Western Judeo-Christian civilization rose to dominate world culture and create the wealth and quality of life of modern civilization because it embraced science based on Aristotelean
logic and free inquiry. Beginning in Ancient Greece, through the Enlightenment until today, Western peoples slowly trod a path that rejected superstition and sought to discover through scientific inquiry the immutable laws of nature and the nature of the Universe itself.
Today, science as a foundational element of Western Civilization is fast crumbling before an onslaught of totalitarian criticism that demands – in an eerie shadow of the Anti-Enlightenment Inquisition – that free inquiry be abandoned in favor of obeisance to government-endorsed opinion, and that scientific fact be abandoned in favor of the linguistic whims of a tiny minority population of the mentally ill.
Two recent events tell us we are leaving the solid foundation upon which Western Civilization was built and entering a new reality resembling one of the more dystopian chapters of Ayn Rand’s masterful Atlas Shrugged.
Through the must-read Common Sense with Bari Weiss substack, we found Katie Herzog’s ongoing series about the spread of “woke ideology” in the field of medicine.
From Ms. Herzog’s latest article in the series:
During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class.
“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.”
His offense: using the term “pregnant women.”
“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”
It wasn’t the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly inoffensive. Words like “male” and “female.”
Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”
When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”
In other words, some of the country’s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.
The idea that sex is a social construct may be interesting debate fodder in an anthropology class. But in medicine, the material reality of sex really matters, in part because the refusal to acknowledge sex can have devastating effects on patient outcomes.
You will have to read Ms. Herzog’s original article here for the examples of what some of those devastating outcomes have been, but suffice it to say that when political correctness dictates to medical science, the outcomes for individual patients are horrific.
Note: As this article was about to be posted we learned the American Medical Association Board of Trustees (BOT) just passed a resolution that will have the AMA lobbying to end the designation of sex in all future birth certificates.
The other item evidencing how the scientific method and free inquiry have been destabilized is the small but growing number of articles and anecdotes revealing how science has been subverted to achieve political outcomes, rather than revealing facts about the natural world.
Almost everyone must be aware that social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the search engine Google and even web-hosting services have tried to act as the arbiters of what is and is not scientific information open to free inquiry. In pursuit of this political goal, they have banned the work of highly regarded scientists from the public square and ruthlessly hunted and attempted to exterminate from public view the work of America’s Frontline Doctors, who raised scientific and ethical questions about the government’s COVID-19 vaccine program.
One salient example of this phenomenon is the reaction of the Cleveland Clinic press office to a groundbreaking study of naturally acquired immunity in the Cleveland Clinic workforce.
The study found that those who were previously infected with COVID-19 were unlikely to get infected again, even if they were not vaccinated. Indeed, none of the previously infected employees were reinfected.
As Cleveland’s ABC News 5 reported, “Subjects previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 are unlikely to get COVID-19 reinfection whether or not they receive the vaccine. This finding calls into question the necessity to vaccinate those who have already had SARS-CoV-2 infection."
"Our [Cleveland Clinic] study examined rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals and showed that those previously infected who did not receive the vaccine did not have higher rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection than those previously infected who did, thereby providing direct evidence that vaccination does not add protection to those who were previously infected."
The study was conducted on 52,238 employees at the Cleveland Clinic. A positive RT-PCR test was defined as a COVID-19 infection. Among those in the study, 2,579 were previously infected, and 54% of that group remained unvaccinated. None of those 2,759 employees were reinfected.
Another study’s results suggest that reinfections are rare events and patients who have recovered from COVID-19 have a lower risk of reinfection. The study found natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 appears to confer a protective effect for at least a year, which is similar to the protection reported in recent vaccine studies. However, the observation ended before SARS-CoV-2 variants began to spread, and it is unknown how well natural immunity to the wild-type virus will protect against variants.
It is likewise unknown how well – if at all – the various vaccines protect against the variants, however, for questioning vaccine efficacy, the risks of the vaccine and urging the scientific investigation of other treatments, the physicians of America’s Frontline Doctors have been hounded by their woke peers, banned from social media and threatened with loss of their professional licenses.
Should we be surprised the Cleveland Clinic issued a statement urging those who had recovered from COVID-19 to be vaccinated anyway?
Why?
Certainly not because there was any scientifically validated reason for vaccinating those who had recovered and had COVID-19 antibodies – the reason for the recommendation was strictly political.
The Biden administration wants every single American vaccinated, and so a study that proves such a vaccination is unnecessary for those who have recovered from the disease had a political admonition appended to it, urging Americans to do the exact opposite of what the science of the study demonstrated.
Western Civilization was built on logic, the pursuit of truth through science and the principle of free inquiry. Today, government, academia, the establishment media, medical institutions and even “scientists” themselves reject those foundational elements of our civilization for an ideology that disclaims the idea that truth is knowable, regards politics as the final arbiter of all knowledge and has given social media platforms with their algorithms and twenty-something content moderators the power to decide the parameters of scientific debate. If we are to save Western Civilization, and the human progress it has achieved, the first thing we must do is save science from woke ideology and return it to the pursuit of truth.
“It is only in the realm of pure science that truth is an absolute criterion. When we deal with applied science, with technology—we deal with people. And when we deal with people, considerations other than truth enter the question.” Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
CHQ Editor George Rasley is a member of American MENSA.
Western Judeo-Christian civilization
Science
Aristotelean logic
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dystopia
woke ideology
Katie Herzog
biological sex
Sex on birth certificates
America’s Frontline Doctors
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COVID vaccines
Cleveland Clinic study
Biden Administration