If you’re as old as I am you’re probably dead, but if not you might remember the strange foreboding that gripped some of us back in the day when the fateful year of “1984” began to loom on the calendarial horizon: It was actually going to be 1984!
We had been bred and baked in the Cold War, and one of the urtexts of that worldwide existential struggle was socialist George Orwell’s dystopia, written to explore and expose the workings of the totalitarian mind. And now the year was here!
And so it was, and so it passed, like Halley’s comet in 1986, with considerably less punch than anticipated.1 To top matters off, the whole Soviet Union imploded circa 1990, and so 1984 more or less receded as a cultural artifact, a warning of a danger that had passed.
Now, of course, not so much. The age of the thoughtcrime has returned, with a vengeance, although, fortunately—I mean “fortunately” in the relative rather than the absolute sense—it’s academia rather than the government that’s wielding the truncheon.
Retired mathematics professor Theodore P. Hill tells us the story in Quillette, “Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole” (Robby Soave gives us the short version in Reason.) Hill explains how his paper, proposing an explanation for the observed fact that men (or “males”, as we scientists like to call them) are more likely to score at both the very high and the very low end of the “distribution” for mathematical performance, and a lot of other distributions as well. Charles Darwin—the Charles Darwin—suspected that Mother Nature was fucking with us, as she so often does, using guys as her guinea pigs, although Charlie preferred to dress up his theory by calling it the “Greater Male Variability Hypothesis”.
Precisely why Nature is fucking with us is open to question, but the fact that she is fucking with us is pretty obvious. Hill set out to suggest an answer, not to the grand question of Ma Nature’s motivation but rather the more manageable (perhaps) one of exactly what mechanism She employs while working her wiles, working with Sergei Tabachnikov, a Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University. His paper, “An Evolutionary Theory for the Variability Hypothesis”, was first accepted, and then rejected, by the Mathematical Intelligencer. An even greater reverse occurred when the New York Journal of Mathematics offered to publish the article and did so, and then quickly repented of its temerity, not only pulling the piece from its website but replacing it with another article with the same page number, reminiscent of Stalin’s trick of erasing importunate personalities like Trotsky from official Soviet photographs. Impure thoughts are not only removed, but smoothed over, as if they had never been.
Dr. Hill describes in detail the variety of pressures that were put on everyone involved in this thoughtcrime and provides a short history of previous examples, including former Harvard President Larry Summers’ famous flame-out over the same issue, as well as former Google guy James Damore, who was fired for writing a memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, which argued that while sexism in the workplace undeniably does exist, “[d]ifferences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.”
When Hill and Tabachnikov were being put through all variety of wringers to confess and repent, Tabachnikov emailed to Hill, describing the “feedback” he was enduring and remarked that “analogies with scientific racism were made by some; I am afraid, we are likely to hear more of it in the future.”
Well, the future is now, if not a couple of days ago, for on September 9 the Washington Post ran an article on the Florida governor’s race, “GOP candidate for Fla. governor spoke at racially charged events”, accusing the Republican candidate, Ron DeSantis, of, well, speaking at “racially charged” events, which I guess is WashPostspeak for “we want to accuse him of being a racist, but the libel laws won’t let us.”
The events in question were “Restoration Weekend” confabs held by the “David Horowitz Freedom Center.” Well, David Horowitz is not my favorite self-pitying loudmouth, and the gang of speakers Dave put together to “restore” whatever it is he wants to restore—probably not the House of Stuart2—including Stephen K. Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos and Sebastian Gorka, are a gaggle of right-wing goons that I’d travel a long way to avoid. DeSantis actually appeared at a 2017 conference that also featured, the Post said, “a former Google engineer who was fired after arguing that ‘biological causes’ in part explain why there are relatively few women working in tech and leadership.” I don’t know why the Post couldn’t actually name Damore, and, more to the point, couldn’t summarize his argument more accurately. And I also wonder why his appearance was used to justify the use of the term “racially charged”. Unless saying that men and women may differ in significant ways is the same thing as saying that black people are racially inferior to whites.
- Halley’s comet is in fact far less famous than it used to be. According to Wikipedia, Halley’s comet is “the only known short-period comet that is regularly visible to the naked eye.” I can remember reading as a boy, circa 1956, that Halley’s would reappear in 1986, at which point I would have obtained the obviously impossible age of 41, and the thought caused me to tremble just a little at the prospect of the great expanse of unfilled time that stretched before me. In 1986 Halley’s presented a far less impressive sight than it had in its previous visits, which is why its appearance was such a letdown. (Comets, unlike planets, have quite variable orbits.) Fortunately, a “real” comet, Hale-Bopp, previously unknown, showed up in the mid-1990s and put on the show that everyone expected from Halley’s. ↩︎
- “Restoration” probably refers to the Restoration Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina. Since the Restoration is located on King Street, it probably was named in honor of the return to the English throne of the House of Stuart, in the form of Charles II, the “Merry Monarch”. The Stuarts finally got the final boot from England via the “Glorious Revolution” in 1688, after their long-hidden Roman Catholicism became explicit. I doubt that Horowitz is planning on converting, but holding conferences in a royalist hotel in the Cradle of the Confederacy is something I would not do. ↩︎
