Thread by @EPoe187

1) Progressives have ruined the humans sciences. The latest example is Nature Reviews Psychology encouraging authors to include a "citation diversity statement." But the damage was already near total.

aporiamagazine.com/p/progressives…

2) What is a citation diversity statement? Well, it's essentially a letter confirming the authors' efforts to cite non-white, non-male, non-Western scholars. For progressives, diversity is a euphemism for "fewer white men."

3) Science is supposed to be meritocratic, though. Good papers get cited because they are good papers. Not because the authors are black disabled scholars. This policy is thus antithetical to the spirit of science.

4) How did such a prestigious journal reach such an appalling low? The pernicious cultural progressivism that ravages the human sciences began in the humanities, in literary criticism and sociology.

5) I had wanted to major in literature, but the field proved appalling. Evolutionary psychology was dismissed as an apology for white men, while Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and other motley mountebanks were exalted. Everything was oppression.

6) But this was easy for others to ignore. Let the neo-Freudians prattle about Oedipal complexes in Proust. who cares? At least the scientists were still doing the real work of understanding man.

7) But cultural progressivism kept spreading like an escaped laboratory monster from a bad horror film. Soon it was attacking and subverting the human sciences. People fought back outside the academy, but inside there was little resistance.

8) People unfamiliar with academia often accuse me of exaggeration. Yet if anything, the truth is worse than I can convey. Social psychology has become a propaganda arm of progressivism. It no longer even tries to explain human social nature.

9) After the riots of 2020, everything accelerated. Peak wokeness. The revolutionaries saw their moment and acted with alacrity, seizing the means of information production.

10) The APA released two documents that stand out: one apologizing to “people of color” for psychology’s complicity in white supremacy, and another describing psychology’s role in dismantling systemic racism. Both were more religious than scientific.

11) More disturbing still was an editorial in Nature Human Behavior essentially asserting that editors would reject articles that offended the moral sensibilities of egalitarians.

12) This was an explicit assertion that the human sciences were subordinating the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of "social justice." Race and IQ? Forget about it. Honest discussion of sex differences? Not a chance.

13) The cause of this mess is straightforward: Progressivism is committed to doctrines about human equality that are inconsistent with reality. Thus, progressives are compelled to stifle science, lest the truth destroy their political vision.

14) Ironically, progressives still claim to "trust the science" while actively suppressing the honest study of human variation and while rejecting the straightforward consequences of Darwinism. Indeed, they have become the new creationists.

15) The human sciences are a disaster. If you want to understand human nature, read Goethe or Mann, Turgenev or Tolstoy, Balzac or Proust, Dickens or Lawrence. You will not find it in modern psychology journals. They made their choice. The pursuit of truth lost.