Who does not remember Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei and a few others that posterity has not remembered? The first was burned in a public square, the second was placed under house arrest, the others probably did not meet a better fate. Their fault was all to have issued scientific propositions that did not have the good fortune to adjust to the religious convictions of the ecclesiastical authorities and to the transcribed letter of their dogma.
Well, in 2023, the same scenario is playing out across the Atlantic.American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropological Society (CASCA) have cancelled a session of their annual conference that was to examine the question “Why biological sex remains a necessary analytical category in anthropology?” The reason given by the decision-makers, I guess you can guess: it would have offended the sensibilities of some of their own and “caused harm to the trans and LGBTQI members of the anthropological community as well as to the community at large.”
Yes, science today, like in the 16th centurye and XVIIthe centuries, must fit into religious belief and respect the delicate sensitivity of the community that has made it its article of faith. Spirit of the Enlightenment, are you still there?
This could have been a pleasant pantomime aimed at academics who would be a little more depressed by a new school year. But no, this is happening in the real life of North American learned societies, it concerns our anthropologist colleagues, those we know, whom we read and with whom we sometimes exchange. Will their anthropology pass under the Caudine Forks of this new obscurantism?
We believed that the battle for rationality had been won, that science and its epistemology of reasoning reason had imposed themselves in all areas of knowledge, thatEnlightenment was a basic form of philosophy for use by any university researcher. So it is not the case, everything has to be redone. We will have to fight again so that the reason and logic of science prevails, so that hypocrisies and other "gendered", "decolonial" or "racialized" farce are confined to their fantastical delirium. Science still has no use for the emotional, social, religious, ideological sensibilities of researchers, or even their sexual obsessions. Science must continue to be done according to its own logic, which each discipline has developed in its own epistemology and methodology.
Through deconstruction and intersection of all kinds, we have come to forget this ABC of all scientific activity. A new obscurantism adorned with the prestigious tunic of science, all the majesty of a few academic authorities with ideas as new as they are unverifiable, as revolutionary as they are riddled with logical biases, truncated interpretations and messianic intentions, has thus settled among scientists and now intends to govern their activity in its own way. The new ayatollahs of correct thought have therefore just taken their first decrees.
That is in North America! But in France and Europe? Are the learned societies of anthropologists, ethnologists, sociologists, etc. ready to follow in their footsteps? Will they let themselves be lulled by the little music of the dark night of the new obscurantism and submit to the new version of the Inquisition?
