Liu Cixin lived through that period, which inspired one of the scenes he wrote in the Three Body Problem. In it, a physics professor is submitted to a struggle session by his students for teaching counter-revolutionary science (relativity and quantum mechanics) and beaten to death.
While this story is fictionalised, it certainly was no exaggeration of the climate at the time.
What happened in China during the Cultural Revolution is on such a different level of awfulness it just isn't even the tiniest bit comparable to anything controversial or problematic happening in West right now. Even today what is happening in China, and even the freer parts like Hong Kong, is still far removed from issues in the West. Even as a "thin end of the wedge" argument it's just weak.
It hurts legitimate and necessary criticism of actual authoritarian countries and it hurts legitimate and necessary criticism of real issues (such as that raised in the article above) in free, Western countries.
There is a nice sort of proportionality to how everything is hysterically overdone and out of proportion!
That said everything is on a sliding scale here, and the worst enforcement of orthodoxy on the mildest offenders can certainly be compared to much lesser attacks if they stem from similar impulses.
If you cannot make a comparison of this sort then the world would be a place with unconnected events and patterns, and no real way of defining or discussing how situations move from a not bad condition to a very bad one, or in the other direction.
There would never be such a thing as warning signs or worrying trends, because those things would not be relatable to absolutely awful things they might lead to.
Conversely if you were living with awful things there would be no reason to discuss how they could improve, because the improved version of life would not be comparable. How can you make legitimate and necessary criticism of actual authoritarian countries if you cannot compare bad with less bad?
When I looked more deeply in to it, the only mentions of people being held hostage came from far right sources, such as the youtube channel you linked, with little credibility.
Watching recordings of what happened it's hard to take you seriously when you say people are being held hostage.
It can simultaneously be true that the West is a long way from communism and that these scenes look a lot like what happened in times when communism was seriously tried. These are the same dynamics that got out of control and into the halls of power.
That's right. People are being beaten to death, locked up in labor camps, mysteriously vanished and worse, all because they don't bow down to people who think there are different metrics worth using at least some of the time when judging science (or anything else). It's absolutely terrifying!
(+) and let's not overlook that UPenn is actively considering changing tenure rules just because a poor law professor made some actually racist remarks. Labor camps could be here by 2023!
This is definitely true, for a less-charged example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/17/world/europe/serbia-media...:
> BELGRADE, Serbia — When Covid-19 reached Eastern Europe in the spring of 2020, a Serbian journalist reported a severe shortage of masks and other protective equipment. She was swiftly arrested, thrown in a windowless cell and charged with inciting panic.
> The journalist, Ana Lalic, was quickly released and even got a public apology from the government in what seemed like a small victory against old-style repression by Serbia’s authoritarian president, Aleksandar Vucic.
> But Ms. Lalic was then vilified for weeks as a traitor by much of the country’s news media, which has come increasingly under the control of Mr. Vucic and his allies as Serbia adopts tactics favored by Hungary and other states now in retreat from democracy across Europe’s formerly communist eastern fringe.
> “For the whole nation, I became a public enemy,” she recalled.
> Serbia no longer jails or kills critical journalists, as happened under the rule of Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s. It now seeks to destroy their credibility and ensure few people see their reports.
> That's right. People are being beaten to death, locked up in labor camps, mysteriously vanished and worse, all because they don't bow down to people who think there are different metrics worth using at least some of the time when judging science (or anything else). It's absolutely terrifying!
FYI, "reminiscent" does not mean "exactly identical in all respects."
"Rebuttals" like yours are obnoxious, because you can always find some difference in a comparison. If there's some merit to the comparison, you shouldn't try to knock it down as you did. You've accurately noted that the current social justice movement lacks the violence of the Cultural Revolution, but that does not mean it doesn't have other similarities. IIRC, it was far more common for the Red Guards to harass their opponents than it was for them to beat and kill them.
Most social change movements have similarities. The civil rights movement, the anti-slavery movement, the women's suffrage movement, the equal rights movement ... these all have similarities with the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It is precisely because they lack the violence that equating them to the CCR is a distraction and also poses its own dangers.
Yeah, but isn't it obvious that some are more similar than others? Did the woman's suffrage movement deface monuments or have the ability to enforce some of its ideological orthodoxy outside of its own activist institutions? There's obviously more similarity between the Cultural Revolution and the current social justice movement than they're both "social change movements."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds
> The first things to change were the names of streets and stores: "Blue Sky Clothes Store" to "Defending Mao Zedong Clothes Store", "Cai E Road" to "Red Guard Road", and so forth. Many people also changed their given names to revolutionary slogans, such as Zhihong (志红, "Determined Red") or Jige (继革, "Following the Revolution").[5]
> Other manifestations of the Red Guard campaign included...harassment of people, such as intellectuals,[8] who defiantly demonstrated the Four Olds.[4] In later stages of the campaign, examples of Chinese architecture were destroyed, classical literature and Chinese paintings were torn apart, and Chinese temples were desecrated.[5]
> ...This statue of the Yongle Emperor was originally carved in stone, and was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. A metal replica is in its place.
Not every "social change movement" does stuff like these examples, but they all have parallels in the current social justice movement.
But it also doesn't mean that the fact the I can use similar terminology to describe the Cultural Revolution and today (because of the broad meaning of various words in most human languages) implies that they are in fact meaningfully related, either.
In some ways they are meaningfully related, in some ways they aren't. That's the point. And the relation is not "because of the broad meaning of various words," since (for instance) they both contain instances of energetic radical youth movements seeking to enforce, with little tolerance for dissent, some orthodoxy on the wider society, etc.
The activists have not taken to beating to death landlords, but that is only a function of their not possessing the same level of social support as Red Guards did, but even without that they are capable of some level of harm. Don't mistake the lack of violence from a wolf in a cage as evidence of its benignity.
We live in a society where large corporations can destroy (or save) the economy of an entire town with a single investment decision. We live a society where a single corporation's employment policies dictate the life experience of more than 1.25 million people. We live in a society that spends that 10% of all federal income on the military (more than half of all discretionary spending), and that routinely launches disastrous wars overseas. A world in which the behavior of fossil fuel extraction industries threatens the current structure and distribution of contemporary human civilizations, yet they are largely beyond control. I could go on.
In the midst of all this, the idea that a small number of people who have a different idea of what constitutes justice and equality, most of them college age or not far from it, somehow represent an existential threat to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness is just laughable to me.
Anyway, I would not say they represent some sort of existential threat. Cultural winds can blow in either direction, and while they could become worse, it could also blow over and become a curiosity for the history books akin to a left wing version of the Red Scare. But that notwithstanding, my overall point is that these activists exhibit a similar attitude as Red Guards, even if they lack the same environment. The problem is not that they have 'a different idea of what constitutes justice and equality', it is that they have allowed ideology to subordinate both reason and empathy, so they see their political opponents as less than human, treat them as such, and cannot be persuaded otherwise.
I feel pity more for them than fear, however. Infighting is the nature of all political movements, and when you have such a worldview, it does not end well for you. For example, later in the novel, the former Red Guards meet with the physicist's daughter years later. In the intervening years, they had fallen out of favour and become some of the rusticated youth, being sent down to the countryside to work and living a subsequent life of hardship. And while I'm sure she's doing quite fine financially at the moment, I can't help but draw a similarity with Lindsay Ellis's experience getting cancelled apparently for saying that one TV show resembled another. Logically, of course, I'm sure you'll say she has little to worry about in terms of her livelihood, but that really is beside the point.
It's quite literally a mindless zombie remnant of the actual Cultural Revolution ideology of Lin Biao and the criminal Gang Of Four. That whole ideological memeplex was taken up by young radical leftists throughout the West in the late 1960s and 1970s. A generation has passed, and now those leftist students have grown up and become respected "liberal" and "progressive" leaders. Do the math, it's not rocket science.
Which is not at all surprising given how many young people in the West like to style themselves as Marxists.
But historically it doesn't seem to lead to much else when adopted by a society wholesale.
I reckon you're correct. Unfortunately, it seems we are again entering an age when opponents of those with views or ideas attack the actual person rather than debate the ideas themselves.
We could been forgiven for thinking that this was just a passing phase when such attacks ocured in social media, Facebook etc., but when an associate professor who holds a very prominent and responsible position in public life and who uses the pages of Scientific American to attack an eminent person who is now dead and who can no longer defend himself, then I'd say such attacks are here to stay.
Most thinking people would find such attacks abhorrent. How we change the public discourse back to a more even keel is an unanswered question.
The so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.
When she so casually misinterprets normal distribution in medical application in SciAm, what stop her from brining this notion into the classroom. And this is how we end up with Lysenkovschina, but in medicine instead of agriculture.
Arguing that an idea is wrong because it "lends support to scientific racism" is unscientific. To argue against an idea, demonstrate why it's wrong or offer a better alternative. "That's racist" is neither a scientific argument nor a serious one.
Since racism is itself not a scientific concept, arguments about this sort of thing are inherently never going to be scientific, but rather always political/philosophical. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Gould, Lewontin (or Wilson) engaging in such debates, which are as at least as important (and possibly more directly impactful) than the scientific ones.
Political/philosophical debates do not involve questions of demonstrable "right" or "wrong", but rather are a stage for beliefs about the world and different notions of utility. You don't settle them by "demonstrating why it's wrong", or by "offering a better idea".
It isn't fruitful when one side is arguing science and the other is arguing politics.
You see, Wilson, like Gallant in Highlights magazine cartoons, was someone who looked at the evidence, and used logic and the scientific method to lead him to his conclusions. He only sought the truth. Which in his case, was that the white race is superior to the black race.
Gould and Lewontin were like Goofus. They were just engaging in academic politics.
Easy case to win when one side is all science and logic and the other is "political". Not sure why everyone hasn't come around.
You've been asked several times to provide a quote from Wilson's published works where he said this, both in this thread and previous ones.
So far you have not.
I think you should either provide such a quote or retract this claim.
When Edward O. Wilson published Sociobiology, it generated a firestorm of criticism, mostly focused on the book's final chapter, in which Wilson applied lessons learned from animal behavior to human society. In Defenders of the Truth, Ullica Segerstrale takes a hard look at the sociobiology controversy, sorting through a hornet's nest of claims and counterclaims, moral concerns, metaphysical beliefs, political convictions, strawmen, red herrings, and much juicy gossip. The result is a fascinating look at the world of modern science.
Segerstrale has interviewed all the major participants, including such eminent scientists as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard C. Lewontin, Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, Nobel Laureates Peter Medawar and Salvador Luria, and of course Edward Wilson. She reveals that most of the criticism of Wilson was unfair, but argues that it was not politically motivated. Instead, she sees the conflict over sociobiology as a drawn-out battle about the nature of "good science" and the social responsibility of the scientist. Behind the often nasty attacks were the very different approaches to science taken by naturalists (such as Wilson) and experimentalists (such as Lewontin), between the "planters" and the "weeders." The protagonists were all defenders of the truth, Segerstrale concludes, it was just that everyone's truth was different.
It's available in some university libraries, used from Amazon for about $60, or as a PDF from here: https://b-ok.cc/book/2325442/6946b3.
But, I'm curious. What would have helped the Soviet Union from forming? Was there a solution?
Large-scale invasion by the rest of Europe in support of the White Army, potentially. Hard to imagine Europe having the stomach for it after WW1 though.
This false dichotomy is key to the false comparisons with Lysenkoism, etc. E. O. Wilson did not represent all scientists even during his working career and many of the people criticizing him are also scientists using their scientific expertise. The author of the Scientific American piece is “an associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department and a clinician-scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco.” — hardly a political apparatchik. Some of the most outspoken criticisms of his work came from Richard C. Lewontin (a population geneticist) and Stephen Jay Gould (a paleontologist).
Similarly, Razib Khan is someone who is at least comfortable using his expertise in forums which do not shy away from race politics — for example, he lost a contract writing for The New York Times when his regular contributions to Taki's Magazine, a very conservative venue which was at least neo-Nazi-adjacent (Richard Spencer was the managing editor). That doesn't mean that we should dismiss Khan's writing entirely but we should recognize that he's a human rather than the objective voice of science and his work also needs to be read with an understanding of how his political positions influence it.
Hardly Wilson's peer either, and the article shows this quite clearly.
> Some of the most outspoken criticisms of his work came from Richard C. Lewontin (a population geneticist) and Stephen Jay Gould (a paleontologist).
Yes, criticisms of the substance and inferences like any good scientist would focus on, not thinly veiled accusations of racism.
Wilson's peers were people who studied ants and other insects, or maybe people who write popular science.
If he wants to jump into his views of the human brain, she is as much a peer as he is.
Whether you find her politically correct isn’t relevant to the topic at hand: she’s clearly qualified to participate in a scientific discussion.
No, her remarks about the normal distribution disqualified her from all scientific discussion.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757...
(and, for that matter, did you notice the clever way in which Razib said it was nonsense but didn't directly address or show any signs of understanding the argument? He was hoping that you'd have a good sense of righteous indignation and roll right past that without pausing to ask whether things like human cognition might not be as simple as the length of a cucumber.)
And she doesn't even use that confusion to make any sensible point. The rest of that paragraph is just a rehash of the paper's argument. I don't "understand" why McLemore inserted this guff about normal distributions, but if I had to guess, she might have done it to strengthen the link between what Wilson wrote about and what the paper is criticising – not by reasoning, but by wordplay.
The normal distribution does not entail there is any such concept as a "default human".
Furthermore, that paper shows the corrupt logic inherent to a lot of woke criticism. You're tarred as a racist if you claim there are biological differences between races, while these same people cry that existing science is racist because it's not accounting for the biological differences between races.
Yes, the one which was in a peer-reviewed journal. If it was so roundly condemned you should have no trouble doing more than drive-by accusations.
McLemore didn't see fit to do more than drive by accusations of Wilson, so I'm not sure why I should bother extending her more courtesy than she extended to the recently deceased.
Other scientists have already commented on this widely anyway, so you can find them if you're actually interested.
I suppose she referenced it because she hoped people would assume that an article on an important topic wouldn't just be thrown around by the same author as a citation in support of total nonsense. But people who assumed that would be wrong.
Questioning the idea of a "default human" is fine. Saying that the normal distribution implies the idea -- this is nonsense.
1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757...
Whatever the merits of that argument, that's not what the SciAm article was claiming -- which was a either ignorance or a deliberate confusing of the popular and technical meanings of the word "normal". She might as well said that magnetic fields have to do with the plots of land farmers grow crops on because they are both "fields".