How the West Destroyed Science

'Freedom of speech' guarantees aren't enough — our institutions can only be fixed through radical decentralization.

A great deal of ink has been spilled to explain why so many of our scientific and academic institutions are broken:

• The undermining of freedom of speech.

• Groupthink.

• Catering to funding sources.

• Cancel culture.

• Corruption.

• Corporate infiltration.

• Ideological capture.

• And so on.

While I don’t dispute any of these given reasons, they are merely symptoms of a much deeper problem.

The University of Bologna, established in 1088, is the world's oldest university in continuous operation. Source: Wikipedia

Each of these “reasons” assumes that if only people could be convinced to be more moral or act with more integrity — or if the bad actors could be purged or regulated into compliance or punished so severely as to scare everyone else straight — or if the institutions could be “compelled” to defend the principle of free speech through more explicit legislation — or if good politicians could be found to enforce existing laws or write better ones — then the problem would be solved.

In other words, if we could all agree on the same moral code and then win the culture war to get the “right” people into power to enforce the rules, sanity and scientific integrity would return. And yet, merely expressing it this way makes it sound like some socialist’s pipe dream that depends on inspiring, compelling, or purging enough people to achieve their desired results. 🤔

By this reading, the unravelling of our scientific institutions is allegedly a cultural problem that must be fixed by restoring governmental and cultural protections for freedom of speech — the free exchange of ideas, rigorous debate, and the ability to challenge entrenched or corrupted ideas would surely follow. Virtually every classroom lesson, textbook, or television show about the history of science always portrays the constitutional protection of free speech as the essential ingredient underpinning all our scientific (and democratic) endeavours.

But what if that view is wrong… not because freedom of speech doesn’t matter, but because the idea that constitutional protections can reliably protect our rights and freedoms is hopelessly naïve?

If you have to win a culture war in order to convince censorious leaders, outraged mobs, and progressive judges that even “dangerous ideas” and “misinformation” deserve equal protection in the public forum, isn’t that functionally the equivalent of the heretic asking the Inquisitorial Courts and the pitchfork-carrying mob for permission to speak every time some new heretical thought crosses his mind?

What happens if they say “no”?

And even if you do win this week’s free speech debate (unlikely, considering that our culture has been gradually but relentlessly undermining those constitutional principles for over 230 years since before the ink on the Bill of Rights was even dry), what happens next week when some new “dangerous idea” comes along to outrage the masses or upset the establishment, thus triggering the next round of calls for renewed censorship?

If you have to wait a generation or two for the culture to course-correct from its worst excesses every time it goes off the rails, that’s not exactly “winning”.

Furthermore, constitutional protections aside, as the Left frequently likes to remind us, “freedom of speech isn’t freedom of reach”. Even with constitutional guarantees in place, there are a million other ways, some subtle, some not so subtle, by which heretics can be effectively silenced, such as by threatening their career advancement, by corrupt or ideologically motivated journal editors stonewalling their publishing efforts, by agencies threatening to withdraw grants or funding, and so on.

None of these other soft censorship techniques technically violate free speech laws. And grants and career promotions will ultimately always be political choices no matter who is in charge and will naturally reflect the biases of those decisionmakers.

Outside of America, the chilling of heretical speech is even worse. Canada has even gone as far as proposing legislation to criminalize “climate denialism”… in spite of the constitutional protections written into our Charter of Rights and Freedoms to protect our freedom of expression! To accomplish this, they are leveraging the power of Section 1 of our Charter, which gives our government the discretionary authority to impose “reasonable limits” on our rights and freedoms based on the ‘consensus expert opinion’ of the government’s institutions. In practical terms, this allows the government to drive a truck through our constitutional protections — all under the guise of “public safety” and “fighting misinformation”, of course. You can say whatever you want… unless the government decides that your speech endangers society.

When challenged, our Canadian courts defer to the “expert opinion” of the very same institutions that the heretics and dissidents are trying to challenge. As I explained in my article last week in the context of the forest lockdowns in Nova Scotia, this deferral to expert institutions happens via a process called “judicial notice”, which allows the Supreme Court to accept the “expert” opinion of the government’s institutions as “fact”, thereby exempting the government from having to present evidence to support those “facts” or from having to defend those “facts” in cross-examination — it’s a true coup-de-grâce in the art of circular reasoning that illustrates how easy it is for the Canadian government (and those who influence its decisions) to uphold orthodoxy even in the face of constitutional challenges.

The U.S. had a similar law on its books from 1984 until 2024, known as the Chevron deference doctrine, which allowed agencies to circumvent legislative authority and create their own laws. However, thanks to a group of herring fishermen in a recent case known as Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which argued that this doctrine was obscuring judicial scrutiny and enabling agency overreach, this doctrine was finally overturned. It only took 40 years of rampant agency overreach to finally bring this to a head…

And how long until some new progressive judge brings it back in some other context — how safe are your culture war “wins” when current US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown is on record stating that in her view freedom of speech “hamstring[s] the government in significant ways” and that freedom of speech is an obstacle to the government being able to control the narrative “in an environment of threatening circumstances”.

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There’s no doubt that ‘freedom of speech’ as an idea is essential to the scientific process and to the pursuit of truth in our scientific institutions. However, the controversial part of this story is how to guarantee that freedom. Clearly constitutional protections are not the reliable answer that we take them to be. Something entirely different is needed.

Contrary to popular belief that constitutional guarantees are the ultimate safeguard of our rights and freedoms (and the solution to exposing and purging rot from our institutions), in reality there are several far bigger, far more important, and infinitely more subtle conditions that must be met to truly safeguard freedom of speech and institutional health, as will become clear over the course of this essay.

Indeed, when the U.S. Founding Fathers drafted their Constitution in 1787 for their radically decentralized republic, they initially believed that a Bill of Rights was redundant — and didn’t create one. They felt that the structure of the government itself (with its decentralized structure, its strictly limited and very weak layer of federal authority, and its complex division of powers) along with the freedom to move freely between individual member states would be more than enough to protect individual rights and freedoms. The Bill of Rights was an afterthought, finalized in 1791, as a kind of nod to the people to help gain public trust.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia testified in Congress that the U.S. Founding Fathers viewed the constitutional guarantees outlined by the Bill of Rights as nothing more than parchment guarantees (mere words on paper). He emphasized that the constitution of the Soviet Union had even more robust protections for freedom of speech and other fundamental rights and freedoms than the American Constitution … even as the Soviet Union was murdering millions of its own citizens in its gulags for exercising those very same rights.

As Justice Scalia pointed out, the primary protection that the U.S. Constitution provided its citizens to safeguard their individual rights and freedoms is that the Constitution was designed to prevent the centralization of government power in one person or in one party because when that happens the game is over and the Bill of Rights becomes what the framers would call a “parchment guarantee.” The real restraint imposed by the Constitution is the division of powers, which continually pits the self-interest of different competing parts of the system against one another, thus limiting the power of both the whole and of all of the individual participants, while making it very easy to a small minority to gridlock the government in order to stop government overreach.

The entire 7-minute video is well worth your time:

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If parchment guarantees were the answer, the Scientific Revolution would never have happened. On the contrary, the Scientific Revolution kicked off during the 16^th century at the height of an era with some of the most repressive anti-speech attitudes and laws in history and under the watch of the most bloodthirsty chapter in the Inquisition’s censorious history. And yet, the Scientific Revolution persevered, universities thrived, and the heretical ideas of that era endured because of a unique set of conditions that existed in Europe at that time — in particular in the uniquely decentralized political circumstances of the Holy Roman Empire — as will become clear as this story unfolds over the coming pages.

However, these unique conditions which gave the Scientific Revolution its wings have been completely lost during our own centralized era, both inside and outside of America (despite the fact that the U.S. Founding Fathers incorporated many of these decentralized features of the Holy Roman Empire in their Constitution), thanks to how funding and oversight of our scientific institutions has gradually changed over time — but I’m getting ahead of the story.

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Ironically, as Western nations concentrated ever greater powers in the hands of their central governments in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and especially after the horrors of WWI and WWII demonstrated the destructive powers that could be unleashed by modern governments with too much centralized power at their fingertips, they too recognized that constitutional guarantees were not enough to restrain the worst instincts of ever more powerful nations.

However, instead of rolling back those immense centralized powers, Western governments chose instead to solve this problem by creating an intergovernmental “watchdog” (first in the form of the now defunct League of Nations, followed by the United Nations and all its subsidiaries) to try to hold nations (and national institutions) to account. The intentions were noble but naïve because, by doubling down on even greater centralization, what they created ultimately achieved the opposite of the intended purpose.

Instead of decentralizing government power to undo the damage they’d done by empowering such powerful national governments, they tried to reduce national power by empowering a single international watchdog to watch over them all. And, surprise, surprise, look at what a corrupt, idealistic, self-serving, and censorious rat-infested institution the United Nations has become! As the old saying goes, “who watches the watchmen?”

The arrogant science-destroying attitude at work in the United Nations is best captured by the following quote:

“We [the United Nations] own the science and we think that the world should know it.” — Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, United Nations, speaking at the World Economic Forum 2022 Special Agenda Dialog on “Tackling Misinformation”.

In a twist of historical irony, the role of the United Nations has evolved to become eerily similar to the role played by the Church in the dual power-sharing structure of King and Church during the feudal era, with the Church acting in the capacity of cultural steward and as a kind of principled watchdog to oversee (and mold) feudal society according to its vision. Theoretically, the Church, which spanned across the borders of all European nations, was supposed to serve as a check on absolute monarchial power and act as a watchdog to hold society (both rich and poor) to some commonly-agreed-upon moral code. And yet, as the centuries passed, look at the corrupt, self-serving, power-hungry, censorious, rat-infested mess it evolved to become at the center of the ossified and oppressive feudal hierarchy.

Once established, these watchdogs quickly learned to leverage their perceived “expertise” to establish themselves as judge, jury, and executioner of scientific questions, thereby imposing “allowable” bounds on ideas, research, and debate, and justifying censorship of “inconvenient” heretics. And so, in a million subtle ways and for a million subtle reasons, the watchdog begins to bend things to suit agendas that have nothing to do with science or liberty and everything to do with social engineering.

As the U.S. Founding Fathers so clearly understood, but which subsequent generations have clearly forgotten, any system that relies on a central watchdog as the guarantor of its freedoms won’t remain free for long.

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And with that long introduction, let us turn to the story arc of the Scientific Revolution — to the unique decentralized conditions that unleashed it and subsequently to the gradual erosion, extending into our own modern era, of all the conditions that once allowed the pursuit of truth to flourish in our scientific institutions.

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Our story begins not with the Scientific Revolution but with the Protestant Reformation that preceded it by 26 years.

By the time the Protestant Reformation kicked off in 1517, the combined landholdings, wealth, and revenues (in the form of tithes) of the Church had eclipsed the total landholdings, wealth, and revenues of any single European ruler. The power and reach of the notoriously corrupt watchdog had grown to eclipse the power and wealth of the watched.

Indeed, the Protestant Reformation appealed to many local rulers in Europe because it gave them the excuse to re-assert political control over their own national churches, seize Church wealth and land, and pursue their own interests, which had previously been impeded by Church authority (including creating space for heretical scientific ideas if those ideas gave them a technological or prestigious advantage over their neighbors). Religious reform may have been the spark that lit the fire, but once lit, that religious conflict became a proxy war for many other issues.

It’s within the context of that boiling social upheaval that the Scientific Revolution found the space to grow without having its most heretical ideas extinguished.

Even before the Protestant Revolution kicked off, the Inquisition was no slouch as it doggedly rooted out heretical ideas (and those spreading them). When burning people at the stake wasn’t enough, the pope even went as far as whipping up brutal crusades against dissenters (like the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) against the Cathar movement in Spain, which rejected the authority of the pope, or the Drenther Crusade (1228-1232) against the unique secular proto-democracy evolving in Frisia (in the Netherlands and northwestern Germany), which was a direct challenge to the authority of the local Bishop of Utrecht and, by extension, also to papal authority). The Crusades weren’t just about stopping Islamist expansion on the southern and eastern borders of Europe; they were also unleashed against any threat to the established order, including against threats emerging from within Europe itself.

And yet, when the Protestant Revolution began in 1517 (as Martin Luther nailed his critiques of the Church onto a church door in Wittenberg, Germany), this time the Inquisition failed to extinguish it. This time the decentralized political circumstances unique to German-speaking central Europe saved the heretics from suffering the fate suffered by so many of their predecessors — with heretical scientists soon following in the wake of their heretical religious peers.

If Martin Luther had lived in France, England, Spain, Hungary, or Poland, both he and his ideas would likely have been neutralized by the Inquisition and been reduced to yet another footnote in history. But that’s not what happened.