Early Antecedents of Cancel Culture

Bernard D. Davis is not a household name, unless, of course, your household happens to closely resemble those of the characters on the popular television sitcom The Big Bang Theory. He was a noted microbiologist and the 1989 recipient of the National Academy of the Sciences’ Selman A. Waxman Award in that field. He had been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, where he was Adele Lehmann Professor of Bacterial Physiology, since 1957. He passed away from prostate cancer in 1994 at the age of 78. He was a pioneer in the research of bacterial genetics, noted for developing a technique for using penicillin to isolate mutant bacteria strains.

In 1976 he found himself in the middle of a controversy regarding Harvard’s affirmative action policy. At first, the policy had merely been to set a quota – a minimum of fifteen places would be reserved for blacks in the medical school. Then, when they had difficulty filling those places with students who met their qualification standards, they lowered the admissions standards for black students, justifying this to eyebrow-raising faculty members by promising that graduation standards would not be similarly lowered. For the sake of expediency, however, that promise was soon abandoned. The school’s methods of evaluating student performance were also tinkered with, for the same reason. Unsurprisingly, this started to have a negative effect on the standing of Harvard’s medical graduates with the examination board that issues medical licences.

Dr. Davis, not one to put up with this sort of nonsense, fired off a memo to the Faculty Council telling them in no uncertain terms, that however laudable the goals of affirmative action may be, lowering their standards in this way and potentially turning the school into a degree mill for incompetent quacks, was hardly the way to go about it. He also submitted an article along the same lines to the New England Journal of Medicine and they published it.

That was when the stercus hit the vannus.

The New York Times, which then as now specialized in muckraking, character assassination, and the lowest, basest, sort of yellow gutter journalism, all in the service of an extreme progressive agenda, ran a hit piece on Davis. Other newspapers, with even lower standards, followed suit. Then he came under attack at his own university.

Three years prior to this Dr. Richard C. Lewontin had been appointed the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Biology at Harvard University. Like his frequent collaborator, "paleontologist" Stephen Jay Gould, who was promoted to Professor of Geology that same year, Lewontin belonged to the far left activist group Science for the People, and made accusing other scientists of racism, especially his Harvard colleagues, his pet project. The year before Davis’ article came out, another Harvard professor, entomologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson had published a book entitled Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Lewontin and Gould condemned the book, as well as the entire field of research related to it, and even founded a “Sociobiology Study Group” entirely for the purposes of attacking it. A few years later, this group arranged for a symposium to be held at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which both sides could exchange their viewpoints. Something called the International Committee Against Racism – a front for the (Communist) Progressive Labor Party of the United States – showed up at the symposium, and before Wilson’s scheduled speech stormed the stage, surrounded the microphone, chanting imbecilic slogans like “Racist Wilson you can't hide, we charge you with genocide”, and then dumped a pitcher of water on Wilson’s head. Although Lewontin and Gould disavowed the specific actions of this group, they had obviously created the hostile intellectual climate in which such an event could take place. The “genocide” Wilson was charged with, consisted of incorporating his research from his career studying the social lives of ants and other communal insects, into a general theory about the evolutionary and genetic basis of the social behaviour of animals and human beings. For his account of the way Lewontin, Gould, et al., had responded to his theory, see his memoir Naturalist (Shearwater Books, 1994). For the history of these left wing activist-scientists’ attempts to scupper this entire field of research see Ullica Segerstråle’s Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Lewontin, as you have probably inferred from the account of him in the previous paragraph, condemned Dr. Davis, called him a racist, accused him of holding all sorts of absurd views, and refused to apologize when called upon to account for his unprofessional attacks on a colleague. Then, a pattern of events that was relatively new at the time but which has since become all too familiar, started. The calls for Dr. Davis to be sacked started coming in, radicals disrupted his lectures and organized protests wherever he was invited to speak, and colleagues started shunning him.

These efforts to destroy his career failed. Although Harvard denounced him, they did not fire him and he went on to win the aforementioned Waxman Award. Much to his credit, he did not back down in the face of this sort of bullying. In 1986, Prometheus Books published his Storm Over Biology: Essays on Science, Sentiment and Public Policy which expanded the thesis of his controversial New England Journal of Medicine article into a blistering take-down of this intrusion of left-wing political ideology into science and academics, which he described as a “neo-Lysenkoism.” It included a devastating review of Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, the classic example of a work of left-wing political propaganda wearing the guise of “pop science” which had met with gushing acclaim from those who were least informed about the subjects it addressed and critical scorn from those who were most informed. Davis’ own book, by contrast, while dismissed by Gould, met with largely favourable reviews, and not only by those such as Dr. Edward O. Wilson who reviewed it for the November 1986 issue of Commentary and whom one might expect to sympathize due to having received similar treatment from the same people, but from the scientific community at large and even from some from whom one would have expected a more frosty reception.

In the account given above we can see what are clearly predecessors of what, in the age of the internet, has come to be called “cancel culture.” Other examples could be given. Indeed, the point could be argued that the deaths of Socrates and Jesus Christ were very early examples of “woke mobs” demanding that somebody or, in the case of Jesus, Somebody be “cancelled.” Examples that are closer in both time and detail to what happened to Dr. Davis are the examples of Dr. Arthur Jensen, Dr. Hans Eysenck, and Dr. J. Philippe Rushton.

Dr. Arthur R. Jensen, who passed away eight years ago, was the Professor of Educational Psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Like Dr. Davis, his politics, ironically, were those that would have been described as progressive liberal in the United States in the period in which he grew up. In February of 1969, the Harvard Educational Review published his article “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” He argued that programs like “Head Start”, which were designed to eliminate the interracial gap in academic achievement based on the assumption that it was due entirely to poverty and discrimination were failing – as they were – because they did not take into account the hereditary factor in intelligence, which Jensen called the general factor or g. Protests, death threats against him and his family, vandalism, demands that he be fired, disruption of his lectures, all ensued.

Dr. Hans J. Eysenck, who was born in Germany but moved to the United Kingdom in the 1930s out of disgust with Hitler and the Nazis, was Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry in King’s College, London from 1953 until his retirement in 1983. Up until his death from brain cancer in 1997 he was known as the “world’s most cited psychologist.” Like Jensen, he argued that the evidence all points to there being a large hereditary general factor in intelligence, and, indeed, published an entire book on the subject a couple of years after Jensen’s article, entitled Race, Intelligence and Education (1) which he followed up another couple of years later with The Inequality of Man. He received similar abuse, to the point where he was physically assaulted when invited to give a lecture at the London School of Economics, and at one point had to temporarily change his family name to protect his children.

Dr. J. Philippe Rushton was a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. In 1989, he presented a paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science about the evolutionary origins of the differences between races. He focused on three particular races, whites, blacks, and Asians for which he used the terms “Caucasoids”, “Negroids” and “Mongoloids” respectively, and a wide assortment of statistical differences. The point of his paper was not to argue that these differences are real – that is well-established – but to explain their existence. He did so on the basis of the r/K selection hypothesis that Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson had postulated in 1967. Liberal newspapers – which are the vast majority of them – condemned his paper as “racist”, the province’s Attorney General asked the police to investigate Rushton, left-wing student activists filed complaints with the provincial Human Rights Tribunal, David Peterson, the Liberal premier of Ontario at the time, asked the president of the University to fire him, and he received all the of the same sort of harassment than Davis, Jensen, Wilson and Eysenck had received, especially after he gave his thesis a book length treatment in Race, Evolution, and Behaviour: A Life History Perspective (Transaction Books, 1995).

In none of these cases did the left-wing activists succeed in destroying the careers of the individuals they subjected to their attacks, although they made their jobs and lives a living hell. Sadly, the dawn of the Digital Age has provided them with shiny new tools for stirring up mobs to ruin people and their lives, and they have become much more successful at it. They were, however, successful at one thing. The left, which had dominated sociology since the nineteenth century, spread into anthropology and the remaining social sciences in the early twentieth century, and took over the humanities with the development of Critical Theory in the mid-twentieth century, through these tactics was able to impose at least a lip service to its thought paradigms even on those hard sciences within the STEM disciplines most resistant to their control due to their familiarity with hard data which flatly contradicts their false view of reality. This, rather than the destruction of their targets, may very well have been what they were truly aiming at all along.

(1) This was the title of the original British edition. His American publisher gave it the less-inflammatory title The IQ Question.