We are sorry if our heterodox views serve to disappoint friends and colleagues in the United States and elsewhere. But we retain the belief that, in supposedly pluralistic societies, everyone is entitled to their own opinions. We urge other scientists not to follow the American example, and to resist the campaign to racialize science. While we admire many aspects of American culture, we reject its cultural imperialism—including the new form of ostensibly progressive cultural imperialism that serves to impose America’s own obsessive race tribalism on the rest of the world.
Our European experience provides no shortage of cautionary tales—including Renaissance Florence under the influence of Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, who imposed a regime of religious purity in the 1490s. Such was his sway that no less an artist than Sandro Botticelli was induced to burn his creations and give up painting. In all eras, the demands of ideological purity serve to suppress the pursuit of art and reason. Standing up to puritans is necessary if we are to protect the telos and soul of science.
Happy to see that other Europeans* are taking notice of what was obvious to me about American culture already in 2006.
* In France, of all places!
I submit, however, that Savonarola’s regime was probably more tolerable (as distinct from more tolerant) than what is going on in American academia. That is because Savonarola went by the Book. As long as you followed the Book, you were safe under Savonarola’s regime. Not so in American academia today: you never know what the orthodoxy is going to be tomorrow.
PS: how do i change my avatar?
I predict they are going to get sacked shortly.
It would probably be worth cutting all STEM funding to universities rather than allowing STEM to completely degenerate into academic/woke politics pseudoscience.
Geeze.
We get a McDonalds on every corner. So does every city in the world.
We all start watching tons of reality TV. So does every TV viewer in the world.
We get a Hard Rock Cafe. So does every city in the world.
We decide that we’re an irredeemably racist society. So does every western society in the world.
Get your own life, people.
🙂
Those things are not as universal or influential as you think bobby.
Snorri, if you add your own Gravitar, that should override the one that got generated for you. I think 😆
Heyyyyy, now. Didn’t reality TV start in the UK?
Snorri,
As Perry says, Gravitar.
Someone needs to shut those racists up.
Thus, the smiley. 🙂
(But, I note that every time I say something similar to either people-not-from-here, or people-from-here who are heavily invested in the [Scot accent] “if it’s not European, it’s crrrap” [/Scot accent] outlook, I usually get prickly pushback. Reminds me – humorously, honest – of the old “if you’re taking flak, . . . ” aphorism.)
“We urge other scientists not to follow the American example, and to resist the campaign to racialize science.” Sounds like Canada saying “stop buying all those damned American songs!” Or France saying something about McDonalds and national identity.
We’re an outsized and suffocating marketing center, and our idiots get worldwide coverage. Of course your left is going to duplicate our left.
Sounds like you need a WordPress account?
I’d like for Bobby to be wrong here, but how else do you explain the presence of Black Lives Matter groups in the UK? How many people of any race die at the hands of British cops? It’s all so mind-bogglingly unreal.
@Eric
‘… but how else do you explain the presence of Black Lives Matter groups in the UK?‘
Monkey see; monkey do.
Both sides of the Atlantic mindless blobs have been allowed to get out of control thanks to the gutless invertebrates in an equally mindless political class.
Characterising academic political correctness as ‘US cultural imperialism’ may be an effective gambit in debate in French academia. (I suspect it would have less effect in the UK.)
It might help to understand my first comment that, in this context, “European” is not meant to include the British.
And that is meant neither as an insult nor as a compliment to the British, by the way.
@Niall
I fear that in this instance, as in so many others, my dictum that `in the UK we almost unerringly copy the worst from America when we should rather copy the best’ is in full play.
My university is rushing to introduce new racism policies “based on critical race theory’ even as we speak. This is driven by administrators and has not been through Senate or any other academic committee. Just like Evergreen College. I expect all the other Russell Group to follow suit, with the possible exception of Oxford, which seems to have been getting the odd thing right recently.
Girolamo Savonarola came to a smouldering end.
Be assured, Snorri, it will be taken as a great compliment by many of us 🙂 – not least because, except to compliment us, why would you feel the need to say it. 🙂
Many years ago, in a meeting that included an EU official, I referred to something as being rolled out in the UK now and in Europe soon. He was still talking about my ‘language’ a year later. 🙂
Clovis Sangrail (August 24, 2020 at 5:04 pm), given our free-speech-adverse laws, academics who wish to resist had better start by denouncing critical race theory as racist.
This has the additional advantage of being true.
In my hand-count-of-examples experience, even left-wing academics and former academics tend to have negative opinions of how the modern university is administered.
Elsewhere in the PC bubble
I guess the source is not enamoured of the administrators there, either.
@Niall
I intend to do so. I’m writing the email in my spare time but it keeps expanding.
Techno, house or heavy metal?
Also a great book title.
“Standing up to puritans is necessary”
He means probably “standing up to the crazies” – yes, it is necessary.
And things get copied. Riots inspire other riots.
Yellow shirts in France, riots in Belarus, in Beirut, in the US, Hong Kong… and now in Israel too….
There is nothing American about the leftist conformism the scientists are complaining about.
The Frankfurt School of Marxism was not created in Frankfurt Kentucky.
Gramsci did not live in “Little Italy” – he lived Italy, he was Italian.
And Post Modernism did not come from Paris Texas – it came from Paris France.
I suspect that the French scientists know the above very well – they are just pretending that this Marxist demand for conformism is “American” to try and turn Europeans against it.
Of course complaining about “racial tribalism” and “Puritanism” is a way of avoiding the word MARXISM.
It is MARXISM that is demanding conformity – conformity to its “exploitation” and “oppression” of its “power structures” message.
People who will not even use the word MARXISM are unlikely to defeat it.
Of course they know that. But they also know that the vanguard trying to drive this shit is nevertheless coming from American at the moment. Black Lives Matter did not start in Brighton, Bordeaux, Berlin or Brindisi either, and that is the carrier wave of the poisonous Marxist mutagen in 2020. The Americanisation of European politics by importing toxic American dialogues about race is a huge issue.