9/11, a lesson not learned
A few days ago marked 22 years since 9/11. That horrible event should have been the proverbial wake-up call to America, the biblical writing on the wall.
But America didn't learn. If anything, America learned the wrong thing. Progressives, the woke, "cultural elites," whatever you want to call them, and the political party now in power despise America, Western civilization, and everything good, such as traditional values. The values that not long ago even the worst hypocrites espoused in public are now considered "hate crimes."
I was teaching in Manhattan when 9/11 occurred. Fortunately, it was at a college on the Upper East Side, well away from the World Trade Center.
By 2001, leftists had already tainted countless academic disciplines. History, sociology, anthropology, and literature were in decline, but science was still holding out and upholding the old model that an empirical reality exists, or as its enemies call it, "white male science." (Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for today.)
That day, I was supposed to teach two courses in the psychology department (Statistics; Sensation and Perception), the first class at 9:45 A.M. There was a television set in the college lobby, and as soon as I entered the college building, it was known that airplanes had hit both towers of the World Trade Center, on purpose, and that it was terrorism, even if it was not officially labeled as such yet.
No one yet knew the magnitude of how many lives would be lost. The first class would start and run, but before I dismissed my students, I told them the following:
Every statement in your textbook is followed by references to the research that proved it. The entire Sensation and Perception book was based on experimentation and data, all based on the experimental method, the only way for getting objective knowledge about empirical reality. Every couple of years publishers issue new editions; a new edition sometimes means trivial changes like cover art, but in Sensation and Perception, it really is a new book, because new things are discovered. But this approach to discovering knowledge is just the tradition of a tiny strand of humanity, in a tiny strand of human history. Those who flew the planes into the World Trade Center are opposed to this tradition. They are determined to destroy it. There won't necessarily be a new edition of the textbook. Rationality will not necessarily win.
That is how I ended the class. The next class was canceled.
Little did I know how bad it would be two decades later, underestimating the total madness that would engulf the West and its apparent determination to commit suicide. We saw barbarism on 9/11; today barbarism rules academia, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and the Democrat party.
There is currently a war against empirical science in favor of Marxist science and "indigenous peoples science." There is a war against statistics, the language of proof in science. You can increasingly find woke "scientific" researchers saying that the progressives should not rely on "traditional" statistics procedures invented by toxic white male eugenicists. Freed from capitalist shackles, one can arrive at the correct conclusion through intuition.
Statistics was primarily invented by Sir Ronald Fisher, once hailed as the greatest biologist since Charles Darwin. Now he's been canceled by his former college, and memorials in his honor have been trashed — even though there is scant evidence that he was racist, he was reputed to help students regardless of ethnicity or color, and has been credited with saving millions in India from starvation due to agricultural improvements thanks to his scientific work.
There is a war against rationality itself. Empirical science, statistics, logic were all aspects of, and valued by, Western civilization. They are all outside the human mainstream and are on the verge of extinction.
Leftists have a powerful ally in the destruction of civilization. As put by Osama bin Laden, "the interests of Muslims coincide with the interests of the socialists in the war against crusaders." The two great poisonous flavors of socialism, Bolshevism and National Socialism, have long been allies.
The woke goal is nothing less than the destruction of not just Western civilization, traditional morality, and private property, but rationality. With the aid of their Islamic allies, they're well on their way.
Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.