Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

Girls on film

OK, one more Blast from the pre-Sokal Past before I get back to Steve Fuller.

Every schoolchild knows that the Sokal Hoax proved everything people wanted it to prove: that Sokal showed how many “theorists” write about science despite not knowing very much about it; that he revealed the fatuousness of interpretive theory; that he saved the left from its irrationalist wing; that he struck a blow for plain speech and against obfuscatory jargon; that he demonstrated the vacuity of the humanities as they are taught in American colleges today; that he disclosed the cliqueishness and claqueishness of cultural studies; and that he proved that Anglo-American analytic philosophy is true and that Continental philosophy since Nietzsche is false.

Well, as I argue in Rhetorical Occasions, Alan Sokal’s hoax pretty much nailed the first and sixth of these—the first by way of the previously-published material cited in his essay, and the sixth, of course, by way of the essay’s acceptance by Social Text. His post-hoax claims about the second, third, and fourth were, I think, overdrawn; he never argued or endorsed the fifth, to his credit; and he didn’t have much interest in the seventh, though some analytic philosophers have been more than happy to pretend, in the intervening years, that the whole thing was really about them all along.

(No, I’m not quite this telegraphic in the book itself. I spin out a more detailed argument over the course of about a hundred pages, an argument informed in places by long and largely fruitful exchanges with Sokal himself, way back in 1996-99.)

But in the course of my recent review of the relevant literature, I came upon a few gems from the book that started it all, Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. And it reminded me of two things: one, there were some good reasons why people on my side of the quad dismissed Gross and Levitt when their book first appeared. And two, there was more than enough silliness to go around back then.

The first excerpt suggests a certain, er, defensiveness with regard to sexism in academe:

We take a position that is not likely, in the climate described, to endear us to a majority of our colleagues in or out of the sciences, or to the political and administrative avant-garde. It is that sexist discrimination, while certainly not vanished into history, is largely vestigial in the universities; that the only widespread, obvious discrimination today is against white males. (110)

This is not terribly idiosyncratic; lots of people say more or less the same thing. But I love the phrase “administrative avant-garde.” Professor Gross? Professor Levitt? Dean Alfred Jarry will see you now!

A page later, they brace themselves for battle, and that’s when things get a little weirder:

Of course these remarks violate the feminist metaphysics according to which every institution of this society is irremediably sexist, and every male, even the most sympathetic, ineradicably guilty by association with it. Some positions, even among persons brought up in the logophallocentric West, are well beyond the reach of rational argument. Feminist fundamentalism shares that distinction with other dogmatisms, such as religious fundamentalism; and when all is said and done, similar mentalities give rise to both. (111)

Uh, guys, it’s “phallogocentric,” not “logophallocentric.” Just saying.

And then a dozen pages later, a deservedly famous passage—one that many textual scholars have attributed not to Gross and Levitt but to John Derbyshire:

If there were any longer anything like a hegemonic, white, masculinist slant to popular natural and social science, denunciation of it would be proper.

The shoe, however, is now on the other foot. Anyone who gives prime-time television a passing glance (we hope none of our readers give it more) is familiar with today’s universal spin, for example, on women’s careers. Who has not looked sidewise at the screen and seen a beautiful young woman (political correctness in the media does not yet frown upon “lookism”), high heels, lipstick and all, leaping about with her 9-mm. Beretta held, two-handed, in the approved barrel-up manner, dodging around corners, stalking a murderous criminal? Who has not seen her straddle and handcuff the oaf, toward the end of the show? Who has not seen the impenetrably tough, young woman lawyer face down a crooked male judge in court, and then, as a sop to story line and the connectedness of women, make a lonely phone call to her mother, or her sister, late at night? Who, for that matter, hasn’t seen the new, standard children’s books, in which Mama Bear, like Papa Bear, goes to work or runs a honey-packing business? Who is so asleep as not to have noticed that Dagwood of the funnies, always an amiable dunce, is today a bigger jerk than ever, now that Blondie is a successful businesswoman while he remains under the thumb of his boss? (123-24)

Who, indeed? (smiling politely and searching the room for the nearest safe exit).

Personally, my faves are the approved barrel-up manner and the sidewise look at the screen (I imagine that Gross or Levitt happened to turn on the TV during CBS’s now-notorious week-long Femme Nikita marathon in October 1993). But that late-night phone call and the Dagwood finale are good too, and the whole thing rocks pretty hard in the aggregate. The high-heeled shoe is very clearly on the other oaf-handcuffing foot, no question about it. Or something like that.

Yes, yes, I know, Gross and Levitt uncovered some serious mischief on the part of people who didn’t know their Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture from their Lorentz transformation. But “truth” be told, they had some funny little quarks—oops! I mean quirks—of their own, as well.

Now, don’t worry, folks, I don’t spend all my time in Rhetorical Occasions going after low-hanging fruit. That’s this blog’s job! In the book I am the very model of judiciousness and equanimity, as measured by my own deluxe Judiciousness and Equanimity Calipers, which I recently purchased online from Phrenology Associates.

Oh, and I want to thank Sean Carroll for looking over a couple of pages in my opening essay and reminding me that the Calabi-Yau space involved in superstring theory accounts for only six of the eleven dimensions. I didn’t even know that the number of dimensions in Calabi-Yau space had to be even! D’oh. Is my face red! Or infrared, if you’re receding from me at a very high speed.

Posted by on 12/07 at 01:42 PM

So, am I to assume that the stereotypes of professional women in television cited in that third passage are positive ones?

Posted by Roxanne on 12/07 at 03:09 PM
Yes, Rox, all of which are to be attributed to Feminist Fundamentalism Incorporated, which, as you know, took control over network television in 1987.

Posted by on 12/07 at 03:13 PM
There’s a special place in Hell waiting for David E. Kelley.

Posted by Roxanne on 12/07 at 03:18 PM
Hee. That last long quoted section is just marvelous. Looking for the nearest safe exit indeed. I mostly hang out here for the humor but if you’re going to be hitting my physics groupie buttons too we could have a problem… Haven’t I already asked you to marry me at least once?

MKK

Posted by Mary Kay on 12/07 at 03:36 PM
BTW, take a look at the comment thread on the Valve before posting on Fuller—he’s written one more response (if you haven’t seen enough already).

Now, this post. You quote Gross and Levitt as “a few gems from the book that started it all”. Did they really start it all? To put that more concretely, since you’ve talked to Sokal, did he read their book and think “Egad, I must rush out and write a hoax lampooning these tricksters?” Because otherwise, I might suspect that this just doesn’t have much to do with Sokal at all.

Now, actually, there is yet another thread on the Valve (busy today) by Bill Benzon, “Who Owns Shakespeare?”, which holds you up as example of the unnecessary-making-fun-of-people-Cultural-Studies-guy. I defended you as exemplar of that cultural archetype seen at a more pedestrian level in the devotee of obscure music, for whom making-fun-of-others and being-made-fun-of must be in mystical balance. But, since Bill really meant that this behavior was a kind of turf defense, maybe you’d like to chip in on that thread, especially since this particular instance does look a lot like “Laugh at these guys to make their point, if there is one, go away.”

Posted by on 12/07 at 04:46 PM
high heels, lipstick and all, leaping about with her 9-mm. Beretta held, two-handed, in the approved barrel-up manner

Daggone girls got a hold of the phallus on the t.v. No tellin’ what they’ll do with it next.

(psst...do you think they’ve seen “Commander in Chief” yet?)

Posted by on 12/07 at 04:47 PM
When you’re in restraints and your keepers don’t aim you directly at the TV, there’s no way to watch other than sidewise. It leads to terrible eyestrain.

And wait, it’s OK to issue marriage proposals here? Just checking.

Posted by Orange on 12/07 at 05:34 PM
To put that more concretely, since you’ve talked to Sokal, did he read their book and think “Egad, I must rush out and write a hoax lampooning these tricksters?”

Actually, Rich, that’s pretty much exactly what happened. Though Alan didn’t say “egad.” I forget whether he got in touch with Levitt in the course of composing his parody (which, btw, I describe in the book as a “virtuoso” piece of work), and I don’t want to misstate any fine details, because in 1999 I made the mistake of saying (in Tikkun) that Barbara Epstein had helped him compose the parody when, in fact, she had helped him put together the “revelation” essay for Lingua Franca, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies.”

Posted by Michael on 12/07 at 05:41 PM
Not quite on topic, but I think that most of the pseudoscientific crap in postmodernism can be traced back specifically to Lacan.

Derrida has an arch way of writing which I don’t especially like, but Lacan to me seems to be a real charlatan when he cites topology, etc., etc.

I gave Lacan a short, perfunctory rotten-egg reading 20 years ago, and I have never seen cause to regret it.

Posted by John Emerson on 12/07 at 06:14 PM
"Actually, Rich, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.”

Interesting—I’m glad I asked, since otherwise I would have assumed that there wasn’t really a connection. Thanks for the clarification.

Posted by on 12/07 at 06:26 PM
You have no idea how dysfunctional the comics are. It’s hard to find something funny to do every day. Dagwood has been in a horrible downward spiral for years. I have no idea how Blondie puts up with him.

I have heard rumors that Sluggo hits Nancy. Billy over at Family Circus has been acting very strange lately. I think Beetle Baily has a drinking problem. Poor Ziggy is so neurotic he rarely leaves his house any more.

Posted by on 12/07 at 07:55 PM
People who dismiss _Higher Superstition_ as of no consequence ought to read the overwhelmingly favorable reader reviews in Amazon.com. There is much more of a market for that sort of thing than you might think. Consider the career of John Derbeyshire. I consider it part of the same phenomenon. Is there any legitimate reason why he is published as much as he is? Of course not. Far too many people in this country are *eager* to accept the lies, bigotry, and hypocrisy they want to hear, and so they praise such books and people. In like manner, the Amurrican Pee-pul want to have Creationism/Intelligent Design taught in the schools, no doubt because if flatters the egos of Most Christians to be told that it all happened the way their religious book says it did, even if they realize that it couldn’t really have happened that way. The Amurrican Pee-pul always have had and still have an unhealthy taste for superstition. A prediction: As the right becomes increasingly successful it its attempt to replace science with sectarian religious dogma, they will also insist the the Noachic Flood myth be taught as an actual event, and they will get far more support for such a course than you might think.

Posted by on 12/07 at 08:20 PM
As is becoming increasingly apparent, certain religious based movements (creationism) are much more of a threat to Science than the sociology of science. Who would have thought in 1994 that there would be an attempt to make common cause between religion and the sociology of science (Fuller))?

Posted by on 12/07 at 08:44 PM
In other words, Gross and Levitt were busy chasing phantoms when the real dangers were amassing elsewhere.

Posted by on 12/07 at 08:45 PM
You have no idea how dysfunctional the comics are.

Indeed. Dilbert is so bored in his cubicle that he’s become a proponent of Intelligent Design.

Posted by on 12/07 at 08:57 PM
But but but John, were it not for Lacan we wouldn’t have Zizek. I don’t think I could live in that world. What would become of the deadlocks?

Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman on 12/07 at 09:20 PM
In other words, Gross and Levitt were busy chasing phantoms when the real dangers were amassing elsewhere.

I wouldn’t say that, blah. They were right about a couple of things, and I do believe they saw the religious right as a threat. But their followup effort, The Flight from Science and Reason, misses the political boat pretty badly—you know, the one that started sailing in 1994 and eventually became this. And their caustic take on environmentalism and climate change is looking very, very bad today. Sure, Jeremy Rifkin is a crank; on that, Norm Levitt and Steven Jay Gould could agree. But G & L dismissed a lot of environmental activism back in the day, and not all of it was Rifkinesque. G & L were kind of indiscriminate that way.

Not quite on topic, but I think that most of the pseudoscientific crap in postmodernism can be traced back specifically to Lacan.

On topic enough for me, John. My review of Fashionable Nonsense said as much. Here’s the updated version, in Rhetorical Occasions: “Whatever defense one might marshal for Lacan and crew, the general impression rendered by Fashionable Nonsense is pretty damning by any measure: for whatever reasons, there was a time when certain French thinkers evidently expounded, at every opportunity, on theoretical sciences they barely understood. You’d think it was part of the official job description of the Post-’68 French Intellectual—except that Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, interestingly enough, seem to have generally avoided the impulse (not that this has stopped Sokal’s cheering section from dismissing Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes). Thus one finds the usually clear-headed Kristeva writing stupefying passages like this:

[I]n the syntactic operations following the mirror stage, the subject is already sure of his uniqueness: his flight toward the “point ∞” in the signifying [signifiance] is stopped. One thinks for example of a set C sub 0 on a usual space R cubed where for every continuous function F on R cubed and each integer n > 0, the set of points X where F(X) exceeds n is bounded, the functions of C sub 0 tending to 0 when the variable X recedes toward the “other scene.” In this topos, the subject placed in C sub 0 does not reach this “center exterior to language” about which Lacan speaks and where he loses himself as subject, a situation that would translate the relational group that topology calls a ring. (Kristeva 313; qtd. in Sokal and Bricmont, 47-48)

“Kristeva abandoned this kind of silliness decades ago, as Sokal and Bricmont admit, but it’s remarkable nonetheless that someone as incisive as Kristeva obviously felt, upon her arrival in the Lacanian quarter of Paris (from her native Bulgaria), that the way to produce a theory of language was to haul out some of the technical implications of Gödel-Bernays set theory and then casually drop phrases like ‘Dedekind structure with orthocomplements.’ And Kristeva, for better and for worse, had some idea of the meaning of the mathematical concepts she played with; Luce Irigaray, by contrast, writing about science and not just mining it for metaphors, is a rank embarrassment.”

You all better buy this book o’ mine, is what I’m saying. It’s just chock full of stuff.

Posted by Michael on 12/07 at 09:26 PM
Scott, when I heard that Zizek’s wife’s name was Analia, I didn’t know what to say.

I could think of lots of things to say, I mean, and I said some of them too, but besides being sexist and gross, people seemed to find the jokes too obvious.

Posted by John Emerson on 12/07 at 09:30 PM
Ah, yes, Dagwood and Blondie. Wasn’t that written by Mary Wollstonecraft?

Posted by bitchphd on 12/07 at 09:32 PM
Haven’t I already asked you to marry me at least once?

How rude of me not to reply to this before now, Mary Kay! Yes, I recall you did make that request. And your insistence on my marrying you “at least once” was precisely the reason the negotiations broke down.

Posted by Michael on 12/07 at 09:44 PM
Michael, will you marry me at least twice?

Posted by Orange on 12/07 at 11:55 PM
Oh, all right, Orange, since you asked so nicely. But you’ll have to change your name—otherwise the patriarchy will collapse as a result of its internal contradictions.

Posted by Michael on 12/08 at 01:37 AM
Sure, Jeremy Rifkin is a crank

I’m a crank. Rifkin is an intellectually dishonest hack.

Ah, yes, Dagwood and Blondie. Wasn’t that written by Mary Wollstonecraft?

I thought she did Sally Forth.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 12/08 at 01:51 AM
I love a good patriarchy, so I’m changing everything: Boysenberry Bérubé it is.

Posted by Orange on 12/08 at 02:04 AM
...certain French thinkers...

In the fine tradition of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, I suppose. He was a practicing anthropologist, but apparently it didn’t matter much when he got wound up and started theologizing.

And oooh, how we good Catholic girls lapped up that vertiginous stuff back in the day! “Thought is born.” The noosphere. Torn-paper collage posters with badly lettered quotes.

I blame the Catholiarchy.

Posted by Ron Sullivan on 12/08 at 02:28 AM
Daggone girls got a hold of the phallus on the t.v. No tellin’ what they’ll do with it next.

Disgraceful.

Like a good traditional housewife, if I need to use a tool, I ask to borrow my husband’s.

Honestly, women today. I ask you.

Posted by julia on 12/08 at 02:48 AM
Sorry but this is not related to the topic or the blog.

Over the pask few weeks; a small group including myself have been busy creating a website on the truth about terrorism, democracy, dictatorships, human rights, American imperialism etc from the Arab point of view, with a slightly sarcastic twist. I’d be very grateful if you could perhaps have a look at it- there are some good articles we’ve written which really emphasise the incredible hypocrisy and double-standards of the U.S. political elite in its foreign policy, the injustice of occupation in Palestine and Iraq, as well as a simple ‘solution’ to solving terrorism which is a must-see. It is not anti-American, nor does it condone or support violence.

Hope you like it.

Thanks for your time.

Posted by Sammy B. on 12/08 at 07:04 AM
"Yes, yes, I know, Gross and Levitt uncovered some serious mischief on the part of people who didn’t know their Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture from their Lorentz transformation. But “truth” be told, they had some funny little quarks—oops! I mean quirks—of their own, as well.”

They certainly did, but it hardly constitutes the substance of their book.

Posted by on 12/08 at 08:04 AM
I’m a crank. Rifkin is an intellectually dishonest hack.

Quite right, Chris! Sorry to have made this basic category error.

They certainly did, but it hardly constitutes the substance of their book.

Actually, RS, it’s part of the substance of their book. I could just as well have mentioned their approving citations of the work of right-wing crank Michael Fumento on AIDS, or their very strange insistence that “all environmentalists” have “an unwilling and dependent relation to science” (162).

Posted by Michael on 12/08 at 08:50 AM
"Actually, RS, it’s part of the substance of their book.”

But you introduced Higher Superstition as the book that started it all, ‘it all’ being the Sokal affair. Obviously I’m not denying that they had some pretty ideologically suspect beliefs, and I guess this results in some of their more barmy positions on things like gender and climate change. However, these don’t have anything to do with those bits of their book that relate to Sokal, i.e. the stuff on postmodernism, social constructivism, that sort of thing. You seem to be suggesting ("there were some good reasons why people on my side of the quad dismissed Gross and Levitt when their book first appeared") that their wrong positions on some things completely unrelated to both the core of their book, and what you were talking about, somehow lessens whether or not they were right about the bollocks being talked in certain parts of the academy.

The real benefit of the Sokal Hoax is that someone a bit more ideologically sound was able to put some of these objections in such a way that those better positioned to actually do anything about it (i.e. those in the humanities) might actually take some notice. But it is sad that people weren’t able to discern where Gross and Levitt were talking sense because of their ideological blinders.

“their very strange insistence that “all environmentalists” have “an unwilling and dependent relation to science””

I think it is unfair to quote this line in isolation, their clarification of that sections says “In short, environmentalism, in its modern form, including the radical wing of it, is a reaction, occasionally appropriate, to specific discoveries of orthodox science.” This isn’t to defend their over-reaction to radical environmentalism and consequent rejection of mainstream environmental thought though.

Posted by on 12/08 at 10:36 AM
their clarification of that sections says “In short, environmentalism, in its modern form, including the radical wing of it, is a reaction, occasionally appropriate, to specific discoveries of orthodox science.”

Which, though more equivocal, is still wholly and amusingly wrong. Unless you describe bulldozers and chainsaws and garbage barges as “specific discoveries of orthodox science.”

Posted by Chris Clarke on 12/08 at 10:44 AM
Actually, how anti-scientific is environmentalism? Some spiritual deep ecologists probably are, but most global-warming people are just trying to get the political system to pay due attention to the known scientific facts.

It’s the economic utopians, free-marketers and futurologists who are trying to suppress science.

Posted by John Emerson on 12/08 at 11:28 AM
"Which, though more equivocal, is still wholly and amusingly wrong. Unless you describe bulldozers and chainsaws and garbage barges as “specific discoveries of orthodox science.””

I would describe climate modelling, and orbital mapping of deforestation as orthodox science though.

Posted by on 12/08 at 11:33 AM
As an environmentalist, I started to write a comment about the modern regulatory state and the ways in which their claim was and was not true. But that would take too long, and might involve sounding like I was somehow excusing their anti-feminism and their support of Fumento (which, no matter when they were writing, they should have known better than to do) and their attack on climate science. Suffice it to say that this particular type of focus on their book seems very similar to “How could you join the anti-war movement? Don’t you know that their marches were first organized by ANSWER?”

Posted by on 12/08 at 11:37 AM
All very good points.

Here’s what I meant. If you’re talking about environmental activism as opposed to environmental science, the vast majority of environmentalists in the world are involved in protection of habitat, and most of them on a rather local scale. There is little controversial or cutting edge science involved in alleging that when you cut an oak woodland down, or pave over farmland to build suburbs, the woodland and the farm are no longer there.

Climate scientists and wildlife toxicologists and satellite GIS folks are doing important, cutting edge work, and what I do for a living in part is to help that work inform the activism of the folks on the ground. But, like I said, “environmentalism” in the mass is people thinking “oil is finite, we’re using it rapidly, prices will go up, and so I’m buying a car with better mileage.” No cutting edge science there.

Posted by Chris Clarke on 12/08 at 11:43 AM
Suffice it to say that this particular type of focus on their book seems very similar to “How could you join the anti-war movement? Don’t you know that their marches were first organized by ANSWER?”

I dunno, Rich—usually you uphold higher standards of logic than this. But I mostly agree with this:

Obviously I’m not denying that they had some pretty ideologically suspect beliefs, and I guess this results in some of their more barmy positions on things like gender and climate change. However, these don’t have anything to do with those bits of their book that relate to Sokal, i.e. the stuff on postmodernism, social constructivism, that sort of thing.

But, RS, that’s because Sokal had the good sense to leave aside those aspects of the book, just as he didn’t include N. Katherine Hayles in his parody essay even though G & L spent pages attacking her for making some pretty innocuous (if, in one case, inaccurate) zeitgeisty remarks about twentieth-century science. But I don’t agree with this:

You seem to be suggesting . . . that their wrong positions on some things completely unrelated to both the core of their book

because I don’t believe that their weird opinions on feminism and environmentalism are completely unrelated to the core of the book. Don’t make me deconstruct center and margin, now! You know I’ll do it if I have to. Seriously, their book is in many places and in many ways sweeping and indiscriminate. This was overlooked at the time, and is still overlooked today, by people who believe (sincerely, and not entirely without reason) that some kind of greater good was being served by the demonstration that Stanley Aronowitz didn’t know what he was talking about in Science as Power.

Their hysteria over Derrida’s nonsensical, offhand, Q-and-A remark about the Einsteinian constant in 1966 is a case in point. Sokal, by contrast, had the good grace to admit that this was a “one-shot abuse,” never repeated anywhere in Derrida’s very large body of work.

Posted by Michael on 12/08 at 11:47 AM
"Actually, how anti-scientific is environmentalism? Some spiritual deep ecologists probably are, but most global-warming people are just trying to get the political system to pay due attention to the known scientific facts.”

I don’t think you could really call that radical environmentalism. Gross and Levitt seem to have been mostly objecting to people oversimplifying and misusing the scientific evidence for radical agendas not primarily motivated by science, and in this respect they were probably right (even those in the mainstream environmentalist moevement have been accused of oversimplifying things, but personally I regard that as something of an unavoidable necessity when trying to communicate to a wider audience). However they also seem to have taken something of an odd view of the scientific evidence itself when it comes to global warming - in their 1998 edition they add a barely contrite note that “Recently, the scientific consensus has moved in the direction of greater certainty of a significant global warming due to anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases...The fact remains, however, that we have as yet no unequivocal signal...of global warming of anything like the magnitude predicted by the available climate models. The atmosphere has in fact cooled...”

Posted by on 12/08 at 11:47 AM
"because I don’t believe that their weird opinions on feminism and environmentalism are completely unrelated to the core of the book...Seriously, their book is in many places and in many ways sweeping and indiscriminate.”

It certainly is sweeping and indiscriminate, but I really think you have to read it with a particularly perverse motivation to think that it is primarily motivated by nutty political views, rather than by horror at the misuse of science by what they term the academic left.

Which is why I can read their book and wince at their claims that women are no longer discriminated against, but agree wholeheartedly that Sandra Harding talks a lot of rubbish.

Posted by on 12/08 at 11:58 AM
I still don’t get the “environmentalism is antiscientific” idea at all. If you define the group by its wackiest members, sure. And the environmentalist ground troops are mostly issue-oriented and not scientifically sharp, but that doesn’t make them anti-scientific.

Among the environmentalists are various climatologists, earth scientists, oceanographers, etc.

The real anti-scientists are the cornucopians who say that resources are unlimited, that there can be no environmental limits on economic growth, and that any attempt of any kind to reduce consumption and growth is Luddite statism.

Posted by John Emerson on 12/08 at 12:05 PM
"Suffice it to say that this particular type of focus on their book seems very similar to “How could you join the anti-war movement? Don’t you know that their marches were first organized by ANSWER?”

I dunno, Rich—usually you uphold higher standards of logic than this.”

It seems like an exact analogy to me. Conservatives are always bringing up some kind of ridiculous position or other that ANSWER supports in order to try to taint the entire anti-war movement by association. You have to reply over and over that cranks are often the first ones motivated to act on a particular issue, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who joins in shares their beliefs.

I’m not saying that their book should not be studied or criticized. It’s just that literally all you’ve said about it here are little snippets of mockery, which, in the context of your characterization of it as “the book that started it all”, looks like a simple rhetorical move.

Posted by on 12/08 at 12:11 PM
"I still don’t get the “environmentalism is antiscientific” idea at all. If you define the group by its wackiest members, sure. And the environmentalist ground troops are mostly issue-oriented and not scientifically sharp, but that doesn’t make them anti-scientific.”

But Gross and Levitt don’t call environmentalism anti-scientific, in fact they call it dependent on science. To quote them: “The problem is that environmentalism, like any political movement, needs a credo, a stock of beliefs that form the core of its motivations. Those upon which environmentalism draws are reasonably obvious and certainly valid as a general rule...All the same, when we get down to cases we find that many rank-and-file environmentalists...understand environmental issues in a way inconsistent with the scientific temperament.”

Posted by on 12/08 at 12:17 PM
RS: I haven’t read Gross and Leavitt. I’ve reread all of your comments, and I seem to be missing something.

If their problem with environmentalism is simply that some environmentalists talk a spiritual, anti-scientific game while depending on scientific results to make their case, I could agree I guess. But that makes the environmentalists rather more credible, not less, unless they’re being critiqued for philosophical consistency—what they’re doing is better than saying “Mother Nature is angry” or whatever. The phrase “unwilling and dependent” makes it seem worse than it is.

Posted by John Emerson on 12/08 at 12:57 PM
It’s just that literally all you’ve said about it here are little snippets of mockery, which, in the context of your characterization of it as “the book that started it all”, looks like a simple rhetorical move.

Ah, OK, Rich. Thanks for explaining. Your logical standards are, once again, just fine with me.

Cool. Now I can just go ahead and tell you you’re wrong!

Seriously, I wasn’t trying to discredit the entire Sokal wing of the “social construction” debate, and I wasn’t trying to do it by way of an analogy like Gross and Levitt : all critics of loopy postmodernism :: ANSWER : antiwar movement. I was simply trying to point out that G & L were, for various reasons, less than ideal messengers for an argument that the academic left should have taken much more seriously than it did. And it’s to Sokal’s credit that he read the book and took away a sense that someone really ought to call Certain Theorists on their ignorance of science—while leaving aside the kinda nutty stuff about Fumento and environmentalism and Beretta-wielding women.

Posted by Michael on 12/08 at 01:16 PM
"I was simply trying to point out that G & L were, for various reasons, less than ideal messengers [...]”

I fully agree.

An anecdote that may help to illustrate why I’m probably over-sensitive about this: I was once meeting with a group of environmental activists (amateurs, not professionals) who were talking about “land farming” of sewerage treatment plant output, i.e. use of human waste as fertilizer for crops. Because of various contaminants, this can sometimes result in elevated levels of certain metals in the food. So we’re talking about it and one of the people turns to the rest and tells everyone that the AIDS virus might somehow be transmitted from the waste through the food to people (as I’m sure that everyone here knows, this is an obvious falsehood, and was even in the early 90’s when it was said). Arghh—but some of the same characteristics that made this woman a good initial volunteer activist on the issue also made her susceptible to this kind of belief. To some extent the early messengers on *anything* are going to look odd.

Which doesn’t excuse Gross and Levitt: they weren’t people trying to fit in their push for change in among what free time they had after working at blue-collar jobs and housework. They had the resources to have known better, to have been more careful.

Posted by on 12/08 at 01:48 PM
Love this thread. Two points, both related to how the danger of anti-rational relativism (or whatever you want to call it; you know what I mean) today comes largely from the right in the form of Intelligent Design; John Derbyshire has always been against it and is speaking out more forcefully against ID these days (there’s a back-and-forth at the Corner, to which I do not link), and Paul Gross appears to have seen the light, since he’s co-authored a book with Eugenie Scott on the subject.

Derbyshire’s still vile, but lucid and therefore valuable when he’s right. Where else are readers of the Corner going to see these arguments? He even called out Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Posted by on 12/08 at 02:13 PM
but it hardly constitutes the substance of their book.

Actually, I would say that “funny little quarks” most definitely constitute the substance of their book. Though that’s a value judgment about the humorousness of quarks, of course. Charm, strange, bottom. Tee-hee!

Oh, and Professor Bérubé, wouldn’t I have to be accelerating away from you for your face to appear infrared?

And I would certainly say that Gross and Levitt definitely missed the boat, given the increasing endorsement of intelligent [sic] design by the right, missile defense, the stem cell idiocy, threats against climate scientists from the Senate, the political football of Plan B, etc, etc. Yeah, the real danger to science is feminism theorists, environmentalists, and cultural studies professors and their vast political powers. Kudos to Paul Gross if he has since experienced an epiphany. A purely rational one, of course.

Posted by on 12/08 at 04:35 PM
"Yeah, the real danger to science is feminism theorists, environmentalists, and cultural studies professors and their vast political powers.”

Bruno Latour’s recent work sort of agrees that there’s a problem, actually, and he’s definitely not a stodgy good-old-days rationalist type (or whatever). The problem is that the right wing will use whatever tools it has in pursuit of its goals. A philosophical or even cultural attack on rationalism can be used in contexts that its originators did not intend. I haven’t read Gross and Levitt’s book, but it sounds like one basic difference between it and Sokal’s is that they associated the attack with its current originators and direction (left-wing to right-wing, vaguely) while Sokal pointed out that it could just as easily go in the other direction, once it had been demonstrated. The concept of Bush as the first postmodern rightist (and, in opposition, the “reality-based community") does make a certain degree of sense.

People like Chomsky have always argued that rationalism inherently favors the left because of, well, the old bit about speaking truth to power. That’s really the tradition that I see Sokal coming out of.

I look forward to Michael’s book.

Posted by on 12/08 at 04:59 PM
Oh, and Professor Bérubé, wouldn’t I have to be accelerating away from you for your face to appear infrared?

Actually, no, mds, a constant speed will do. Though I would suggest that you would need to be receding from me at something like 30,000 km/sec or thereabouts. (Nothing personal.) This, as you know, is often referred to as the “Doppler Shift,” named for its discoverer, the great St. Louis Cardinals offensive lineman Conrad Doppler, who, in his heyday, would break off the line with such speed that opposing defensive linemen perceived his red Cardinals jersey to be slightly red-orange.

Posted by Michael on 12/08 at 05:51 PM
Hey, I remember that Dobler picture - I think it’s from his 78 Topps football card.

Posted by on 12/08 at 07:30 PM
Actually, no, mds, a constant speed will do. Though I would suggest that you would need to be receding from me at something like 30,000 km/sec or thereabouts.

First Theory, then Cheney jokes, now electrodynamics instruction. Is there anything Michael can’t do?

*sighs dreamily*

Posted by Chris Clarke on 12/08 at 08:55 PM
Ah, yes: the unisex swoon. What theory is relevant here?

Posted by Orange on 12/08 at 09:06 PM
It’s been awhile since I read Gross & Levitt’s book, but I do remember having a sense that all they really did was pick out a few “theorists” who said some strange-sounding things, use this as a brush to tar almost anyone involved in any kind of critical study of science, and harken back to an idealized notion of the Enlightenment that didn’t actually exist. This was years ago, though, so maybe I should read it again.

Norton Wise reviewed Higher Superstition in Isis (I forget when)and I found his argument that Gross & Levitt were really arguing about who should control the history/sociology of science to be pretty convincing.

Posted by on 12/09 at 03:09 AM
"Norton Wise reviewed Higher Superstition in Isis (I forget when)and I found his argument that Gross & Levitt were really arguing about who should control the history/sociology of science to be pretty convincing.”

Haven’t read this review, but you can see how that argument jut goes to reinforce what Gross & Levitt are saying can’t you? ‘We think a lot of what you people say about science is woefully misinformed’, ‘hey stop trying to disempower me man! fascist!’.

Posted by on 12/09 at 03:53 AM
Haven’t read this review, but you can see how that argument jut goes to reinforce what Gross & Levitt are saying can’t you? ‘We think a lot of what you people say about science is woefully misinformed’, ‘hey stop trying to disempower me man! fascist!’.

That’s a fair point, and that actually occurred to me just after I posted that. My condensation of Wise’s review doesn’t really do it justice, since it’s based on my recollection from having read it once about seven years ago, and the subsequent brief discussion I had about it with my then-advisor. So, I should probably just go back and re-read it.

I think the point I was trying to get at is that Wise’s review was an attempt to critique the view that Higher Superstition was simply a straightforward defense of science from attacks by know-nothings.

Posted by on 12/09 at 05:13 AM
Well I suppose on one level all scientists have something invested in the rather heroic view of science propounded in popular coverage. We all know that internally it is a lot different, particularly for those working at the coal face. But we’re often afraid to admit that the whole enterprise is a bit more complex than is commonly portrayed because that opens the door to all kinds of nonsensical claims to escape into the public arena. If one more anthropology grad student tells me my research is actually part of a socially constructed power struggle I think I’ll batter them with my microscope.

Posted by on 12/09 at 06:18 AM
Conservatives are always bringing up some kind of ridiculous position or other that ANSWER supports in order to try to taint the entire anti-war movement by association.

This is a bit OT, but in my experience pro-war liberals, and even many anti-war-but-I-wouldn’t-want-to-do-anything-about-it liberals, are just as committed as conservatives are to tarring the entire antiwar movement with the views and tactics of ANSWER (examples are on display at major Democratic blogs like Daily Kos whenever a big antiwar demonstration takes place).

Posted by on 12/09 at 10:22 AM
If one more anthropology grad student tells me my research is actually part of a socially constructed power struggle I think I’ll batter them with my microscope.

*laugh*. Point taken; I’ve never said that to anyone (we historians can be stodgy that way), but I can see how such statements might lead one to throw the baby out with the bathwater and dismiss all ideas of social constructivism ,which is a valuable tool of analysis, but it’s often misunderstood and/or misrepresented even by its defenders, because it’s, well, complicated.

Posted by on 12/09 at 04:31 PM
If one more anthropology grad student tells me my research is actually part of a socially constructed power struggle I think I’ll batter them with my microscope.

But, but, but . . . then your research would be part of a socially constructed power struggle!

First Theory, then Cheney jokes, now electrodynamics instruction. Is there anything Michael can’t do?

Pshaw, Mr. Clarke. You know perfectly well that I am incompetent at basic calculus.

Posted by Michael on 12/09 at 04:54 PM
Exactly! It’s “I’ll show you a socially constructed power struggle, you nincompoop!”

Posted by on 12/10 at 05:50 PM

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