Here’s a 36-minute interview of Lawrence Krauss by journalist and Quillette editor Jonathan Kay, concentrating on Krauss’s new anthology The War on Science, This book has become somewhat controversial for liberals simply because it blames the Left for some ideological erosion of science at a time when, “progressives” argue, everyone should be going after Trump’s damage to science, not the Left’s.
I consider that criticism misguided. No political side should be free from criticism because it’s your side. As Krauss says in the video, the book’s chapters represent people from all sorts of disciplines and from all segments of the political spectrum. Nevertheless, it’s still touted by progressives as a “right-wing attack on science”. (Full disclosure: Luana and I have a reworked version of this paper as one chapter in the anthology.)
Here are the YouTube notes:
Astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss joins Quillette’s Jonathan Kay to discuss his explosive new book, The War on Science, featuring essays from 39 leading scholars—including Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Sally Satel. In this in-depth conversation, Krauss explains how progressive ideology, DEI mandates, and academic cowardice are threatening the foundations of scientific inquiry in universities across the West. He also addresses the political right’s war on vaccine science and funding cuts under the Trump administration.
Topics discussed:
The ideological capture of science (physics, medicine, anthropology)
DEI in academia and its impact on meritocracy
Free speech and academic freedom in STEM fields
The decline of research funding and long-term risks
Why Krauss believes this is a “two-front war” on science
You can see the book’s table of contents here.
Just two comments. First, I think Krauss mentions my own personal holiday, “Coynezaa” (Dec. 25-30), at 4:30. But he may have been trying to say “Kwanzaa”, which is an ethnic holiday.
Kay is a tough interviewer, and asks Lawrence critical questions like “Why is Jordan Peterson in there?”; “Isn’t there still discrimination against ethnicities, so why are you going after DEAI?”; or Aren’t we past peak wokeness anyway?”
In my view, the chapters are of variable quality (see, for example’s Peterson’s contribution, which is dire), but there are enough good chapters—most of them—to make the book a valuable contribution. Richard Dawkins’s chapter, for example, is alone worth the price of the book. It’s a shame that it came out when Trump is blackmailing universities about science, but of course we had no idea that would happen. Still, I didn’t anticipate the “whataboutery” we’d receive from progressives.