The Real Threat to Science (2024)

Not Orange Man Bad, but “[i]deological DEI mandates [that] risk corrupting knowledge production at the root,” Robert P. George and Anna I. Krylov at The Chronicle of Higher Education, hardly a MAGA mouthpiece, warn — The Ruthless Politicization of Science Funding. They write:

To get funding today, scientists must show that their research will advance the goals of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

These terms connote lofty goals, but a close look at what is actually implemented under the DEI umbrella reveals a program of discrimination, justified on more or less nakedly ideological grounds, that impedes rather than advances science. And that program has spread much more deeply into core scientific disciplines than most people, including many scientists, realize. This has happened, in large part, by federal mandate, in particular by two Executive Orders, EO 13985 and EO 14091, issued by the Biden White House.

These executive orders do not call for equal opportunity in science funding — funding of the best scientific ideas, regardless of who proposes them — but for so-called equity, which gives preferences in funding to specific identity groups. EO 13985 perversely claims that such group preferences are a prerequisite for equal opportunity….

We know from the history of totalitarian regimes that when science is subjugated to ideology, science suffers. And the current approach to linking DEI considerations to funding decisions weakens achievement- and merit-based criteria in science funding, which means that money paid by hardworking taxpayers is not being used to support the best scientific projects.

Moreover, when funding agencies use their power to further a particular political or ideological agenda, they contribute to public distrust of science and scientific institutions. When scientists become complicit by infusing ideology into their research, they are no longer perceived as trustworthy experts — nor should they be. Should the public withdraw its support for science, loss of funding will ultimately ensue, with attendant detrimental consequences to the nation.

Ora Pro Nobis…

Mary Immaculate, Patroness of the United States
“[T]he Virgin still remained and remains the most intensely and the most widely and the most personally felt, of all characters, divine or human or imaginary, that ever existed among men… In no well-regulated community, under a proper system of police, could the Virgin feel at home, and the same thing may be said of most other saints as well as sinners.”— Henry Adams, self-described “conservative Christian anarchist,” a grandson and great-grandson of presidents, “with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him.”

Weltanschauung

“The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” — G.K. Chesterton

“To see in Catholicism one religion among others, one system among others, even if it be added that it is the only true religion, the only system that works, is to mistake its very nature, or at least to stop at the threshold. Catholicism is religion itself.” — Henri-Marie Cardinal de Lubac, in Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man

Like Nicolás Gómez Dávila, whom Martin Mosebach said understood “the Catholic Church, which he did not regard as simply one of several Christian confessions, but as the great collecting tank of all religions, as the heiress of all paganism, as the still living original religion.”

“The Gospel revelation alone has permitted us to succeed in reaching a coherent interpretation of myth and ritual and of human culture in its entirety…. The resurrection of Christ crowns and finishes both the subversion and the unmasking of mythology, of archaic ritual, of everything that insures the foundation and perpetuation of human cultures. The Gospels reveal everything that human beings need to understand their moral responsibility with regard to the whole spectrum of violence in human history and to all the false religions.” — René Girard in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

Politics

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people” — J.R.R. Tolkien

“In pre-imperial America, conservatives objected to war and empire out of jealous regard for personal liberties, a balanced budget, the free enterprise system, and federalism. These concerns came together under the umbrella of the badly misunderstood America First Committee, the largest popular antiwar organization in U.S. history. The AFC was formed in 1940 to keep the United States out of a second European war that many Americans feared would be a repeat of the first. Numbering eight hundred thousand members who ranged from populist to patrician, from Main Street Republican to prairie socialist, America First embodied and acted upon George Washington’s Farewell Address counsel to pursue a foreign policy of neutrality.” ─ Bill Kauffman in Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism

“Libertarian isolationism draws its adherents from both the left and the right. According to the libertarian isolationist interpretation of history, the U.S. changed from a decentralized republic into a militarized, authoritarian empire in the late 19th century, when the Spanish-American War made the U.S. a colonial power and trusts and cartels took over the economy. Every president since McKinley, they believe, has been a tool of a self-aggrandizing crony capitalist oligarchy, which exaggerated the threats of Imperial and Nazi Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union and communist China and now of Islamist terrorism in order to regiment American society and divert resources to the bloated ‘military-industrial complex.’ If the libertarian isolationists had their way, the U.S. would abandon foreign alliances, dismantle most of its military, and return to a 19th-century pattern of decentralized government and an economy based on small businesses and small farms.” ─ Michael Lind in The five worldviews that define American politics

Economics

“We need a combination of supreme moral sensitivity and economic knowledge. Economically ignorant moralism is as objectionable as morally callous economism. Ethics and economics are two equally difficult subjects, and while the former needs discerning and expert reason, the latter cannot do without humane values.” ─ Wilhelm Röpke

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