Leftists love science … that is, until the science debunks or challenges their worldview, like the science that says transgenders suffer from mental illness or that the inconvenient occupier in the womb is actually a human or that men have distinct biological differences from women. When confronted with those facts, leftists have a conniption fit and burn at the stake whomever disagrees with their opinion.
Leftists have typically held science as the beacon of all Truth, using it as a battering ram against people of faith to classify them as bunch of mad idiots who spend their days talking to an invisible vending machine in the sky. Now they suggest, as a recent article in Slate does, that people should stop equating “science” with the Truth, and by Truth, they don’t mean eternal Truth — something religion provides — they mean my truth.
The article by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein begins with a false pretense by characterizing the recent Google memo that got a non-PC employee fired for questioning his company’s prevailing orthodoxy of forced diversity as endorsing the backward notion that “women are intellectually inferior to men.” As noted by Ben Shapiro, and what should be obvious to anyone who actually read the memo, its author clearly denounced sexism or any suggestion that women were inferior to men. He only suggested that men and women have innate biological differences — an a priori Truth that requires little social science data to support — not that men were Übermensch juggernauts and women were helpless pygmies.
“The Google employee memo about the apparent harms of diversity policies in Silicon Valley is both a shocking news story for the general public and for many women and gender minorities — especially of color — working in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine, a banal sign of normalcy,” she begins.
She takes issue with the memo citing evolutionary psychology and biology as its main source, and though she rightly claims that those two fields have been exploited in pursuit of evil ends (Social Darwinism), she neither debates the evidence put forth or counters it with any evidence of her own. Instead, she takes the reader on a journey through “Social Justice 101” to highlight the many sins committed by Enlightenment thinkers who used “Science!” as a club to beat minorities into submission. Her citation may be true; in fact, conservatives may find themselves agreeing with some of her points about the abuse of science, but how any of that squares with the Google memo makes zero sense.
Much of the science that resulted from this system, conducted primarily by white men, is what helped teach us that women were the inferior sex. Racial taxonomies conveniently confirmed that enslaving African people was a perfectly reasonable behavior since, as Thomas Jefferson put it, black people were “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind.” Of course, this apparent inferiority never stopped Jefferson from repeatedly raping his wife’s half-sister, Sally Hemings, herself a product of rape. Jefferson is remembered as a great thinker, but when one reads his writing about race, it becomes immediately evident that rather than being much of a scientist, he was a biased white supremacist who hid behind science as a shield.
Google bro would argue that we ought to consider the possibility that white women and racial minorities simply produce lower-quality work, which is why we struggle to be recognized as competent knowledge producers. It’s time to turn the tables on this debate. Rather than leaning in and trying endlessly to prove our humanity and value, people like him should have to prove that our inferiority is the problem. Eliminate structural biases in education, health care, housing, and salaries that favor white men and see if we fail. Run the experiment. Be a scientist about it.
Her implication here is that the memo’s author is operating under the same white supremacist mindset as the Enlightenment thinkers when all the poor chap did was put forth an argument for which he welcomed open debate.
“Neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society or, in this case, company,” he wrote. “A company too far to the right may be slow to react, overly hierarchical, and untrusting of others. In contrast, a company too far to the left will constantly be changing (deprecating much loved services), over diversify its interests (ignoring or being ashamed of its core business), and overly trust its employees and competitors.”
That sentiment doesn’t fall anywhere in the realm that Prescod-Weinstein says it belongs. The memo is calling for a diversity of ideas, and rather than debate the subject, which requires science and facts, the commissars of Google hung the author in the public square.