Is it worth expending time and effort on 'educating' strategically-dishonest propagandists like Stephen Jay Gould?

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Yesterday I heard (in private) of yet another example of an eminent scientist who spent several years trying to educate Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), on the assumption that he was a well-meaning but misguided individual who would be pleased if his mistakes were corrected - and whose public influence could then be brought to bear on behalf of truth rather than error.

Even just from people whom I have personally known, this activity of 'Educating Stevie' seems to have been something of a cottage industry among the more rigorous scientists and philosophers - Gould's daily post must have been a deluge of careful, friendly letters and offprints from major scholars earnestly pointing-out sources of better evidence by which he could correct his work.

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How Gould must have sniggered, and rubbed his hands with delight at the thought of all that brain power being wasted in futile argument based on the false assumption that Gould was making honest mistakes - instead of engaging in deceitful propaganda.

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Because of course Gould never corrected his errors, never engaged his friendly critics, continued to make false assertions, to ignore conclusive evidence and to use emotional manipulation and moral blackmail instead of logic.

SJG was indeed skillful and industrious in service to evil  - specifically to lies; and like all effective evil this was mixed with good; lies embedded in truths; vicious venom coated with smooth and pleasant prose - precisely in order that it could be influential.

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Gould would engage in utterly unfair, go-for-the-jugular, character-smearing and reputation-assassination - but was himself exempted from tough attacks.

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Why was this? I would say that one reason was that Gould was a man of the extreme Left, a Marxist - and his critics were men of the moderate Left - socialists, Liberals, Democrats, Labour party supporters - thus they were all on the same side.

The lying, incompetent Gould was therefore indulgently treated by the academic community as if he were an over-enthusiastic, impatient but fundamentally good-hearted teenager - and the adults were patiently waiting for him to grow-up and be sensible and reasonable.

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The reality that Gould was deliberately wicked, strategically lying by seeding public discourse with self-serving errors, assassinating the characters of good men, encouraging the worst kind of mob thinking and blind self-righteousness... this reality seems to have been excluded from consideration on principle. Perhaps the critics actually denied - in the face of common sense and experience - that evil people exist? Or maybe they assumed such people existed only on the Right? But no matter how many times Gould ignored corrections, and re-printed and re-printed his lies in the face of overwhelming refutations, he was given another chance, and another.

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The lesson I draw from this is that Leftism goes deeper and further than most people realize, and includes a much wider range of people - such that it is literally unthinkable for a prestigious and influential academic to abandon Leftism - because then there would be no place for them to inhabit.

To not-be of the Left, to be truly of the Reactionary Right (which includes being primarily religious) is to be professionally and publicly isolated in the world of today.

Yet unless you inhabit the Right, it cannot be thought that someone like Gould might genuinely be motivated by a desire to harm, including the desire to divert, annoy and waste the time of those better than himself in non-reality-based and futile attempts to argue.

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When reasonable people, rigorous academics, claim that SJG, and his like, are well-intentioned but misguided, and deserve education rather than robust rejection, they are actually revealing not that the Leftist destroyers have good motivations but that they themselves, the rigorous academics, share the motivations of the subversive Marxists.

I am sorry to say this, but it is accurate: wickedly motivated lying Leftists get a free pass or kid gloves treatment because those who police them are merely dilute versions of the same type.

So the 'academic police', the 'good guys' are themselves wickedly motivated (Leftists), just as wickedly motivated as those they purport to regulate; and the argument between Gould and his critics is merely a matter of ends and means: the critics agree with Gould's goals, they merely quibble over his blatantly dishonest means. No wonder they never got truly angry with him, never treated him with the toughness he so abundantly deserved.

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The phenomenon of Stephen Jay Gould is evidence of the sheer extent of corruption in science, academia and elite culture - a corruption based on shared Leftism trumping - in practice - considerations of truth; and so very extensive that it is hard to perceive an edge, hard to perceive anyone powerful or influential who is truly exempt.

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