Greetings Economists,
I also got what LP repeated was his point. The Sokal attack has seemed
to me over blown in importance or affect. There are many examples of
serious efforts to take on Pomo's that strike me as better. And Louis
does us a favor by pointing out Lewontin was there in that issue to
make a serious point. Lewontin's essay is a beautiful analysis.
Lewontin puts his essay in a framework of a challenge to legitmacy that
were the sixties and raises a curious metaphors that appeals to me; the
foot with a sore upon it never cured since for intellectual life.
thanks LP,
yours,
Doyle Saylor
On Feb 3, 2006, at 8:04 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
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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