Totalitarianism doesn’t always come wearing jackboots. It can curl its malign tendrils around us without massed parades, torture chambers, or firing squads.
During the Cold War, most Warsaw Pact states bore only a mild resemblance to George Orwell’s Oceania. They were altogether more banal, more tawdry, more sordid. Yes, they depended on police informers and, yes, only one party was allowed to win elections. But, by the 1970s, quite a lot of normal life had reasserted itself. There were shops and underground punk bands and sports teams and even limited foreign travel.
The defining feature of totalitarianism, the characteristic that made life in Erich Honecker’s East Germany or Gustav Husak’s Czechoslovakia so miserable, was the not the repression of free elections but the repression of free inquiry. People were afraid to open their mouths in case they said the wrong thing.
The consequences of expressing an unorthodox opinion were not usually judicial. A few committed dissidents were locked up for sedition, but, more typically, the penalties were unofficial. Your driving license would somehow go missing in the system. Your kids would lose their university places. Above all, you’d be unable to find any but menial jobs. The bitter joke in Czechoslovakia was that the window cleaners were professors, poets, and playwrights.
Can you imagine living in such a society, where your words, though they broke no written law, might condemn you? Where saying the wrong thing, even unintentionally, could end your career?
Welcome to our universities.
Last week, more than 200 academics demanded that Cambridge University sack a young scholar named Noah Carl who was guilty, they averred, of “racist pseudoscience.” They accused Carl of “vital errors in data analysis and interpretation,” although they failed to cite any of these errors. They went on: “Carl’s published work and public stance on various issues, particularly on the claimed relationship between ‘race’, ‘criminality’ and ‘genetic intelligence’, leads us to conclude that his work is ethically suspect and methodologically flawed.”
Despite the quotation marks, none of Carl’s works is being quoted there, and for a good reason. As far as I can make out, he has not himself written about any relationship between race and intelligence.
His actual offense seems to be that he published a paper arguing that scholars ought to be free to explore such issues. His argument was, in essence, that repressing academic research is more damaging than reaching uncomfortable conclusions. Instead of denying that some traits might be inherited, he argued, antiracists should take their stand on the firm ground that treating people differently because of their ethnicity is morally repugnant, irrespective of any conclusions that science reaches.
This point is worth stressing. Carl has not himself carried out any research on the heritability of IQ. He has simply defended the right of researchers to follow their studies as they see fit. Yet, it is precisely the defense of intellectual freedom that, paradoxically, upsets so many academics these days.
A year ago, for example, Nigel Biggar of Oxford University, arguably Britain’s senior academic theologian, was similarly denounced by a professorial mob for suggesting that the assessment of the British Empire should be rigorous and measured rather than unequivocally condemnatory. (Full disclosure: Biggar, a clever, modest and devout man, was my college chaplain when I was an Oxford undergraduate.)
Again, the pursuit of disinterested inquiry — the very reason that universities are supposed to exist — is nowadays seen as a provocation.
It’s hard not to recall the attitude of premodern churchmen, who saw certain subjects as beyond argument. Darwinism was not assessed dispassionately in clerical circles. It was not assessed at all. Even to study such an idea was at first considered blasphemous.
Most societies sacralize certain values, sometimes pretty arbitrarily. The doctrine of diversity, equality, and inclusion is, in a sense, our modern Trinity. But note the extraordinary reversal. Darwin’s theories were, by and large, taken up by people who preferred science to faith, evidence to dogma. Evolutionary biology was seen as a rational and progressive discipline, a challenge to obscurantism, and it eventually prevailed for that reason.
Today, though, evolutionary biology has become the most dangerous of topics to people who regard themselves as progressive in other contexts. They are the first to howl down antiscientific prejudices when it comes to, say, climate change. But when confronted with this topic, they suddenly act like medieval inquisitors, refusing to allow any discussion that might offend against the approved dogmas.
I leave the last words to Frederick Douglass — words which Carl quotes approvingly, and which recall the days when leftists saw free speech as an uncomplicated good: “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
Amen.
