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Preface to the French Edition of Gross + Levitt, Higher Superstition

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Preface to the French Edition of Gross + Levitt, Higher Superstition Preface to the French translation of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science Dedicated to the memory of Norman Levitt (1943–2009) Published in Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Superstition supérieure, traduit de l’anglais par Brice Le Stunff (Heurstionne, Berlin, 2021). Alan Sokal Department of Mathematics University College London and Department of Physics New York University E-mail: [email protected] July 19, 2019 Sometime in the spring of 1994, I saw a notice — I no longer remember where — for a book authored by a biologist (Paul Gross) and a mathematician (Norman Levitt), entitled Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Sci- ence. My first thought was: “Oh, no, here we go again: yet another right-wing diatribe about how the Marxist feminist subversives have taken over the universities and are brainwashing our children.” The genre was familiar: in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s there had been a whole spate of such jeremiads.1 But my second thought was: “academic left and its quarrels with science?” I ’m an academic leftist and I don’t have any quarrel with science. I didn’t know that the academic left — or some of it, anyway — did have a quarrel with science. So I got a copy of the book and read it. I learned about a small but trendy subculture within the academic humanities and social sciences that had turned to pontificating on science and its philosophy, making a complete botch of both. The per- petrators were heterogeneous: postmodernist literary theorists, social-constructivist sociologists and anthropologists, practitioners of the new-fangled “Cultural Studies”, advocates of “feminist epistemology” and “postcolonial theory”. Unlike the Science for the People movements of the 1960s, these scholars’ target was not just the com- plicity of the scientific and technological establishment with capitalism, militarism and environmental destruction (a critique with which I have much sympathy). And unlike the feminist movement of the 1970s, their target was not just discrimination against girls and women in science, or sexist bias in some areas of psychology, biology and medicine (critiques with which I also have much sympathy). Rather, these critics argued that both the content and the methodology of modern science — in physics, chemistry and astronomy no less than biology — is a mere “social construct” that encodes a Western, patriarchal and capitalist ideology; the critics aimed to defend “other ways of knowing” as “equally valid” (if not more so). As one avowed convert to this perspective later summarized it: It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ide- ologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.2 The first thing I did, after reading Higher Superstition, was to run to the library and look up some of the books and articles that Gross and Levitt had cited, to see whether their criticisms were fair. Perhaps Gross and Levitt had distorted the au- thors’ true meaning by quoting out of context, thereby making a reasonable argument 1Of these, the best-known were the books by Allan Bloom (1987), Roger Kimball (1990), Dinesh D’Souza (1991) and Gertrude Himmelfarb (1994). For a detailed and brilliantly scathing assessment of both the conservative critics and their leftist academic targets, see Jacoby (1994). 2Sokal (1996, pp. 217–218), reprinted in Sokal (2008, p. 9); French translation in Sokal and Bricmont (1997, p. 212). For further discussion, see Sokal and Bricmont (1997) and Sokal (2008). 2 — or at least one worth debating — seem ridiculous. Or perhaps they had cited silli- ness published by minor personalities, while ignoring the solid work done by major figures within the same ideological camp. In the end I concluded that, in about 80% of the cases, Gross and Levitt’s criticisms were right on target: these texts were every bit as bad as they said (or in a few cases even worse). In the remaining 20%, it seemed to me that Gross and Levitt had exaggerated: the text was indeed mediocre, but they had portrayed it as more ridiculous than it actually (in my opinion) was. I’ll give some examples of both in a moment. And while some of Gross and Levitt’s targets were indeed minor figures, others were luminaries: Bruno Latour in the sociology of science, Sandra Harding and Evelyn Fox Keller in feminist philosophy of science, N. Katherine Hayles in literary theory applied to science, Andrew Ross in “cultural studies”. The focus of the Gross–Levitt book is the analysis of a curious historical volte- face. For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mys- tifications promoted by the powerful — not to mention being desirable human ends in their own right. And yet, over the past few decades, a significant number of “progres- sive” or “leftist” academic humanists and social scientists (though virtually no natural scientists, whatever their political views) have turned away from this Enlightenment legacy and — bolstered by varying admixtures of deconstructive literary theory, con- structivist sociology, postcolonialist theory, and feminist standpoint epistemology — have embraced one or another version of cognitive relativism.3 Moreover, a small but growing subset of these scholars have turned their critique on the natural sciences, questioning not only the political and economic organization of scientific research but also the alleged “cultural prejudices inscribed in the very epistemology of scientific inquiry”, as Andrew Ross put it.4 Gross and Levitt contend that these latter scholars, combining an inadequate philosophy of science with an utter ignorance of the science they purport to criticize, have made fools of themselves and subverted the standards of scholarship. What’s more, they have harmed the Left: in Levitt’s words, they have served up hanging curve balls to the cultural Right, who have proceeded, alas, to hit them out of the park.5 3Here I (and Gross and Levitt) use the term “relativism” to designate any philosophy that claims that the truth or falsity of a statement is not an objective matter but is relative to an individual or to a social group. One may distinguish different forms of relativism according to the nature of the statement in question: cognitive relativism when one is dealing with an assertion of purported fact; moral or ethical relativism when one is dealing with a value judgment (about what is good or bad, desirable or pernicious); and aesthetic relativism when one is dealing with an artistic judgment (about what is beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant). Here I shall be concerned solely with cognitive relativism and not with moral or aesthetic relativism, which raise very different issues. See Sokal (2008, pp. 174–175) for additional details. 4Ross (1995). This same phrase recurs in Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz, unpublished letter to the author (and to other contributors to the “Science Wars” issue of Social Text), March 8, 1995, cited in Traweek (1996, p. 129). 5Levitt (1995, p. 15). I apologize to non-American readers who may not share my and Levitt’s 3 Gross and Levitt were the first to draw attention, in a systematic way, to the excesses of social-constructivist and feminist science-criticism; and for this reason alone, their book is important. It was immediately reviled in some circles, hailed in others; it spawned a debate that is as relevant today as it was 25 years ago — if not more so. Gross and Levitt foresaw clearly the dangers to humanity when everyone is entitled to invent his or her own “facts” and to tout them as “equally valid”. And they insisted on the old-fashioned goal of objectivity: seeing things as they really are. That goal may never be perfectly achieved, despite our best collective efforts; but if we abandon objectivity even as a goal towards which to strive, we concede defeat before we start. But no contribution, however path-breaking, is beyond criticism; so it is perhaps not out of place for me to differ with Gross and Levitt on a few points. First of all, it seems to me that Gross and Levitt’s picture of the “academic left” is overdrawn. Some of the trendy theoretical gadgets of the (post)modern academic humanities do in fact derive from leftist or feminist politics, but many others evolved as weapons for use in old-fashioned academic turf battles. Much of present-day schol- arship marks, in my estimation, not the triumph of politics over intellectual inquiry but rather a retreat from real politics into careerism disguised as progressive politics.6 Indeed, many of those criticized by Gross and Levitt are only marginally “leftist” in the usual political sense, even if by “politics” we mean simply political rhetoric. What Gross and Levitt represent as a political conflict may perhaps be more adequately con- ceptualized as a new phase in the disciplinary conflict (and economic competition) between the “two cultures” of humanists and scientists. To be sure, these points were already made to some extent by Gross and Levitt themselves, who repeatedly stress their uneasiness with their catch-all term “academic left” (pp.
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