When social psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth took the podium at a recent interdisciplinary seminar on emotions, she was already feeling rattled. Colleagues who'd presented earlier had warned her that the crowd was tough and had little patience for the reduction of human experience to numbers or bold generalizations about emotions across cultures. Ellsworth had a plan: She would pre-empt criticism by playing the critic, offering a social history of psychological approaches to the topic. But no sooner had the word "experiment" passed her lips than the hands shot up. Audience members pointed out that the experimental method is the brainchild of white Victorian males. Ellsworth agreed that white Victorian males had done their share of damage in the world but noted that, nonetheless, their efforts had led to the discovery of DNA. This short-lived dialogue between paradigms ground to a halt with the retort: "You believe in DNA?"Then a lot happened. Postmodernism faded as an academic force. Tensions between conservatives and scientists increased, most saliently on climate and evolution. Left-wing antiscience turned into a relatively obscure issue, albeit one that this blog, with its affinity for obscurity, occasionally visited.
However, if anyone thinks that science is going to be untouched by the current inflammation of PC leftism on campuses and beyond, let's just say "You believe in DNA?" has spawned more questions in febrile young minds:
This is where unthinking adherence to identity politics gets us. (From an NY student, name cropped for obv reasons). pic.twitter.com/CHdIRZVP6Z
— Juliet (@Jsoosty) November 12, 2015
I've written in the past about a possible switcheroo of pro- and anti-science positions in the political spectrum. I was thinking of a decades-long timeframe, but it may not be such a long wait.
