2000-01-01

Enforcing PC

Kevin MacDonald on 2010-02-22 wrote:



Another example is E. O. Wilson,
the Harvard biologist who in 1975 stunned the academic left
with the publication of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
Wilson included a chapter applying evolutionary thinking to humans —
a topic that had been expunged from the social sciences
ever since the triumph of Boasian anthropology in the 1920s.
Wilson was already well-known as an entomologist and ecologist,
and his position at Harvard gave him immense authority.

The Left went into full-fledged moral panic mode,
led by high-profile attacks from Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould
both of whom were also at Harvard
and were discussed in Chapter 2 of Culture of Critique
as examples of leftist Jewish intellectuals
who undermined evolutionary and biological approaches in the social sciences.



Some examples of the criticism Wilson’s book received from the academic left
are described at Wikipedia.
I personally was particularly offended
by the physical attack on Wilson where, at an AAAS meeting,
an opponent dumped a pitcher of water on Wilson’s head
and shouted “Wilson, you’re all wet.”

There were many among the politically correct who,
unwilling to stick to intellectual debate,
or to thinly veiled threats of being discredited (e.g.),
resorted to all sorts of methods to advance their ideas
and discredit their opponents, by any means possible,
from street theater to demonstrations to sit-ins to disrupting classes, exams, and meetings,
tactics which even today are used by
the enforcers of political correctness (e.g., also).

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