Posted on 09/24/2002 12:55:07 AM PDT by RogerFGay
Rejecting "Male Science"
Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party had some amazing technological achievements. The V-2 rocket was the first man-made object sent into outer space. The autobahn was one of the finest roads ever constructed and the Volkswagen or “People’s Car” was one of the best mass produced automobiles ever made. Nazi science built jet airplanes, cruise missiles, and smart bombs.
Were these achievements the consequence of superior ideology? Hardly. Imperial Germany had also been very advanced in science and technology. Zeppelins glided over London, while British biplanes flew far below, unable to touch them. The Unterseeboot or U-Boat almost drove the British to the peace table in 1917. Germans also created such ghastly, but sophisticated, weapons as poison gases.
The ideology of Nazism may have insured German defeat in the Second World War. How? Because Hitler and his henchmen rejected “Jewish Science.” This did not just mean that many Jewish scientists or scientists with Jewish wives, like Enrico Fermi, left Europe for Britain or America. The Nazis also rejected “Jewish Science” itself.
So, when the Germans accidentally discovered Tabun nerve gas, later refined into Soman and then Sarin, one of the leading German scientists - a very patriotic German, who loathed Great Britain and longed for a Greater Germany - was rejected by Hitler because of his Jewishness, and Der Fuhrer would not even agree to meet him.
Womenists engage in the same sort of madness. Men have traditionally done very well in higher mathematics, physics, chemistry and a number of other physical sciences. Men, in fact, have produced many more of the greatest minds in these areas than women have.
There is nothing particularly sinister about this. The male and female mind are wired differently. The two sexes think differently and approach problems differently. This is just enough of a distinction so that the vast majority of men and women are not world class thinkers in abstract areas, but the very, very few who are tend to be male.
This has not kept women from also being great physicists, like Madame Curie, and it has not kept women from being great mathematicians (Albert Einstein’s first wife was a better mathematician than Albert himself). But overwhelmingly, in those disciplines that require high levels of analytical skill, men are the only people at the very top.
There simply has never been a woman whose accomplishments in those areas of analytic powers and great intuitive leaps equaled Newton, Napier, Galileo, Einstein, Maxwell, Heisenberg or Pythagoras. There have been large numbers of excellent female scientists, doctors, and mathematicians. There have also been large numbers of great female minds, like Beatrix Potter, who meticulously and accurately accumulated a large body of knowledge and accurately categorized the collected knowledge.
There have also been very, very few human beings in history who have made the sorts of vast strides that Pythagoras did when he first saw the projection of abstract principles into the material world, or that Newton did when he noted that a twenty-pound lead ball fell at the same rate as a ten-pound lead ball, or that Einstein did when he saw that space-time itself was a dimension. Nevertheless, men utterly dominate the pinnacles of analytical achievement.
The best chess players in the world have never been female, despite the fact that the best chess in the world has often been a member of some unpopular ethnic group - Jewish, Cuban, German (as a pawn of the Nazis) or Russian (during the Cold War) - and despite the great coup that such a victory would provide Womenists.
The increasingly obvious difference at the highest levels of intellectual achievement between men and women has led Womenists to produce the same sorts of absurd theories that Hitler produced when confronted with the obvious accomplishments of Jewish scientists. Womenists simply call exceptional analysis “male science” and so unworthy of serious attention.
The ultimate problem for Womenists is that, while those cultures which rejected “European education” can catch up over time, the difference in the very highest levels of analytical power seems inherent in our maleness of femaleness. Men, who have long understood that the differences between the sexes were a series of tradeoffs with no clear “winner” or “loser”, have no problem with this.
Womenists, however, are infected with the same fatal hubris toward women that the Nazis had toward Aryans: women must be superior to men in every way at every level and in every sense. Because reality is so different from this, Womenists have taken the same path as Nazis: descent into pagan worship of partisan deities, which insure the metaphysical victory of their super-race or super-sex. Evil, like history, repeats itself.
Bruce Walker
Bruce Walker writes regular, orginal, weekly columns for Enter Stage Right and Conservative Truth. His articles have also appeared in a variety of print and electronic periodicals, including Christian Science Monitor, Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law and Order, Legal Secretary Today, and The Docket. Bruce also wrote a regular column for several years entitled "Law and You" for The Single Parent, the national journal of Parents Without Partners. His professional career includes five years as Executive Director of the Oklahoma District Attorneys Association, three years as Administrator of the Oklahoma Child Support Enforcement Program, and six years as Managing Attorney of the Tulsa Child Support Office.
It's a statement of fact. But don't let that deter you.
What's there to wonder about?
That seems to sum up your position on "analytical" matters that you don't understand.
Women have a psychological edge, though, in playing Eastern European men - many of whom are quite chauvinistic and can't really accord a player like Judit the respect that she deserves over the board. They end up losing to her for reasons that have as much to do with their own preconceptions as her abilities. If Judit had been a man with the exact same chess talent, she might never have broken into the top 100.
I have one: Cecile Chaminade.
Any more?
Great female scientists: Marie Curie. Name three more of Nobel Quality.
Great female mathematicians: Sophie Germain. Name three more.
--Boris
Agreed. There are indeed feminists who argue that reductive science is characteristically masculine and 'bad'. Sandra Harding is the best known of these. And Harding is taught in Women's Studies courses around the country, as are various other wacko theories such as "Einstein stole relativity from his first wife', 'Watson and Crick stole the Double Helix from Rosalind Franklin', etc. The gist is that logic and scientific deduction are 'male' ways of knowing, and that the men who were really good at science stole their ideas from women. Yeah, bit of a contradiction there, but remember, logic is patriarchal!
The sexists are the ones who think there is something called "male science" and refuse to believe it because it is "male". The author is perfectly correct to compare this to Hitler's idiotic rejection of so-called "Jewish science", and call them on it. Why it would be "misogyny" to say this is beyond me; you cheapen and dilute the term by throwing it around incorrectly like this.
Yes, it would be an unfair and dangerous generalization, if someone were to make such a generalization.
That's not what the author did. He wasn't saying "all women believe this!" Rather, he was saying "the women who do believe this are wrong!" Do you understand the difference?
Did you actually read the article?
Yeah, you can really conclude that from the article.
Why are people so defensive about this article that they feel the need to make wild-guess personal attacks on the author, about whom you know nothing? What did the article say that you can't stand so much? He's just saying "intellectuals who complain about 'male science' are being stupid". What exactly is your problem with that statement?
Let that be a lesson: never let statististics tell you what is possible or impossible.
The article is correct, though. There is only one science, and the door is open to those with the ability to pass through it. But opportunity does not assure results.
Yes, he does: from the context of the article it is clear that his targets are women who talk about "male science".
He needs to tell us a little more about the straw-woman he is attacking
It's not a "straw-woman" unless there really aren't any women who put forth the notion of "male science". Are you asserting that there are no such women? If there are, then that's who the author is talking about. "Those women are wrong", he is saying. It makes no sense to call this a "straw-woman".
and then proceeded to make a lot of dumb points about how women can't play chess and how male scientists are better.
He didn't say women can't play chess. And how can you dispute that the best scientists have been predominantly male?
Who are the feminists saying men should not be allowed to be scientists? If there are such people, are they growing in significance?
Irrelevant. If they exist, whoever they are, in how many numbers, they are wrong. And that's what the author is saying. What's your problem with saying this?
Why is there so much knee-jerk defensiveness about this article? Sheesh.
There's a hint of that. We used to joke in graduate school that we needed wives. Biological destiny has caught up with me.
The author makes a bit of an error in his last paragraph: "Womenists, however, are infected with the same fatal hubris toward women that the Nazis had toward Aryans: women must be superior to men in every way at every level and in every sense. Because reality is so different from this...". Looking at the (normal) distributions of abilities, whether cognitive, analytic or whatever, the tails for men are longer than men. We don't see female Einsteins, and we don't see female Ted Bundy's either. What we do see is a greater concentration of women in the center of the distribution, right around the mean. There are some men who are better than all women, but more women are better than the average man. And it is people with these abilities, both men and women, who are the backbone of society, and I dare say, even science. Most of science is done by people with a narrow range of interest, wittling away at the leading edge of knowledge. Few, if any scientists are making earth-shaking leaps.
That said, all this pointing to historical giants makes me wonder where today's Newtons are. Men or women.
longer than for women...!
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If you were alive during the time you would know it. It was, and is, common knowledge. Anything over 100,000 feet is considered outer space in this country. Some SR 71 pilots received astronauts wings for looping above that. The V@ went considerably above that although it ran out of propellant for controlled reentry. The Germans shelled Paris from 75 miles away with artillary that went into what is called outer space. When I was in air ROTC in the 50s Fr. Lippish's son brought in films from from the 30s showing rocket planes equivalent to what we developed after the war. The Germans developed a bomber capable of boming New York round trip. It's employment would have changed the course of the war. Fortunately for New York, Hitler got a bug up his behind and cancelled the project.
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