Anna I. Krylov
(Department of Chemistry, University of Southern California) writes at
the American Chemical Society The Peril of Politicizing Science.
"I came of age during a relatively mellow period of the Soviet rule,
post-Stalin. Still, the ideology permeated all aspects of life, and
survival required strict adherence to the party line and enthusiastic
displays of ideologically proper behavior. Not joining a young
communist organization (Komsomol) would be career suicide—nonmemb
ers
were barred from higher education. Openly practicing religion could
lead to more grim consequences, up to imprisonment. So could reading
the wrong book (Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, etc.). Even a poetry book that
was not on the state-approved list could get one in trouble.
Mere compliance was not sufficient—the ideology committees were
constantly on the lookout for individuals whose support of the regime
was not sufficiently enthusiastic. It was not uncommon to get
disciplined for being too quiet during mandatory political assemblies
(politinformati
on or komsomolskoe sobranie) or for showing up late to mandatory mass-celebratio
ns (such as the May or November demonstrations)
.
Once I got a notice for promoting an imperialistic agenda by showing up
in jeans for an informal school event. A friend’s dossier was
permanently blemished—makin
g
him ineligible for Ph.D. programs—for not fully participating in a trip
required of university students: an act of "voluntary†help to comrades
in collective farms.
Fast forward to 2021—another century.
The Cold War is a distant memory and the country shown on my birth
certificate and school and university diplomas, the USSR, is no longer
on the map. But I find myself experiencing its legacy some thousands of
miles to the west, as if I am living in an Orwellian twilight zone. I
witness ever-increasing
attempts to subject science and education to ideological control and
censorship. Just as in Soviet times, the censorship is being justified
by the greater good. Whereas in 1950, the greater good was advancing
the World Revolution (in the USSR; in the USA the greater good meant
fighting Communism), in 2021 the greater good is "Social Justice†(the
capitalization is important: "Social Justice†is a specific ideology,
with goals that have little in common with what lower-case "social
justice†means in plain English).(10−12
) As in the USSR, the censorship is enthusiasticall
y
imposed also from the bottom, by members of the scientific community,
whose motives vary from naive idealism to cynical power-grabbing.
Just as during the time of the Great Terror,dangerou
s
conspiracies and plots against the World Revolution were seen
everywhere, from illustrations in children’s books to hairstyles and
fashions; today we are told that racism, patriarchy, misogyny, and
other reprehensible ideas are encoded in scientific terms, names of
equations, and in plain English words. We are told that in order to
build a better world and to address societal inequalities, we need to
purge our literature of the names of people whose personal records are
not up to the high standards of the self-anointed bearers of the new
truth, the Elect. We are told that we need to rewrite our syllabi and
change the way we teach and speak."
