The term used to mean the science of politics. Nowadays it can also denote the politics of science.
All intellectual attitudes might have been latently political to Thomas Mann, but he probably thought natural science was exempt from that observation.
No longer. Science these days has acquired aspects of a religious cult and a political ideology. Whatever you may think of cultish or ideological attitudes, they certainly don’t encourage objective, dispassionate thought.
Consider the 2006 book The Trouble with Physics by the American scientist Lee Smolin.
Throughout the book, Prof. Smolin mocks religion, what with its reliance on blind faith rather than hard data. However, he inadvertently shows that science is just as fideistic.
Strewn over his every chapter are little pearls along these lines (the emphases are mine): “Unfortunately, M-theory remains a tantalising conjecture. It’s tempting to believe it. At the same time, in the absence of a real formulation, it is not really a theory – it is a conjecture about a theory we would love to believe in.’
Or, “In the two string revolutions, observation played almost no role… most string theorists continued to believe in the original vision of a unique theory…, but there were no results that pointed in that direction… Meanwhile, the optimists insisted that we must have faith…”.
Prof. Smolin goes on to lament that scientists who have no such faith can forget about having academic careers or receiving research grants. And there I was, thinking that natural science is brutally objective, impervious to fads or political toing and froing.
If certain lines of inquiry are discouraged or even proscribed in physics, then you can imagine what goes on in the study of man.
This term itself would be seen as a political no-no in research papers. As far as today’s censors go, man no longer embraces woman. Insisting that he does is an objectionable, possibly indictable, offence.
And let’s not forget about the 100-odd ‘genders’ in between those binary extremes. Out comes the blue pencil: it’s ‘human studies’, you fascist you. And where do you get off writing about a ‘conference chairman’? It’s ‘chair’ – or you can kiss your career good-bye.
Modernity strives for uniformity in general, but especially when it comes to races, sexes and other large swaths of humanity. When in their 1994 book The Bell Curve Herrnstein and Murray showed, statistics in hand, that average IQ differences between racial and ethnic groups are at least partly genetic in origin, they were demonised.
The point wasn’t about the quality of their research, although Thomas Sowell, a more reliable source than the authors, argued convincingly against it. What incensed the scientific community was the conclusion, however it had been reached. For, if IQ was genetic, then the well-documented IQ differences among various races couldn’t be put down to strictly social and historical factors, such as white colonialism.
When it comes to men and women, certain anatomical differences may still be acknowledged, with reservations. However, anyone talking about the physiological and psychological differences does so at his peril.
An intrepid scholar or writer broaching such subjects must watch his every step not to find himself on the receiving end of today’s version of tarring and feathering. Hence one must both praise Dominic Lawson’s bravery and understand his caution in exercising it.
On the side, Mr Lawson is a strong chess player and the president of the English Chess Federation, which is why he often writes on chess-related subjects. His article Chess Will Never be Ruled by a Queen talks about the demonstrable superiority of men in that ancient game.
This fact is uncomfortable for feminists. They can see why men and women compete separately in physical sports: men are stronger and faster by nature. But chess is a game of intelligence, isn’t it? So are men also smarter by nature?
When transsexuality became fashionable, such issues came to the fore. Various governing bodies have barred biological men from competing in women’s athletic events, correctly stating that they have an unfair advantage.
However, why did the International Chess Federation follow suit in 2023? Its spokesman gave the following explanation: “Of course men and women are equally intellectually capable. However, in chess as a sport other factors like physical endurance may play a role.”
Physical endurance does have a role to play in chess, as any competitive player will confirm. I was one such in my childhood, only giving up chess when I discovered girls. However, in 1990 I went to Hastings to watch the traditional Christmas tournament, which changed my life for the next few months.
Chess is like booze: you may control the addiction, but it never quite goes away. So I relapsed. The very next day I joined the Barbican Club, one of the strongest in London.
The London team championship was halfway through, but they still put me on one of their top boards, and I played half a season, competing for the first time in 30 years. I did rather well, considering, scoring 50 per cent and even drawing with a man who had beaten a grandmaster in the previous round.
But I realised I wasn’t physically up to it. According to Penelope, I was beetroot-red at the end of the games and wound-up to the point of breaking. The team captain wanted me to stay for the next season, but I said no. I like chess, I said, but I’m not prepared to die for it.
So yes, physical endurance is definitely a factor. But here’s the thing: since the advent of chess computers, most events are played at short time limits, often five minutes each for the whole game. My sapping experience was with traditional tournament chess, with games lasting four hours or longer. These days, physicality plays a lesser role – and yet there’s only one woman in the top 100, and she is at the very bottom.
At the same time, tournaments have become much more lucrative than they used to be, and male players may see women’s events as easy pickings. Germany makes cheating not only possible but legal: her Self-Determination Act says that a man is a woman if he so declares.
Lawson cites the case of a trans woman winning the national junior event and getting congratulations from the German Chess Youth organisation. He could have mentioned another example, that one from Kenya.
Dressed head to toe in a burka, wearing spectacles and staying silent, a man registered himself as a woman player and kept winning one tournament after another. When found out, he explained that he had “financial needs”.
Since we’ve more or less eliminated physical strength as the decisive factor, why are men so much better than women? The usual explanation is social: unlike girls, boys are encouraged to take up chess. That’s why they greatly outnumber female players, making it statistically more likely that they’ll win more tournaments.
Mr Lawson demolishes that argument by mentioning Scrabble and bridge. There, women greatly outnumber men at both the recreational and competitive level (85 per cent of Scrabble players are women). And yet men dominate rankings in those games as well.
Mr Lawson knows, I know and everyone knows that factors other than physical endurance are involved too.
Nor is it just about IQ. Mr Lawson points out that, “although the male and female averages are the same, males are overrepresented at the very bottom and the very top of the range.” However, we both know that neither chess mastery nor indeed IQ is to be equated with intelligence.
Bobbie Fischer, arguably the best player ever, had an IQ of 185, and yet he wasn’t an intelligent man outside the chessboard. In his capacity of chess administrator, Mr Lawson must have met many grandmasters who weren’t breathtakingly smart either.
It’s clear that men possess more of the innate characteristics essential to chess success. One such is aggressiveness, a sine qua non of competitive chess. A player isn’t just trying to win the game. He wants to crush his opponent’s spirit and befuddle his mind. “I like to see’em squirm,” as Fischer put it.
And aggression, as extensive research shows, is a function of testosterone levels, which, for all the headway made by feminism, are still higher for men. Spatial awareness is also involved, which again is known to be more of a male characteristic.
In any case, the conclusion conveyed by the title of Lawson’s article is unassailable. Women will never be as good at chess as men.
Nurture probably has something to do with it, as does physical strength. But above all, men’s and women’s brains are physiologically different, and the differences predetermine their relative prowess at chess. (Also at mathematics and philosophy, but, having already dug a hole for myself, I’d better stop digging.)
Reams of scientific papers support this conclusion, but nowadays politics trumps science every time. So let’s just say that boys are encouraged to play with chess pieces, girls with dolls, and that explains why only one woman in history could compete with the top men. Leave it at that, shall we?