Lisa Nandy, Labour motormouth northern spokesperson for everything, described Joe Biden as ‘woke’. Has she seen him? He’s more half asleep. Yet, of course, she means ‘woke’, the most stupid, nauseating word purloined by the militant PC brigade, who’ve also stolen the term ‘cancelled’ for those found wanting in the woke department. To the extent where it is simply moronic. And reminded me of a high quality purveyor of the way things should be.

Stephen Jay Gould is my favourite ever (and now sadly departed) non-fiction writer. He was averagely clever. Being only a professor of geology, palaeontology, evolution, history of science and philosophy of science at Harvard. He wrote essays for Science magazine which were then grouped together into books which were unapologetically not-dumbed down. But he didn’t need to dumb down. He was funny. And something of a polymath, bright enough to make everything accessible. So he would use for analogies things like baseball and Hershey bars (the only thing I ever disagreed with him about. Not that he’d have known).

And he believed in God. He didn’t spend his life praying but he was comfortable with some kind of divine presence. And although he spent a lot of time writing, for example about Darwin’s battle (both internal and external) with the church about presenting his theory of evolution, which attacked religious interpretation, he never stooped as low as a Richard Dawkins type who calls you stupid to believe in anything spiritual. He lived and worked under his own construct of NOMA. Non-Overlapping MagesteriA. Meaning that he won’t argue about the spiritual world because its not his domain. But similarly, religion shouldn’t quote the bible to try and refute scientific fact. Like evolution. That’s not their domain.

Yet best of all was when this New York liberal related various histories in the scientific world in which the ‘establishment’, like the Royal Society and other esteemed organisations, had published articles ‘proving’ that black people were lower down the evolutionary scale than white. Had smaller brains. And other such ‘scientific facts’ which a bunch of Victorian ‘scientists’ (all white, all rich) paraded before their colleagues.

Yet Gould’s position was always one of learning from the errors of the past. Moving forwards, as science should. He advocated that we should never judge the past by the values of the present. The eminent aristocrats of the Royal Society didn’t know ‘woke’, didn’t have ‘PC’, they were just victims of their society. Just like the justification used for some criminals now, but obviously a very different kind of ‘society’. They couldn’t know how ‘wrong’ they could be judged by standards not yet available to they.

Gould never advocated ‘cancelling’ pretty much all of scientific history because of racism, slave connections or anything else. Nor the removal of the statues and busts and portraits relating to it. That form of revisionism would have been abhorrent to him. As it should be to us.

Happy snowy Sunday

A xxxx