The American Psychological Association (APA) only days into 2019 made public a set of guidelines asserting "traditional masculinity" to be harmful, leading to a host of maladies: homophobia, sexual harassment, competitiveness, dominance, aggression, etc.
Americans might at first want to simply ignore this jaw-dropping affront to logic, science and commonsense — except that as an insult to half the human race, careful note probably should be taken.
This is hardly the only fringe-leftist nonsense that has found its way into dozens of disciplines, weakening them in the process since politics is the antithesis of the scientific method.
Politics always has and always will diminish the tremendous benefits of science.
The "APA Guidelines for the Psychological Practice with Boys and Men" does however distinguish itself with its astoundingly wide attack range. It’s an assault not just on males, but also against every mother, wife, sister, daughter, aunt, and grandmother of every boy and man in America.
Until it is rescinded, everyone in the U.S. — regardless of gender—should have grave concerns availing themselves of the services of any professional affiliated with the APA.
History has shown time and again what happens when politics twists science’s arm to say what it wants, or else. Any branch of science giving in is lessened. Medicine, of which the APA is part, knows this better than any profession.
As early as the third century B.C. in Alexandria, the epicenter of medicine in antiquity, human dissections were being performed in public for sophisticated and educated audiences; much about human anatomy was learned. Centuries later it was Rome’s view of things that prevailed and human dissection gave offense to Roman social mores.
Consequently, the greatest physician of the second century A.D., Claudius Galen, earns note on the one hand as the single most influential voice in medicine for the next 14 centuries yet someone who on the other never himself peered inside a deceased body.
Galen, one might well imagine, got more than a few things wrong about human biology, and passed those errors down through the ages.
Physics too has put politics and its inherent blunders above science, and stagnated just as long and equally profoundly.
Galileo Galilei set physics on course around 1590 by utilizing the opposite of theory and opinion. He allowed people to see objective truth with their own eyes, publicly dropping light and heavy weights which fell at the same rate, erasing erroneous Aristotelian science that had reigned for over two thousand years.
How something so wrong could have stood for so long was due to that which is pernicious to science, yet equally powerful. Here too, the blame again falls upon politics.
Artisans, craftsmen, and mechanics in the ancient world, even though they shouldered the burden of civilization, were looked upon with scorn by the nobility.
The soiled, sweat-stained world of the lower-classes was beneath the purely intellectual realm of the aristocrats. And since the upper-classes determined what science was, they made it the noble elegance of theory, thought and intellectual creativity, excluding anything requiring hammers, nails — or experimentation — to prove.
Aristotle got away declaring that heavier things fall faster than lighter ones because not a single nobleman had the slightest inclination to go outside and actually verify it.
Aristotle never addressed the laborers who might have checked it, while he himself certainly couldn’t be sullied by something so low-class and undignified as an experiment.
Modern science, unfortunately, is hardly free itself from the biases afflicting it in prior eras.
The current hyper-political atmosphere of partisanship tainting everything has not only failed to exempt science from the culture wars, but instead taken dead aim at it.
The greatest debates presently taking place in earth science, biology, and chemistry — and now sadly adding psychology to the growing list — today face a gauntlet of closed-minded dogmatists who mount attacks on anything that fails to validate many politically extremist views of humanity, life, the Earth, the universe.
Even Newtonian classical physics is under siege by far-leftist revisionists. One stark and astounding example is the "intersectional quantum physics" contrived by a feminist academic affiliated with the University of Arizona and given credence in a journal published by Duke University Press in 2017.
In this unintelligible appraisal, Newton shouldn’t be viewed as the inventor of calculus, the discoverer of the gravitational constant, and the formulator of primal knowledge about light, but is instead an "oppressor" who can and should be overthrown by "combining intersectionality and quantum physics to better understand marginalized people."
If extremist activism isn’t checked — such as the APA defining masculinity as a patholog — 14 centuries from now there’s no telling what shocking and ridiculous drivel will have been passed down to our progeny, perhaps even surpassing the missteps of Claudius Galen.
David Nabhan is a science writer, the author of "Earthquake Prediction: Dawn of the New Seismology" (2017) and three previous books on earthquakes. Nabhan is also a science fiction writer ("Pilots of Borealis," 2015) and the author of many scores of newspaper and magazine op-eds. Nabhan has been featured on television and talk radio all over the world. His website is www.earthquakepredictors.com. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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