We Should Live - Ben Bateman

I’m too upset about the whole Larry Summers thing to write anything interesting about the whole thing. His case dramatizes the overall sorry state of academia in a single story. That’s why the story upsets me so.

Here’s one piece from the morass of issues that Mr. Summers’ case presents: When he hypothesized about a year ago that men and women might be inherently different in their capacities to do math and science, conservatives found this so obvious as to be beneath serious comment. It requires a zealot’s faith to maintain against all evidence that the sexes are identical in every ability (except, of course, the abilities at which women excel).

So when he gave the fateful speech, I didn’t think much about the internal politics that must lie beneath the furor that ousted him. But in the past year I’ve acquainted myself with the evolution vs. intelligent design debate, and that has led me to think about the many honest scientists who, like moderate Muslims, meekly accept governance by the radicals.

Without getting into the particulars, my position on the evolution/ID question is: neither. But the debate’s structure is more interesting than its outcome. The types of arguments and rhetorical maneuvers that the participants employ reveal how their minds work. One of the most common from the evolution side is to deny that the other side is even qualified to participate in such a debate. This worldview, stated crudely, is that the evolution side represents logic and respectability, while the other side consists mainly of ignorant, irrational, froth-at-the-mouth religious types. Many of the people who present this argument in any of its many forms believe sincerely that religious believers would wreathe the world in a dark cloud of ignorance, even as those same people submit meekly to their political masters on the left and mouth pieties that they know to be absurd.

See, a serious belief in evolution requires that you know something substantive about how well organisms fit with their environments. In fact, it doesn’t really matter which side of the evolution debate you take. All agree that organisms are well-suited to their environments; the evolution question is how they became that way. But my point for now is simply that animals are, in fact, well-suited to their environments. Whatever the mechanism, the animals in cold climates are designed to stay warm, the desert animals are good at avoiding dehydration, and so on.

From that perspective, it’s absolutely bizarre to assume that the males and females of any sexually reproducing species would be biologically identical on most significant characteristics. In terms of genetic propagation, males and females face very different obstacles, and so we would expect them to be biologically different from each other—in every species.

I’ve no doubt that there are feminist biologists out there who believe that they can square this circle—or at least who understand that their jobs depend on saying that they believe it. I wonder if they also claim that all mental capabilities are identical between the males and females of every species. Or do they instead believe, as a sort of PC non-religious religion, that Homo Sapiens happens to be the only species on the planet in which the male and female minds are indistinguishable?

The answer, of course, is that you aren’t allowed to ask that sort of question. Just ask Mr. Summers: The left guards its truth with a stout stick.

I was once amazed at the left’s ability to maintain internal contradictions like this, but it no longer surprises me. Evolution vs. feminism is small potatoes. As Mark Steyn observes here, they somehow simultaneously cheer the gay agenda and demand respect for Muslims and their customs. That those customs include execution of homosexuals apparently bothers them not at all.

No doubt there are many other contradictions like this within liberalism. It’s hard to see, for example, how the feminists tolerate the multi-cultis who see no difference between cultures that treat women as slaves and those that treat them as human. The underlying answer, I suspect, is that they’re all Marxists underneath, so the differences don’t really matter. The goal is to destroy society by pitting groups against each other, so it’s all the same whether the warring groups are divided according to race, sex, sexual preference, or any other characteristic. As long as they hate each other, it doesn’t matter whether the different types of rhetoric make sense with each other.

But the secular intellectuals are different. They come from a very different and much older intellectual tradition that stretches back at least as far as the French Revolution. While Marxism was certainly hostile to religion, I suspect that the Marxists make up a small minority of the many secular intellectuals who are hostile to religion and wish that it would go away.

So it’s sad, though not surprising, that otherwise-rational atheist intellectuals would be so easily silenced by the gender Marxists. It’s a powerful argument against a purely intellectual worldview built on logic, science, technology, and a distaste for religion: Those who believe in essentially nothing are easily conquered by those who believe in something, even if it’s something silly like feminism or something suicidal like radical Islam. As Lenin demonstrated nearly a century ago, a hundred polite gentlemen speaking the truth don’t stand a chance against one true believer with a machine gun.

And Larry Summers has proven that yet again. It doesn’t matter whether boys and girls are biologically different. All that matters is that the true believers have decreed that they’re the same, and they’re prepared to punish anyone who disagrees.

This lesson will hit us over the head again and again until we learn it: In the real world, truth is not enough. It can’t survive on its own. It can’t protect itself from thugs, and it can’t perpetuate itself. No civilization has ever flourished without some sort of religion, without some transcendent idea that assures each individual that his toil, pain, and suffering serve some higher purpose. There are no atheists in the foxholes because no atheists would stay there. If each individual sought only his own happiness, and were free to do so, then no one would want to be a soldier, because the essence of front-line military service is to risk your life—and forego a lifetime of pleasure—to serve some greater entity, The Nation.

And it’s not just soldiers. Think of all the people who do all the dirty, low-paying jobs around you. If no one believed in anything higher than themselves, would anyone do those jobs? Would anyone go through the pain, work, and expense of raising a child unless they viewed themselves as something more than their consciousness and their bodies? (Ask the Europeans about that, with their suicidally low birth rate.)

I say all this because I’m fond of the atheist intellectuals, having recently been something of one myself. And I’m not a religious true believer in any conventional sense. I don’t go to church, and my personal theology is a disgraceful muddle. My argument is that the pure intellectuals ought to be able to work through their natural tendency toward atheism and come out the other side. With logic alone, I think that you can prove that logic alone is not enough to survive, and therefore not worth much without some underlying faith.

And that brings us back to Larry Summers. Even though he was politically very liberal, he was apparently a very intelligent and intellectually honest man. And on the specific question of women in science, there can be no doubt of his intellectual good faith. You can read the speech here if you’re having trouble falling asleep.

But the world is no longer hospitable to that kind of naive, apolitical intellectual curiosity—if it ever was. The future belongs to those who hold beliefs and are willing to fight for them, and no amount of intellect can change that fact.