The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 28
The agriculturalist Trofim Lysenko should be a household name throughout the world in roughly the same way that Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong are or should be. That is, Lysenko shouldn’t be known for his successes, which are none of his legacy, but for his catastrophic failure. He was the agriculturalist of the Soviet Union, first under Stalin, and his ideological biology (Lysenkoism) led directly to the deaths of tens of millions, first in the Soviet Union and then in Maoist China. Lysenkoism implied famine and mass death, and disputing Lysenkoism, despite its catastrophe, meant a trip to the gulag or a bullet in your head.
We should be aware of Lysenko because it is crucially important to understand how the ideological perversion of science, especially the biological sciences, can lead to catastrophes. In fact, if we were more aware of Trofim Lysenko and his legacy of death, we might be more cognizant of the threat we’re currently stumbling our way into under the banners of “antiracist medicine” and “health equity.” These are the dawn of Medical Lysenkoism, which is a tragedy in the making, potentially on a grand scale, and this is already well underway.
The threat of Medical Lysenkoism is rapidly growing around us already, and we have to take it seriously and demand it be put to a halt. In this case, Critical Race Theory and its perverse doctrines of “antiracism” and “equity” are being leveraged to transform healthcare away from a science- and patient-oriented endeavor to an activist opportunity to “level the playing field.” Further, under the banner of “health equity” and Covid-19, our society’s concerning lurch toward medical dictatorship (governed by this new “equitable” Medical Lysenkoism) is becoming the standard throughout our medical schools, hospitals, and research universities. This is a preventable catastrophe in the making.
In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, join James Lindsay as he reads through a recent essay published in Boston Review outlining an advance in the “health equity” agenda wherein even racially preferential care is described as already being implemented and reparations are demanded at a major Boston-area teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard University.
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2 comments
While I appreciate your concerns with woke medicine, making statements about some hidden problem with vaccines to prevent patients dying of COVID-19 does not help the cause. I am not a woke physician, and deeply fear about the silly crap that you have clearly described with the article today under “The Dawn of Medical Lysenkoism”. Having a child being an “immunization star” is simply a means that we in health care will used for decades as a means to reduce vaccine hesitancy and combat anti-vaxxer flat earth nutbars. Where the issue of woke medicine is deeply dangerous is listed in many of your lines of argument in Cynical Theories such as CRT where a black doctor making a serious medical error cannot be held to account because that would be white privilege or labeled a racist act, or that a white doctor supposedly now harms black patients, or doctor trying to better understand transgender issues without losing your job, postcolonialism making indigenous patients less likely to look at their own individual agency as being part of the solution, etc. Focus on how woke philosophy will undermine “first do no harm and then do good”, instead of tangentiating into vaccine conspiracy theories. We need you out there helping the medical cause, not being sidelined by sounding like a quack. If you’re not sure what you are talking about in medicine, then avoid talking about that topic, reach out for help, and move into another area. For example, consider selection to medical school based on different paths (one for black students and one for everyone else), what is the future impact on patients’ trust in the competency of black doctors if the path was made explicitly easier. There is a ton of crap coming into medicine through wokeism, that I deeply fear. Talk about that. Race, gender, sexuality, fatties being a normal body size, psychiatric illness normalization, etc. The crazies are running the asylum. And people will die.
O.K. What can the average person do to combat medical Lysenkoism?