>I start by proclaiming that science does not >equal rationalism. In fact, they can be quite >exclusive of each other. Spend one day at a >university dominated by a college of science, and >you'll have to agree with me. > >CJ
Unfortunately critical thinking toward bourgeois science (and there *is* such a thing has been associated with postmodernist relativism, whereas in fact you can find an analogous critique in Lewontin and Levins's "The Dialectical Biologist" and elsewhere. Here is a pip of an article by Richard Lewontin that appeared in the "Social Text" alongside Sokal's specious spoof. I asked Sokal if he had read Lewins & Lewontin--he had not. Nor had he read Gramsci. === A la recherche du temps perdu: A Review Essay Richard C. Lewontin Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 328 pages $25.95. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. 192 pages $23.00. THE political movements in Europe and America in the 1960s hat Americans identify primarily with opposition to the Vietnam War were not, at base, pacifist or anticapitalist or "counter-cultural" or simply a revolt of youth against age--although they were all those things. Rather, they were held together by a general challenge to conventional structures of authority. They were an attempt to create a general crisis of legitimacy. They were a "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" and were made in the image of 1792 and the revolt of the Paris Commune. The state, the military, the corporate holders of economic power, those over thirty, males, white--all were the sources of authority and legitimacy that maintained a social structure riddled with injustice. Those who were in the forefront of the struggles of the sixties knew what their revolutionary forebears knew, that a real crisis of legitimacy is the precondition of revolutionary change. But their attempt failed, and the main sources of authority and legitimacy for civil and political life remain what they have been for two hundred years, apparently unaltered in their stability or sense of permanence. There is, however, one bit of the body politic whose sores from the abrasions of the sixties have never quite healed over, rather like a bloody heel that is perpetually rubbed raw by a new shoe that doesn't fit the old foot. It is the academy and its intellectual hangers-on who, while not themselves professors, depend on academics to buy, assign, review, and cite their works. No one was more troubled, hurt, and indignant than the professional intellectuals when their legitimacy was challenged. The state and the corporations, after all, have long been the objects of attack. They are used to the fight, they know their enemies and they have the weapons to hand. Their authority can always be reinforced when necessary by the police, the courts, and the layoff. Intellectuals, on the other hand, are particularly vulnerable, because professional intellectual life is the nexus of all strands of legitimacy, yet it has had no serious experience of opposition. Despite the centrality of authority in intellectual life, the academy has not, since the seventeenth century, been immersed in a constant struggle for the maintenance of the legitimacy of its methods and products; on the contrary, it seemed for a long time to be rooted in universal and unchallenged sources of authority. Then, suddenly, students began to question the authority of the older and the learned. No longer were genteel and civilized scholars allowed to propagate their political and social prejudices without rude challenges from pimply adolescents. The attack on the legitimacy and authority of the academy during the sixties was met by incredulity, outrage, and anger. It produced an unhealing wound that continues to be a source of pain to some intellectuals, who see nothing but an irrational nihilism in the rejection of traditional structures of academic authority. Were it only the institutional authority of professors that was challenged, the hurt would be nearly forgotten. For the most part the control of the scholarly environment has returned to its former masters-- although not without alteration: professors are no longer free to make racist and sexist remarks in class without challenge, and even quite innocent events may lead to serious struggles, making many academics long for the days when they could say anything they damn well pleased. But even more sinister developments have continued the crisis in the academy, long after the rest of civil and political society has restabilized. For the last three decades there has been a growing attack on the very intellectual foundations on which academic legitimacy is ultimately grounded. What was revealed even by the rather unsophisticated attacks of thirty years ago has encouraged a thoroughgoing foundational reexamination in every field. It is no longer obvious to all that the methods and problematic of natural science produce an "objective" picture of the world untainted by ideology and by the social and political predispositions of scientists, or that the Divina Commedia contains all that much of universal or lasting value to someone uninterested in the history of medieval and early Renaissance Italy (or without the ability to read fourteenth-century Italian). What makes this attack even more unsettling is that it comes from within. God grant us another Urban VIII! The reaction to the foundational attack on the intellectual presuppositions of the sciences and the humanities, following so soon on the blows to the personal status of academics, has been the creation of a literature of indignation, characterized for the most part by the analytic coherence of a cry of pain. Among the most recent expressions of hurt and anger are Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, and On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society by the longtime protector of traditional values of the intellectual family, Gertrude Himmelfarb. What suicidal impulse must have possessed Paul Gross and Norman Levitt when they produced, as the first line for their book, "Muddleheadedness has always been the sovereign force in human affairs"? While reading the book I thought it might be amusing to review it entirely through artfully arranged quotations from it, producing a kind of autophagous destruction, but then I decided it was not worth the considerable effort required to copy out all the passages. Yet it is impossible to resist totally: "This is a book that is content, in the main, to posture, rather than to argue. It is driven by resentment, rather than the logic of its ideas" (91). "Very few positions are analyzed at great enough length to make them coherent; names and phrases are simply run in and out of the text as props for [their] views" (51). The argument of Higher Superstition is simple, although its rhetoric is rococo: (1) There is a set of antiscientific critics who comprise the "academic left" and are the direct descendants of the Marxist or Marx-inspired new-lefties of the sixties. Their program to devalue science is the deliberate extension of the attempt to destabilize bourgeois society, an attempt that failed politically but continues to plague intellectual life. (2) A great deal of nonsense has been written about science by the "academic left," who, in fact, hate science. The claims of these people are that the content and method of science are culturally biased -- against feminine values, against non-Europeans--and are tools for the oppression of groups without power. Moreover, according to these critics, science is just another language, and like all texts, the texts of science can mean many different things at different times and in different contexts. Such people deny the objective reality of the material world that is described by science. (3) Science is a set of practices that has been developed in order to produce an objective picture of the natural world. Scientists, ofcourse, make mistakes like anyone else, but the results of science that really last are those that are "written in nature." Moreover, science is good for you. It is the one methodology that is guaranteed to produce objective knowledge about the world, and it is the only way to solve the world's problems. "The wretched of the earth want science and the benefits of science." The first problem with Gross and Levitt's thesis is that it is impossible to tell what is meant by the "academic left," although they spend a lot of energy trying to justify the term. It definitely does not mean academics who are politically left: they exclude all practicing scientists with leftist politics. Indeed, some of their best friends are lefties. They love Steve Gould. Nor does it include all leftist humanists and social scientists. They use, for example, an article in the New Left Review by an admirer of Marx, Elizabeth Wilson, to castigate the "academic left." On the other hand, the academic left includes such well-known lefties as Paul de Man! Nor does one have to be an academic to be included (Jeremy Rifkin is on the list). Their archetype of the "academic left" is Stanley Aronowitz, whose leftist credentials are for them that he is actually a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the left wing of what used to be the Democratic Party. The hopeless muddle they make of the category renders the term academic left useless for any analytic purpose, yet it appears over and over, beginning with the subtitle of the book itself. What is revealed is the unbroken historical line that connects the present literature of indignation with the struggles for authority and legitimacy of the sixties and the still-present memories of clenched fists and cries of "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!" It is certainly true, and Gross and Levitt provide some lovely examples, that some people have written nonsense about the method and content of natural science. What is not clear from their treatment is whether these examples of nonsense represent any significant or threatening attack on rationality, any more than their own vulgar six-page history of the Left in the United States threatens the profession of political history, or their one-liners out of Cliff Notes characterizing Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, and Coleridge need worry those who study European literature. By deliberately choosing a few extreme examples--so extreme that they require only quotation and not analysis--the authors have created a bogeyman meant to frighten us so much that we will be distracted from considering the real critique of naive reductionism and positivism. The vulgarity of their approach prevents any serious analysis of the presuppositions, methods, and results of what goes on under the name of Science. The "science" of Gross and Levitt is something out of a high school textbook. It is the Law of Combining Proportions, the motion of a falling body in a vacuum, the ratio of round to wrinkled peas in the second generation of a hybrid cross. They know that there are serious problems in epistemology, but they announce their intention to ignore these problems because they have already been disposed of by others: "This is a book about politics and its curious offspring, not about epistemology or the philosophy of science; we cannot therefore refute, in abstracto, the constructionist view. . . . Nor are we obliged to do so: serious philosophers have been at it for decades" (48). Decades, indeed! Since Plato's cave. What Gross and Levitt have done is to turn their back on, or deny the existence of, some of the most important questions in the formation of scientific knowledge. They are scornful of "metaphor mongers," yet Gross's own field of developmental biology is in the iron grip of a metaphor, the metaphor of "development." To describe the life history of an organism as "development" is to prejudice the entire problematic of the investigation and to guarantee that certain explanations will dominate. "Development" means literally an unrolling or an unfolding, seen also in the Spanish desarollo, or the German Entwicklung (unwinding). It means the making manifest of an already predetermined pattern immanent in the fertilized egg, just as the picture is immanent in an exposed film, which is then "developed." All that is required is the appropriate triggering of the process and the provision of a milieu that allows it to unfold. This is not mere "metaphor mongering"; it reveals the shape of investigation in the field. Genes are everything. The environment is irrelevant except insofar as it allows development. The field then takes as its problematic precisely those life-history events that are indeed specified in the genome: the differentiation of the front end from the back end, and why pigs do not have wings. But it ignores completely the vast field of characters for which there is a constant interplay between genes and environment, and which cannot be understood under the rubric of "development." Nor are these characters trivial: they certainly include the central nervous system, for which the life history of the nerve connections of the roundworm is a very bad metaphor. The study of evolution is filled with ideological prejudices whose influence is increasing. Notions of "optimality," "strategy," and "utility" have been taken over from economics and are the organizing metaphors of fields of biology, like sociobiology that Gross and Levitt so admire. Yet there is no "hard science" here. In its place is a collection of imaginative stories with no empirical test that can put them into the frame of analytic genetics on which evolutionary theory is claimed to be built. One of the most extraordinary developments in evolutionary studies has been the coming into dominance of metaphors of selective adaptation for explanations at the level of whole organisms, while, simultaneously, explanations in population genetics have become characterized by reference to historical contingency, "random walks," and "gamblers' ruin." Even molecular biology, with its talk of "self-reproducing" genes that "determine" the organism, is ideological in its implications. DNA is certainly not "self-reproducing," any more than a text copied by a Xerox machine is self-reproducing; in fact, it is the machine that is interesting and needs to be understood. So it is the total cell machinery that needs to be understood if we are to understand both the production of new DNA and how the information in the DNA is, in fact, turned into flesh. Higher Superstition is not a serious book about the problems of understanding and constructing science. It is, instead, one long fit of bad temper, taking as its object the most vulnerable and easiest targets. Its authors remind one of the father who, having been told off by his wife and children, goes out and kicks the dog. The body of writing to which Higher Superstition and On Looking Into the Abyss belong, while appealing to transcendent standards, is, ironically, the product of a particular historical moment in the development of European culture. In a movement that began with the growth of the noblesse de robe in prerevolutionary France, technical and intellectual competence has increasingly become a pathway to upward social mobility. More secure and, from all attitudinal surveys, more prestigious than entrepreneurship or state service, intellectual activities increasingly have provided status, material well-being, and some forms of social power. Professional intellectuals, chiefly academics, have only relatively recently found themselves to be a major source of authority and legitimacy in European bourgeois society. An important part of that power is the image that intellectuals speak for no special interest, time, or group but are the conduits into society of the eternal verities. Thus, they have not appreciated the degree to which they, like any other source of legitimacy, necessarily become identified with the general structures of authority, and so they are unprepared for the attack on their authority that periodic crises of political legitimation must bring. In reading these books I saw before me Masaccio's bathetic image of Adam and Eve, faces screwed up in anguish, shedding bitter tears and covering their genitals as they are expelled from Paradise. Note: This essay previously appeared in Configurations 3, no. 2 (spring 1995): 257-65. Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org
