A collection of 67 papers published in the Journal of Chemical Education includes “Decolonizing the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum” and “Integrating Antiracism, Social Justice and Equity Themes in a Biochemistry Class.” What’s next—the Periodic Table of Intersectional Elements?

Rice University offers a course on “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black-Life Matter.” BLM, get it?

And don’t get me started on Scientific American where, for 214 consecutive months, I debunked all manner of flapdoodle and flimflam in my “Skeptic” column, only to see this once-august publication announce “Modern Mathematics Confronts its White Patriarchal Past,” and “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather is Wrong,” concluding from this (mis)reading of the scientific literature that “[i]nequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” Peak wokeness was reached when Scientific American explained “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ is Problematic for Describing Programs that Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,” explaining that Star Wars characters are too white, toxically masculine, religious, ableist, eugenicist, and worst of all resolved their conflicts through “duels with phallic lightsabers.” Phallic lightsabers? What would Freud say?

Does anyone actually believe such claptrap? Obviously some do, and the fervor of their woke faith only makes them all the more able to convince themselves (and others of parallel ideological stripes) of the truth of claims that nearly everyone else can see have little-to-no contact with reality.

So how do we understand this? It seems to help to divide the ideology of “woke” into “proximate” and “ultimate” causes. The proximate causes are what is more or less consciously going on in people’s minds as they adopt stridently woke positions that may fly in the face of their own common sense. The ultimate causes are a little deeper, more historical and psychological. And the deeper we go, the more ultimate causes seem to base themselves in unrealistic conceptions of human nature.

Proximate Causes

  1. Moral Progress and Changing Standards of Immorality

We have made so much moral progress since the Enlightenment—particularly since the civil rights and women’s rights movements that launched the modern campus protest movement in the first place—that our standards of what is intolerable have been ratcheted ever upward to the point where many people are hypersensitive to things that, by comparison, didn’t even appear on the cultural radar half a century ago. Thus it is that modern moral crusaders have forgotten how far we’ve come since the abolition of slavery, the elimination of the death penalty in most countries, the franchise for all adult citizens, children’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, and even the rights of future generations to inhabit a livable planet. In other words, most of the big moral movements have been fought and won, leaving today’s moral crusaders with comparatively smaller causes to promote and evils to protest, resulting in demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings, and paroxysms thrown over microaggressions and misgendering trans people."

Yes.  When I was young,  racism was still blatant and many racists felt no need to apologize or even justify it.  Today,  anyone who genuinely believes blacks are inferior knows to keep their mouths shut.  Similarly,  no one would openly claim women are inferior.  (This is not the same as supporting traditional gender roles, which is built on perceived and likely real differences in how average men and average women see their needs and value.  Mom may stay at home raising kids, but not because she is dumb.)

Without a cause for which to feel morally superior, many people in our society need to find a cause worthy of their rage and contempt for their inferiors.

The abolition of absolute truths (F=ma, x=1/2at^2) and the rejection of reason are major contributing factors. Hence, the attempt to confuse science by seeing racism in math, chemistry, and other fields where there are answers that are demonstrably right or wrong.