New Criterion editor Roger Kimball rightly takes issue with the assumption that correcting the problems with the Smithsonian Institution is a mere “footnote” to a larger agenda. On the contrary, he sees it as being of “central” importance.
Agreed! He writes at The Spectator:
If you want to restore society, you must commandeer the institutions that represent elite culture. Over the last several decades, those institutions have gradually become captive of a woke ideology that denigrates America while simultaneously celebrating the entire radical menu of racialist redress, sexual exoticism and political intransigence.
Again, agreed. But let’s not forget the culture of science, which is also a problem at the Smithsonian. See geologist Casey Luskin in the New York Post, detailing the multiple scientific issues with the Human Origins hall at the American Museum of Natural History. In comparison with denigrating America, denigrating human beings — hammering visitors over the head with the now-debunked myth that humans and chimps are a mere 1 percent different genetically, and that ape-like, pre-human creatures were hardly different from us — should not be seen as being of only “footnote”-level importance, either.
Denying human exceptionalism is intended to make human visitors to the museum feel animal-like and without special dignity. Though phrased in scientific terms, that’s as corrosive a message as the rest of the radical messaging.
Arguably, it’s more corrosive, in that it attacks something — being human — that’s far more fundamental than being American. Social restoration, so urgently needed, can’t be accomplished if the public is consistently being told we are little better than animals in the forest. In telling us that, over and over, our institutions of science education train us to act like animals. And in that, they are succeeding.