The “great awokening” touches every elite institution in America, mostly radiating out from our compromised system of higher education. One of the most disturbing and illuminating aspects of this cultural revolution is how much it is transforming science and medicine.
A video of medical students at Columbia University reciting an updated version of the Hippocratic oath that injected elements of critical race theory made the rounds on social media recently. As many have noted, this “student-led initiative” sounds cult-like.
Fox News reported that “the August 2021 ceremony was the first time in the medical school’s 255-year history that the incoming medical students recited their personalized class oath, a spin on the Hippocratic Oath to ‘better reflect the values [students] wish to uphold as they enter their medical training.’”
You can read the full “new Hippocratic oath” here.
“We enter the profession of medicine with appreciation for the opportunity to build on the scientific and humanistic achievements of the past,” the oath begins. “We also recognize the acts and systems of oppression effected in the name of medicine. We take this oath of service to begin building a future grounded in truth, restoration, and equity to fulfill medicine’s capacity to liberate.”
All I can say is if you have serious health problems, I suggest looking for an older doctor.
This effort to transform even the most elite institutions of science and medicine into temples of wokeness isn’t just being led by a few radical students. It’s part of a widespread and, yes, systemic effort to convert elite institutions into revolutionary political organizations.
A recent report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine highlights how our most prestigious research and medical institutions are being transformed into engines of fanatical wokeness.
“Calls for the National Academies to pursue such a report had been building for years, the authors write, but took off after the murder of George Floyd and ensuing Black Lives Matter protests in 2020,” Stat News reported. “The authors note that they first started with a literature review ‘to illuminate how historical policies, practices, and laws can have lasting effects’ and note that they use the term racism ‘because it is scientifically accurate … even if it makes readers uncomfortable.’”
The National Academies report doesn’t specifically cite critical race theory or the works of Ibram X. Kendi—the leading public proponent of “anti-racism”—but it clearly relies on a similar network of ideas.
The central premise of this ideology is that the United States and Western societies in general were founded in racism, that their basic institutions inculcate white supremacy, and that racial disparities in nearly any profession or societal outcome proves that structural racism exists. Therefore, it dodges the need to prove individual or literal acts of racism and instead pins the discrepancy of outcomes on “unconscious bias” and other structural barriers.
To correct what is defined as a “systemic problem,” Kendi and the National Academies suggest anti-racism, which often actually means racial discrimination against whites and Asians in the name of equity.
“Racial disparities in [science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine] careers do not rest on individual deficiency in candidates or even primarily on the individual racism of institutional and organizational gatekeepers,” the National Academies report says in its preface. “Racism is embedded in our society.”
Even the mushrooming number of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that are taking over higher education aren’t enough, according to the authors of the report.
“It is incumbent upon organizations and institutions to address racial biases that individual decisionmakers are unlikely to notice, identify, or prioritize because, as evidence shows, they may not recognize how their own, perhaps inadvertent, individual decisions contribute to overall patterns,” the report says.
Got it? The ways of systemic racism are so obscure and mysterious that we need a class of hyper-dedicated inquisitors who can read the tea leaves and stamp out racist heresies. Science be praised.
Notice how seamlessly—and ludicrously—ideology has been wedded to science and medicine—fields once thought to be objective and removed from cultural debates.
Remember the whole “the real pandemic is racism” stuff that was used to justify lifting COVID-19 restrictions for Black Lives Matter protests and creating race-based medical treatment programs? That’s the mentality that dominates elite institutions and continues to accelerate.
Gutting actual science, wearing it as a skin suit, and yelling that this is “scientifically accurate” doesn’t make it so. Instead, our society’s revolutionary vanguard relies on institutional bureaucratic power to simply overcome any opposition to their political designs.
This is the crisis that looms over all other political debate in America.
What kind of country will we live in if this continues to be the guiding ideology of every serious institution? We won’t be a serious country. Eventually, the incredible advances we’ve made in science, technology, and medicine will fall into ruin. We will become a society in which opportunities for advancement and “success” rely on historic grievance and arcane knowledge of a rapidly evolving ideology.
The Soviet Union tried something like that. It didn’t end well.
That’s why we need to use the power we have now to reverse this institutional takeover while enough Americans still have the common sense to understand just how pernicious it is.
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