Mathematics used to be a field where the politically oppressed could excel and find refuge — emphasis on “used to be.”
Natan Sharansky was among the Soviet Union’s most famous dissidents. His autobiography Fear No Evil details how he outwitted the KGB, even in prison. He was also a mathematician.
So too was Ukrainian Leonid Plyushch, who publicly denounced the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia from inside the Soviet Union. Andrei Sakharov, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, was a physicist. So too was Yuri Orlov, who founded the Moscow Helsinki Group. The late Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá also studied physics. Current Iraqi President Barham Salih, who was arrested as a teenager by Saddam Hussein’s security services, studied engineering. Late Iraqi oppositionist Ahmed Chalabi was also a mathematician. Former Prime Minister Haider Abadi was an electrical engineer. Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood activist who stood in opposition to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and briefly succeeded him, also studied engineering.
In countries where discrimination against ethnic or religious minorities face official and state-sanctioned discrimination, mathematics and the hard sciences are often a refuge. The reasons are simple: In systems where politics pervade almost every aspect of life, mathematics, physics, and engineering were immune. When the subjectivity of social sciences gave an easy path for regime loyalists to “win” coveted university spots, those who did not enjoy societal privilege could only aspire to university admission by scoring well on mathematics exams where there was a clear right and wrong answer with which no politician could interfere.
How ironic, then, that the field that often is the last respite of minorities and the oppressed is now being overtly politicized in the United States.
Rod Dreher at The American Conservative broke the story late last month that Seattle seeks to teach math “through the lens of oppression and racism.” The Seattle Public Schools’ “Ethnic Studies Framework” for K-12 math is here. One theme to be taught is, “Power and oppression, as defined by ethnic studies, are the ways in which individuals and groups define mathematical knowledge so as to see ‘Western’ mathematics as the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence. This definition of legitimacy is then used to disenfranchise people and communities of color.” Some of the essential questions to be taught are, “How important is it to be right? What is right? Says who?” One plus one is therefore not always two, if political expediency says otherwise.
Such “woke” math might appear to be socially liberal in the minds of Seattle educators, but in reality they expose the hypocrisy of their own liberalism and their ignorance of the world outside their immediate bubble. Generations of dissidents and some of the most consequential politicians and scientists to emerge from oppression and racist regimes owe their success and their freedom to the fact that the objectivity of mathematical truth remained outside the grasp of overzealous cultural warriors.
Twisting science to conform to social trends brings not freedom and liberation but rather eases the path for forces, liberal or reactionary, to undercut human freedom. Ignorance may be the result of a Seattle education, but its attack on the pathway to liberty is also a tragedy.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
