Part One of this essay is here.
ALAN writes:
Today, signs and brochures proclaim that the James S. McDonnell Planetarium and its neighboring Science Center in St. Louis aspire to be “inclusive”. In other words, buildings ostensibly devoted to science are now surrendered to political sloganeering.
Observe the idiocy: Science is going to be made “inclusive”. Legitimate scientists and philosophers would have enjoyed a rollicking good laugh at that idea in 1963, when they still had sense enough to recognize flim-flammery.
“Inclusive” science museums make as much sense as an “inclusive” Catholic Church or the “Council for Inclusive Capitalism” or your home being made into an “inclusive home” for any bums, parasites, or “refugees”-of-the-month club who choose to walk in. “Inclusion” is part of the flim-flam industry, whose goal is to make people dumb enough not to be able to recognize intellectual-philosophical swindles. You can be confident that any word or phrase preceded by “inclusive” is a hoax and a fraud.
“Inclusion” is Communist agitprop. Its purpose is to erase liberty and rights and expand government power, all in the name of doing good, of course.
Nothing important in life can be “inclusive”. Life is not “inclusive”. Your body is not “inclusive”; it must exclude deadly poisons and other menaces. Private property is not “inclusive”; it excludes trespassers and parasites. Knowledge and wisdom are not “inclusive’; they exclude stupidity, ignorance, fallacies, and lies. Science must exclude fakery, pseudoscience and the countless carnival barkers who promote those things. (It should also exclude at least half of the things that are now called “scientific” but are pretentious nonsense, like the fake science called psychiatry, “climate change”, and the medico-pharmacological racket called “behavioral science” — each of which is a colossal fraud. They have nothing to do with science and everything to do with the lust for power.)
There is nothing innocent about “inclusion” or those who promote it. “Inclusive” public policies are not life-improving; they are life-destroying. “Inclusion” means a gun held by government and pointed at your head and mine.
When I was growing up in the 1950s, we never heard anything about “inclusion”. That was because Communists and Fabians had not yet crafted it into yet another prong in their multi-pronged, multi-decade assault on individual rights, political liberty, private property, and Western Civilization.
How was the Planetarium’s devotion to astronomy, and space science in the 1960s diminished by the absence of “diversity” and “inclusion”? To those who were there in those years–as I was–such claims are laughable. That perpetual-adolescent-witted Americans today do not laugh at them is not a measure of their moral, intellectual, or cultural advancement over their ancestors but of their gullibility and mindlessness.
Words like “inclusion”, “diversity”, “non-discrimination” and “All are welcome” are chokeholds on thought. That is their purpose. People who cannot speak or think without using such words prove thereby that they are well-trained parrots. They are incapable of imagining a time before Americans agreed to swallow that vocabulary and the unexamined premises It conceals.
“Inclusion” is not about raising standards; it is about obliterating standards and the frame of mind that understands why standards are necessary and why compromise is cultural suicide. “Inclusion” is part of planned chaos.
The St Louis Public Library never tires of boasting that it is “inclusive”. What that means is that it now welcomes into its buildings people who will a) break glass windows and doors, b) squirt lighter fluid on security guards, c) threaten to blow up the building. “Inclusion” means not keeping those people out of such buildings. That knowledge ought to warm your heart and inspire your confidence.
The history of astronomy and space exploration is not “inclusive”, nor could it be, a fact that Americans understood years ago but don’t want to understand today. Like anything else requiring brains and talent, they involve hierarchy. A photograph taken in 1964 shows 275 members of the American Astronomical Society: 219 White men, 52 White women, and 4 non-White men. (Sky and Telescope magazine, March 1964, pp. 148-49)
The fraud called “inclusion” is why visitors to the Planetarium today will not hear classical music, as we did in the 1960s: Because it represents hierarchy and uplift, something far better than the primitive noise and filth that are now blasted everywhere and that proponents of “inclusion” demand that we respect and celebrate.
I visited the Planetarium with three friends. They are good people, articulate, sensible, and well-educated, but also a decade younger than me, hence cannot remember the Planetarium in its early years or much about American culture before 1965. They enjoyed the visit, and I was happy for them. Thoughts like those I express in this essay would never occur to them — such is the difference in frame of mind between my generation and theirs. They have no idea what life was like in this country before the 1960s radical-leftist cultural revolution. They cannot imagine a frame of mind in which rock “music”, feminism, and conversations laced with profanity are not favorably accommodated.
I count myself extremely fortunate to have known the Planetarium as it was in those early years, which were also the twilight years of a nation and social order that were at least semi-rational, not long before the custodians of that nation would agree to adopt the 1960s-teenage-boy frame of mind to show how hip-and-cool they could be.
It was there that I purchased magazines about astronomy; became friends with the Planetarium’s assistant director; ascended the catwalk to the observation deck on top of the building; walked throughout an extensive exhibit of satellites, spacecraft, and rockets during “Space Exposition” month in May 1965; and attended lectures by astronomers Donald Menzel, Peter van de Kamp, and J. Allen Hynek.
I have no objection to fun houses or platforms for propaganda. Americans today have an excess of both. But they are not satisfied with mere excess; total conquest is their goal. They want every building, space, and cultural institution made into a fun house to keep us amused and diverted. That is why I object to museums, planetariums, and libraries being dumbed down. They should be left alone to be what they have always been — without fun and games, “inclusion”, and political ideology.
— Comments —
Terry Morris writes:
Alan writes:
“Today, signs and brochures proclaim that the James S. McDonnell Planetarium and its neighboring Science Center in St. Louis aspire to be “inclusive”. In other words, buildings ostensibly devoted to science are now surrendered to political sloganeering.”
They don’t “aspire” to be inclusive, they emphatically are inclusive – inclusive of every freak and deviant “lifestyle” and human behavior under the sun, as Alan well knows. Meanwhile, they shutter normal people out, “cancel” us, and so on. This is the death knell of Western Civilization writ large. See y’all on the other side!
