Vol. 68 No. 2 2001 - page 273

GORMAN BEAUCHAMP
275
having demonstrated the weak and fatuous nature of most of the asser–
tions in the "Seville Declaration," continued:
The point is not whether one or the other of the positions here sup–
posed
to
exist is
true
or not; the point is that
IT
IS SCIENTIFI–
CALLY INCORRECT to say that position X or Y is true or
false-especially on the grounds offered in the Declaration. Either
position should be stated in a way that leaves it open to refutation:
then it is "scientific" and open to argument. Thus, I have quarreled
here with the arguments of the Declaration, not to prove an alter–
nate view "true" . .. but simply to show that there are valid objec–
tions and alternatives that the document arrogantly dismisses as
"impossible." This is profoundly antiscientific. . . .No position can
be declared "correct" or "incorrect" by fiat.
Fox notes ironically that Seville was the home of the Inquisition and
suggests that the promulgators of the Declaration were similarly trying
to
enforce an orthodoxy by silencing heretics-those whose "alleged
biological findings ...have been used . . .to justify violence and war." "I
know of no one in any discipline," Fox responds, "who has ever used
biological findings to
justify
violence and war. This is an outrageous
libel." Both Zenner and Fox adduce the Lysenko affair, science by
calumny, truth by fiat.
ALL
HIS ADULT LIFE
Orwell was a man of the left, a socialist; still he was
and remains one of the most effective critics of its authoritarian and
irrationalist tendencies . Of what he called "the English russophile intel–
ligentsia," Orwell claimed that
"It
was only
after
the Soviet Union
became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large
numbers, began to show interest in it." He once commented to a friend,
"I notice people always say
'under
Socialism.' They look forward to
being on top-with all the others underneath, being told what is good
for them." At least since Robespierre, the dangerously authoritarian
implications of the dictatorship of virtue have been all too evident, so
that Orwell, while making effective demonstration of the dangers from
the evidence of his age, breaks no new theoretical ground here. But his
linking leftoid authoritarianism to epistemological and axiological rela–
tivism, as he does in
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
accurately predicted the
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