal anger will somehow be cathartic in exorcising her personal and professional demons and at the same time effect the change which she believes is necessary for others equally hard done by in her  professional sphere, which she then extends to encompass the entire field of scientific endeavour. Indoctrinated from an early age in the politics of supposed social injustice, she invokes a whole host of other put upon minorities/identities in her quest to mold Science in her own image – LGBTQ, refugees, immigrants, people of colour and the disabled. What arrogance, what stupidity, what reckless unconscionable self-indulgence. Would that she were the only one. Alas not. There is a war going on out there, for the very heart and soul of science.