Scientific Fraud Grows

According to the US National Academy of Sciences, the rate of retraction of published scientific papers has increased tenfold since 1975.

Seems to me this is a good measure of the growing corruption of the professional, which is to say ruling, class. Not a good sign for the nation or the culture.

How did it happen? What happened in 1975?

The maturity of scientists born in 1945. The beginning of the baby boom.

Not that it is entirely the baby boomers’ fault. It is at least as much the fault of their parents, the “Greatest Generation.” It was the sexual revolution, and the fashionable dismissal by those who considered themselves well-educated of “conventional morality,” which inevitably meant morality straight up, as there is no separating the two. Sexual promiscuity soon necessitated abortion, and there was no way to square that with morality. Morality had to go. Too many people of prominence were in too far.

But the sexual revolution was a creature of the Greatest Generation, not the Baby Boomers; the Boomers just accepted what they were taught. The Playboy Philosophy, James Bond, with his independence from any moral restraints, and the randiness of a Jack Kennedy, were things of the Fifties, of men who had been of age in the Second World War. So was the beat movement, which included everything we later identified with “hippies.”

Is there hope? Yes. Cultures and civilizations have gone through other such phases of moral depravity, and recovered.

But it’s going to require another big shock of some kind.