From Russia with Love: Science and Ideology Then and Now
When I left the USSR in 1991, shortly after the Wall came down, I thought that the oppressions of totalitarian regimes would be a thing of the past; a story you tell your grandchildren, and they tell you, Oh, come on, grandma, you are making this up. I thought I would never again experience an atmosphere of ideological control, omnipresence of ideology, policing of speech and thought, suppression of dissent, compelled speech, fear, and self-censorship.
Yet living my life as a professor of chemistry at an American university in 2021 keeps bringing back memories from my school and university time in the USSR. Not good, sweet memories more like Orwellian nightmares.
Not everyone sees these parallels. This is not surprising. How would someone who grew up in a liberal democracy recognize the tactics and tools used by totalitarian regimes? It takes a genius like Orwell to know.
That is why I wrote my essay, The Peril of Politicizing Science [1]. I wanted to bring this message to my community. And I am happy to be here and to talk about these parallels.
I have organized my remarks around four themes:
The atmosphere of fear and self-censorship;
The omnipresence of ideology (examples from science);
The intolerance of dissenting opinions (suppression of ideas and people, censorship, Newspeak);
The use of social engineering to solve real and imagined problems.
RTWT. I am particularly sorry to hear about the woke takeover (if that’s the right word) of physical science. I fell in with a very talented physical chemist in my second year at Oxford. The guy was brilliant. I felt my IQ went up by 20 points just being around him. He went on to become a distinguished professor of physical chemistry. It’s hard to believe that people like him are now encumbered by the woke nonsense. But I guess it is so.