ravi wrote:
Hello all,
Louis Proyect has posted some material recently regarding the Sokal
prank and the other dubious characters (Gross, Levitt, etc) involved in
pomo witch-hunting. This characterization is mine, since Proyect counts
Sokal as a good friend. At the risk then of offending him, I wish to
point out that not only was Sokal's prank mean-spirited but it was also
meaningless.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. In retrospect, I don't find Sokal's hoax
useful at all. I am much more in sympathy with the Social Text issue that
it was meant to "expose". That issue contained hard-hitting attacks on
Gross and Levitt by Lewontin. This sort of thing:
Essay Review
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
Richard C. Lewontin
Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and
Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
328 pp. $25.95.
Gertrude Himmelfarb. On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on
Culture and Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. xvi+192 pp. $23.00.
The political movements in Europe and America in the 1960s that Americans
identify primarily with opposition to the Vietnam War were not, at base,
pacifist or anticapitalist or "countercultural," 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,
whites--all were the sources of authority and legitimacy that maintained in
place 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 [End Page 257] remain
what they have been for two hundred years, with no apparent effect on 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 challenge 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 damned 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 [End Page 258] 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 it
even more unsettling is that the attack 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" (p. 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" (p. 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 [End Page 259] 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 have been developed in order to
produce an objective picture of the natural world. Scientists, of course,
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 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
DeMan! 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 makes the
"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 that 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 [End Page 260] 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 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" (p. 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," but 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 [End Page
261] system, for which the life history of the nerve connections of a
roundworm is a very bad metaphor.
The study of evolution is filled with ideological prejudices whose
influence is increasing. Notions of "optimality," "strategy," "utility"
have been taken over from economics and are the organizing metaphors of
fields of biology like the sociobiology that Gross and Levitt so admire.
Yet there is no "hard science" here, but 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. The authors remind one
of the father who, having been told off by his wife and children, goes out
and kicks the dog.
While Higher Superstition misses the real action, the author of On Looking
into The Abyss knows the enemy and engages it directly. As Himmelfarb
correctly perceives, the traditional bases for authority and legitimacy in
questions of aesthetic, historical, and moral judgment are under direct
attack. The claim for "contingencies of value," in Barbara Herrnstein
Smith's resonant phrase, is the demand for a thoroughgoing revision in our
arguments about what is good and bad in both the moral and aesthetic
spheres. If the struggles of moral philosophers can only be judged in time
and place, if Shakespeare was only a marvelous English poet and dramatist,
then we are indeed adrift. Can it really be that Tupac Shakur and Ludwig
van Beethoven are in some way on the same plane? After all, they both
qualify as antisocial personalities. The problem of the source of authority
and legitimacy of values is more than an academic issue, and its
implications are far greater than just finding a good [End Page 262] reason
to make all undergraduates take a survey course in English literature.
Like Higher Superstition, Himmelfarb's book belongs to the genre of the
literature of indignation. Her argument is simple and direct. If there is
no universal and absolute source of value, then there is no basis on which
we can hold in check the most destructive and inhumane behavior of
individuals and nations. If Opus 131 is not "great" in some absolute sense,
then we are doomed to an eternity of punk rock. If we cannot hold the
Western ideas of freedom to be absolute, then we are doomed to be slaves or
slave-drivers. The claim of contingency must be rejected, because the
alternative is the abyss.
Unfortunately, the seriousness of a project does not guarantee the
coherence of its consideration. First, she is wrong about history. She
makes many references to the Holocaust, all meant to warn us of the hideous
consequences of a loss of commitment to absolute values. But, if there is
one thing that characterized Nazism, it was not a nihilism of values but
rather a psychopathic adherence to absolute principles of the right, the
good, and the beautiful. Race purity, the morality of the Volk, the rescue
of culture and civilization from the evils and corruption of Jews and other
orientals were the cornerstones of justification for the Holocaust. No word
was more important to Nazi cultural criticism than "degenerate." Does
Himmelfarb think that the tortures of the Inquisition were in the name of
cultural relativism? In fact, we do not have a single example of mass
inhumanity that was the consequence of a rejection of value; on the
contrary, institutions of human slavery and oppression have always been
justified by an appeal to the highest principles. The question, alas, is
not one of "freedom," but of freedom for whom and to do what. Himmelfarb is
too well versed in political philosophy not to know the deep contradictions
in concepts of liberty, but none of that surfaces in her discussion. For
her, the philosophical questions of liberty were all definitively dealt
with by Mill.
Second, there is no argument in On Looking into The Abyss, only alarm and
indignation. Suppose it were true (and I will argue that it is not) that
the abandonment of absolute cultural values would lead ineluctably into the
depths. It would not follow therefore that values do indeed have an
absolute basis, but only that a willing suspension of clear thought is a
prudential necessity. Himmelfarb does not present a single argument for the
existence of an absolute standard either of morality or of "greatness."
Indeed, there are only two positions she might take. One is religious: the
good and the beautiful are given by God, or by some equivalent source of
value that is prior to human existence. The other is a Darwinian gloss on
Kant: [End Page 263] all human beings, as a result of the evolution of
their central nervous systems, have in the structure of their brains a set
of a prioris that dictate what appear to be universal values. Himmelfarb is
too perspicacious to commit herself to either of these, at least in public.
Curiously, she does not try to finesse the problem by the standard negative
argument from the Theaetetus, namely, that to argue that man is the measure
of all things is self-contradictory, and so there must be absolute values.
This is a Socratic ploy, which cannot carry real weight. It is a feature of
language that the statement "There is no absolute truth" is self-denying;
but it does not follow that there is absolute truth, any more than it
follows from Russell's dictionary paradox that we should burn all our
dictionaries.
In the absence of a religious or natural historical claim for absolute
standards, there remains only the evident fact that human beings have
created values in the course of their varied histories. To the extent that
some values have made possible stable social orders and others have not,
there has been a convergence on values, and this prudential consideration
is quite sufficient as an argument for adherence to them. But this
instrumental argument leads to the possibility that prudence may lead in
other directions in other times. It is this possibility that Himmelfarb
wishes to deny, despite the fact that the intellectual circle to which she
belongs was quite willing to support the murder of Vietnamese by Americans
for the sake of freedom. It simply does not follow that if there are no
absolute and transcendent values, then there are no values. If that were
true we would still be on the gold standard. I do not need to believe in
God or a universal human nature to know that I would find it intolerable to
live in a society where I could not dissent publicly from received truth,
but I also know that the members of the College of Cardinals do not share
my view and that they have a better claim to represent the long sweep of
European history than I do. The difference is that I am on the victorious
side of the most recent serious crisis of legitimation.
One of the ironies of Himmelfarb's position is that she, like the school of
cultural theorists to which she belongs, makes the same indissoluble
linkage between absolute moral values and absolute cultural standards that
was made by the National Socialists. The most common attribute in The Abyss
is "greatness," but it is never quite clear what one needs in order to
qualify as "great" in a universal sense, beyond the historical approbation
of people who are in a position to know. But how are we to tell who is in a
position to know, except that they have read and approved of the "great"?
The claim that great authors have provided deep and novel insight into [End
Page 264] the general human condition that necessarily speaks to all,
irrespective of class and culture, is patently false. When I reply to a
friend who has twitted me about taking myself too seriously, "He jests at
scars that never felt a wound," I am not providing a deep philosophical
insight, unknown to the rudest groundling, but I am quoting a superb bit of
English poetry. Anyone who is in any doubt that Shakespeare was an English
poet should try André Gide's translation of Hamlet: "Thou wretched, rash,
intruding fool, farewell!" comes out as "Pauvre sot, brouillon, indiscret,
bon voyage!" Nor can Pushkin's dancing tetrameter,
Onegin, dobryi moi pryatel',
Rodilcya na bregakh Nevy,
Gde, mozhet bit', rodilic' vy
be carried into any English translation of Evgenii Onegin, not to speak of
creating any cultural resonance with the upbringing and love life of a late
eighteenth-century dandy who "was born on the banks of the Neva, where,
perhaps, you too were born, my dear reader." Sorry, wrong river, wrong
century, wrong social class, wrong language.
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.
Harvard University
Richard C. Lewontin, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard
University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, is an evolutionary geneticist
whose work investigates both the mathematical theory of population genetics
and the experimental determination of genetic structure of natural
populations. He works particularly at the molecular level, having
introduced the study of molecular population genetics about twenty-five
years ago. He is also active in the philosophy of science and has written a
number of papers with philosophers of science on questions of evolutionary
theory. He is interested in relating genetics and evolution to social
issues, and in this connection has written several books including Biology
and Ideology, Not in Our Genes, and Human Diversity. In particular, he has
been concerned for a very long time with questions about the inheritance or
non-inheritance of human behavioral traits like I.Q. and temperament.
--
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