Last year, L’Express devoted its Christmas issue to the dangerous links between religion and science. This year, we have investigated the threats to rationality that come not from an age-old belief, but from a new ideology, often hastily summed up by the term “wokism”. Increasingly, activists, students and even academics are challenging fundamental knowledge in science, especially biology. The evolution of the species or the idea of human nature are discarded. Differences between men and women become taboo. Entire disciplines, such as genetics, are stigmatized. Figures as brilliant as Charles Darwin find themselves denigrated.
As in the case of creationism, here dogmas collide with scientific knowledge. First dogma: the human being is only a “blank page”, entirely shaped by society. Second dogma: equality between individuals could only imply their biological similarity. Third dogma, inherited from postmodernism: science would be only a cultural construction like the others, which pushes activists to want to “decolonize” it, because it is too “Western” or “white”.
The fundamental error of these new obscurantists? To confuse science and morality, and to want to abolish all that, in nature, seems to oppose their progressive credo (which we share elsewhere). However, as the biologist Jerry Coyne sums it up well, there is no need to instrumentalize science and blur the observation of nature to achieve a society in which all citizens, regardless of their orientation or sexual identity, have similar rights.
Like all animals, humans are shaped by evolution, genes and their environment. But, as individuals in a liberal society, they can free themselves from nature and be whatever they want.