"Gender is one of the Trojan horses of identity politics that is damaging science and society."
—Alessandro Strumia
Scottish author and television presenter Neil Oliver makes a general but effective distinction between two categories of human beings: “dreadful people,” who comprise the overwhelming majority, and “good people,” always a minority. The political world, of course, is most visibly replete with dreadful people, but no other discipline, field, profession, or mere multitude is exempt. One thinks of the ancient cynic Diogenes who strolled through the marketplace in broad daylight while carrying a lamp, searching for an honest person. Now science, perhaps the last bastion of scrupulous intent, has been materially compromised by the dreadfuls.
As a result, the good people in science have come under sustained attack. One such paragon is Alessandro Strumia about whom I’ve been reading of late, a leading scientist at the University of Pisa studying high energy physics and the theory of supersymmetry. Coauthor of a paper that announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, he joined the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 2000.
Some years later, Strumia ran into what he self-deprecatingly called, in an essay for the edited volume Diversity Inclusion Equity, and The Threat to Academic Freedom, “my little trouble,” in effect a storm of protest and reprehension that nearly ended his career. What was the transgression that rendered so ground-breaking and once-respected a scientist non grata, a leper in his discipline?
Reacting to a new rule requiring gender quotas favoring females at CERN, Strumia had given a controversial paper at a CERN Workshop on High Energy Theory and Gender, where he claimed that male, not female, scientists were the targets of discrimination on the part of universities. And he had the evidence. Strumia had coauthored a bibliometric publication, as he reports, “about papers and authors in fundamental physics worldwide from 1970 to the present [which] showed no bias in hires against female researchers.”
Indeed, Strumia’s series of graphs showed that, far from being discriminated against, women were being significantly advantaged over men in physics hiring, promotion, and financial assistance, that many of these women were less proficient than their male competitors, at least in terms of academic honors and paper citations, and that claims of bias against women did not rest on any hard proof. His results were later verified in further biometric studies by accredited scientists.
In challenging the reigning social orthodoxy of the day, in focusing on the impact of gender ideology on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) and the “boundaries imposed by political correctness,” he soon felt the iron fist of censorship, deplatforming and job harassment. CERN eventually threw Strumia, as it were, under the Large Hadron Collider, removed the slides of his presentation from its conference website, and suspended him from his position at the institution. “My little problems,” he writes, “exemplify the big problem [as] western leftists moved to identity politics with its cancel culture and systemic victimization narratives.”
Among what Strumia called “an industry of activists that work… to paint real science as discredited and their ideology as science” are the myriad of official members of the scientific community who have contributed to and approved a hysterical open letter by Particles for Justice, “a posse of modern-day Puritans,” as Janice Fiamengo says in a celebrated video, “who hunt academic thought criminals, led by New Hampshire University physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a self-described ‘activist for equality in science’ and AI researcher Brian Nord of the University of Chicago.”
The situation is increasingly dire. Indeed, what I regard as the Strumian principle is the only formula that can save the STEM disciplines as they undergo subversion from within by “social justice” feminists like Prescod-Weinstein and their male enablers like Nord, purveyors of what we might call canonical frivolity. The principle should be obvious: do the research, stay on topic, check for errors, publish the findings, stand by the results, modify them only if new, dispositive data supervene, and do not apologize, especially when attacked on non-scientific grounds. This is Strumia’s practice, as it is for every genuine and committed scientist.
Prescod-Weinstein, however, who styles herself a “pansexual agender cissex woman and a queer black femme” (though her complexion seems more sepia/white than black), need not enter a space capsule to find herself free-floating in an ether of utter vapidity. As for Nord, a coiffeured soyboy if ever there was one, he seems more interested in making a fashion statement than a scientific argument.
It is hard not to hold such people in disdain, academics who consider themselves above reproach but are really beneath contempt. They are not scientists but sciolists, whose primary concern is not the practice of rigorous science, which they disingenuously profess, but the intersectional almanac of race, LGBTQ+, and gender. The elements they cannot tolerate are common sense, practical reason, and plain evidence.
Strumia is both a brilliant scientist and a humble man. Prescod-Weinstein and Nord, on the other hand, are arrogant charlatans, adherents, in Strumia’s words, to “rules that restrict free speech using vague, subjective language,” subversive agents who have transformed science into a form of political activism toxic to the pursuit of truth. Particles for Justice, as Strumia puts it, is “an elite institution that discriminates to get a politically correct demographic, sacrificing excellence and free speech.” It is, to speak bluntly, a cabal of dreadful people, numbering in the thousands and including some of the most prestigious names in the field, abjectly fearful for their reputations and research grants.
There is no reasoning with people who have no conscience, no introspective self-awareness, and no courage, who go on reverently about the fug of climate change, the ideological fentanyl of diversity, equity, and inclusion which they can’t get enough of, Black Lives Matter, sexual deviance, radical feminism, and oppressed marginals, while the wonders of the universe pass them by. The Higgs boson would not stop to give them the time of day.
Of course, truth is never easy to come by. Even for people who do not live by the lie, truth, for the most part, and so far as it is attainable, is a hit-and-miss affair. We are easily deceived or misguided and often say things we wish we could take back and believe things that turn out to be false. Italian novelist Italo Svevo is reputed to have said that a story becomes true when it cannot be told in any other way, but this is the truth of consensus, not of fact. Accepting a desired or persuasive narrative is simply another form of self-deception to which we are all prone.
Even our greatest writers have no lien on truth — they will frequently express petty, fallible, and reductionist opinions and observations — although sometimes they will light on universals that are beyond doubt. One thinks, to take just a handful of instances, of the analysis of human character one finds in the Bible, Homer’s Iliad or Dante’s Inferno, or the sense of a cultural world in Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The conclusion of Shakespeare’s The Tempest...
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
...or Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach...
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
...articulate important realities in the form of single and sensible insights about human experience arrived at through personal reflection. The human truths we may assent to, however, tell us nothing about the workings of the non-human world, about nature and biology, in which we are compelled to live, which impinge upon our lives at every step, and which we get wrong at our peril.
Only STEM can give us truths that are not single insights but are objectively testable or, as in mathematics, logically irrefutable. Science is our fallback, our touchstone, our default option when it comes to the quest for undeniable truth. This is why identity politics is the scourge of reputable minds. This is why scientists like Strumia are to be treasured while compromised scientists like Prescod-Weinstein and Nord have betrayed their calling by introducing the gremlins of social and political partisanship into the human adventure to uncover that which is beyond dispute. Sensual cravings and dogmatic obsessions have nothing to do with science.
As noted, the political, academic, and corporate worlds brim with Oliver’s dreadful specimens, but in fact dreadful people are legion in every career, vocation, employment, and walk of life. To repeat, what makes — or made — STEM so special is that it is — or was — the only human endeavor fully wedded to the pursuit of unadulterated truth, to stringent experimental techniques, to mathematical logic, and to the dictum to remain skeptical of its findings until further and continuous confirmation — Karl Popper’s theory of falsification, that is, for a theory to be considered scientific, it must be able to be tested and conceivably proven false.
Theorems, postulates, premises, and deductions may jockey for recognition, and paradigms may shift, but what we call the scientific method — systematic attention, measurement, experimentation, formulation, predictability, and replication — persists and arrives at truths justified by function. Things work or can be made to work. Phrased simply, you put telescopes in space, not people out of a job.
Science is not kind to human folly and the endemic tendency to self-indulgent nonsense. In undermining STEM, the dreadful people have tarnished the last redoubt of professional honesty and intellectual virtue that transcends the mere individual. This is what makes such people so pernicious. They are the bane of true science and will bring STEM into terminal disrepute unless the Strumian principle of disinterested research and personal fortitude can ultimately prevail.
As Strumia concludes his quotable essay, “identity politics and its victim ideology denies individuality, liberal universalism, [and] objectivity.” For the real victims are the ethic of meritocracy, free speech, the search for truth, and the universal value of science.
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