How different the views held by the elite look after
the great populist victory in 2016, the election of Donald Trump. I'm thinking particularly of views
expressed in intellectual circles in 1998, year of the great quarrel between
the dominating elite in the sciences, physicists, and the dominating elite in
the humanities, postmodern theorists. A couple of physicists had attacked French theorists, the
elite of the humanities elite, in 1997 (Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont,
Impostures intellectuelles) and in 1998 both sides were battling — if you
could call the few short reviews in journals of busy scientists battling.
The battling review I remember best is one in the London Review (7-16-98) by John Sturrock,
representing the humanities at, I would say, its postmodern peak. "Intellectual charmers" was
one of the physicists' terms for the French intellectuals (Lacan,
Kristeva, Irigaray, Latour, Baudrillard, Virilio, Deleuze/Guattari) and I must say the term fit Sturrock, spokesman for
the side I (by profession) was supposed to be on. His prose was so imaginative and daring. The humanities people were trying
"to steal food from Sokal and Bricmont’s
professional larder"; Sokal and Bricmont were a "two-man vigilante patrol"
trying to "catch out a few LFFs" (people pursuing the Latest Foreign
Fad) who were guilty of "acts of lese-science"). He diminishes the physicists'
concerns so expertly, in the way of humanities people with words, that I couldn't help but be
charmed.
What Sokal and Bricmont were attacking is called factual
relativism. It's also called epistemic relativism
and cognitive relativism, but whatever
it's called the physicists couldn't tolerate it, either in sociology (the claim
that the facts about the world are different for different individuals, or
groups, or cultures) or philosophy of science (the view that scientific facts about
the world are not absolute, but are relative to historical eras and to
evolving scientific theories).
And with many readers in the
humanities who go to Wiktionary for that definition, as I did (Wikipedia is
where you go for the common understanding), the scientists start out with a
handicap. Everybody on the Arts
side of Arts and Sciences knows that nothing in the world, the rich, varied,
mixed-up world, is absolute. You
can't make statements about it that are universally valid, you can't ask
questions about it expecting certain answers, you can't assume that any issue
arising in it has been finally decided.
And there are our scientists doing
just that, with their belief that facts about the world are absolute. That lets our relativists, with their
more sensitive reading of the varied and changing world, slip their toes in the
door.
It's a promising move, but it
depends on their choice of the word "absolute," which is absolutely
wrong. As any practicing scientist
can report, the box of absolutely decided things is empty; there are only more
or less firmly decided things, weakly or strongly confirmed hypotheses — like (strong)
that tomorrow the sun will come up.
Remove the misunderstanding and the postmodern foot gets stomped
on. It's not hard to evict belief that sunrises depend on
who gets shined on.
The differences with Sturrock and
those he speaks for, though, are not so much over wrong belief but over how
seriously such wrongness should be taken.
The physicists take it very seriously. To them the relativism of the French intellectuals has
"disastrous implications."
That, to Sturrock, is an unimaginative over-reaction. Errors like this are not worth "a
whole book." The word
"errors" itself goes too far; they are "intellectual
misdemeanors." Only
"priggish" vigilantes will get worked up about them.
One of the misdemeanors Sokal and
Bricmont get worked up about is feminist theorist Luce Irigaray's suggestion
that science has a masculinist bias.
In Sturrock's paraphrase,
the 20th
century’s most resonant (and sinister) equation, E = MC2, may be
sexist for having ‘privileged the speed of light’ or ‘what goes fastest’ over
other velocities, and that if the science of fluid mechanics is
under-developed, then that is because it is a quintessentially feminine topic.
To Sturrock Irigaray's ideas of
the sciences here may be "dodgy" but "in that libertarian
province of the intellectual world in which she functions, far better wild and
contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately
demanded by Sokal and Bricmont."
Sturrock,
like the physicists, is turned off by the extreme skepticism displayed by some of their
French targets, the ones who reject "the very idea that facts exist or
that one may refer to them." He just wouldn't make his distaste into a big program. He would (as the picture of him takes
shape through the essay) stay cool, enjoy the "happily expansive discourse
of thought" he's getting in these gypsy pages, and keep things in
proportion. I see him quietly
savoring his difference from these fact-bound fanatics and inviting his readers
to join him.
In 1998, with
the nation enjoying peace and prosperity, a balanced budget, more and more
states — on evidence that it was dangerous —banning smoking, President Clinton continuing his healing move to the
center, the Supreme Court ruling in favor of gay rights, belief
from the data that there was a high probability of significant water in Moon
craters, and agreement in editorials that the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had indeed burnt a cross in his
garden and deserved to be fined, you've got a contrast with 2016 that just begs
to be made.
Begin with the value of
fact. Test that value
yourself. With Trump's voice in
your ears, telling you that thousands and thousands of people in New Jersey
were cheering as the Trade Center went down, that the concept of global warming
was created by and for the Chinese, that Hillary Clinton started the birther
movement, that there was voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire, and California, that the number of illegal
immigrants was between 30 and 34 million [I'm
going to keep on going until I'm sure you're gagging],
that Barack Obama founded ISIS, that he wants
to take in 250,000 people from Syria, that blacks kill 81% of homicide victims,
that the federal government is
sending refugees to states whose governors are Republicans, that the unemployment
rate may be as high as 42%, and that in the Philippines more than a century
ago, Gen. John Pershing "took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’
blood," and shot 49 Muslim rebels.
To the 50th person, he said, ‘You go back to your people, and you tell
them what happened.’ And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem."
Are you
disturbed? Do these kinds of words
from a presidential candidate make you fear for your country? Well [I know this is shooting fish in a
barrel], it's time to play your tape from 1998. Oh these excitable scientists, seeing disastrous implications in a
theory that tolerated error. And trying
so inappropriately to impose their stultifying rigor. To simple misdemeanors! Things only prigs get worked up over.
I listen to that tape and I can't
help thinking of Casey Stengel, in the locker room before players who were to
make 210 errors and lose more games than any team in modern history (the 1962
Mets}. "Can't anybody here
play this game?" he asks in anguish.
Then Sturrock's voice: "Relax, Casey. Enjoy the
errors." And the players
going out saying, "Oh, he's such a prig."
Final test: Go to today's social
media. Zoom in on Trump's
supporters. A fact appears. How does it look to you?
I'll guess: like a jewel in the
mud. Look there, supporting
evidence! Water you've been gasping
for in a desert of tweets. Not
just fact but somebody who actually cares
about fact. If you're like me you're
saying oh diamonds, oh rubies, oh pearl of great price.
I don't think this is just a
matter of elitist vs. populist. A moderately
educated populist knows that Irigaray is out of her fucking mind. It's something deeper, and I'll have to
think about it. Another post.
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