The Russian word pravda is often translated as ‘truth’, but it can also mean ‘justice’. The proto-Slavic prav had that latter meaning, pravo refers to a legal right, and the first law code in Kievan Rus’ was called the Russkaya Pravda. Over time the word has come to mean ‘truth’, but with strong connotations of ‘moral or spiritual truth’, or a just way to order human relations. Sometimes it is translated into English as ‘social justice’, whereas istina is the term for objective truth. In other Slavic languages, such as Serbo-Croatian, pravda has retained its meaning of ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’.

Truth and justice are synonymous, or related, in the human mind, and it is actually quite unusual to care about truth in a literal, scientific sense, irrespective of the social consequences. It is a characteristic found in nerds, and especially those on the autistic spectrum; only a small number of people obsess about the objective truth, and they often repulse the rest of society as a result. For most, a sense of pravda is more important, as is the approval of peers, and they also tend to question the intentions of people making dissenting claims. If you’re seeking knowledge which might disrupt social harmony, you’re probably a bad person with ulterior motives, and your arguments will be mentally screened out by people who don’t wish to expend energy on issues that don’t concern them.

We’ve seen an odd, smaller-scale repeat of the summer of 2020 in Britain this past week

We’ve seen an odd, smaller-scale repeat of the summer of 2020 in Britain this past week

It is only with the advent of universities that we developed institutions committed to finding empirical truths, and only relatively recently that open inquiry was permitted in sensitive areas; Catholics, Jews and Nonconformists were still excluded from Oxford and Cambridge until the 1870s, while most Ivy League colleges were originally established along sectarian lines.

In recent years there has been a notable return to older concepts of quasi-religious tests in academia, and a key driver in the upheavals within American universities during the 2010s was a search for pravda over istina. This resulted in more than 200 professors losing their jobs, more than during the Red Scare (admittedly from a far larger pool). Many were ruined simply for questioning the prevailing wisdom, and in some cases the hysterical drive for justice drove people to suicide. It was merciless.

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This movement culminated with the events of June 2020, an eye-opening time for many nerds, revealing how large numbers of people were prepared to assert something that seemed plainly false: that a disproportionate use of lethal force on black men in the United States was primarily driven by racism, even when there was plenty of evidence showing that this was not the case.

It was one thing to state that racism exists, and influences personal relations; that is certainly true, although hard to measure. It is another to suggest that this has a quantifiable impact on group disparities, without any attempt at presenting evidence and where there are clearly other factors at work. Systemic racism felt true, not because there was evidence, but because it was the only explanation that satisfied a sense of justice. In fact, not only could systemic racism not explain these disparities, but in the United States and Britain there was a system in place – under the guise of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion – which had the precise opposite effect, an established legal form of systemic racism. It’s very disconcerting, radicalising even, to believe that millions of your countrymen have no interest in seeking the truth when it conflicts with their idea of social justice. It’s why the summer of lockdown had the claustrophobic feel of a medieval village in the midst of religious hysteria.

We’ve seen an odd, smaller-scale repeat of the summer of 2020 in Britain this past week, with the tragic death of Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism and........

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