The America I grew up in is disappearing into an identity politics vortex

Igrew up in the Boston area in the 1980s and 1990s, with Harvard, MIT and other great centres of science and learning all around me. I took it for granted that I lived in the epicentre of world knowledge production, scientific brilliance and general academic might, as well as their ultimate capitalist answer: a biotech industry that went like gangbusters, setting the agenda for the whole world.

America is still the world leader when it comes to almost everything big, including biotech and technology. But for how long? I’m back in Boston now to visit my parents, and I no longer feel that sense of pride or thrill when I stroll through, say, Kendall Square in Cambridge, home to MIT and more than 1,000 biotech companies. I passed that way last week on my way to the cinema, and this time felt a sense of dullness, of decline.

Everything has changed since I was a kid. Instead of focusing on the relentless drive to learn more, try more and figure more out, in other words the things that made it great, America got sidetracked by the rotten vortex of identity politics, which has now found its way into once-great science faculties. The rot has now reached medical schools, which is terrifying: the future generation of doctors may well be better equipped to offer a politics lecture than save one’s life.

At a prestigious faculty in California, a student recently taped a professor pleading forgiveness for having said the term “pregnant women”. “I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant, and I most sincerely apologise,” he jabbered.

Medical lecturers are scared to mention sex to students and are increasingly avoiding the whole area. No wonder. Petitions are dispatched to “name and shame” lecturers for “wrongspeak”, which includes the terms “her”, “father” and “son”.

Unsurprisingly, there are life-and-death consequences to all this. A number of saner students have realised that they are not being taught, for instance, about illnesses that affect males and females differently. “Take abdominal aortic aneurysms,” said Lauren, a medical student interviewed by Seattle-based reporter Katie Herzog. “These are four times as likely to occur in males than females, but this very significant difference wasn’t emphasised. I had to look it up, and I don’t have the time to look up the sex predominance for the hundreds of diseases I’m expected to know.”

In 2019, the New England

Journal of Medicine reported that a 32-year-old transgender man had ended up in A&E, with suspected abdominal issues. His medical records failed to relay that he had been born a woman – meaning the professionals he saw put his pain down to medication he had been taking – rather than the fact he was pregnant, and in labour. The baby did not survive.

Disdain for the natural world in favour of distorted identity politics is also apparent in other science faculties. In June, the Ivy League university Cornell announced a new astrophysics course on black holes that was about… how racist black holes are. Called “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos”, the course “will introduce students to astronomy concepts through readings in Black Studies”.

It is to be co-taught by professors of comparative literature, while artists, including the rapper Outkast, will be deployed to “conjure blackness through cosmological themes and images”. Quite how “the fundamentals” of astronomy are to be found in such wild ideological posturing and speculation is unclear. What is clear is that the students who used to emerge from Ivy League physics departments as the best-equipped in the world are now simply going to leave as some of the best-indoctrinated.

There is something so totalitarian about what is going on that it is hard to believe it at all. Yet around the country, professors are tying themselves in knots to avoid describing reality so that students will be politically pacified, and not offended. It all smacks of Lysenkoism, after Trofim Lysenko, the Stalin-era agriculturalist who rejected genetics-based agriculture, preferring erroneous methods he claimed increased crop yields and glorified Soviet collectivisation. He insisted that science is class-based, and as crop yields declined under Lysenko, over 3,000 biologists were imprisoned or executed for opposing his useless political biology. A non-murderous version of this is happening in American science faculties and it spells doom.

The America of my childhood was the best in the world at ideas, innovation, science and true multiculturalism. That place, I fear, is fast disappearing. Meanwhile in Britain, our astrophysics departments still know what black holes are, but only just. Unlike America, we can still pull back from the brink, but we don’t have long.

Future doctors may be better at giving lectures on avoiding offence than saving lives