Let the cobbler stick to his Last

Chemistry is not a behavioral science Keep political correctness out of science

My last post, pointing to the need for honesty, concluded by suggesting that universities are not qualified to engage in social engineering; and that therefore it is not their proper function in society.

But universities do have a proper, moreover essential place in society: scholarship and research toward continuing progress in knowledge and understanding, and educating and training novitiates to carry on those tasks. No other institutions can fill that role, so academe is betraying the whole society as well as itself if it deviates from that role under political or ideological or other influences. A clear present contemporary danger comes from the ideology of political correctness (PC), wokeness, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), as Krylov [i] warned in the letter described in my previous post. Now a group of chemists has responded [ii], incompetently and fallaciously, to Krylov’s warning. 

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Societal hand-wringing is rather frequent over the fact that secondary-school students in the United States compare quite unfavorably to high-schoolers in other developed countries, in their intellectual mastery of basic material. That circumstance was actually foreseen and warned against many decades ago by people [iii] who noted that the schools were placing priority on social engineering over intellectual education and training. There is every reason to worry that “higher education”, scholarship, and research will also decline in quality and achievement when universities engage in social engineering.

There is excellent sense in the old proverb, “Let the cobbler stick to his last” — let everyone do what they are really good at, what they are qualified to do, and let them not meddle in what they are not qualified to do or judge. Civilization has progressed incalculably over a wide range of ventures as a result of specialization. No single individuals could ever acquire the abilities needed to do all the things that nowadays go on in developed societies. Therefore specialist expertise needs to be respected within its own specialty, and everyone benefits thereby. And specialists need to recognize their own limitations and respect the expertise of their peers in other fields.

That applies not only to material things, it includes the essential intellectual infrastructure of civilization: education, philosophy, religious studies, linguistics, the behavioral and social sciences, the physical sciences. In every specialty within that infrastructure, there are dedicated experts whose deep knowledge and understanding can and does add something of benefit to the whole society.

It makes no sense, indeed it is harmful, if political or ideological aims or demands supersede the best expert specialist knowledge on a particular matter. PC ideology seeks to shape all relevant specialties in pursuit of “Social Justice” and “DEI”. In that attempt, proper specialist knowledge is ignored or transgressed in linguistics, psychology, sociology, and other specialist aspects of civilization’s intellectual infrastructure. In particular, PC ignores what philosophers, psychologists, physiologists, historians, among others, have learned:

Ø      We (all humans) cannot perceive actual, objective reality. We interpret sense impressions using what we have learned, and in science we interpret observations and measurements on the basis of our theories, our beliefs about what our instruments do.

Ø      Historians have come to understand that “whiggishness”, judging the past by standards of the present, is misleading. To benefit from lessons of the past, we must understand the past on its own terms.

PC proclaims the most laudable aims, but the devil is in the details. The means exercised determine what ends reached, and, as is well known, good intentions pave some of the roads to hell [iv]. The most desirable ends cannot be achieved if actions are based on wrong facts or misguided interpretations.

The laudable aims of PC have led a host of individuals and institutions, at times it seems the whole world, into misguided, ill-thought-out and damaging statements and actions, blindly following the activists of PC ideology into a rabbit-hole of superficiality that hardly qualified as thinking.

For example, a team of 10 chemists responded thus [ii] to Anna Krylov’s warning [i] over the politicization of science:

“What do we value as an academic and a scientific community? Do our core values include only the pursuit of facts and inventions, to the exclusion of other considerations?

 Or do we accept that scientists have a responsibility to serve society beyond simply expanding the knowledge base, and should therefore concern themselves (at least in part) with how their words and actions intersect and impact the human sphere? A scientist’s innovations might be profound, benefiting many, but if that person’s words or actions create an alienating or hostile workplace or learning environment, then how should the scientific community evaluate that person’s overall contribution to humanity? How should society view such a person?”

The errors and misunderstandings in these couple of paragraphs might call for several volumes to answer adequately. Before addressing a few specific points, however, it is evident that these chemists are not sticking to their proverbial “Last”, namely chemistry; they write in authoritative tone about citizenship and civic responsibility, ethics, morality, social roles and responsibilities, and even how individuals should be evaluated by the scientific community and by the whole society. It is far from obvious that chemists have, individually or collectively, the background of cosmopolitan knowledge of civilization’s intellectual infrastructure and understanding to speak in this way; they are ultracrepidarian [v].

“Core values” is a meaningless platitude, mere feel-good sloganeering and virtue signaling, in absence of detailed specification of actions that would follow directly and inevitably from those core values; one of which appears to be a responsibility to serve society.

For example: Almost everyone would subscribe to the core value, to refrain from killing a human being. But those who would subscribe to this core value in the abstract would not all agree on exceptions for, say, self-defense, or the defense of loved ones, or in warfare — where this core value might conflict with the core value of responsibility to serve one’s society. Even more, that core value yields no unequivocal answer in the ongoing public controversy over abortion: different individuals and groups and religions offer different answers based on their idiosyncratic  interpretations of religious doctrine, of presumptions about when human life begins, and of an individual’s right to autonomous decision-making about one’s own body.

I trust this example suffices to justify the appellation, “platitude”.

The 10 chemists ask whether  the core values of professional chemists include only the pursuit of facts and inventions, to the exclusion of other considerations?

The correct answer is, “Yes, very much so, when invoking or relying on their specialist expertise.”

Further, they ask whether scientists have responsibilities to society outside their professional pursuits?

Of course they do, the same responsibilities —  no less, but also no more  than all other citizens: to obey the laws, to vote — and to behave honestly and competently in their specialist professional activities. That latter means, as Krylov argued, not to allow ideological influences to affect what they do. As Hudlicky argued [vi], evaluations and criteria should be based on disciplinary standards, not cronyism or political or social prejudices.

 One can certainly agree that all specialists bear a certain responsibility for how they behave in their workplace — as all people do; but it is not the case that “[a] person’s words . . . [can] create an alienating or hostile workplace or learning environment”.

A person's actions could of course disrupt a workplace, and common existing laws are perfectly adequate to deal with such situations; but to assert that words have such power takes us back from chemistry even beyond alchemy to magical thinking in general; it ignores what we have learned about human psychology and about the perversion and mis- and ab-using of language.

Am I now being myself an ultracrepidarian, as I have labeled the 10 chemists? Trained in Chemistry and later in Science and Technology Studies, what qualifies me to criticize other chemists on matters of philosophy, history, psychology, linguistics?

Because the 10 chemists rely on abstract generalities, whereas I follow Anna Krylov in citing appropriate specialist understanding in the pertinent subjects, as well as pertinent actual  experience.

As philosophy has understood since Plato’s discussion of shadows in caves, what we take to be “reality” depends on how we interpret what comes to our eyes and ears and noses; and our interpretations are determined by our beliefs, our biases, our  presumptions. That’s why there is a diversity of opinions on any given social issue.

No environment is inherently “alienating” or “hostile”. Some may find a given place to be so, but others would not. Some might find a word offensive, where others would not. There is no way that anyone could know that any given statement could not be taken as offensive by someone. What matters is not the word or the statement, it is the interpretation, with its presumption of underlying motive. In another country (Australia) at a different time (many decades ago) [vii]:

[F]oreigners or immigrants were “Chinks,” “Dagos,” “Frogs,” “Pommies,” “reffos,” “Wops”; in fact “bloody Pommies,” “bloody reffos,” and so on. Those were not usually terms of affection or respect. But it was at the same time true that some people who used those terms were singularly kind and helpful to individuals within all those groups, as they dealt with them in day-to-day life.
       I suspect it was very good for me to learn that people who make stereotypically denigrating remarks about refugees, Jews, people with accents, intellectuals, people who don’t play football, and so on, might still be kind and helpful to me personally even though I belong in all those despicable categories. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” we said in those days. I think it helped me put things into perspective so that, for instance, I’ve liked and respected and conversed comfortably with some people who use the phrase, “getting jewed down.” What would my life be like if, whenever I heard such a phrase, I felt obliged to rush to the nearest EO/AA Office to report the culprit? What sort of person might I have become if I’d been drilled, coached, trained to be ever on the alert and to feel insulted by such idioms?

One of the great sins committed by activists of PC and DEI ideologies is to mis-educate members of “marginalized” groups, as well as well-meaning others, to be on the constant look-out for such words and to believe that words can in and of themselves indicate hostility, a lack of welcoming acceptance, even outright racism. Hence the absurdities cited by Krylov [i] — not using “supremacy” in any context, or “master password”, or “brown bag lunch”, etc. etc. As George Orwell’s 1984 teaches, such insults to language have the political purpose of instituting as mandatory the viewpoints of these ideologists.

Ben Jonson pointed out centuries ago that clear thinking and clear language go hand-in-hand: “Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous”, a citation that the Underground Grammarian, Richard Mitchell, adopted as the logo for his newsletter [viii].

Again as Krylov pointed out, PC and DEI ideologists use words deceptively. In DEI, “diversity” does not stand for what the word means, it is used specifically to argue that black people, and also other “people of color”, and maybe even white women, should be present more frequently in various venues.

“People of color”, in turn, does not mean what it says, for it intends to refer only to black or brown, definitely not yellow, and absolutely not white (unless female). Orwell had something to say about that, too, in Animal Farm, where all are equal even as some are more equal than others.

DEI aims not for diversity, but for homogeneity of their particular “core values” [ix]. They do not wish diversity to mean intellectual diversity, or “Inclusion” to include conservative political viewpoints; the “Inclusion” focuses on mainly contemporary and recent writings of members of marginalized groups, certainly not the classics of Western civilization [x].

The 10 chemists do not go so far as to approve re-naming of scientific terms to eliminate eponyms of people nowadays judged, by them, to have been racist; but they regard it as good to re-name buildings, say; and they indulge in Orwellian Newspeak by saying this is not “cancelling” viewpoints but merely recalibrating “institutional values”. Words fail me here, but I do recall that the Soviet Union used to periodically or even continually recalibrate its official Encyclopedia to remove the names of wrong thinkers.

Re-naming buildings, removing statues, destroy historical artefacts; that is vandalism, quite the same in principle as ISIS demolition of Buddhist statues. We can learn from history only if we preserve it. Moreover it is possible to do that without pretending that our “core values” have remained unchanged. For instance, a monument erected in 1922 in honor of a Confederate could have added to it an explanatory plaque, that this 1920s anachronism illustrates the resurgence in those times of opposition to full equality for black people; and that things are getting better, as the addition of the plaque demonstrates.

I saw a nice example of such informative recalibrating in 1958 in Germany, I think Stuttgart: a prominent obelisk in the middle of a city square, to “The Thousand-Year Reich, 1931-1945”. What a concise way to teach quite a lot of history.

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[i]     Anna I. Krylov, The peril of politicizing science, Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 12 (2021) 5371−76; https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475. See also https://quillette.com/2021/12/18/scientists-must-gain-the-courage-to-oppose-the-politicization-of-their-disciplines/

[ii]    John M. Herbert, Martin Head-Gordon, Hrant P. Hratchian, Teresa Head-Gordon, Rommie E. Amaro, Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Roald Hoffmann, Carol A. Parish, Christina M. Payne, Troy Van Voorhis, “Words matter: on the debate over free speech, inclusivity, and academic excellence”, Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 13 (2022) 7100-7104; https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.2c02242?ref=pdf

[iii]    For example, Albert Lynd, Quackery in the Public Schools, Little, Brown, 1953;  Arthur Bestor, Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in our Public Schools, University of Illinois Press, 1953; 2^nd ed. with added material, 1985.         
      I found it interesting that the 1980s seemed right for re-publication, because it was during that decade that I experienced personally a drastic decline in high-school preparation of college freshmen: “The new generations: students who don’t study”, https://mega.nz/file/YCx22a5Y#eIBvxIaK4ARiuQ5fyDMgJxmNvCEAQ1gOmasz5ntShGo  

[iv]    This saying has been attributed to many sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_road_to_hell_is_paved_with_good_intentions.
Such insights into humanity tend to have very long histories, quite probably originating before written records. Robert Merton published an amusing volume describing the many attributions of the concept that one gets further only by improving on what others achieved: On the Shoulders of Giants,

[v]     Adjective or noun referring to the voicing of opinions about those who do not know what they are talking about.
      I came upon this useful word by looking for the historical derivation of the proverbial “let the cobbler stick to his last”. The delightful story reveals why the etymology of the word is impenetrable without knowing the tale: Pete Butler, “Don’t be an ultracrepidarian”, 16 November 2017;  https://butlerprofessionalfarrierschool.com/archives/1527

[vi]    See https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/good-science-needs-intellectual-honesty

[vii]   “Diversity and Identity”, keynote address at 49^th Annual Meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans, Seattle (WA), January 1993; https://mega.nz/file/EThXlaYZ#vD9XZVPGFDLnIwWY0dW4dS53zd6_RVFyFqpa5Fzzkn8; published in several places, most recently in Ben ik wel woke enoeg? (Am I woke enough? A journey through the land of the Social Justice Warriors), ed. Martin Harlaar, https://gompel-svacina.eu/product/ben-ik-wel-woke-genoeg.

[viii] The Underground Grammarian; https://sourcetext.com/grammarian

[ix]    Anthony Esolen, “My college succumbed to the totalitarian diversity cult”; https://www.crisismagazine.com/opinion/college-succumbed-totalitarian-diversity-cult

[x]    Anthony Esolen, “The narcissism of campus diversity activists”; https://www.crisismagazine.com/opinion/the-narcissism-of-campus-diversity-activists