[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
What do Cancel Culture, Samitza and Darwinism have in common?
We'll find out on today's podcast when we hear from a neurosurgeon, professor of neurosurgery at Stony Brook University and and a prolific contributing writer at both Evolution News and Science Today, as well as at MindMatters AI.
Welcome and thank you for being here. Dr. Michael Egnor.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Hi. Thank you, Rob. Thank you.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: Recently you wrote an essay that was published at Evolution News titled Live not by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Intelligent Design.
And in that you were looking at our current cancel culture and how that relates to the debate over intelligent design and evolution, the censoring of pro ID scientists and scholars that we've seen. And you were also reflecting on the great Russian writer, dissident, Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and specifically an essay he wrote, live not by lies, and how those lies and our participation in them result in the stifling of speech and thought. And so I want to jump into that with you today.
And you posed at the beginning of your piece, which I have to say that one reason we're talking about this is that piece has been amazingly popular for us. It's been shared tens of thousands of times on social media. I don't know if you knew that. It has over 7000 likes just on the Evolution News page itself. And I think you really struck a nerve with people on this. And so I want to ask you the question that you posed at the beginning of your piece. And you were writing this kind of as we were in the beginning of the throes of the protests and riots that, you know, have now swept across so many cities. And you were asking how people like our listeners, like you and me, anyone who cherishes free speech, academic freedom and scientific integrity, you ask, what can we do to protect those things in this sort of environment?
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Yes, it's quite remarkable how in our culture we are imitating in many ways some of the aspects of totalitarian cultures, particularly in communist countries, in the sense that people's lives can be ruined. People, for the most part, aren't being sent to prison or gulag, but they can be professionally destroyed and personally destroyed simply for expressing opinions that even, you know, six months before were quite accepted.
And I think we all feel that this repression is closing in on us, that we're no longer allowed to speak freely to express our opinions. We're only allowed in many ways to express the officially approved opinions of the elites who run things.
And what has been helpful to me is to recognize that, of course, we're not the first people who've gone through this. And, and people like Solzhenitsyn have faced this, and they faced it in a much more draconian way than we thus far have. And they have answers. They have ways that we can deal with this that can be quite effective.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Yeah, he went through a lot.
I haven't read a lot of him, but I understand his trials and tribulations. And what he faced is worse than what most of our scientists and scholars face and all of us in various ways right now with the kind of cancel culture. And his response was to basically tell people not to participate in the ongoing sort of misinformation, the lies.
Maybe you can explain that part of his approach.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: Sure.
Well, Solz Neeson, for listeners who don't know him well, was a Soviet dissident. He was a writer, wrote many great novels and nonfiction, won the Nobel Prize in literature.
And as a younger man, he was a rather active dissident in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 50s. And he was sentenced to the Gulag. He spent many years in the Gulag and wrote about it. He was released, but continued to resist the totalitarian system he was living under.
And In February of 1974, he wrote a short essay called Live not by Lies. It was an essay on how ordinary people could deal with living in a repressive system.
Ironically, the same day he wrote the essay, he was arrested by the Soviet secret police and he was exiled from the Soviet Union. The very next day, he was thrown out of the country, actually settled in Vermont, lived in the US for many years.
But his insights in the essay are quite remarkable.
The point he makes is that living in a system of totalitarian repression really reduces us spiritually. It makes us craven, makes us afraid, makes us cowards, makes us willing to sacrifice our integrity, to sacrifice the truth, simply to assure that we can still feed ourselves, get a nice house, nice job, and things like that. But he said that's really a betrayal, a betrayal of ourselves, betrayal of the truth, and that there are ways that we can fight back, and they're. They're not risk free, but they're for the most part doable. And he based his strategy on the observation, and I think he's exactly right that totalitarian systems, either formally totalitarian system like the Soviet Union, or at least implicitly totalitarian systems like cancel culture and political correctness and so on, simply don't have the Resources to police with force everybody who lives under the system. That is, there's not enough violence available to these people to shut everybody up. So what they do is they will pick a small number of individuals and do terrible things to them, and then they count on the rest of the population to censor themselves so that the only way that cancel culture, to use our example, works, is with our complicity. That is, it only works if we go along with it. They can't cancel us all. There are too many of us.
So they depend on us living their lives.
They depend on us not speaking out on us saying what they want us to say.
And what Solzhenissen said is that you don't have to do that.
That is that you don't have to necessarily actively, physically, in a confrontational way, oppose this kind of behavior. You can oppose this behavior simply by refusing to participate in their lives.
The fundamental expression that he uses in the essay is let us refuse to say what we do not think, so that if we don't believe something, we don't say it, we just refuse to say it. If we're asked to dispel some Marxist ideology or critical theory or any of the various kinds of things that we're supposed to be saying nowadays, we retain the ability to simply refuse to not cooperate. We'll write it. And he said, refuse to write or speak or endorse anything that you do not believe is true.
Simply don't participate.
Refuse to attend any meetings that are predicated on lies that you believe are predicated. And if you're at a meeting and lies come up, you can of course, stand up and oppose them, but that takes quite a bit of courage and takes some risks. Or you can just walk out of the meeting, just leave.
He pointed out that there are consequences to that. Of course you can get in trouble, but they're not the same consequences as if you spoke out loudly on a regular basis.
And the powers that are imposing this on us really can't deal with large numbers of people who don't participate.
I mean, they can demand your presence at meetings, but if millions of people don't show up at these meetings, if millions of people are not a part of the lie, there's not a lot they can do, right, so that we retain the power to fight back. And the power is fairly simple. It's basically non compliance with lies.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: That is amazing when you think about it. It sounds simple, non compliance with lies. But as you said, it can have repercussions and consequences. So it does take a certain amount of courage and bravery to even be silent in the face of demands, to make certain claims or to speak out. As we've seen in the Intelligent Design community, they can't censor all of the scientists. They certainly can't change the science itself, but they can do things that cause a chilling effect. Like you said, they single out one or two people.
Maybe they deny them tenure, maybe they don't publish the work or whatever it is. They hold them up for some sort of ridicule in order to make others self censor. And so we have seen that in the past in Intelligent Design and certainly in the debates about Darwinism for the past 20 years, we've sort of seen this coming. And now it's moved beyond just that one area into a much wider part of the culture.
And, you know, it's great to see that there are people, scientists and scholars, who have stood up. And it gives you the feeling that, yes, if I need to, I can do that as well.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Yes, I really think that the Intelligent Design Darwinism struggle has been a kind of a prelude, kind of a microcosm of what we're going through now, because we see the very same patterns that you're expected to sort of take a knee to a particular ideology.
And, you know, you can get into a lot of trouble if you actively fight back. The beauty of Soltanitsyn's approach to things is that it can be tailored to fit the circumstances.
That is that if you are in a personal and professional circumstance where you can stand up and refute lies that are being told, do it publicly, do it vocally, or do it by writing or by contributing to organizations and so on, that's great.
Please do. If you're not in a personal position where you can do that, and I have colleagues who are in just that spot, like for example, with the Intelligent Design conflict. I have a friend who's a very prominent basic science researcher, who's a devout Christian, very supportive of Intelligent Design privately. But he's told me that he could never speak out about it publicly. He said that he would never get another grant. His wife is ill and he needs his health insurance. And he said, I just professionally couldn't survive. I'd be sacrificing my. My whole life and my family for this.
So there are times when you just can't speak out unless you're willing to take a huge hit. But what Solzhenitsyn says is that you don't have to do that. You know, if you're in a position where you can Be an active public dissident.
Wonderful, that's great.
But if you can't take such a high profile, you can still just quietly walk away.
And what you can also do, I point out, is you can make. You can ridicule it. You can make little jokes. There's no harm in a little chuckle. You know, you hear the latest Darwinian fairy tale, you know, and you kind of say it's pretty funny. You know, even just a smile or a quip is a way of fighting back. And particularly, I believe they can't handle ridicule. That is, ridicule is extraordinarily hard to respond to. And generally trying to respond to ridicule just makes the ridicule more effective.
So both with the Darwinism question and with the cancel culture, some of the cultural Marxism that we're dealing with now, refusal, participation, a little bit of ridicule can be a very powerful tool.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: And it's interesting in the wider culture now, the sort of role that science has grown into, of people adhere it in a religious fervor. It's scientism, and it is being used in the name of science. You know, all of these things happen in public policy now, whether it's in how we respond to the pandemic or in other similar things in climate change and so on. And that largely originated in the Darwinian debate over many years. And now we're seeing that fervor being transferred to all sorts of things in the culture in the name of science, where it's taking a role that is beyond the, like you said, the basic research, the bench research, evidentiary finding and so on. And when you do fight against that, there. There are going to be some consequences. So how do you not.
I mean, it's one thing to ridicule it, I guess you just don't stand up and support when they say, we need people to stand up and raise their fist and say, yes, we agree with something.
So you just don't do that.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: Yes.
And Solzhenitsyn, his basic concept was don't participate.
That is that you don't have to actively oppose these ideas if your circumstances are such that that's not something you can do, but don't be a part of it. If they want to do their lies, if they want to perpetuate their silly concepts, let them have at it. But not in my name.
I'm not doing it. And what I have found is just in my everyday life, that we're in the majority, that is that the people who feel as we do about Science very much about our culture and our civilization, freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry.
That's the majority opinion. But it often doesn't get expressed as if it were the majority opinion because people are afraid to speak up. There was a. Something that happened in my medical center back when Terry Schiavo was being starved to death. If you recall, this is this young woman who had severe brain damage and was in what they called a persistent vegetative state, and her feeding tube was withdrawn. There was a national controversy over whether she should have been starved to death. And we had a meeting at the hospital where everybody who worked at the hospital was invited. And our Ethics committee was up on the stage, and there must have been several hundred people from hospital, doctors and nurses and all sorts of workers at the meeting. And I came in a little late and was standing in the back of the auditorium, and. And the Ethics Committee was talking about. And they, all people on the committee, basically supported what was being done to her.
So nobody said a word. The entire room just seemed to be that everybody agreed that what was being done to her was the appropriate thing to do.
And I just couldn't take it. It was just disgusting. So I spoke up and I said, look, I don't think what was done. What's being done to her is right.
I pointed out, ironically, that we're having a meeting about starving a handicapped woman to death. And the meeting was catered, so they brought samples. So people, the auditorium were eating sandwiches while they're talking about this. And as soon as I said that, everybody stopped eating. Everyone put the sandwich down. Nobody ate a bite after that.
And as soon as I said that, the hands went up all over the auditorium. But half the people in the auditorium completely agreed with me.
But people were afraid to speak up. So sometimes even just speaking up a little bit, or at least not being a part of the line, can embolden other people.
And ultimately, people on the Ethics Committee come up to me and say thank you, because I kind of felt that way, but I didn't want to say anything. And these are the people who grew up there, and they're on the committee, so it can make a tremendous difference. The fact is that there are orders of magnitude more of us than of them.
That is that people who feel as we do, who support academic freedom, who support human dignity, who support freedom of speech and freedom of religion, there's a lot more of us than there are of them. And the only way they control us, the only way they oppress us is with our cooperation.
So the very least we can do is refuse to cooperate, and if you can do more, great, but at least don't be a part of it.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: Well, I appreciate your insight on this and sharing this, because it does at times seem hard to know what to do, especially if you're not working in a field where this comes up, but you still feel and watch those things and you feel this is important.
One easy thing people can do is read your articles and
[email protected] and share those with their friends and help to spread good information and hopeful information about how to stand up in the face of some of these things like you've written about here. I'd like to encourage all the listeners that if they haven't already, they should read your piece live, not by Lies Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Intelligent Design. There's a link to
[email protected] it's in this podcast's
[email protected] it'S a great piece, very helpful and hopeful and give people a sense of how they can feel like they're doing something to support what they know to be true and believe in. So I really want to thank you for the insight from that.
[00:18:46] Speaker B: Thank you, Rob.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: Your writing is needed at this time and I encourage everyone to follow your
[email protected] and also, you do a lot of writing@mindmatters AI. I know you focus largely on the brain, surprise, surprise, and issues of consciousness and free will and some very interesting things there. So people can also find your writing at Mindmatters AI.
Again, I really appreciate your taking the time to talk with us.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: Thank you so much.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: This is Robert Crowther for ID the Future. Thanks for listening.
This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is Copyright Discovery Institute.
For more information, visit IntelligentDesign.org and IDTheFuture.com SA.
