Progressives have destroyed the human sciences
Science still flourishes in the West, but the human sciences have been ruined by progressivism.
Written by Bo Winegard.
Was it some parody of progressivism run amok in academia? Unfortunately not. A few weeks ago, Nature Reviews Psychology published an editorial urging authors to “diversify” their scholarly citations by exploring “relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers” and by including “a citation diversity statement”.
In effect, the journal was advocating an intersectional socialism of science, in which scholarly status is determined not by merit but by one’s place on the hierarchy of victimhood. From each according to his privilege; to each according to his intersectionality. And since academia is overwhelmingly leftist, it subscribes to an ideologically distorted definition of diversity that is overtly anti-white.
For confirmation, consider this sentence from the journal’s model citation diversity statement:
Every attempt has been made to reference relevant research in a manner that is equitable in terms of racial, ethnic, gender and geographical representation.
Translated from euphemism:
Every attempt has been made to include citations from scholars who are not white, not male, not heterosexual, and not European.
So a journal — and not just a trifling one, but a publication bearing one of the most venerated names in science — is now urging researchers to scour the literature in search of papers written by non-white, non-male and non-Western authors, and to cite them instead of white, male, Western ones. It’s hard to imagine a practice more antithetical to science, short of recommending that scholars falsify data or suppress inconvenient results.
How did we get here. How did such a prestigious scientific institution fall so far?
