(New Soviet Man and Woman down on the collective farm).

I promised I was going to try to link the troubled history of the last century with this one. I don’t know if I am going to succeed in the amount of time we have this morning, but let’s have a go of it, shall we?

I had a long chat with the Professor Emeritus last night that helped me understand what is happening today, and realize why the institutions of our great nation are subject to such profound and consistently delusional behavior. The specific observations were about the American University system, but it is applicable to institutional behavior as far afield as the CIA and the Search for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Group think.

You know what I am talking about. Things are so painfully correct these days that you have to be looking over your shoulder all the time. Any deviation from the collective line- whatever it is about, the latest terror from the HR department, who is awarded grants, the realty of Climate Change, political correctness, the nature of the cruel patriarchy, the historic evil of the West, blah blah blah, can bring career destruction.

The last things that held much interest for him as an educator were the meetings about tenure and promotion to full professorship. The tenure track is illustrative, that being the threshold for life-employment. It is the first big deal for the aspiring educator.

“We would see people apply for full Professor just a couple years after getting tenure. They don’t understand that the clock is re-set, and they have to generate more peer-reviewed papers. When tenure and full professorship is on the line, it is important that no deviation from the party line be tolerated. It was really a mess.” The professor sighed. He knew when it was time to go, he said, when recommendations from the Department Chairs, were shot down by opponents in other disciplines over issues that nothing to do with scholastic matters.

That review is similar to the US Senate’s unique system by which a single Senator can but an unspoken hold on nominations. It is a useful enforcement tool- and stifles free speech. Then we got onto my hobby-horse of Lysenkoism, since it appears to have risen from the dead and is walking around. I explained to him about the earnest Reds who thought the young Soviet Union was going to bring paradise to earth, and who were willing to betray their country to do so.

I told him about Hal Ware, the American Communist who spent the decade of the 1920s attempting to collectivize the agriculture of the New Soviet State, and that he could not have missed the misery that went along with it.

It is difficult now to convey just how awful the whole thing was. Even the CPUSA was a little uneasy about it, though it did not shake the faith of most of the true believers. Only the 1939 pact with the Devil in Berlin did that, and then only to a few who woke to the nature Uncle Joe’s ruthless interpretation of his interpretation of Marxism-Leninism.

Doctrine was important to the State, and that is where Dr. Trofim Lysenko enters the narrative. Born a peasant in the Poltava Oblast, he attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute. I can’t demonstrate that he and Hal Ware ever met personally, but they both certainly would have been at the Agricultural conferences on the formation of the Five Year Plan.

(A young Lysenko in the field, with wheat).

He came to fame in 1927, when the first plan was being formulated. At the tender age of 29, he was working at an agricultural experiment station in Azerbaijan. He discovered that by treating wheat seeds with moisture and chill temperature he could induce an early crop in the spring. Lysenko termed his process  “Jarovization” to describe the low-temperature process to make the seeds of winter cereals behave like spring cereals. In the West, the term was translated as “vernalization” from the Latin word for Spring.

That might have worked- Lysenko moved so fast that there was never much time to actually validate what he was up to. He worked steadily through the great slaughter of the Kulaks. Hal Ware returned to the US shortly before it began, though there is no evidence that he voiced any disaffection with Stalin or his deliberate campaign to kill or relocate the hapless small farmers. We will never know. Hal was known to have a lead foot and a fondness for fast cars, and was killed on a Pennsylvania highway in 1935.

Later, however, Lysenko falsely claimed that a vernalized state could be inherited – i.e., that the offspring of a vernalized plant would behave as if they themselves had also been vernalized and would not require the treatment to flower quickly.

The fact that it contradicted collective wisdom in no way invalidated its appeal to Soviet policymakers. It promised something for nothing.

Defenders (he still has some) point out that his journal ‘Yarovizatsya’ ran an article in 1937 that stated:

“The discussion here is about securing the further development of geneticists from the point of view of development, securing the development of genetics as a science in place of converting genetics into a service of Goebbels. Only this will make it possible to convert such science into the highest stage that, at the moment, is in its primary stages of development. Only this will make is possible for our geneticists to earn respect of all the progressive scientists in the world. For the sake of clarity we repeat that Darwinism is not against genetics. Darwinism is for genetics. Darwinism is not against genetics but Darwinism is against fascist distortion of genetics and the fascist utilization of genetics in its political aims that are detrimental to the progress of humanity.”

By 1938, this distinct move from agronomy science to policy formation was complete, and Stalin made him the Chief Scientist of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, he was entrusted with terminating the propagation of “harmful” ideas among Soviet scientists. Lysenko served this purpose by causing the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists. He also eliminated all study and research involving Mendelian genetics throughout the Soviet Union.

His predecessor at the Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was a particular target of his wrath, and was jailed and died of starvation in prison in 1943.

It was all the rage in the USSR and East Europe thereafter to denounce non-mainstream thought as clear deviations from sanity. Confinement of such confused persons in mental institutions or the Gulag were natural extensions of Lysenkoism. It was truly an exquisite application of terror in a looking-glass world.  Vavilov was rehabilitated, by the way, and an oceanographic research ship was named for him- one of the famous “Cluster Twin” ships of Vavilov and Lebedev fame.

Not that the refurbished reputation mattered much to him by then, but maybe the family cared.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Lysenko survived the death of Stalin, but his quirky pseudo-science was denounced by a new generation of scientists in 1962, a time of great upheaval within the USSR, and redefinition of what really constituted the New Soviet Man.

In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov thundered against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences:

“He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists.”

It seemed at the time that Lysenkoism was dead, but everything old is new again. I mentioned Dr. Kari Norgaard the other day, the University of Oregon PhD in sociology who specialized in gender issues and tribal ecosystems. She is not a climate scientist, but is a fellow traveler on the road to saving the planet.

Her paper at the Planet Under Pressure Conference is a marvel of fuzzy group-think.

Any real system that values critical thinking would have blown her out of the water long ago. Instead, her observation that climate skeptics are mentally ill was met with deer-in-the-headlights silence by her peers and astonished disbelief by others.

She equated ‘cultural resistance’ to accepting humans as being responsible for climate change as a disease that ‘must be recognized and treated.’ It is aberrant sociological behavior. “Resolving skepticism about climate change alarmists,” she added, “is a challenge equitable to overcoming racism or slavery in the U.S. South.”
“In the last 30 years,” Norgaard said in outrage from the podium, “climate change has been seen as either a hoax or fixable with minimal political or economic intervention.”

Now, before you call, I personally am no ‘denier,’ as I think I have said fifty or sixty times. There has been a warming of almost a full degree centigrade in the last 140 years, and I am fully prepared to accept that man’s influence have something to do with the increase of a trace gas that constitutes .038% of the atmosphere. But I also remain skeptical about the impending doom thing, and the REALLY IMPORTANT imperative to scrap our national sovereignty and Constitution right away, just in case.

It is not only Dr. Norgaard. The party line is well established now, and I hear it like talking points from some committe. The version I heard on NPR a couple weeks ago went like this:

“Climate deniers are like those who want Creationism taught instead of Darwinian evolution. Deniers are paid by Big Oil and lavishly funded. It is run by the people who tried to defend cigarettes.”

I like the points- they are powerful, even if delusional. It starts with the term “denier,” which echoes powerfully the severely deluded who claim the Holocaust never happened. It is akin to the “birther” thing, a convenient shorthand for labeling political opponents crackpots- possibly dangerous ones- without precisely addressing the specific concerns. I lit up a Lucky and thought about it.

The lady who made the points on NPR seemed bemused that any right-thinking person could be associated with any skepticism of the notion of the re-branded Global Warming movement. I wrote them down, since I hear the same points emanating from a variety of sources who are really concerned that we are not getting on with global government, industry shut-down and divesting ourselves of our cars.

I would laugh it off is she had not been so earnest, and so many people had not agreed with her, and if I had not seen similar views in the Huffington Post and elsewhere. I even saw one in Playboy (I read for the pictures, but sometimes the articles get in the way) that argued there is actually a genetic predisposition to Blue and Red orientations- and it might be possible to “fix” it.

We are going somewhere very troubling these days. The climate thing is worth discussing in something less than apocalyptic terms- we can talk about what things like California’s experiment in unilateral cap-and-trade is likely to do to the Golden State.

But I do think it is interesting to look back in comparison to the generation who believed in the impossible change in human nature specified by the Communist vanguard, filtered through our generation of Boomers who had the arrogance to think we could change the world, here it is again, only with some uncomfortable quotations from some experiments in science that went very badly for a lot of people. Everything old is new, again.

“Calling Dr. Lysenko, Calling Dr. Lysenko!”

(The Good Doctor, from the New York Review of Books).

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com