How Professional Merit and Scientific Objectivity Became Casualties of Social Justice Insanity. By David Solway

How Professional Merit and Scientific Objectivity Became Casualties of Social Justice Insanity. By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/how-professional-merit-and-scientific-objectivity-became-casualties-of-social-justice-insanity/

Excerpt: The idea of merit has fallen on evil times, as has its corollary concept, objectivity. These principles have now been breached by a consortium of the ideologically minded, who resemble a gang of robbers tunneling under a bank vault. The masterminds planning and executing this operation are a class of “treasonous” intellectuals as Julien Benda defined them, primarily academics, along with members of the political left. In the interests of creating a society based on the axioms of “social justice”—which is really socialist justice—the principles of professional merit and scientific objectivity are dismissed by our mandarin class as forms of bigotry. As the professions, the educational institution, the political arena, and the scientific establishment engage in a process of diversification, accommodating claimants who trade on race and gender rather than ability and native endowment, merit is in the process of being replaced by outright mediocrity. In the university, for example, no department is safe from the “inclusion and diversity” mania that is bringing higher education into the slough of disrepute—not law, not medicine, not business, not even the STEM subjects. As is, or should be, common knowledge, literature and the social sciences have long succumbed to the social justice, disparate impact, and feminist miasma that has clouded the atmosphere of thought, paving the way for pervasive academic decadence. When even classics programs are contaminated by race and gender issues, we know the end is nigh. In the "Notes & Comments" to the recent issue of The New Criterion, Roger Kimball documents the shameful degradation of this once elite, non-politicized academic study. “Classics has fallen under the spell of grievance warriors,” he writes, “who have injected an obsession with race and sexual exoticism into a discipline that, until recently, was mostly innocent of such politicized deformations.” Unlike the plethora of “cultural studies” programs that now command the academic landscape—Women’s Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Chicano Studies, Peace Studies, Fat Studies, etc.—in classics, after all, “You actually have to know something.” The challenging nature of the subject, as well as the fact that most of its representative scholars and students appear to be white males, have rendered it suspect and ripe for demolition. (The only real "social justice" that important is equal opportunity. No one's thumb on any scale for any reason. If more women want to be veterinarians than men and more men want to be mechanical engineers than women, OK they get to do that. Watch any playground with small kids and notice the boys tend to play in one way and the girls in another. Check who reads what kind of books and notice that there's a difference between men and women there too. But as long as anyone can buy whatever book they feel like, that's as fair as it gets, and as functional. We can only hope the crazes for equal results and diversity start to die down soon, before society really has to pay the price that comes with being foolish. --Del. A terrible price can no longer be avoided. ~Bob)