SJW Series (3 of 3):What Soviet Plant Science Tells Us About Our Woke Future

A Russian friend of mine told me that growing up during the Soviet Union, it was required by law that anytime anything was learned in class, the teacher had to first preface the learning by acknowledging Soviet Socialism. Propaganda of this sort might seem obvious in something like the study of history or political theory – but how does it show up with something like Botany?

 “Funny you should ask,” he replied. He had a distinct memory of taking a plant class in middle school. The professor had to begin the class each day by discussing Lenin for five minutes.

The teacher would say something to the effect of “As our great leader Lenin taught us, sharing our resources helps us achieve higher levels of harmony and being. Plants also follow this immutable law, sharing their resources with one another.”

Soviet Communism’s ideology affected their whole approach to something as apolitical and mundane as plants. This fact might seem irrelevant.

It took such hold that a country that was once on the vanguard of the science of biology did something extraordinary – they did away with the study of genetics in its entirety.

Well who cares if kids stop learning about genetics?

However, that single extra ordinary decision cost the lives of tens of millions of people and not just in Russia.

Gregor Mendel created the modern field of genetics in the 19th century, using experiments in biology to show that characteristics of an organism were inherited by genes that could be passed through reproduction. Combing this theory with Darwinism, Mendel showed how a mutation could occur in one organism and spread throughout an entire population. 

This science was at odds with the historical materialism of Marxism, which asserted that large scale change only happens at the collective level. In other words, the individual can not change things – the state collective does. Given it was incompatible with their political ideology, Stalin did away with Mendelian genetics and replaced it with something called Lysenkoism. 

Lysenko was a Soviet biologist who claimed that all science was class based – that Western science was biased by classism and that the science of natural selection and Mendelian genetics reflected those biases (does this denial of science sound familiar?). He postulated his own biology, which took its cues from Marxism.

He argued among other things that plants and animals were naturally self-sacrificing – plants did not die because of lack of sunlight but died because they wanted to help the next generation of plants to live.

He believed that genes and DNA did not exist and that the body once alive obtained heredity – so that meant that what happened to the body during its lifetime would be inherited. If you grafted two plants together, the next plant would reflect those prior two plants. Plants could also in turn learn to do things – like survive winter.

Among other things Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds that were very close together because he believed that plants never compete with each other and instead work collectively. Denying Mendelian genetics, he shut down programs to selectively breed wheat that could better survive cold temperatures believing that plants rapidly adjust to a changed environment.

These approaches led to countless crop failures and ensuing famines that killed millions of people in Russia and China (which also adopted these practices). Rather than accept responsibility (after all, the empirical evidence was damning), he lashed out against Western scientists who criticized his approaches and tried to get anyone who concurred with them on the Soviet side thrown in jail. He succeed in having thousands of scientists who refused to renounce genetics sent to the Gulags, which meant certain death.

In time, folks recognized that Lysenko’s work was completely fraudulent, but it was too late, the damage had been done. Millions of lives had been lost and the study of genetics in Russia had been set back a whole century.

 Now the story of Lysenko is important today, particularly as these Social Justice Theories have come to encroach upon not just politics but upon science and free inquiry.

Unless folks fight back wokeness, we are going to be living in a world where free speech is severely limited as is scientific inquiry – and our understanding of reality particularly the reality of differences among groups will be impaired.

 But the dangers of social justice activism go beyond even that – as it creates a world where objective truth becomes impossible to discern and various forms of arbitrary justice will eventually be rendered out on increasingly tribal terms. Any ideology centered entirely on group identity, will eventually devolve into tribal warfare between the various defined groups.

Today, we can go in one of two directions.

The religious ideology of Social Justice activism and theories of systemic oppression could come to envelope our media, universities, and corporations so totally that this new religion becomes the operating paradigm of the United States – much in the same way communism became the operating paradigm of Russia.

If this successfully happens, not only will forward scientific progress be setback but society itself will be riven asunder just was Europe during wars of Religion. It could lead to a low-grade or full-blown civil war as the folks who do not convert to the woke religion fight the folks who do. You could see the rise of a much more militant far right – just as communism helped birth fascism.

Our ability to negotiate with one another will be rendered asunder as there will be no objective truth or empirical reality we can reference back to as the agreed upon frameworks of the Enlightenment and modernism are dismissed.

Or we can try to go down a different path.

A path where free speech is held sacrosanct and no one is de-platformed. To the degree that dangerous and subversive ideas exist, they will wilt under the light of being brought to the fore rather than let fester in the darker corners of the web.

Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, we should all push for this direction.