Glenn Ellmers: "Lysenko convinced Stalin that..'political truth,'.. could command nature..spirit of Lysenko..is alive..[COVID] authority, not nature, determines scientific truth..Australia post-COVID"

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/pandemic-pandemonium/

Glenn Ellmers:

Lysenko convinced Stalin that plants could be “educated” to conform with Marxist dogma, altering their natures—i.e., their genetic traits—to meet the needs of the state. Stalin was only too happy to hear that “political truth,” as revealed in the unfolding of the historical dialectic, could command nature. This conceit, however, neither originated nor dissolved with the Soviet Union.

If Niccolò Machiavelli was, as Leo Strauss argued, the founder of the modern world, one could say that the one who perpetuated this new political order by giving it a religion was Francis Bacon. The religion Bacon preached, of course, was science. Both Kheriaty and Desmet want to defend genuine, modern science, which is objective, modest, and reasonable, from scientism, which isn’t. But we may wonder if this is a distinction without a difference, and whether the inclination to reductionist materialism (as well as technological utopianism) was present from the beginning of the modern project.

Bacon’s approach to science is premised on the need to interrogate and “vex” nature to uncover her secrets. He suggests in The Advancement of Learning that with diligent effort future scientists might “become the instruments and dispensers” of “prolonging and renewing the life of man.” Bacon explains his general method in Sylva Sylvarum: when perceiving some unseen action at work, we must look for the “pneumaticals” found “in all tangible bodies,” and must not be distracted by what the classical philosophers vaguely called “virtues and qualities.” True causes, Bacon insists, are “infinitely material in nature. For spirits are nothing else but a natural body.” Then, with an astounding string of technical words which perfectly capture the direction and tone of his enterprise, he declares that the invisible pneumatics

are in all tangible bodies whatsoever, more or less; and they are never (almost) at rest: and from them, and their motions, principally proceed arefaction, colliquation, concoction, maturation, putrefaction, vivification, and most of the effects of nature.

Can we not see here the spirit of Harari’s transhumanism, and the WEF’s goal of expedited evolution? In The Great Instauration, Bacon announces a goal that today would earn him a grant from the Gates Foundation: “I am laboring to lay the foundation not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power.”

Consider in this light a statement Kheriaty quotes by the Australian Medical Indemnity Protection Society, which issues the malpractice insurance necessary for an Australian medical license: “Health practitioners are obliged to ensure their views are consistent with public health messaging…. Views expressed which may be consistent with evidence-based material may not necessarily be consistent with public health messaging” (emphasis added). As Kheriaty notes, “evidence-based material” means peer-reviewed research—which used to be the standard for legitimate science. But the pandemic revealed that the spirit of Lysenko and Bacon is alive and well: power or authority, not nature, determines scientific truth. To practice medicine in Australia post-COVID means pledging obedience to “public health messaging”—that is, to the diktats of the establishment bureaucracy. The Australian guidance is only slightly more explicit than similar language promulgated by the Federation of State Medical Boards in the U.S., which warned (Kheriaty quoting again): “Physicians who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action,” which may include “the suspension or revocation of their medical license.” Millions starved in Soviet Russia in compliance with the official edicts for growing wheat and potatoes. We don’t yet know, and probably never will, how many have died because of official rules about COVID “misinformation.”

Let me note one regrettable omission in Kheriaty’s book: gender reassignment therapies. Especially with regard to children, this must surely be the most alarming aspect of the Left’s neo-Lysenkoism. Just as the Soviet Central Committee decreed that the nature of plants could be made to conform to the wishes of the party, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—in a list of resources for “Gender-Affirming Care and Young People”—explains that gender identity is a subjective “experience,” and “not always congruent with biological sex.”

But what happens when nature does not yield as submissively as we would like?

Disappointed Hopes and New Anxieties

John Milton used the term “pandemonium” for the great hall of “all demons” (pan daimon) that he describes at the end of Book I of Paradise Lost. Over time, Milton’s term for Satan’s home base in his revolt against God came to be synonymous with chaos and violent disorder. [https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/pandemic-pandemonium/]