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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Gross, Paul R.
Higher superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with
science / Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8018-4766-4 (alk. paper)
1. ScienceSocial aspects. 2. Humanities. I. Levitt, N.
(Norman), 1943 II. Title.
Q1755G757 1944
500dc20 93-32914
ISBN 0-8018-5707-4 (pbk.)
 Contents

Preface to the 1998 Edition

Acknowledgments
ONE The Academic Left and Science
TWO Some History and Politics: Natural Science and Its Natural
Enemies
THREE The Cultural Construction of Cultural Constructivism
FOUR The Realm of Idle Phrases: Postmodernism, Literary Theory,
and Cultural Criticism
FIVE Auspicating Gender
SIX The Gates of Eden
SEVEN The Schools of Indictment
EIGHT Why Do the People Imagine a Vain Thing?
NINE Does It Matter?
Notes
Supplementary Notes to the 1998 Edition
References
Index
 Preface to the 1998 Edition

Like most scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, including those

who founded the U.S. National Science Foundation and encouraged its
social-science programs, we have always valued social analysis of
science and its history. We still do. As for anti-science, that is a very
old story in our culture. In its accustomed forms, it would hardly have
stirred us to take the trouble to study and write about it. The writing of
Higher Superstition was undertaken only when it became clear to us,
from separate but remarkably similar experiences at our respective
universities, that something new and unwelcome had found its way into
the academic bloodstream and thence into lecture rooms, journals,
books, and faculty chit-chat: the systematic disparagement of modern
science. A public response was clearly needed. Even the silliest
criticisms of science, dressed up as social analysis, hermeneutics, or
emancipatory politics, were going largely unanswered. Neither
scientists as individuals, nor scientific organizations, nor scholars
within the disciplines whence issued the disparagement, showed any
inclination (might it have been any courage?) to rebut the kinds of
antiscientific nonsense and flawed scholarship we were encountering in
the academy. We didnt know what sort of response the book we
considered writing would evoke. In fact, we rather feared, since the
argument would necessarily alternate between broad-brushing and
technical detail and between polemic and analysis, that it would slip
unremarked from new release to backlist to remainder without stirring
much interest one way or the other.
The fear turned out to be groundless: it was dispelled by
astonishing numbers of allies and opponents promptly having their say
in conferences, seminars, journals, and on the internet. We found
ourselves in the eye of a storm generated by the book. Predictably
enough, in the flood of reviews, most of those from scientists were
strongly positive, while most of the antagonism came from the
science-critique academic subculture and its allies. Interestingly,
however, some of the most hostile criticism appeared in journals
affiliated with the scientific community, which lent their pages (as they
have been doing for some time) to anxious apologists for the
antiscientific, pseudo-sociological fads that are the subject of this book.
It was lauded in some conservative journals of opinion despite our
disclaimer of any wish to advance conservative political causesor
indeed any political program. Most of the indignant huffing and puffing
came from the circled wagons of what we called, with repeated
misgivings, the academic left, which tried to encourage the
perception that we are deep-dyed conservatives (closeted or otherwise)
pursuing reactionary agenda, and protecting our fat research grants.
As it happened, the instinctive dislike of science that lurks
historically in the conservative woodwork was mostly dormant when
we wrote the book. Since then it seems to have begun scratching again,
in the form of new denunciations of Darwinism (which is not to
suggest that there is no anti-Darwinism on the left). If, therefore, we
were writing this book ab ovo, the academic right would have to join
the academic left in its subtitle and there would have to be a chapter on
Intelligent Design Theory. Indeed, right and left are curiously
united on these issues, with leftist adherents of identity politics just as
comfortable with the doctrine of special creationin its Native
American versionas are rightist defenders of biblical orthodoxy. We
know at least one public incident in which a senior and greatly
esteemed member of the science studies establishment, fashionably
leftist in most respects, defended the right of fundamentalist school
boards to mandate the teaching of creationism in science classrooms.
Apparently, for her (a noted scholar not mentioned in our original text),
the intrusion of religion into the science classroom is less troubling
than the idea that natural science gets at truths about nature that
transcend socio-cultural particulars.
For us, however, the greatest surprises have been pleasant ones.
Chief among them was the international uproar occasioned by the
publication of Alan Sokals now-famous hoax, Transgressing the
Boundaries: The Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,
in the trendy cultural studies journal Social Text . The ongoing saga of
Sokals pleasantry is instructive on several levels. The joke arose from
Sokals reading of our book. Originally, as a principled leftist, he
suspected that we two might be conservatives as charged, advancing
antiliberal agenda under the pretext of defending science. However, he
ultimately found much of our argument persuasive. In fact, his own
researches convinced him that we had in some respects understated the
case. His dismay at the clear evidence that a once-vigorous intellectual
tradition of radical dissent is slipping into irrationality prompted him
to put aside physics for a few weeks in the fall of 1994 in order to
compose his delightful parody. It was submitted to Social Text , in all
apparent seriousness, early that winter. Unknown to Sokal at the time,
that publication, under the leadership of Prof. Andrew Ross (see
Chapter 4), was preparing a special issue on what it dubbed the
science wars. The intention was to vindicate assorted poststructuralist,
multicultural, and feminist critiques of science and to denounce their
critics, most notably the depraved Gross and Levitt. Sokals piece, with
its seconding and fulsome praise of such intentions, was snapped up by
the editors.
The tainted issue appeared in due course (May 1996), Sokals
revelation of the hoax appeared a few days later in Lingua Franca, and
then all hell broke loose. Predictably, some conservatives crowed,
citing the Sokal Text affair as further proof that left-wing sympathies
equate to outright dementia (notwithstanding Sokals own leftist
views). But the reaction of a large number of left-intellectuals was
more lasting and perhaps more significant for the academy. Sokals
hoax brought into the open a widespread reaction, years in the making,
against the sesquipedalian posturings of postmodern theory and the
futility of the identity politics that so often travels with it. Cutting-edge
celebrities, long used to dictating the tone of political discussion in
progressive circles, suddenly found themselves on the hot seat. As of
this writing, the recriminations continue with no sign of abatement.
We had hoped to include in this new edition, as an appendix, the
full text of Sokals article, which cites verbatim and to exceedingly
comic effect a goodly collection of postmodernist authorities on
science and its philosophical import. Alas, their tender sensibilities
intervened to frustrate the hope. Duke University Press, under the
leadership of Prof. Stanley Fish, is the publisher of Social Text and thus
owns the copyright to Sokals piece. That scholarly organization
responded to a Johns Hopkins University Press request for reprint
permission with what can only be described as an exorbitant demand
for royalties. The proffered justification was greed: they expected, it
was explained, that the Johns Hopkins Press would make lots of money
from such a deal, and they wanted their cut. The grapevine brings to our
ears, however, credible rumors suggesting that spite, rather than lucre,
might have been the chief reason for this dogfish-in-the-manger
attitude. Whatever the case, we apologize to the reader. The text of
Sokals highly relevant put-on must be consulted elsewhere.
Interest stirred up by our book convinced us to try to extend the
discussion by organizing a conference under the sponsorship of the
New York Academy of Sciences. This conference, held in New York in
the spring of 1995, was called The Flight from Science and Reason;
several dozen scholars and writerswhom we do not blush to call
distinguishedcontributed to it. It had at least the virtue of
demonstrating that misgivings about the spread of relativism and
antirationalism, or, more broadly, the increasing loss of nerve within an
intellectual community faced with the need to defend logic, evidence,
and rational thought, are not the parochial concern of self-interested
scientists. The wide spectrum of political views and academic
disciplines represented confirmed that the proposition that there is a
growing disdain for reason and science is not simply a bugbear of
conservatives looking for a pretext to discredit the left. The conference
proceedings, now reissued by the Johns Hopkins Press, incorporate a
number of essays recruited subsequent to the actual meeting, expanding
the range of topics and perspectives. Whatever else might be said about
this conference, its breadth was, in our age of narrow specialization,
astonishing (at least it astonished us). Where else, in a single volume,
can one find informed debate about editorial practice in preparing
editions of King Lear, on the one hand, and about the implications of
the quantum-mechanical formalism for our view of physical reality, on
the other?
By the time those proceedings were published, the science wars
(we dislike the term, but the coinage is out there) were in full career,
with the Sokal affair but one obvious stimulant. Radical science
studies, with its do-it-yourself epistemologies, had long enjoyed a
certain immunity from serious challenge or criticism. That immunity
began to melt away as more and more scientists became aware of the
breadth and depth of the misconceptions about science being
propagated by constructivist historians, sociologists of scientific
knowledge, and feminist epistemologists, among others. Benchmarks in
this process included Nobelist M. F. Perutzs astringent New York
Review of Books article on Gerald Geisons The Private Science of
Louis Pasteur and the ensuing correspondence. The Sokal parody
generated its own large literature, including essays by another Nobel
laureate, physicist Steven Weinberg, also in the New York Review of
Books, and philosopher Paul Boghossian, in the Times Literary
Supplement. The science studies establishment seems divided about
how to respond to such arguments. Heavy manifestos in defense of the
absolute truth of relativism and the permanent ephemerality of
scientific knowledge issue from some quarters; historian Paul Forman
and literary theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith have provided
paradigmatic samples of the genre. On the other hand, there have been
some frantic signals from once-stalwart adherents of the science-as-
social-convention orthodoxy that the time has come to back away from
the now-blunted cutting edge. Angry arguments for the defense, of the
nobody ever believed that variety, erupt from time to time into print
M. Norton Wise has provided important type-specimens. These come
to grief, however, as time and again something else pops up in print to
prove that someone pretty famous in the science studies game does
indeed believe exactly that.
The issues now reverberate in elite scholarly institutions. Stanford
University, for instance, raised serious questions about its own science
studies program. Even more striking, the Institute for Advanced Study,
at Princeton University, perhaps the most prestige-laden academic
research facility in the country, has been in the thick of the argument.
Unknown to us, shortly before this volume was written, there was
conflict when anthropologist of science Bruno Latour (see Chapter 3)
was proposed as a permanent member by the Faculty of Social Science.
The Institutes mathematicians and physicists, acquainting themselves
with Latours writings, raised the roof, and the nomination was
withdrawn. Our own comments on Latour were written in ignorance of
these events; in fact, owing to the institutes code of silence, nearly a
year passed following the publication of Higher Superstition before
rumors of the fracas were confirmed. Quite recently (within the past
few weeks) the issue has flared anew in the same place. M. Norton
Wise, a cultural historian of science at Princeton, was proposed for the
institute position once denied Latour, and rejected. Readers of Wises
review of this book (in Isis) and of The Flight from Science and Reason
( i n American Scientist) will perhaps understand why we are not as
disheartened by this event as the social-scientist commentators say we
ought all to be. It is among the signals that scientists and
mathematicians have begun, finally, to take notice of what some of the
leading figures of science studies have been writing and teaching for
nearly two decades.
Conferences and seminars throughout the United States and
Western Europe, as well as a flood of new publications, now reflect the
argument, or struggle: in that sense, the flippant coinage science wars
can be justified. Many notable historians and sociologists of science
have long held misgivings about the intellectual nihilism that offers
itself as cultural constructivism; but they have been reluctant to
challenge it for fear of gaining a reputation as sissies, too weak-kneed
to play the exhilarating game of epistemological chicken. Just as
often, they have been cowed by fear of the academically fatal
accusations: political conservatism, sexism, disdain for the Other.
Moreover, in order to commit themselves publicly to professional
conflict, honest scholars need time to do painstaking research, and they
usually need to feel that they wont be just wasting breath. Now,
however, some of them seem to be in a fighting mood. Highly touted
works of the science studies avant garde have recently come under
systematic scrutiny and have been found lacking, not only because of
perverse philosophical assumptions but also for flaws in methodology
and for serious historical inaccuracies. As evidence of this new mood,
we cite A House Built on Sand, a compilation of such critiques soon to
appear from Oxford University Press. If the publication of Higher
Superstition played some catalytic role in these reactions, then we are
pleased to have written it.
A word about changes and supplements to this second edition. We
have corrected some typographical errors in the text and a few
awkwardnesses in wording, without altering the underlying meaning. A
few minor factual slips have been corrected. We have had second
thoughts about some points, often at the prompting of well-informed
readers; a new set of Supplementary Notes sets those forth. The notes
also include evidence on matters whose further investigation has made
our case stronger than it was when first examined. A few new, relevant
facts complete the addenda.
During the preparation of this new edition, we have had deeply
appreciated support for it and related projects: N. L., from the Open
Society Institutes Individual Project Fellowships Program, and P. R.
G., via a grant from the Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund to the
New York Academy of Sciences. Finally, we thank Douglas Armato
and the Johns Hopkins University Press staff for their expert assistance
in bringing this paperback edition to timely printing.
 Acknowledgments

The following friends and colleagues have helped, beyond the

possibility of adequate thanks, in the writing of this book. All have
read, or heard, or discussed with us at least some part of it. All had
blame as well as praise to reportin varied proportions. In no case
have we taken all of someones advice; but in every case we have taken
some of it. We owe special thanks to those correspondents who
identified examples and sources we had over-looked, and who went out
of their way to provide us with their own published and unpublished
work and with other documents that might otherwise have eluded us.
We are deeply grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Press, whose
director and staff have from the start displayed the mixture of
flexibility and intellectual seriousness that one does, and should, expect
from a university press. Our gratitude to editors Marie Blanchard and
Terry Schutz is boundless.
In this book we speak, at one point, of threats to the essential grace
and comity of scholarship and the academic life. We mean what we say
there; but the generous responses of our colleagues to various versions
of our writing show clearly that threats are by no means equivalent, as
yet, to major damage. None of those listed here bears the slightest
responsibility for errors of fact, judgment, or style in what follows. We
alone are culpable. On the other hand, a good many such errors are not
here because the following people graciously gave some thought to our
project: Tony Bahri, Felix Browder, Ralph Cohen, Eric Davidson,
Robin Fox, Sheldon Goldstein, Wendy Gross, Antoni Kosinski, Steven
Levitt, Martin Lewis, Eve Menger, R. L. Norman, Bernard Ortiz de
Montellano, Philip Pauly, Christopher Phillips, R. K. Ramazani,
Eugenie Scott, Keith Spurgeon, E. O. Wilson, and Joe Wisnovsky.
We consider it proper to note that our university affiliations are
given for identification only. No position we take in this book is an
official one of either institution or of any academic unit with which we
are associated for teaching or administrative purposes.
Higher Superstition
 CHAPTER ONE

The Academic Left and Science

Ever since puberty I have believed in the value of two things:

kindness and clear thinking. At first these two remained more or
less distinct; when I felt triumphant I believed most in clear
thinking, and in the opposite mood I believed most in kindness.
Gradually, the two have come more and more together in my
feelings. I find that much unclear thought exists as an excuse for
cruelty, and that much cruelty is prompted by superstitious beliefs.
BERTRAND RUSSELL, AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Muddleheadedness has always been the sovereign force in human

affairsa force far more potent than malevolence or nobility. It
lubricates our hurtful impulses and ties our best intentions in knots. It
blunts our wisdom, misdirects our compassion, clouds whatever
insights into the human condition we manage to acquire. It is the chief
artisan of the unintended consequences that constitute human history.
To crusade against muddleheadedness, therefore, may be the most
futile, and hence the most muddleheaded, quest of all. Inasmuch as that
is the aim of this book, we concede that we may be as misguided as any
of our subjects. Still, passivity in the end is more reprehensible than
quixotry.
Sub specie aeternitatis, it hardly pays to subdivide
muddleheadedness into different categories arising from different
social and historical circumstances. An attempted taxonomy implies
ingratitude toward the philosophers and poets who have demonstrated,
in their varied and powerful ways, the ineluctability of folly. What one
is muddled about may well be the consequence of ones specific
relation to society, politics, and history. Muddleheadedness, as such,
goes on forever. Humankind does not live, however, sub specie
aeternitatis; neither of us has ever tried to do so and we dont think we
would like it. And so we are tempted to make, this once, a
categorization that we reject as in general illusory. We take on a
species of muddleheadedness that abounds in a particular contemporary
communitymore precisely an interlinked net of communitiesthat
has flourished in its present form for a decade or two and that might,
although we doubt it, fade out of existence before another decade has
passed.
We hope to be as clear in our thinking as Bertrand Russell would
have wished, though it will be difficult to be as kind. Since much of
what we write will appear, and in places may actually be, polemical, a
certain gleefulness may be imputed to some of our observations. It
would be sanctimonious to plead innocence, or to seek forgiveness in
advance. But it should be noted that such glee as we may inadvertently
exhibit is an ambiguous thing: in the last analysis, the subjects of our
rancor are not enemies but friends. There is inescapable irony in that,
but, we trust, no hypocrisy. Our chief hope in writing this is to convert
friends (whose asseverations are for the moment our subject), or at
least to persuade them to reflect. If we succeed only in gratifying their
traditional foes, providing one more shaft to be launched against them,
we shall have failed utterly.
 The Academic Left

Our subject is the peculiarly troubled relationship between the natural

sciences and a large and influential segment of the American academic
community which, for convenience but with great misgiving, we call
here the academic left. The academic left cannot be said to have a
well-defined theoretical position with respect to scienceit is far too
diverse and internally contentious for thatbut there is a noteworthy
uniformity of tone, and that tone is unambiguously hostile. To put it
bluntly, the academic left dislikes science. Naturally enough, it dislikes
some of the uses to which science is put by the political and economic
forces controlling our society, especially in such areas as military
hardware, surveillance of dissidents, destructive and environmentally
unsound industrial processes, and the manipulation of mass
consciousness through the technologies of popular culture.1
This is hardly surprising: such dislikes are widespread, and
scientists themselves display them as much as anyone. Within the
academic left, however, hostility extends to the social structures
through which science is institutionalized, to the system of education
by which professional scientists are produced, and to a mentality that is
taken, rightly or wrongly, as characteristic of scientists. Most
surprisingly, there is open hostility toward the actual content of
scientific knowledge and toward the assumption, which one might have
supposed universal among educated people, that scientific knowledge is
reasonably reliable and rests on a sound methodology.
It is this last kind of hostility that scientists who are aware of it
find most enigmatic. There is something medieval about it, in spite of
the hypermodern language in which it is nowadays couched. It seems to
represent a rejection of the strongest heritage of the Enlightenment. It
seems to mock the idea that, on the whole, a civilization is capable of
progressing from ignorance to insight, notwithstanding the
benightedness of some of its members. We have the sense,
encountering such attitudes, that irrationality is courted and proclaimed
with pride. All the more shocking is the fact that the challenge comes
from a quarter that views itself as fearlessly progressivethe veritable
cutting edge of the cultural future. On the surface at least, the
phenomenon is not a case of nostalgia. These critics of science do not
repine for the traditional mores and devout certainties of a prescientific
age. They accuse science itself of a reactionary obscurantism, and they
revile it as an ideological prop of the present order, which many of
them despise and hope to abolish.
We try to use the troubling term academic left with reasonable
precision. This category is comprised, in the main, of humanists and
social scientists; rarely do working natural scientists (who may
nevertheless associate themselves with liberal or leftist ideas) show up
within its ranks. The academic left is not completely defined by the
spectrum of issues that form the benchmarks for the left/right
dichotomy in American and world politics, although by reference to
that standard setrace, womens rights, health care, disarmament,
foreign policyit unquestionably belongs on the left. Another set of
beliefsperhaps it is more accurate to call them attitudescomes into
play in an essential way, shaping this subculture. What defines it, as
much as anything else, is a deep concern with cultural issues, and, in
particular, a commitment to the idea that fundamental political change
is urgently needed and can be achieved only through revolutionary
processes rooted in a wholesale revision of cultural categories.
 This apocalyptic break with things-as-they-are is supposed to
displace a vast array of received cultural values and substitute an
entirely novel ethos. From this perspective feminism, for example,
means more than full juridical equality for women, more than income
parity and equal access to careers, more than irrevocable reproductive
rights. It means, in fact, a complete overthrow of traditional gender
categories, with all their conscious and unconscious postulates. By the
same token, racial justice, on this view, does not mean peaceful
assimilation of blacks into the dominant culture, but the forging of an
entirely new culture, in which black (or African) valuesin social
relations, economics, aesthetics, personal sensibilitieswill have at
least equal standing with white values. Similarly, environmentalism,
as understood and preached on the academic left, extends far beyond
concrete measures to eliminate pollution, or to avoid extinction of
species and elimination of habitats. Rather, it envisions a transcendence
of the values of Western industrial society and the restoration of an
imagined prelapsarian harmony to humanitys relations with nature.
Most scientists are made aware of the academic lefts critique
only by fragmentary and sporadic contact. They may have heard
feminist or environmentalist or multiculturalist criticisms of their
disciplines; but they have given themgenerallyscant attention.
They may have encountered books and popular articles proclaiming
epistemological revolution in science and everything else on the basis
of postmodernist philosophical insight; but they have not been much
moved. They think they know that species of proclamation. They have
heard rumors of literary critics waxing sententious over the uncertainty
principle, or Gdels theorem; but if so, they have almost certainly
written these efforts off as harmless, even charming, examples of the
literary temperament.
 We do not suggest that there is any reason for scientists to be
acutely alarmed in the short run. The academic lefts rebellion against
science is unlikely to affect scientific practice and content; nor will it
penetrate the attitudes of those who study the philosophical
implications of science from a position of genuine familiarity. The
danger, for the moment at least, is not to science itself. What is
threatened is the capability of the larger culture, which embraces the
mass media as well as the more serious processes of education, to
interact fruitfully with the sciences, to draw insight from scientific
advances, and, above all, to evaluate science intelligently. To the extent
that the academic lefts critique becomes the dominant mode of
thinking about science on the part of nonscientists, that thinking will be
distorted and dangerously irrelevant.

Sources of Indignation

Much of this critique is informed or inspired by what is usually called

postmodern thought and its concomitant value system.2 In turn,
postmodernism is embedded and elaborated in the scholarly work of
the academic left, notably in fields such as literary criticism, social
history, and a new hybrid called cultural studies. Postmodernism is
grounded in the assumption that the ideological system sustaining the
cultural and material practices of Western European civilization is
bankrupt and on the point of collapse. It claims that the intellectual
schemata of the Enlightenment have been abraded by history to the
point that nothing but a skeleton remains, held together by unreflective
habit, incapable of accommodating the creative impulses of the future.
Postmodernism, however, is but one of the strands from which the
academic left weaves its indictment. Other notions both new and old
enter into the cloth. The traditional Marxist view that what we think of
as science is really bourgeois science, a superstructural manifestation
of the capitalist order, recurs with predictable regularity, in its own
right or refurbished as the doctrine of cultural constructivism. The
radical feminist view that science, like every other intellectual
structure of modern society, is poisoned and corrupted by an
ineradicable gender bias, is another vitally important element. An
analogous accusation comes from multiculturalists, who view
Western science as inherently inaccurate and incomplete by virtue of
its failure to incorporate the full range of cultural perspectives. A
certain strain of radical environmentalism condemns science as
embodying the instrumentalism and alienation from direct experience
of nature which are the twin sources of an eventual (or imminent)
ecological doomsday.
These ideas are the chief elements alloyed to form the academic
lefts challenge to conventional scientific thinking. It must be noted,
however, that there is no canonical way of combining them. Although
we have been speaking of an academic left critique, it must be stressed
and we are compelled to stress it throughout the discussion to follow
that this is not a self-consistent body of doctrine. Rather, it is a
congeries of different doctrines, with no well-defined center, each of
which draws upon the notions we have cited in an idiosyncratic way,
elaborating some of them with enthusiasm while leaving others in the
background and rejecting still others completely. What enables them to
coexist congenially, in spite of gross logical inconsistencies, is a shared
sense of injury, resentment, and indignation against modern science.
Natural science is one of the last major features of Western life
and thought to come systematically under the critical gaze of the
academic left. The reason is obvious. In order to think critically about
science, one must understand it at a reasonably deep level. This task, if
honestly approached, requires much time and labor. In fact it is best
started when one is young. It is scarcely compatible with the style of
education and training that nurtures the average humanist, irrespective
of his or her political inclinations. On the other hand, science, together
with its immediate realization as technology, isas much as anything
can bethe single aspect of Western thought and social practice that
defines the Western outlook and accounts for its special position in the
world. Non-Western societiesJapan, to take the obvious example
can simultaneously succeed and maintain their identities only to the
degree that they naturalize the science and technology of Western
culture. Consequently, if one is predisposed to regard that Western
position of privilege as wicked, for its prejudices and for its history of
conquest, then one will inevitably regard Western science with
suspicion and perhaps with contempt. Sooner or later any critique of
Western values aspiring to be comprehensive must offer an analysis of
natural science, preferably scathing.
It would seem to follow, then, that the last eight or ten years
should have seen a flock of earnest humanists and social critics
crowding into science and mathematics lecture rooms, the better to arm
themselves for the fateful confrontation. This has not happened. A
curious fact about the recent left-critique of science is the degree to
which its instigators have overcome their former timidity or
indifference toward the subject not by studying it in detail but rather by
creating a repertoire of rationalizations for avoiding such study.
Buoyed by a stance on science, they feel justified in bypassing the
grubby necessities of actual scientific knowledge. This is not because
any great number of science apostates has flocked to their banner,
although a handful of figures with scientific credentials, as well as the
occasional refugee from an unsatisfactory scientific career, can be
found on the movements fringes. The assumption that makes specific
knowledge of science dispensable is that certain new-forged
intellectual toolsfeminist theory, postmodern philosophy,
deconstruction, deep ecologyand, above all, the moral authority with
which the academic left emphatically credits itself are in themselves
sufficient to guarantee the validity of the critique.
Thus we encounter books that pontificate about the intellectual
crisis of contemporary physics, whose authors have never troubled
themselves with a simple problem in statics; essays that make knowing
reference to chaos theory, from writers who could not recognize, much
less solve, a first-order linear differential equation; tirades about the
semiotic tyranny of DNA and molecular biology, from scholars who
have never been inside a real laboratory, or asked how the drug they
take lowers their blood pressure. We speak not only from an
acquaintance with the literature, but from regular experience of
lectures, seminars, and symposia, where speakers tend to say more
directly what they think than they do in print, and whose reigning
attitude is that the cultivation of an authentically postmodern cultural
critique requires the avoidance of dialogue with anyone who happens to
be a working professional scientist. Above all, it demands a principled
refusal to learn the substance of the science one proposes to criticize.
It would appear alarmist, then, for us to get in a lather about what
is, by our own account, a feckless enterprise. Life is short; the impulse
to let asses bray is strong. It would certainly have saved us the trouble
of writing this book had we honored it. We do not anticipate, after all,
that radio astronomers will be hanged from the Very Large Array, or
that topologists will be shown the instruments of torture and forced to
recant the h-cobordism theorem. We expect little early change in the
teaching and learning of science on the basis of these politicized
critiques (although proposals in that direction, including some from
people who should know better, pop up now with regularity).
Nevertheless, we judge it worthwhile to analyze at some length the
animus toward science currently expressed by the academic left. Its
existence has to be read as the manifestation of a certain intellectual
debility afflicting the contemporary university: one that will ultimately
threaten it. One learns, after many years of observing university life
and of experiencing most of its levels, that these institutions are
fundamentally unlovable,3 but also that their health has become
incalculably important for the future of our descendants and, indeed, of
our species.

Insularities

The academic left is embedded in a nearly inviolable insularity, which

extends and intensifies that of traditional humanists. The classicists and
historians of whom C. P. Snow spoke famously in The Two Cultures
and the Scientific Revolution were excoriated for their self-satisfied
ignorance of the most basic principles of science. Today we find
ourselves, as scientists, confronting an ignorance even more profound
when it is not, in fact, simply displaced by a sea of misinformation.
That ignorance is now conjoined with a startling eagerness to judge and
condemn in the scientific realm. A respect for the larger intellectual
community of which we are a part urges us to speak out against such an
absurdity. This, we consider, is one of the duties of the scientific
thinker, a duty commonly ignored.
 Working scientists undeniably have the habitmore than a bit
arrogantof assuming that laymen cant get it right anyway, and that
comical misunderstanding of what science is up to is inevitable. Why
should yet another episode of the same old thingthey have been
seeing it all their working livesexercise them? We reply that the
proliferation of distortions and exaggerations about science, of tall
tales and imprecations, threatens to poison the intellectual cohesion
necessary for a university to work as anything other than a collection of
fiefdoms, trying to avoid each others concernsand studentsas
much as possible. We recognize that it is necessary for science
patiently to abide social scrutiny, since science and its uses affect the
prospects of the entire society. That kind of scrutiny is a serious
enterprise, requiring painstaking attention to fact and a disinclination to
extrapolate beyond the bounds of reasonable inference. In the current
climate, such sane and indispensable scrutiny threatens to be displaced
by myth-making of the most fanciful sort. The key function of these
myths is to gratify the resentment and self-righteousness of those who
propose them, and to serve as symbolic wish-fulfillment in a world that
is notably indifferent to their politics.
On our own, we cannot hope to undo any significant fraction of the
damage already done. Our wish is that thoughtful people in and out of
the academy, but most particularly scientists, engineers, physicians,
and the like, might become aware that this hostility to science exists,
that it has coherence as a political project, if not, strictly speaking, as a
body of doctrine, and that time and effort should be devoted to
examining and refuting it. The countering arguments must be made
with reason and patience, but also with a determination not to be put off
by sloganeering or by the insinuationwhich is certain to arisethat
one is covertly inspired by a desire to keep the oppressed from having
their say or winning the justice due them.
The academic lefts critiques of science have come to exert a
remarkable influence. The primary reason for their success is not that
they put forward sound arguments, but rather that they resort constantly
and shamelessly to moral one-upmanship. If you decry the feminist
critique of science, you are guilty of trying to preserve science as an
old-boys network. If you take exception to eco-apocalyptic rhetoric,
you are an agent, witting or otherwise, of the greed of capitalist-
industrialist polluters. If you reject the convoluted cabalistic fantasies
of postmodernism, you are not only sneered at for a dullard, but
inevitably told that you are in the grip of a crumbling Western
episteme, linked hopelessly to a failing white-male-European
hegemony. This is not pleasant to encounter in debate; but it is very far
from unanswerable. Be assured that it conceals fundamental
weaknesses of fact and logic in the argument of the accuser.
We are treading now on the slippery territory of the political
correctness debate; and we face the fact that this book will be read as
yet another salvo in that dreary war. If we are to be candid, we must
admit that nothing we offer will comfort those who describe the PC
furor as a vicious invention of the political right. Their enemies, on the
other hand, may find here a certain amount of ammunition, if they
wish. It would be idle of us to lay claim to a prim neutrality.
Nonetheless, we are not happy to be classed as reflex partisans of the
right on any issue. There has been plenty of bad faith, dissimulation,
sanctimony, and hypocrisy from all quarters. The academic right is all
too eager to use the grotesqueries of the academic left as an excuse for
walking away from deep and intractable problems. For its part, the left
is ready, at the slightest hint of challenge, to play the martyr and to find
fascism, racism, or denial in it, no matter how judicious and well
reasoned the challenge may be.
We refuse on principle to take sides in the dispute over the literary
canon, in the fights over affirmative action, in the question of whether
it is well to have studies departments for subpopulations with a
history of victimhood. Its not that we dont have opinions on those
questions: we do; but they are simply not what this book is about. What
we have to say is narrowly concerned with science and with
misconceived attacks on science that grow out of a doctrinaire political
position. The left has to take the blame, because thats where most (but
certainly not all) of the silliness is coming from on this issue, at this
time, although there has been an abundance of it in the past from the
other side.4 The campus right has had the good tactical sense to leave
the matter alone, except to comment on the foibles of the left. It may
well be that there are dead-of-night confabulations between leading
anti-PC activists and, let us say, the Institute for Creation Research. If
so, these have yet to come to light. In any case, we are not stalking-
horses for social conservatism. If the academic left were to choose to
abandon the most extravagant of its philosophical lucubrations,
particularly those that lead to misguided assaults on natural science, the
occasion for books like this one would disappear.

Distinctions

In this vein, let us reinforce some fussy but essential distinctions.

When we use the phrase academic left we do not refer merely to
academics with left-wing political views. There are plenty of such
people with whom we have no quarrel. There are countless academics
who do excellent and penetrating work, in appropriate fields, from a
left-wing viewpoint. There are countless left-wing scientistsalthough
we are stodgy enough to insist that there is no such thing as left-wing
science. We are using academic left to designate those people whose
doctrinal idiosyncracies sustain the misreadings of science, its
methods, and its conceptual foundations that have generated what
nowadays passes for a politically progressive critique of it. If this
terminological improvisation causes confusion, we apologize; but
under the circumstances, it seemed the least arbitrary, if not the least
inflammatory, choice. We hope that as our analysis progresses the
necessary distinctions will become clearer to those who read it.
Of course, distinctions between left and right, between the
academic left as we have defined it and other points of view that
generally belong on the left of the political spectrum, cannot be hard
and fast. Notwithstanding that, many of the groups and individuals we
discuss will be eager to denounce us as disguised reactionaries and as
apostles of right-wing malignity. But the academic left makes a grave
mistake when it believes that its ideological extravagances irritate no
one but reactionaries and apologists for oppression. The saddest part of
the situation is that professorial types who are, by any standard, well-
meaning have developed a fatal facility for making enemies much
faster than they make allies. One need look no farther for evidence of
this than the declining public respect for them.
The most perplexing difficulty in responding with a critique of our
own to the newly fashionable critique of science is the absence of a
central body of doctrine that can be said to constitute the quintessence
of that view. There is no intellectual core to the process by which the
critics scrutinize and, for the most part, disparage science; thus there is
no obvious target for a definitive rejoinder. If one examines some of
the best-known and most highly praised assaults as they come to hand,
one immediately notes that each goes off on its own tack, showing little
correlation with the others in its choice of particular scientific practices
to focus upon, its analytical methodology, or its ultimate conclusions
beyond the most general. If one were to compare, say, a traditionally
Marxist analysis, a hard-core postmodern epistemological critique, and
an ecofeminist harangue from the Goddess-worshiping camp, there
would be little to connect any two of them in terms of language or
philosophy. The first would view science as a construct of capitalist
social relations, misdirected by bourgeois idealism, or by some similar
error. The second might concentrate on the instability of language and
the indeterminacy of meaning, on the view that the subversive
implications of these insights apply in full force to the scientific
theories we construct, even those couched in the abstract and
supposedly rigorous language of mathematics and physics. The third
would, presumably, view science as a product of the patriarchal
paradigm of dominance, control, and objectification, and would call for
its transformation or even its abolition as a step on our path back to an
edenic, nature-centered society.
The rank incompatibility of these views would seem, at first
glance, to defy any attempt to characterize them as products of one
ideological subculture. By claiming to do so, we lay ourselves open to
the charge of taking an illegitimate polemical shortcut, of mere
journalism, of ignoring crucial distinctions in order to condemn
irritating opponents. This, however, would be to misread our case.
What we assert is that the examples above, isolated from one another as
they may be in strictly logical terms, are, in fact, extreme points in a
contiguous ideological field. One can easily connect one to the other by
a chain of intermediate examples, positions that synthesize something
of this, a little of that, and just a bit of the other. This, moreover, would
be more than just a theoretical exercise; the intermediate positions exist
as components of the critique: they are being taughtincreasinglyin
university classes.
It is in fact not an exaggeration to say that the science criticism of
the academic left is just such a game of mix-and-match. Each
practitioner assembles his or her arsenal from favorite polemical bits
and piecesa little Marxism to emphasize the twinship of science with
economic exploitation, a little feminism to arraign the sexism of
scientific practice, a little deconstruction to subvert the traditional
reading of scientific theory, perhaps a bit of Afro-centrism to
undermine the notion that scientific achievement is inevitably linked to
European cultural values. Proportions and emphases vary from text to
text; but, as one becomes familiar with this body of theory, the
underlying unities appear. They are more a matter of rhetorical style
than of logical articulation. A strong sense of fellowship and common
purpose unites the array. It is commonplace for one writer to cite, in
flattering terms, a host of others for their bold, incisive, and
devastating insights into the injustices and illusions of the official
scientific culture. As praise of B, like Bs praise of A, takes little
account of the fact that the respective views of A and B are
fundamentally at odds. Still, the name of the game is solidarity.
Differences are soft-pedaled in the interest of an overriding common
purpose, which is to demystify science, to undermine its epistemic
authority, and to valorize ways of knowing incompatible with it.
Although there is no true center, no foundational axiomatics, to
the left-wing critiques of science, a few broad perspectives may be
identified. Sociologists and social theorists, including quite a few
Marxists, tend to produce what may be called cultural constructivist
analyses, viewing scientific knowledge as historically and socially
situated and encoding, in unacknowledged ways, prevailing social
prejudices. The strongest and most aggressive versions of these
theories view science as a wholly social product, a mere set of
conventions generated by social practice. The critics whom, for
convenience, we label as postmodern, attempt to exploit the linguistic
and psychological theories grouped under that cognomen. A radical
epistemological skepticism informs their commentaries on science,
though rarely is it seen to impeach their own researches. For its part,
academic feminism has generated a vast literature commenting on
science from its own perspective. These critiques are probably the best
known and most widely read of all, owing to the ubiquity of womens
studies programs on American campuses and the reality of womens
exclusion from science in the past. As well, the environmental
movement has generated its own challenges to science, concentrating
on the degree to which the orthodox practice of science maintains our
alienation from nature while sustaining technologies that are shattering
the fragile equilibria of planet Earth.
There are no firm and fast divisions among these approaches; they
merge into one another; in most cases we find ourselves dealing with
hybrids. What is common to all of them becomes clear at the rhetorical
level. Modern science is seen, by virtually all of its critics, to be both a
powerful instrument of the reigning order and an ideological guarantor
of its legitimacy. It is stained by all the sins of the culture that
engenders and nurtures it. Thus, whoever attacks it with a view to
vindicating the oppressed, no matter how quixotic the methods, is seen
to be fighting the good fight.
At the same time, in a largely unacknowledged fashion, other old
scores are being settled. For decades certain assumptions about the
epistemological ranking of various fields have prevailed, though rarely
explicitly, among academic intellectuals. The rule of thumb has been
that the hard scientists produce reliable knowledge, assembled into
coherent theories. Historians, it is conceded, generate reliable factual
knowledge (as long as they keep their methodological noses clean); but
this is often contaminated by unprovable and bootless speculation.
Economics has rigor of method; but its assumptions are serious, often
fatal, oversimplifications of the real world. In the other social sciences
impressionistic description and subjective hermeneutics rule, though
they may come dressed in elaborate statistical costumes. The more
theoretical the social scientists are, the less respect they get. Literary
criticism, finally, has been looked upon as a species of highly
elaborated connoisseurship, interesting and valuable, perhaps, but
subjective beyond hope of redemption, and thus out of the running in
the epistemological sweepstakes.
How justified or absurd this folklore may be is beyond the scope
of our inquiry. The point is that it has been folklore for more than a
century, no matter how much presidents, provosts, chancellors, and
deans deny it. The resentment it provokes has been festering. Thus the
fact that theoretical social scientists and professional literary critics
at least those on the leftare prominent among the current critics of
science should not be a surprise. The recent critiques of science
incarnate attempts to regain the high ground, to assert that the methods
of social theory and literary analysis are equal in epistemic power to
those of science.

Designing a Rejoinder

In view of the enormous range of left-wing criticism of science in

terms of philosophical assumptions, historical focus, and working
methodology, the only way to compose a coherent rejoinder within a
reasonable space is to examine a range of specimens. Our study begins
with a brief historical survey of the relation between the sciences and
what may be called, without prejudice, emancipatory politics since the
European Enlightenment. We point to certain intellectual and emotive
roots of the current critique, some of them quite unacknowledged by
recent writers who have demonstrably been influenced by them. We
then devote a number of chapters to surveying the best-known critiques
of science that have emanated from the academic left during the past
few years. In aid of clarity, we group these as categories in accordance
with the distinctions outlined above. We look first at the sociological
or anthropological approach, that is, at the cultural constructivists.
Next we examine the background and the specific practice of the new
academic cult of postmodernism, reflecting upon its attempt to bring
science within its empire. A separate chapter is devoted to the theory
and practice of feminist science criticism. Finally, we examine the
strange and vexatious mixture of good sense and folly that constitutes
the radical-environmentalist approach to science, although, strictly
speaking, in dealing with this topic we move a bit away from the
theoretical atmosphere of the campus and become involved with public
political and technological disputes of great moment.
Our approach in these sections is conspective and polemical.
Nothing else will get attention. We synopsize and, as we see it, refute
some of the representative work in each area. Our space for doing so is
limited. Consequently, the synopses are brief. Simultaneously, we
extract from the critics work certain crucial arguments which, in our
view, exemplify methodological weaknesses and expose the fallacies of
the underlying viewpoint. Admittedly, this is rebuttal of a swift and
selective sort. Nevertheless, given the volume and the diversity of left-
wing science-criticism, we see no other way of giving a comprehensive
idea of the range and variety of these attacks, while at the same time
revealing what we see as their flaws.
A word about scholarly apparatus: Our experience and instincts,
where scientific substance is at stake, call for presentation of necessary
detail within the text, and for comprehensive citation of precedents.
That is the style to which we are accustomed, and it is the one we
would want to use in addressing one part of our hoped-for readership:
professional scholars, including scientists, engineers, and physicians.
Another of our hopes, however, is to reach a wider audience, whose
members would be, if not put off, then at least distracted by the
standard tools of scholarly communication. Compromise, clearly, is
required. It takes the following form: In general, the facts of science
are dealt with in text, but economically andto the best of our ability
comprehensibly. Where there is necessary detail, it is relegated to
endnotes. We have kept the number of those to the minimum consistent
with conscience. Bibliographic citations cannot, therefore, be
comprehensive, as the best scholarly practice would demand. We have
taken pains to choose for citation representative writing and, where
possible, especially among the cited scientific items, to select books
and articles that are themselves bibliographically competent. The
combination of endnotes for any chapter with the appropriate sources
should provide for any reader who wants to pursue its subject, or check
up on us, an adequate guide to the relevant literature.
The thinkers we examine are by no means obscure or peripheral to
the academic lefts assault upon science. Most of them are VIPs in
academia and some are public figures as well. All have published
widely read work on the subject (although occasionally we shall
concentrate on a more obscure paper or a recent, as-yet-unpublished
lecture). To exemplify cultural constructivism, we have chosen
sociologists and historians of science: Stanley Arono-witz, Bruno
Latour, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. For postmodernism, we
have settled upon the philosopher Steven Best, the cultural critic
Andrew Ross, and the literary critic N. Katherine Hayles. The feminist
theorists we consider include some of the best known: Sandra Harding,
Donna Hara-way, Evelyn Fox Keller, Helen Longino. As for the radical
environmentalist attack on science, we concentrate on academics like
Carolyn Merchant, but also on theoristsJeremy Rifkin and Dave
Foreman to take the most obvious exampleswho may not be
academics in the narrow sense, but whose writings and activist
crusades have gained credence and widespread support from the
academy, and whose language and intellectual temperament seem to
echo closely the styles and prejudices of the most prominent
contemporary critics of science.
We follow up these argumentative chapters with a brief survey of
the effect of antiscientific rhetoric from the academic left on a few
well-known (if not particularly powerful) dissident movements.
Specifically, we take a look at the activism that has sprung up within
the gay community in response to the AIDS epidemic, at the animal
rights movement, and at the movement for Afrocentrism (representing
here multiculturalism)5 in education. In reference to the last, we are
particularly concerned with the active championing of an Afrocentric
curriculum, as it affects the teaching of the history of science as well as
of science itself.
In the final chapters, we claim the right, as does everyone else, to
philosophize a bit, going beyond the confines of polemical necessity.
We speculate on the deeper psychological, cultural and social roots of
left-wing hostility to science, viewing it as a phenomenon to be
explained with the help of some cultural constructivism of our own. We
consider the importance of the phenomenon, its implications for
education, for womens participation in science, and for effective
environmental advocacy, among other serious issues. We argue that,
although the criticisms we have examined amount, individually and
collectively, to very little in strictly intellectual terms, it is nonetheless
important for scientists and fair-minded intellectualsand this
includes many left-wing thinkersto take them very seriously. It is not
without historical precedent that incoherent or simply
incomprehensible opinions have had great and pernicious social effect.
Our greatest hope is to stimulate awareness and debate. If other
commentators sympathetic to our views arise to outdo us in polemical
efficiency and pertinacity, we shall have done science a needed service.
If the subjects of our analyses rise to the occasion and sharpen their
own analyses to the point that arguments like ours become irrelevant,
we shall have learned something important about science and the social
organism that begets it. And, of course, we will be delighted either way,
or both.
 CHAPTER TWO

Some History and Politics: Natural

Science and Its Natural Enemies

Having in past days perused Signor Galileo Galileis book entitled

The Assayer, I have come to consider a doctrine already taught by
certain ancient philosophers and effectively rejected by Aristotle,
but renewed by the same Signor Galilei. And having decided to
compare it with the true and undoubted Rule of revealed doctrines,
I have found that in the Light of that Lantern which by the exercise
and merit of our faith shines out indeed in murky places, and
which more securely and more certainly than any natural evidence
illuminates us, this doctrine appears false or even very difficult
and dangerous.
DOCUMENT G3, ARCHIVE OF THE SACRED CONGREGATION FOR THE
DOCTRINE OF THE FAITH

What is the advantage of again digging up a controversy that

was a dialog among the deaf, having no beneficent (but only a
delaying) effect on the history of modern science? Certainly the
theories of physics, unlike theology, did not obtain results from the
century-old struggle, only obstacles.
But there was an effect and that history will make us
appreciate it. It was the effect of making us conquer the autonomy
 of research and reason from which we benefit today. And one
might appreciate the fact that it did not descend to earth from the
heaven of Platos ideas, but was conquered at great cost in the
seventeenth century, like every other human freedom. It is a
common good, which must be safeguarded.
PIETRO REDONDI, IN GALILEO HERETIC

Fresh from the horrors of the Thirty Years War, late seventeenth-
century Europe produced a generation of intellectual giants whose
collective accomplishment was to set in motion an epistemological
enterprise that has continued to flourish over the past three hundred
years, an effort that accelerates and expands continually in its scope,
precision, and reliability. The true scientific revolution instituted by
Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Halley, Harvey, Boyle, Leibniz, and others is
to be found, not in their particular discoveries about the world,
stupendous as these were, but rather in the creation, almost in passing,
of a methodology and a worldview capable of expanding, modifying
and generalizing these discoveries indefinitely. It was, moreover, a
methodology that almost unwittingly set aside the metaphysical
assumptions of a dozen centuries, under which a description of the
physical world would have been incomprehensible had it stood apart
from a vision of transcendent divine order on the Christian model. That
Newton, say, or Leibniz sought in all sincerity to affirm some version
of this divine order through his scientific work is almost beside the
point. The implicit logic of their work turned out to be of immensely
greater importance than the explicit pious intentions of those who
achieved it.
In its ineluctable dynamic, the science of the turn of the eighteenth
century could not be contained within the shell of any theological
system. It was, in important ways, already fully modern. Open-
endedness is the vital principle at stake here. It constitutes the lifeblood
of ongoing science. Newton said it best: an ocean of truth lies
undiscovered before us. Unless we are unlucky, this always will be the
case.
Having escaped most of the constraints of systematic theology, the
new science was hardly to be contained within the ideological matrix of
the society and political system within which it arose. The birth of
Western science as a powerful, systematic, and ever-expanding set of
interlinked disciplines very nearly coincides with the birth of its
prestige as a uniquely reliable and accurate way of describing the
phenomenal world. Consequently, philosophers and political thinkers
of all shades of opinion attempted eagerly to conscript that prestige on
behalf of their own favored ideas. Newton, along with his contemporary
Locke, is often thought of as the tutelary figure of the Glorious
Revolution and of the gentlemanly class, devoted equally to the pursuit
of mercantile wealth and to an Anglican faith forever irreconcilable
with Catholicism, that forged this constitutional and dynastic upheaval
this despite Newtons own peculiarly heterodox Protestantism. A
faction within the Established Church came to be called Newtonian
for its stout insistence that, just as Newtons singularly English genius
revealed the eternal regularity of Gods law made manifest in celestial
mechanics, so too did the Church of England and the social system with
which it was intertwined reveal the intentions of the Deity for the
rightful ordering of human affairs.
But the partisans of social stability could scarcely maintain a
monopoly over the totemic power of Newtonian physics. A deeper
understanding of science itself, as well as an entirely different set of
speculations as to what it might imply for the human political order,
emerged throughout Western Europe. This is symbolized by the growth
of Freemasonry as a sort of philosophical shadow government, by the
attempts of the Encyclopedists to systematize and codify the full range
of human knowledge, by the development of political economy as a
fruitful intellectual enterprise.1 The relationship between science as
such and these various tendencies was by no means fixed according to
any particular stereotype. It is, however, certain that sciencein
particular Newtonian physics and its related mathematicsheld sway
as a privileged model and inspiration, the very emblem of the power of
the human intellect to probe beneath surface appearances, to rectify
vulgar prejudices, and to exile habits of thought more ancient than
accurate.
In the sphere of social thought, the success of physics inspired
emulation in the form of analyses of society seeking general principles
that might be made to yield a deep understanding of the dynamics of
history, politics, and economic activity. The urge to prescribe, as well
as to describe and predict, ran strong in these attempts, in a manner
quite uncharacteristic of physics itself; but the boldness, indeed the
arrogance, required to set forth schemes for the radical improvement of
the human condition and for the rapid cure of its ancient ills reflects an
intellectual self-assurance that derives largely from contemplation of
the well-confirmed triumphs of eighteenth-century mathematical
science. If the few simple axioms adumbrated by the Principia could be
induced to yield precise accounts of the orbits of planets and comets, of
the eccentricity of the earth and the precession of its axis, of the pattern
of oceanic tides, why should there not be an equally elegant,
comprehensive, and reliable systemization of the study of human
affairs?
The obligations of hindsight impel us to look on most of these
attempts as failures variously fatuous, quixotic, or disastrous, whose
culmination is to be found in the self-defeating utopianism of the
French Revolution. Admirers of Adam Smiths economics, or of the
abiding wisdom of the American Constitution, will, on the other hand,
discern triumphs amidst the scores of false starts and blind alleys. Our
own position is that even on the most optimistic view such triumphs are
drenched in irony and soured by an unending stream of historical
misfortunes. These disputes, however, are not central to our point.
What we wish to emphasize, rather, is that the underlying strategy that
guides the intellectual enterprises of Smith, Diderot, Locke, Gibbon,
Herder, Hume, Jefferson, and (what was until recently) a pantheon of
others remains as an ongoing tradition that is unlikely to disappear
within the imaginable future. This is simply, in its most naked form,
the strategy of taking the social order, per se, as the object of ones
critical investigations, seeing it as describable, in large measure, on the
basis of discoverable first principles. It is to be implemented by
combining careful and exhaustive attention to solid empirical fact with
the construction of a more or less rigorous deductive model.
At their best, such theories yield chains of propositions which
themselves may be variously regarded as confirmed insights into the
social organism, or as tentative hypotheses to be tested in the hard
world of experience, as a trial of the soundness of the fundamental
postulates of the theory. That this accords, if only in a very rough
sense, with the epistemological model already set in place by the
physical sciences is, we think, so obvious as to need no further
argument.
It is important to attend to another aspect of such Enlightenment
for that is what we are describingsocial thought. It seems to us that
what a broad spectrum of thinkers have in common is their
determination to regard the social position of individuals as resulting
neither from the decrees of a transcendent divinity nor from the
processes of an optimal social mechanism. Rank, wealth, and power are
seen as contingent facts, rather than as the emblems of an innate or
achieved social perfection. Whatever their differences, none of these
philosophers cry along with Pope and Handel Whatever Is, Is Right.
Rather, schemes and prescriptions abound for the reconstitution of the
social organism to bring it into alignment with the dictates of reason
and nature. Furthermore, the ills and malfunctions of the existing order
are almost always located in the undeniable maldistribution of wealth,
power, prestige, and immunity that is to be found everywhere. Thus a
strongly implicit egalitarianism suffuses the thinking of the savants of
the time, at least of those whose work still speaks resonantly to us. This
may range from the openness to entrepreneurial innovation advocated
by Smith to Rousseaus near-mystical celebration of the General Will
and the unanimity of its votaries; but such distinctions seem more
important, we submit, in hindsight. The key point is that it came to be
seen that any system claiming to be based on natural justice must
accommodate the concept that at some level all individuals are to be
equally empowered by the fundamental political processes of the state.
It hardly matters that at this level of generality such ideas are as
ancestral to the apologies for free-market capitalism so dear to modern
conservatives as to the garrison-state socialism of North Korea or
Vietnam, and it hardly matters that the egalitarian view tended to be
blind, now and again, to particular parts of the landscape.
It is fair to say, in short, that by the time of the French Revolution
a certain suite of ideas had become regnant in European (and North
American) political philosophy. The empiricism and rigor of the
sciences were emulated in the analytic strategies of political thought;
and this, in turn, was for the most part linked to an emancipatory
project for the renovation or reconstitution of existing social systems.
It is of course possible, and tempting, to speculate whether a similar
system of scientific discourse might have arisen in an entirely different
social context. Might it have been possible, for instance, in Tang
Dynasty China or under the Pax Romana? Or could science have
matured only upon a substrate of subtly congenial social ideals and
institutions, like those found in seventeenth-century Europe? Such
speculation, though it continues actively and vigorously, is, in some
sense, futile, for we are speaking of an event that is in essence unique
and unrepeatable. Short of an utter collapse of our civilization on a
global scale, the opportunity to reinvent science will not arise. So the
association of Enlightenment ideas in the realm of politics with that
eras celebrationindeed, near-deificationof science may be largely
fortuitous. Nonetheless, at least to the extent that the political aspects
come up against the authority of religion as well as the mythic power of
other traditional rationalizations of the established order, science is a
weapon to be wielded both specifically and emblematically. Laplaces
famous explanationI did not find the hypothesis necessaryof the
absence of the Deity from his system of cosmology is both a succinct
lesson in the explanatory parsimony of scientific thinking and a war cry
of political and ideological defiance.
The disastrous failure of the French Revolution and the aftermath
of that failure is, of course, perhaps the most ringing example of the
triumph of inadvertence over intention in human history. It instilled in
Western thinkers a full measure of skepticism concerning utopian
systems and schemes for universal reform. Even before that, during the
headiest moments of early republicanism, the canny Burke had already
put his finger on the weaknesses of abstract philosophizing as a guide
to the attainment of social perfection. Burke, however, is but one of a
spectrum of thinkers who begin to show strong doubts about the
deification of the merely rational. Far more emphatic and impassioned
are the great figures of Romantic individualism, including Blake,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and, above all, Goethe. It is in literature and
poetry that we first begin to encounter a reaction against Enlightenment
values that reveals a specific distrust of science, as well as a strong
reluctance to believe that mankind can be reformed along scientific
lines.
This is a vexatious topic: to do it justice, one must be endlessly
willing to draw distinctions. Blake is a very different animal,
politically and philosophically as well as poetically, from the Olympian
Goethe, and neither is very close in spirit to the reactionary
Wordsworth settled into his endless counterrevolutionary old age. Yet,
in point of attitude toward epistemological questions, and, quite
explicitly, toward the authority of science, the poets are linked by a
strong commonality of thought. Each distrusts the narrowly empirical
and the strictly rational, each celebrates the vital importance of the
intuitive, the irreproducible moment of insight and of direct access to
truth in its unmediated essence. Each accuses science, especially in its
schematic, mathematicized form, of blindness, or worse, stubborn
refusal to see. Each fears a world in which scientific thought has
become the sovereign mode, and recoils from the spiritual degradation
and servility that, in his opinion, must inevitably come to characterize
such a world. Blake makes his protest in the name of an ecstatic,
antinomian, revolutionary vision that comforts neither Jacobins nor
Royalists. Goethe speaks for an idiosyncratic classicism, neither fully
pagan nor fully Christian, neither revolutionary nor reactionary, as
singular as the great man himself. Wordsworth seems merely a self-
satisfied old Tory. But beneath these divergent visions, we find an
underlying distrust of straightforward, impersonal reasoning. The belief
in direct, revelatory, intuitive truth to be had from communion with
nature is the obverse of a deep epistemological skepticism about the
kind of systematic truth that is the core of scientific knowledge. In
this aspect, Romantic thought, even at its most revolutionary, is allied
to the caustic, all-encompassing skepticism of that relentless
reactionary Joseph de Maistre, whose most brilliant exercises in logic
and empirical inference are expressly designed to demonstrate the
unreliability and futility of logic and empirical inference.2
(We cannot resist the temptation to take note, in passing, of the
fact that the Romantic exaltation of intuitive Understanding above
merely cerebral Reason foreshadows the celebration of holism and
organicism by contemporary critics of science, who are impatient
with the disciplined analysis and methodological exactness of serious
scientific work. Likewise, Maistre, in his counterrevolutionary ferocity,
is the true spiritual ancestor of the postmodern skepticism so dear to
the hearts of the academic left.)
Whatever its effect on the history of poetry and sensibility,
however, the Romantic revulsion against the scientific worldview had
virtually no effect on the development of science itself. The nineteenth
century turned science into a profession. Its status as the preserve of
gentlemen-amateurs and isolated virtuosi dependent on aristocratic
patronage receded into history. The education of scientists was rapidly
systematized, and the universities, especially in France and Germany,
took on their now-familiar role as nurseries for aspiring scientists and
sponsors of experimental, as well as speculative, work. The
subdivisions of science came to be ever more clearly defined, and the
intense specialization that marks the science of our own day took
shape. At the same time, the link between theoretical science and direct
technological innovation became concretized in the growth of
institutions, both educational and commercial, that vastly expanded the
scope of the engineering profession, while tying it ever more firmly to
rigorous scientific foundations. The interval between the first
systematic attempts to derive an adequate mathematical theory of
electricity and magnetismthose of Gauss and Ampre, sayand the
systematic construction first of telegraph networks, then of electrical
systems to power whole cities is, by any standard, incredibly brief.
This fully symbolizes the degree to which Western culture, almost
unthinkingly, entirely altered its own material underpinnings. To
compare the European states, circa 1800 with, say, the Chinese or
Ottoman empires is a historical and geopolitical exercise dealing with
entities which, however greatly they differ, may be measured against
each other in terms of economic, industrial, agricultural, navigational,
and military capacity. By 1900, such a comparison is idle. The sudden
disparity has little to do with the traditional ebb and flow of power, and
everything to do with assimilation of the scientific enterprise into the
heart of the Western social fabric. It seems to us doubtful that
historians have yet come to grips with this development, in the sense of
having found a language to tell us exactly what happened in the space
of a few generations. We are still far too close to the scene,
chronologically, to take the measure of this revolution; it is an
upheaval yet in progress and its consequences cascade over us daily.
We are too numb to grasp its magnitude: that privilege must fall to
future historians.
We are nevertheless at liberty to make modest observations on the
political concomitants of these transformations. In the first place, it is
clear that millenarian hopes for the reconstruction of the social order
along scientific lines hardly disappeared with the collapse of
revolutionary idealism in France and the subsequent catastrophe of the
Napoleonic Wars. The tradition of social engineering continued in
the schemes of the Utilitarians, of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, of
the New England Transcendentalists, and of Auguste Comte. 3 Though
of little historical consequence, these demonstrate how the habit of
assuming that society is a tractable category, analytically and
politically, had become ingrained in Western thought. They
demonstrate almost equally well the rough equation of a more
scientific social order with a more egalitarian one, and the
opposition between a view of the world informed by science and one
occluded by stagnant tradition. This observation takes on particular
poignancy when we consider the curious intellectual trajectory of Karl
Marx, an epochal thinker who eagerly admired science in the abstract,
envied the inevitability of its logic, conscripted its prestige for his own
polemical purposes, and still managed in the end to misunderstand it
thoroughly.
In speaking of science and its social consequences in the
nineteenth century, we cannot avoid the notion of Progress and its
role in the generally optimistic view of historical process that held
sway during that period. Contemporary critics have told us repeatedly
and with great sagacity how problematical the idea of progress is.
Progress for whom, in what direction, at what expense to which class?
The progress of the upstart manufacturer in the English midlands or the
New England mill town may well have affronted the seigniorial pride
of the landed aristocrat or the Tidewater planterhardly an outrage to
ones democratic sentiments. On the other hand, the industrialists
prosperity was the millworkers hell. The technology that minted
wealth for its owners forged chains for its servants. The superiority of
the technologized economic superstructure of Europe and the United
States exacted a terrible tribute from millions of Chinese, Indians,
Latin Americans, and Filipinos, who had no reason to praise the
scientific virtuosity that showered them with shells and bullets.
In the final analysis, a real if grossly imperfect alignment
persisted between the scientific outlook and the great emancipatory
sentimentsabolitionism, womens rights, social reform, socialism
itselfthat drove the most idealistic souls of the era. To put it another
way, the science that sustained the most ferociously antiegalitarian
ideasracist eugenics, social Darwinism, and the likehas long
since been effaced, while the claims put forth to bolster the egalitarian
view have endured, on the whole, rather well. At any rate, if we are to
judge a body of ideas by its worst enemies, it is simply absurd to
impugn science as the tool of the most embittered reactionaries. Those
forces, represented by Maistre and by Pius IX, the pope who denounced
socialism, modernism, and the scientific outlook in a single breath,
were convinced that their quarrel with science was a struggle to the
death. Martin Heidegger was their recent offspring. To the extent that
the liberatory and democratic ideals that roiled the nineteenth century
and persist to our day with amplified force face the adamant resistance
of dogmatic religions of one sort or another (hardly a dead issue in a
world beset by a swarm of angry fundamentalisms), science, it would
seem, has been and will be their strongest and least dispensable ally.

Disillusion and Illusion

There are many reasonably well read people to whom the growing
antagonism toward science on the part of a large number of left-wing
intellectuals will come as something of a surprise. There is a tendency,
mostly justified, as we have seen, to think of political progessivism
as naturally linked to a struggle against obscurantism, superstition, and
the dead weight of religious and social dogma. In this effort, the
obvious ally and chief resource is scientific knowledge of the world and
the systematic methodology that supports it, as these have developed
over the past few centuries, chiefly in Western culture. Though the
specific achievements of science are of some polemical importance for
certain ongoing disputes, far more valuable and effective have been the
modalities of critical and skeptical thought that have matured for the
most part in a scientific context. The dissecting blade of scientific
skepticism, with its insistence that theories are worthy of respect only
to the extent that their assertions pass the twin tests of internal logical
consistency and empirical verification, has been an invaluable weapon
against intellectual authoritarianisms of all sorts, not least those that
sustain social systems based on exploitation, domination, and
absolutism. The notion that human liberation ought to be the chief
project of the intellectual community is, it seems to us, coeval with the
idea that superstition and credulity are among the most powerful foes
of liberation, and that science, in particular, holds out the best hope for
cutting through their fogs of error and confusion. Towering figures of
political and ethical thought over the last three or four centuries make
this point; one thinks, in this regard, of Galileo, Spinoza, Locke,
Voltaire, Diderot, Lessing, Hume, Kant, Mill, Herzen, Turgenev,
Russell, Einsteinthe list could be extended endlessly. And, of course,
one thinks of Marx, albeit with a sad irony that dwells on weaknesses in
his mode of thinking, whose consequences and echoes will, to a great
extent, comprise the focus of this argument.
Our era is singular, in that the commonplace wisdom cited in the
last paragraph (wisdom we hold to be as valid as any generalization can
be) has come under strident and increasingly scornful attack, not from
reactionaries and traditionalists, who have always feared science, but
from its natural heirsthe community of thinkers, theoreticians, and
activists who challenge both the material injustices of the existing
social system and the underlying assumptions and prejudices that
perpetuate them. As Timothy Ferris observes in his appropriately
skeptical review of a recent and popular anti-scientific polemic, The
scientific community today, for all its faults, remains generally open
and unsecretive, international and egalitarian: It is no accident that
scientists are to be found at the forefront among those who call for
global ecological responsibility, racial and sexual equality, better
education, an end to hunger, a fair break for indigenous peoples, and
other enlightened values.4 Yet the alliance, so historically familiar
that one is tempted to call it natural, between the scientific
worldview and the tradition of egalitarian social criticism, is not only
under challenge but, from some points of view, may be said already to
have dissolved. This has to be understood not as a hazy generality about
the zeitgeist, but rather as an observation about a specific community, a
particular, if rather limited, contemporary social formation: that of
self-conscious left-wing political intellectuals and those who follow
their work with attention and approval, and take a measure of
inspiration from it.
We are particularly interested in the American left, although its
pugnacity toward science is certainly echoed by left-wing intellectuals
in Western Europe. Some of the key ideas, now common currency on
American campusesthe strong programme in sociology of science
associated with the Edinburgh school, the compendium of
postmodern attitudes transcribed from Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard,
Baudrillard et alii, to take a few obvious examplesare, in fact,
imports. Nonetheless, the antiscientism of the American academic left
has its own idiosyncratic resonances, if only because it is integral to a
much broader array of challenges to received wisdom and settled ideas.
For many left-wing thinkers, a radically skeptical attitude toward
standard science is a means of burning ones bridges, of disavowing
ones connection to a spectrum of liberal Enlightenment values, moral
as well as epistemological. It is a symptom, therefore, of profound
distress at the inability of that value system to deliver on its promises.
In the present situation, the orthodoxies of liberal humanism seem to
have curdled, and the resplendent intellectual achievements that
symbolize the worth of liberal humanist attitudes seem ripe for
dismissal. The defiant bravado that marks the various critiques of
science (ill advised and vainglorious though we think it to be) is an
index of the pained confusion of the left in the face of a world that
seems impervious to its insights, however brilliantly thought out or
passionately expressed.
For many left-intellectuals, social justice and economic equity
seem ever more elusive as practical possibilities. American society and
the global capitalism of which the United States is still the epicenter go
their own way without taking much notice of left-wing thought. The
problem of race in this country seems to be more intractable than ever.
The changing demography of the American population seems to
promise not an amiable and beneficent polyculturalism, but rather an
increasingly venomous tribalism and nativism. Feminists see
themselves as driven into a defensive circle, and the agitation for
equitable treatment of homosexuals seems often to be answered by
paranoia and violence. The hope, which was never quite absent from
the heart of even the most disillusioned leftist, that actually existing
socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe might finally be
able to escape the horrors of its Stalinist past and take on the task of
building a worthy alternative to capitalism, is irredeemably dead. There
may be a resurgence of political liberalism in this country, but, if so, it
will be, at best, a pallid and compromised liberalism, unlikely to
accommodate very much in the way of redemptive social design. The
contemporary, popular definition of liberalism is a political tendency
to leave things pretty much alone, except that they are to be funded,
whenever possible, and monitored, by agents of a wise and beneficent
government.
Meanwhile, the historical constituency of the American left is
fragmented. The traditional moral language of the left, deriving as it
does from Enlightenment humanism, seems to have lost its power to
exhort and unite. It is hard, for example, to imagine a contemporary
black militant employing the rhetoric of Paul Robeson or Martin Luther
King; Malcolm X seems to be the only relevant historical figure.
Feminism has long since wandered into its own discursive universe.
The new immigrant groups from Asia and Latin America have little
familiarity with the themes of working-class emancipation that inspired
Irishmen, Germans, Swedes, Italians, and Polish Jews in the factories,
sweatshops, mines, and rail-yards of America a century ago.
We ought not to wonder, then, that so many academic leftists (as
opposed merely to Democrats who win elections), finding themselves
in a dispiriting historical corner, are in a sullen mood, a mood in which
it seems that the most immediate solace comes from devising reasons
for discounting and minimizing the proudest accomplishments of the
smug society that surrounds them. The history of Western artistic and
intellectual achievement no longer provides hope or inspirationon
the contrary, it taunts and irritates. As the wholly owned subsidiary of a
despised culture, it becomes the target for contempt and disparagement.
The philosophical concomitant of this attitude is, unsurprisingly, a
defiant relativism.
True enough, these instincts find expression in what often seems
like a positive program. The dethronement of the literary and artistic
canon, for instance, is packaged carefully and announced to all who
hear and read as a movement to empower the unempowered by letting
us all hear the voices of those heretofore silenced. New modes of doing
sociology and anthropology are proposed as ways of rescuing
historically subordinate peoples from the ignominious position of
objects of study, and endowing them with agency and meaningful
historical will. This is by no means a hypocritical or disingenuous pose.
These arguments do have moral force. They have to be reckoned with
(although not to the exclusion of countervailing ideas) by anyone
concerned with equity and the redress of historical injustice.
Nevertheless, the aroma of sour grapes is in the air. The urge to redeem
slides easily into an eagerness to debunk for the sake of debunking.
New candidates for venerationwriters, artists, musicians,
philosophers, historical figures, non-Western ways of knowingare
put forward not for what they are but for what they are notwhite,
European, male.
It is impossible to understand fully the academic lefts attack on
science without taking into account how much resentment is embodied
in it. Science is, if anything, a more natural target for the frustrated
spite of the left than literature or art or other aspect of high culture.
Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Rembrandt may adorn the theaters,
concert halls, and museums of the rich, but they are long dead; and, in
any case, there is a venerable tradition of regarding artists per se as
rebels, malcontents, and social critics. Science, on the other hand, is
anything but antique. It thrivesor, as its critics would have it,
fulminatesin the heart of the contemporary world. What is more, it is
an indispensable prop to the politics and commerce of that world. It
builds the bombs for the Pentagon and fiber-optics networks for the
stock exchanges of the world. It computes the macroeconomic
projections of the neoclassical economists and the demographic
projections of cynical political operatives. It creates an enormous
environmental mess and then charges us an arm and a leg to clean it up!
It has all of us by the throat.
Resentment is a strong force in human affairs; philosophical
caution is deplorably weak. The lefts resentment of science is no
sillier than that of, say, religious fundamentalists. Typically, it is
expressed with incomparably greater cleverness and verbal agility.
Nonetheless, resentment is not a trustworthy ally in any intellectual
endeavor. In the present case it has betrayed left-wing intellectuals into
futility.
Neither of us is a professional historian; yet we have undertaken a
study that has important historical dimensions. We cannot ignore them
or dismiss them with the currently fashionable glibness. The lefts
flirtation with irrationalism, its reactionary rejection of the scientific
worldview, is deplorable and contradicts its own deepest traditions. It is
a kind of self-defeating apostasy. But it is not the result of a sudden
whim or of spontaneous mass hysteria. It has a history. We owe the
reader some sense of our understanding of that history, non-
professional as it may be, before proceeding to the details of our
critique.

History of the American Left, Briefly Considered

Socialist radicalism in this country derives, in the main, from the labor
struggles of the second half of the nineteenth century in such industries
as steel, textiles, mining, and railroading, and from the efforts of poor
farmers to free themselves from the dead hand of bankers and
middlemen.5 The emergence of explicitly socialist parties in the 1880s
and 1890s was facilitated by the accession of immigrant workers,
already steeped in European radical traditions, to the ongoing efforts of
native-born Americans. The Socialist party of the early 1900s was the
main vehicle for the dissemination of radical ideas and the main
platform for electoral activity on behalf of those ideas. Its period of
greatest growth followed hard upon the failure of the less ideologically
explicit, antiplutocratic populism championed by William Jennings
Bryan. As is seemingly inevitable in left-wing politics, splits and
factions produced other socialist and anarchist organizations of varying
importance; but, under the leadership of Eugene Debs, the Socialist
party commanded by far the largest following. Less formally,
indigenous radicalism owed much to older movements, notably the
Abolitionist and Suffragist struggles. Looking back from the point of
view of contemporary militancy, one must also take note of the
conservation movement, inspired by such writers as John Muir and
Gifford Pinchot, although at the time of its origin, that movement
largely drew its support from the genteel classes and had little, if any,
connection with the discontents of exploited urban workers or
impoverished mid-western farmers.
The popular appeal of American socialism is usually considered to
have peaked in 1912, with the most successful of Debss presidential
campaigns. However, the coming of World War I proved as disastrous
for the American Socialist party as it had for its sister parties in France
and Germany. The principled opposition of the party to American
participation in the European bloodbath, which it rightly viewed as a
family quarrel among capitalists, a quarrel whose costs were largely to
be reckoned in the death and dismemberment of workingmen, made it
vulnerable to accusations of disloyalty and lack of patriotism, the more
so because so many of its followers came from the foreign-born
population. The popularity of the party sank rapidly; Debs was
imprisoned on absurd sedition charges; and many of the faithful were
imprisoned by dint of similar legal outrages, while others were simply
deported as aliens whose radicalism made them unfit for residence in
America.6
Equally fateful was the October Revolution in the one-time
Russian Empire. Quite naturally, it inspired hope among American
radicals for a worldwide revolution leading to a bright socialist future.
At the same time, however, it precipitated a rancorous split within the
Socialist party, out of which its eventual bitter antagonist, the
Communist Party of the United States of America, was born. 7 Both
wings of the divided socialist movement struggled subsequently,
through the twenties, with little notable success. Furthermore, by the
end of the decade the American Communist movement had become, for
all practical purposes, a shameless satellite of the Stalinist regime,
whose grip was beginning to throttle whatever genuine revolutionary
idealism remained in the Soviet Union.
With the advent of the Great Depression, however, both branches
recovered a measure of their former influence among the millions of
workers and farmers displaced and despoiled by the collapsing
economy. The Communist party was especially successful: at its height
its power and influence rivaled that of Debss prewar Socialist party.
This transitory success is probably best explained by the widespread
fear of international fascism and the sense that the Communist party,
with its discipline, strength of purpose, and alliance with the actually
existing socialism of the Soviet Union, was the most reliable bulwark
against Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, and the most implacable agent of
genuinely fundamental change. A view leavened with appropriate
skepticism would also suggest that the CPs often-cynical political
opportunism contributed to its popularity for a time, even more than
the appeal of its supposedly immutable principles.
This success was, of course, short-lived. The Moscow purge trials
and the Hitler-Stalin Pact disabused many of the partys sympathizers,
especially among the intelligentsia; and the rise of Trotskyism
provided many of them the means of defying the party while remaining
loyal in their own minds to the single-minded revolutionism of Marx
and Lenin.8 As for the other branch of the original split, Norman
Thomass Socialist party, the reprieve brought about by the Depression
revived its fortunes only moderately, and increasingly it became an
aggregation of intellectuals equally disaffected by capitalism and
Stalinism, rather than an active electoral organization or a militant
corps of grass-roots organizers.
World War II brought a truce of sorts between the Communist
party and its customary foes in the government; the interests of Stalin,
Churchill, and Roosevelt had converged momentarily, and the
acquiescent American party subordinated both its ideology and its
organizational tactics to the needs of the war effort. However, the ink
was hardly dry on the surrender instruments of the Axis powers before
the cold war had broken out, and the postwar repression of the
Communists, echoing the antiradicalism of the early 1920s, effectively
quashed the party as a meaningful political force. A curious aspect of
this period is the degree to which non-Communist radicals joined
forces with traditional anti-Communist conservatives to repress the CP
and expunge its influence, while continuing to think of themselves as
loyal and principled socialists. In its early days, for instance, the CIA
recruited a substantial number of such people. This is explained not
only by the enormities of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe, but in equal degree by the distrust and loathing with which
many radicals and ex-radicals had come to regard the American party
by reason of its duplicity and manipulativeness. Many of those appalled
by McCarthyism were chiefly outraged by the witch-hunters refusal to
allow ex-Communists to distance themselves from the party with honor
and dignity, rather than by the misfortunes of the hard-core remnant of
the party itself.9 In any case, by the end of the 1950s American
Communism per se was little more than a comical relic, sustained
chiefly by the contributions in cash and nominal membership of
Hoovers FBI, which felt a desperate need to keep its ritual enemy
alive, or, if not alive, at least in the semblance of a minimally animated
corpse.
On the other hand, anti-Communist socialism of the period fared
little better. The fifties were the local high-water mark of American
postwar ascendancy, economic as well as in military strength: the
material condition of American workers and farmers, at least among
the white population, improved rapidly. The rapid expansion of higher
education, sustained by such measures as the GI Bill, opened in a
remarkable way the upper-middle-class professions to a large number
of men and women of modest social origins. They attained a prosperity
undreamed of by their parents and unmatched elsewhere in the world.
Untroubled by foreign competition, and bolstered by an industrial and
agricultural economy of unrivaled strength, the American social and
political system felt itself poised on the brink of an era in which the
most grievous sources of conflict and discontent were bound to
disappear, leaving no room for serious radical thought, let alone for
active radical movements.
The 1960s were rapidly to shatter the delusion. The appalling
inequities of the racial situation in America, sustained since
Reconstruction by structures of legal and informal segregation, had
bred resentments and rage that could no longer be contained; and the
struggle to enforce the legal end of school segregation quickly
burgeoned into a militant and massive civil rights movement, whose
demands were wide-ranging and which in the context of ossified racial
attitudes effectively constituted a call for radical social change.10
Uneasiness over the cold war and its attendant arms race inspired the
peace and disarmament movement to recover its nerve after more than
a decade of McCarthyite intimidation. But it was the Vietnam War,
with its clear record of governmental blundering and deceit, its lack of
justification either by history or as genuine realpolitik, and its
disproportion of means to ends, that truly revivified the American left
and gave it the sense that a mass constituency receptive to its views
was about to coalesce.
This phenomenon was especially strong on college campuses,
particularly at elite schools where a tradition of intellectual
independence had always been encouraged. Indeed, apart from the
university, it is hard to think of social loci wherein the newly revived
leftist dream of a mass movement ever moved beyond wishful thinking
or outright self-delusion. Even in the black communities, where support
for the civil rights movement, as well as far more intransigent forms of
militancy, was ubiquitous, the endorsement of a specifically socialist
vision of social and economic change was rare and at best equivocal.
Only among students (and a substantial number of sympathetic faculty)
did a more or less coherent radicalism exist, a movement that
combined concern about theoretical issues with a genuine awareness of
its own historical roots. Sectlets that had limped along for decades
suddenly discovered a new generation of recruits. Even more
important, organizations that had come into existence as mildly social
democratic lobbying groups found themselves transformed, after a few
short years, into foci of the most apocalyptic and intransigent
radicalism. The most obvious example is Students for a Democratic
Society, whose trajectory from cautious reformism to a fullblown
Maoism was bewilderingly swift.
As the war continued in Asia and the civil rights struggle raged
amidst rhetorical and real violence, the student left gathered strength
and sympathy; and it acquired new causes. Wide-ranging discontent
with contemporary capitalism and its dislocations was in the air.
Environmentalism, as a radical and transformative view of the world,
began to stir. The tactics and rhetoric of the black civil rights activists
began to infuse the thinking of other minoritiesAmerican Indians and
Latinos. By the end of the decade, feminism, in its modern incarnation,
had taken shape and had become yet another article of faith for campus
radicals. The concerns of lesbians and homosexuals, long trivialized
and regarded as apolitical, were quickly made part of the overall
radical agenda. In terms of constituency, the left seemed to be
constructing a wide base.
Moreover, student activists had apparently genuine grounds for
thinking of themselves as participants in, or even leaders of, a serious
political force. The protest at the 1968 Democratic Convention,
together with its repression by clubs and tear gas, seemed to them (and
to their parents) an event of profoundest historical significance,
especially since it resonated so accurately with the Events of 1968 in
France, the ongoing student militancy in Germany and Japan, and the
Chinese Cultural Revolutionwidely (and absurdly) perceived at the
time, among leftists of all stripes, as authentically democratic in spirit
and practice. The counterculture was at its height, with its twin
promises of political and cultural liberation. A genuine and infectious
euphoria gripped the most committed of university radicals; their
abstractions seemed finally to have become incarnate as authentic
social possibilities.
Within an astonishingly few years all those hopes were
substantially dead. A dozen reasons can now be given for the
disappearance of a mass left, even within the hothouse venue of
higher education. The lefts perennial predilection for factionalism and
internal bickering certainly had something to do with it, as did the
overeager migration of the most ardent theoreticians within the
movement to the far shores of doctrinal extremism. The winding-down
of the Vietnam War relieved millions of young men (and, again, their
parents) of the besetting anxietyof being draftedthat had motivated
them to consider themselves de facto supporters of the antiwar
movement. The failure of the civil rights movement to meet unrealistic
hopes for an immediate abolition of racism and its economic
consequences led to an increasingly emphatic black militancy, which
embraced the most violent rhetoric andoccasionallydistressingly
brutal and violent tactics as well. For many white students, fear
replaced visions of brotherhood. The feminist movement embarked on
its own separatist path, obsessed by its special concerns and its own
brand of hermetic theory. Finally, the foreign models that had by their
example energized the American left throughout the sixties swiftly lost
their power to inspire during the seventies. Events in China, Cuba,
Cambodia, Vietnam itself revealed painfully the moral shortcomings
more bluntly, the moral crimesof Third World revolutionism.
American radicalism became an ideological orphan.
The dream of a unified, militant left with a widespread
constituency belongs once more to the realm of wistful speculation.
The civil rights movement that once stirred the conscience of the nation
and seemed the rightful heir to everything noble in American tradition
has devolved into a morass of bitter resentments, susceptible to
tribalistic fantasies and demagoguery, but unable to formulate coherent
goals or effective strategies. True, the womens movement retains wide
support, if ones criterion is support for such key doctrines as
reproductive rights and equal status in the workplace. But there is a
sharp gradient separating mainstream feminism of this sort from the
acute and apocalyptic oppositionism of academic feminism. (There is
no realistic sense in which the former can be called radical; such
categorizations are out of place everywhere but in the fantasies of the
radical right.) The Marxist tradition has deliquesced into a mere
oppositional posture decorated with a traditional lexicon but severed,
apparently forever, from the struggles of an organized or organizable
working class. The left, in sum, is at the moment the surviving squad of
theoreticians of a nonexistent mass movement.
Nonetheless, the radical style of the sixties left traces that persist.
First, there is the enduring relation between left-intellectuals and
American universities. The campus constitutes the only environment in
which recent radicalism became naturalized. Even as leftist rhetoric
denounced higher education as the breeding ground for unquestioning
servants of the bourgeoisie, leftist intellectuals, almost inadvertently,
were forming a network of personal and professional ties with the
institutions themselves. The scholarly community was the inevitable
refuge to which activism retreated as its concrete political possibilities
melted away.
Secondly, there is an intellectual heritage. Most of the thinking, as
well as the rhetoric, of the sixties left was built around the theme that
liberation for the oppressed can only be won when the oppressed group
acts as the autonomous agent of its own revolutionary process. This
notion of the special competence of the oppressed was deeply
ingrained and has become unchallengeable within leftist circles. Only
blacks, it was held, could define the terms of the black liberation
struggle; all ideas, as well as all decisions, had to come from black
revolutionaries themselves. Whites could function only as agents of
tactical support. The same assumption was extended to other peoples
in struggleNative Americans, Chicanos, and so forth. Of course, it
was always understood that American radicals had no right to criticize
the tactics and strategies of Vietnamese revolutionaries; again, they
were relegated to the function of uncritical support. The corresponding
maxim was applied to radical feminism as that movement took shape
men, however sympathetic, could be spear carriers but never theorists
or analysts, let alone leaders.
These attitudes, recurring from context to context, have a
theoretical counterpart, a doctrine declaring that a group traditionally
privileged has no right to define reality for others. It goes further; the
very state of being oppressed is somehow supposed to confer a greater
clarity of vision, a more authentic view of the world, than the bourgeois
trappings of economic, racial, and sexual hegemony.
Finally, and quite expectedly, there is a lingering distrust of
science and technology. This obviously derives from the long tradition
of fear and loathing toward the nuclear arsenals of the world and the
technocrats who created them. It was greatly intensified by the brutal
spectacle of the war in Indochina, where all the technical ingenuity of
the most scientifically advanced culture in the world seemed to have
been conscripted to inflict butchery on a peasant culture. Finally, the
misgivings of the environmental movement toward technology as such
became common currency within the left, thereby widening still further
the rift between contemporary radicalism and the Enlightenment
tradition of science as the ultimate product of human wisdom and the
staunch ally of liberation. All of these factors come into play, as we
believe, in generating the peculiar amalgam of ignorance and hostility
that glides beneath the surface of virtually all of the critiques of
science that leftist theorizing has brought forth.

The Face of the Enemy

As we have proposed to use the term, academic left refers to a stratum

of the residual intelligentsia surviving the recession of its demotic
base, a stratum that must now, for the most part, content itself with
inward meditations and hopes for the eventual revival of mass
participatory politics on the left. However, the image of this body of
intellectuals as a beleaguered relic is bathetic. In terms of their
relations with this countrys formal institutions of higher education,
particularly those at the elite level, left-wing thinkers have never
enjoyed anything remotely close to the current hospitality.
Prestigeladen departments in the humanities and the social sciences are
thickly populatedin some by now well-known cases we might say,
without opprobrium, dominatedby radical thinkers. Despite all
protestations to the contrary, entire programswomens studies,
African-American (or Latino or Native American) studies, cultural
studiesdemand, de facto, at least a rough allegiance to a leftist
perspective as a qualification for membership in the faculty. A
considerable number of high-flying academic stars are leftist
celebrities who hop from one first-rank institution to the next at their
own pleasure, and who must be given substantial perquisites (as these
things are measured in academia) in order to put down institutional
roots. Scholarly associations are often dominated by these same stars,11
with the substantial assent of a rank and file in whom similar political
sympathies run strong. Administrators who are also prominent left-
wing figures are no longer anomalous. Even more significantly,
university officials whose own politics may, in reality, be considerably
more bland, have, in many places, come to treat the local campus left
as an important and stable segment of the academic community, whose
views must be taken into account and whose misgivings must
continually be placated. Often, when administrations take official
positions on social issuesparticularly those involving race, ethnicity,
and gender questionsthe tone, and the jargon as well, is
indistinguishable from that of the militant left.
These days, academic presses pour out dozens upon dozens of
volumes grounded in left-wing theory. Proportionately numerous are
learned journals, many of them brand new and as slick as MTV, whose
purpose is avowedly political and unapologetically leftist. Universities
by the score are delighted to host conferences and symposia whose
podiums resound with rhetoric whose basic sentiments and passionate
delivery would delight the soul of Emma Goldman (though she might
find the terminology a bit off-putting).
This factthis naturalization of the left as a well-dug-in sector of
the university communitypresents us with a considerable puzzle in
view of the isolation and neutering of significant left-wing sentiment in
the world of real politics. There is no strongor even anemicleft-
wing constituency out there standing godfather to the academic careers
of its theorists. Of course, there is the fact that a surprising number of
foundations, including some of the biggest and most munificent, are
strong patrons of the left intelligentsia, and this affords it much
academic leverage. But then again, the left-wing sympathies of the
foundations themselves are a part of what has to be explained. In any
case, grantsmanship is a minor factor.
The best explanation that we can come up with, ad hoc, is that over
the last twenty-five years the entire process of recruitment into
academic careers, especially outside the exact sciences, has been
altered in a way that lures people with left-wing sympathies and hopes
for radical social change into scholarly careers, while simultaneously
bright young students of conservative bent are less and less enchanted
at the prospect of joining the professoriate. This is not just a matter of
affirmative action or of special enclaves for womens studies, black
studies, and the like. It is a much more diffuse phenomenon, largely
inadvertent and unplanned. The glamorization of high-powered careers
in business, finance, and corporate law has something to do with it.
Absent an initial emotional commitment to a radical political vision, a
bright young person is likely to be far more strongly tempted by the
prospect of having his or her own stretch limousine and Lear jet than by
even the cushiest faculty appointment, especially in a mythic
atmosphere in which twenty-six-year-old self-made billionaires
abound. Moreover, academic recruitment is a process that significantly
involves positive feedback; the greater the density of campus leftists,
the more quickly that density grows. The reputation of the campus as
the place to be for radical action seeded higher education with a
substantial population of militants during the sixties; and this seems to
have started the ball of exponential growth rolling.
Finally, the process has had the crucial goodwill of a kind of
academic silent majority, the great body of professors who, while
they may distance themselves from doctrinaire ideological
formulations and exotic new social theories, somehow continue to
believe vaguely that the left, broadly construed, remains (after all these
decades) the party of humanity, the locus of right thinking; and that it
deserves to be nurtured and encouraged even if it goes overboard from
time to time in the vehemence of its views.
At this point we would seem to be well-launched into the standard
rightwing tract decrying the infestation of the university by
monomaniacal leftists, feminists, and black nationalists, and calling for
the return to the tweedy good old days when the devotional poetry of
John Donne and T. S. Eliot was solemnly celebrated in English
departments everywhere, when acceptance of Americas
responsibilities as leader of the Free World was an article of faith in all
courses on political and social matters, when culture meant Bach,
Shakespeare, and Henry James and was completely disjoint from the
iconography of pop musicians who wear their underwear on the outside,
or compose chants in honor of killing white cops. Under that
presumption, we ought now to start demanding that our campuses whip
themselves into shape and that all these troublesome agitators should
be sent into outer darkness, taking their ideological baggage with them.
At the very least, we should be calling for the depoliticization of the
classroom and for an end to the favoritism now so lavishly bestowed on
left-wing doctrine and its proponents.
This, however, is far from our intention. There is a
counterargument that has merit and is worthy of attention. We are
living in a society where homogenization of political and ideological
opinion is increasingly hard to resist. The number of newspapers has
shrunk to a tiny fraction of what it was a hundred years ago in a much
less populous country; indeed, newspapers no longer seem independent
publications but rather compendia of news stories, columns, and
editorials produced by national syndicates and merely bundled for local
consumption. Broadcast news, similarly, is the mechanical dispersion
of centrally produced material, and television journalism, whether from
the traditional networks or the new cable services, is largely a matter of
indistinguishable talking heads, all doling out the same narrowly
conceived accounts of the same spectrum of stories. As a mode of
discourse, contemporary journalese is as full of formulae and epithets
as the most debased tradition of oral folk-poetry. In depth public
issues programming offering debates between liberals and
conservatives often provide a right-of-center, nominally Democratic
neoconservative as representative of the former, and a neofascist as
spokesman for the latter. The range of discussion of serious political
and social issues in the mass media is, in short, so severely attenuated,
so formulaic, and so castrated by the absence of an honest critical
vocabulary that to call it superficial and inadequate is to praise it
altogether too highly. 12 There are probably some honorable exceptions,
even in the mass media, but their ratings must be insignificant.
Honest and undogmatic intellectuals, whatever the cast of their
views, ought to ask themselves the following question: Shouldnt an
alternative political culture, one with a long and often (if not always)
honorable history, a great deal of intellectual energy and theoretical
acuity, and a habit of asking discomfiting but morally urgent questions,
have some sort of venue, some institutional homeland within this vast
and still wealthy country? The indignant conservative who denounces
the supposed ideological monoculture of the radical universities has
a point; but it is a modest one. Why should the doctrinal narrowness of
black or womens studies departments be more objectionable than that
of some schools of business administration, quite a few military
science departments, or even athletic departments? No fire-breathing
feminist zealot has ever had the power over the lives and minds of her
charges that is exercised routinely by the football or basketball coach at
a school with a major program, that is, one aspiring to be a
significant NFL or NBA farm team. So far as the average student is
concerned, degrees are pursued in marketing or chemical engineering
or pre-med much as they have always been, with little input from the
cryptic rituals of the postmodern, cutting-edge critical theorists. For
such a student, an encounter in an expository writing course with a
graduate teaching assistant who is, shall we say, a little too hyped on
Foucault, Lyotard, and a gaggle of post-everything feminists, will
probably do no lasting harm and might, possibly, do some good.
All this in no way implies that there is something out of bounds in
principled opposition to ones left-wing colleagues over issues
concerning curricular content, speech codes, affirmative action, or
studies departments of one sort or another. Still less does it entail
deference to whatever trendy doctrine or windy generalization has
taken the inconstant fancy of the left. Such theorizing is obliged to take
its chances in the rough-and-tumble of debate. It is a test of the
maturity of the academic left whether it can deal with such criticism
without imputing dire political motivations to the critics.
We thus come round to our own announced intentionto analyze
and refute the critiques of scienceits methods, assumptions,
conclusions, and social aspectsthat have arisen among left-wing
scholars, or, more precisely, that specialized subset we have styled the
academic left. We concede yet again, at risk of trying the patience of
the reader, that the term is not felicitous. 13 Perhaps we should have
used something different, postmodern left, say; but this seems a trifle
too confining. Post-Marxist left or hyper-theoretical left might
have done, but again, these smack of jargon and imply a higher degree
of uniformity than is warranted. Neologisms should not be multiplied
beyond necessity and will not be, at least by us.
Still, there are distinctions and characterizations that need to be
made. Our notion of what constitutes the academic left must, to the
extent possible, be clarified. We are not a credentials committee. Nor is
this book in any sense an update of the Malleus Maleficarum; we shant
give our readers detailed instructions for finding the witchs mark. We
do, however, need a basic intellectual and attitudinal portrait, one that
sharpens the contrast between the academic left as such and those
scholars holding left-wing opinions whose research is basically
apolitical or who pursue a political agenda largely uncolored by those
doctrinal singularities that give the academic left its particular
character.
It seems to us that the central tenet of the various schools of
thought that make up the academic left is one that may be labeled
perspectivist. The basic thrust is that various bodies of ideas that
have been favored and championed by Western culture over the
centuries must be stripped of their claims to universality and timeless,
uncontextual validity. They are at best the expression of local truths
or structures that make sense only within a certain context of social
experience and a certain political symbology. On the other hand, they
may be justificatory myths meant to uphold authority and hierarchy. In
either event, they are always deeply marked by the power relations that
govern the societies in which they arose.
 By the same token, perspectivism is highly sympathetic to the
claim that the heretofore disempowered have the right to have their
own narratives, their own particular accounts of the world, taken as
seriously as those of the standard culture, notwithstanding differences
and outright contradictions. The intellectual apparatus of the post-
Enlightenment West, it is held, affords no special leverage for deciding
among competing versions of the story of the world. Such
methodologies have been deferred to in the past, but that is because
they have been arbitrarily privileged by the historical ascendancy of
Euro-American capitalism, a merely contingent circumstance. They
occupy no firmer epistemological ground than the accounts produced
by women, descendants of black slaves, Third World revolutionaries, or
even a reified and personalized Nature. The latter thus become immune
from criticism by the reigning Western paradigmand from white
European males, dead or alive.
The dethronement of Western modes of knowledge and their
claims to objectivity is said to be justified on a number of grounds. To
some, it is the inherent instability and cloudiness of language that does
the job. Others appeal to fairly traditional Marxist notions of class
consciousness. Feminists champion womens ways of knowing, while
Afrocentrists have their own version of the blood-and-soil myth. The
important point, however, is that each faction thinks the job is complete
and that Western paradigms have been effectively demolished.
Among academics, such attitudes are nowadays extremely
common. They are conjoined, however, with other habits of thought
characteristic of intellectuals as a class. There is, for instance, an
abiding cabalistic faith that excursions into theory, if pursued at great
enough length with sufficient intensity, will tease forth all the deepest
truths of human experience. This adds considerably to the impression,
common outside of academic-left circles, that the critical theory in
which academic leftists take such delight is a swamp of jargon, name
dropping, logic chopping, and massive attempts to obliterate the
obvious. The irony is that this faith in the omnicompetence of theory
runs particularly strong in those who claim to abhor totalizing
theories. Both [Derrida and Foucault] have, in different ways, actually
stimulated a return to a form of scholasticism, to those abstract and
totalizing methods of the traditional Western humanist the new theory
claimed to reject.14
The evidence that this point of view thrives in the academic world
is easy to find. We take as illustrative a series of announcements that
recently appeared in Lingua Franca, a journal for au courant academic
humanists that treats feminism, postmodernism, critical theory and the
like with a piquant mixture of respect and irreverence. In a recent issue
we find assembled a number of calls for manuscripts for new series of
scholarly books. The editors of Pedagogy and Cultural Practice
(University of Minnesota Press) tell us that
the series analyzes the diverse democratic and ideological
struggles of people across a wide range of economic, social and
political spheres and provides an opportunity for cultural workers
from many fields to submit manuscripts that link the pedagogical
and the political around new forms of cultural practice.

The organizers of Theory out of Bounds (also University of

Minnesota Press!) announce:
The works we seek join cultural analysis with tactics of cultural
resistance as they enact their own critical ground and create new
spaces of cultural invention.
 The series will deal with such issues as the affective
constitution of the body, the politics of cultural appropriation, the
social production of subjectivities, feminism and the philosophy of
science, and the formation of communities outside of identity.
(Emphasis added.)

Ideologies of Desire (from Oxford University Press) offers a new

forum for cultural studies and declares:
These new approaches have also traced the inscription of sexual
meanings in widely scattered fields of cultural production, while
detecting the inscription of diverse cultural meanings in the
practices and discourses of sex . The project ultimately has an
oppositional design: its purpose is to map more precisely the
available avenues of cultural resistance to contemporary
institutional and discursive practices of sex.15

Finally, Re-Reading the Canon (Penn State Press) merely asks, in

somewhat less trendy language, for feminist reinterpretations of
important philosophersPlato, Aristotle, Locke, and Wittgenstein, as
well as academic leftist icons such as Marx, de Beauvoir, Foucault, and
Derrida.
Clearly, the academic left thrives as a burgeoning industry within
the scholarly community. The quotations above make clear how easy it
is to spot; any writer who uses discourses, cultural, practice, and
inscription in the same paragraph is a member ipso facto in good
standing. The extent to which the perspectivist attitude, in one form or
another, informs its thinking is equally obvious. Each of the cited
examples obviously enthrones some version of the perspectivist
approach.
In sum, we were finally tempted to supplant the term academic left
by perspectivist left, and might have done so but for our aversion to
conducting debates as though that were a matter of affixing labels.
Perspectivism on the left is the true legacy of the activism of the 1960s
and early 1970s, a time when it was assumed that the oppressed are
endowed with uniquely privileged insights, and that the intellectual, as
well as moral authority of victims is beyond challenge. Like many
philosophical stances, perspectivism points to some genuine issues and
may lead to some valuable observations, as long as it is not run into the
ground. But the overenthusiasm of the academic left consists precisely
in its eagerness for and growing success in running things into the
ground. So far as we are concerned, perspectivism, in its soberest and
most prudent form, has interesting things to say about the history of
science, the shape of modern science as a social institution, the rhetoric
of scientific debates. When it comes to the core of scientific substance,
however, and the deep methodological and epistemological questions
above all, the incredibly difficult ontological questionsthat arise in
scientific contexts, perspectivism can make at best a trivial
contribution. The attempts to read scientific knowledge as the mere
transcription of Western male capitalist social perspectives, or as the
deformed handicraft of the prisonhouse of language, are hopelessly
naive and reductionistic. They take no account of the specific logic of
the sciences and they are far too coarse to deal with the conceptual
texture of any category of important scientific thought.
We are unkind enough to wish to compare the academic lefts
recent attempt to advance perspectivist accounts of science to the
cargo cults that flourished on some Pacific islands in the wake of
World War II. During the war, a number of technologically primitive
tribal cultures acquired new neighbors in the form of the military bases
of the warring powers. What chiefly impressed the indigenous peoples
were the airstrips where giant machines would periodically land to
disgorge vast quantities of goods, some of which found their way into
native hands by barter, as gifts, or simply by being left over when the
armies departed. After the war, sects grew up around the idea that the
airplanes, with their loads of precious goods, could be induced to return
by magical means. In some places, the tribesmen built their own
airplanes, with the idea that ritual might transform them into the real
thing. In our view, the model of science constructed by perspectivist
theorists is a lot like the wicker-and-mud mock-up of a C-47 built by
the cargo cultists. It bears only a vague and superficial resemblance to
the real thing, and its internal logic is laughably different. Still, those
who built it hope, with the aid of their theoretical magic rituals, to gain
control over the real thing.
The remainder of this book deals with a body of research and
scholarship, examining its assertions, its weaknesses, its influence, real
and potential, on social activism of one sort or another, and the
underlying motives, acknowledged or not, that inspire it. For the most
part, we allege, this work is deeply unsatisfactory. In scholarly quality,
it ranges from seriously flawed to hopelessly flawed. It is infested with
tendentious arguments, special pleading of one sort or another, and the
rhetoric of moralistic one-upmanship. Yet it has been well received by
a substantial part of the academy, where it is promulgated as a
breakthrough for current social theory. Textbooks and courses are built
around it and students and scholars with little background in the
sciences turn to it first when they want to understand something about
science.
The left, in this country as elsewhere, has a history of putting
important questions on the table. It is not for this book to judge the
moral worth of its prescriptions for the constitution of society or the
political practicality of putting them into effect. Those arguments will
resound in one way or another for the foreseeable future. As for the
unforeseeable future, it is possible that socialists may prove, after all,
to have been prophetic. We are obliged to observe, however, that
leftists have a long history of weaving philosophical phantoms into
fantasies of universal redemption. We are convinced that the academic
lefts recent attempts to theorize science and society are further
instances of the same thing.
 CHAPTER THREE

The Cultural Construction of Cultural

Constructivism

The point is that neither logic nor mathematics escapes the

contamination of the social.
STANLEY ARONOWITZ, SCIENCE AS POWER

So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity

enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear
logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the
progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and
the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the
traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads
nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without
producing any impact upon the world.
STANISLAV ANDRESKI, SOCIAL SCIENCES AS SORCERY

Natural scientistsat least those with a sense of fair playare usually

diffident in confronting the disciplines that study science from a social
and historical point of view. They do not feel that their particular
expertise in some area of science automatically endows them with
insight into the human phenomenology of scientific practice, or that
their familiarity with the recent results and the liveliest questions of
their specialty qualifies them to pronounce on its evolution as that
relates to the course of human development. Apart from the most
arrogant, they concede that the psychological quirks and modes of
personal interaction characteristic of working scientists are not entitled
to special immunity from the scrutiny of social science. If bricklayers
or insurance salesmen are to be the objects of vocational studies by
academics, there is no reason why mathematicians or molecular
biologists shouldnt sit still for the same treatment.
Accustomed to regarding specialists in a scientific subject remote
from their own with a certain courtesy or even deference, natural
scientists are usually quite willingperhaps even too willingto adopt
a similar attitude toward apparently competent scholars whose chief
interests lie outside of science even as they try to come to grips with
the relation between science and their own fields. Above all, natural
scientists are reluctant to take a haughty and dismissive attitude toward
the hypotheses and theories of outsiders merely because they seem at
first paradoxical or are expressed in a recondite language. They are
aware that some matters of the greatest professional concern to them
may strike an outsider as abstruse, bewildering, perhaps even
nonsensical. Consequently, their initial inclination is to credit the
sociologist or historian of science with having reliable intellectual tools
and a sense of responsibility in applying them, however jarring the
language of the unfamiliar discipline.
This, at least, has been the traditional attitude. We must report,
however, that it is changing to one of skepticism and even revulsion in
the face of what scientistsat least those few who have so far taken a
serious interest in the questionhave come to see as a growing
tendency among a particular breed of historians and sociologists of
science to spin perverse theories. These seem often to escape mere
inaccuracy and rush hell-for-leather toward unalloyed twaddle. Such
words may strike the reader as splenetic; but they seem to us justified
in view of certain recent developments in the social-scientific analysis
of the natural sciences, specifically those that can be lumped together
under the heading cultural constructivism.

Cultural Constructivism, Weak Form

We are all, in a commonsensical way, cultural constructivists in our

view of science. Science is something that human culture has, indeed,
constructed, after seventy thousand years or so of false starts and
dead ends. Our thankfulness for it knows no bounds. Pieties aside,
however, we can accept many of the views that historians and
sociologists of science promulgate by way of asserting that science is,
in some sense, a cultural construct. It would be idle to pretend that the
projects taken on by science, the questions that it asks at any given
period, do not reflect the interests, beliefs, and even the prejudices of
the ambient culture. Clearly, certain kinds of research get the strongest
encouragementfunding, recognition, celebrity, and so forthin
response to the recognized needs of society. To take an obvious current
example, research in high-temperature superconductivity is avidly
pursued by increasing numbers of physicists and chemists, not only
because the subject is fascinating, beautiful, and difficult, but because
the potential utility of high-temperature superconductors is enormous.
They might very well have technological and economic reverberations
comparable to those of semiconductors. And, at least for a time, a few
years ago, when new superconductor materials were appearing thick
and fast, the work got almost as prurient attention from the media as
did cold fusion. To say that in this sense science is culturally
constructed is tautological.
Naturally, some social theorists would extend the analysis to
suggest that the topics scientists focus upon are determined by socially
derived attitudes, aspirations, and biases less forthrightly instrumental,
and that there are negative aspects as wellcertain areas of potential
research are avoided in obedience to assumptions that are rarely
articulated in undisguised form. While this is not incontestable, it has
some plausibility, and we would not deny it out of hand.
An even stronger assertion is that in scientific debate and in the
process by which a preference for one paradigm over another emerges,
attitudes of mind come into play that are in some measure dictated by
social, political, ideological, and religious preconceptions. For
example, Stephen J. Gould1 has recently argued that Darwins view of
sexual selection as an important evolutionary mechanism was slow to
win acceptance because it offended the prejudice, obviously tied to
prevalent ideology, that females are by nature passive and lack
sufficient volition to make the crucial choices that Darwinsextended
model required. We accept such ideas as reasonable in principle,
even though they are much oversold these days. We caution, however,
that the areas of science in which such direct intrusion of ideology
becomes possible are few. Our reading of the history of science
suggests, moreover, that theories leaning heavily on such props tend to
be fragile and ephemeral, and that part of the increasing power of
scientific methodology derives from always-increasing awareness of
the danger that reasoning can be corrupted in this way if one is not
careful. Nevertheless, we are obliged to listen with interest to historical
and sociological accounts of the effect. Thus we accede in principle to
what might be called the weak version of cultural constructivism.
Such a point of view can produce illuminating research. Like any
other point of view, it can also be driven into the ground and employed
in doctrinaire fashion to substitute for evidence. Good work and bad
can be done in its name. A further danger, frequently in evidence in the
writings we consider below, is that analyses and case histories counting
as reasonable instances of weak cultural construction are slyly adduced
as justifying a far more radical and dubious theory, a version of
philosophical relativism and conventionalism that merits the name
strong cultural constructivism. This is another part of the theoretical
woods entirelyalthough many historians, sociologists, and even
philosophers of science are insufficiently vigilant in maintaining the
distinction.

Cultural Constructivism, Strong FormScience

as Convention

In strong form, cultural constructivism (sometimes, another phrase

such as social constructionism may be used, depending on the
terminological preferences of the expositor) holds to the following
epistemological position: science is a highly elaborated set of
conventions brought forth by one particular culture (our own) in the
circumstances of one particular historical period; thus it is not, as the
standard view would have it, a body of knowledge and testable
conjecture concerning the real world. It is a discourse, devised by
and for one specialized interpretive community, under terms created
by the complex net of social circumstance, political opinion, economic
incentive, and ideological climate that constitutes the ineluctable
human environment of the scientist. Thus, orthodox science is but one
discursive community among the many that now exist and that have
existed historically. Consequently its truth claims are irreducibly self-
referential, in that they can be upheld only by appeal to the standards
that define the scientific community and distinguish it from other
social formations.
It must follow, then, that science deludes itself when it asserts a
particular privileged position in respect to its ability to know reality.
Science is practice rather than knowledge; and practice involves
convention and arbitrariness. Questions can be asked only when they
conform to the modalities of existing discursive habits; likewise
answers can be formulated and recognized only to the extent that they
are accommodated within that template. The verification of these
supposed answers is perforce a discursivein the broad sense, a
linguisticevent, in that it involves dialectical manipulation of
accepted semiological conventions. Evenno: especially!the
practices that most particularly embody the sacred objectivity of
scienceexperiment and observationare inescapably textual
practices, meaningless outside the community that endows them with
meaning.
The attentive reader will have noted that this point of view
rigorously applied leaves no ground whatsoever for distinguishing
reliable knowledge from superstition. Indeed, there are various contexts
in which that would seem to be exactly the point of the exercise. Given
the long history of progressive Western thought in which science has
been linked, by and large, with the efforts of human liberation, it will
seem surprising if not positively bewildering that this complex of ideas
has for the most part been developed and embraced by self-identified
left-wing intellectuals.
 True enough, critiques of science employing a similar logic appear
from time to time in defense of theistic views of the universe that place
scientific materialism in its more accustomed role as the enemy of
religion and revealed truth.2 Nowadays, however, the left seems far
more eager to sponsor such views. Its motivation, its polemical point,
seems to be as follows: Scientific questions are decided and scientific
controversies resolved in accord with the ideology that controls the
society wherein the science is done. Social and political interests
dictate scientific answers. Thus, science is not a body of knowledge;
it is, rather, a parable, an allegory, that inscribes a set of social norms
and encodes, however subtly, a mythic structure justifying the
dominance of one class, one race, one gender over another. This, at any
rate, is the message that permeates the culture of the academic left,
setting the terms of its view of science. It is the motto on the banner
flown by cultural constructivism when it functions as a political force.
A typical example of the discourse of the cultural constructivists,
certain to startle a scientifically literate person who has never
encountered the genre, can be found in The Science of Pleasure:
Cosmos and Psyche in the Bourgeois World View, by sociologist Harvie
Ferguson. He summarizes a key development of twentieth-century
physics as follows:
The inner collapse of the bourgeois ego signalled an end to the
fixity and systematic structure of the bourgeois cosmos. One
privileged point of observation was replaced by a complex
interaction of viewpoints.
The new relativistic viewpoint was not itself a product of
scientific advances but was part, rather, of a general cultural and
social transformation which expressed itself in a variety of
 modern movements. It was no longer conceivable that nature
could be reconstructed as a logical whole. The incompleteness,
indeterminacy, and arbitrariness of the subject now reappeared in
the natural world. Nature, that is, like personal existence, makes
itself known only in fragmented images.3

We assure the reader that Ferguson is referring unambiguously to

Einsteins relativity theory, not to some broader and murkier notion of
relativity! He means literally, and reaffirms throughout the book, that
developments in physics are not only conditioned, but dictated by the
evolution of something called bourgeois consciousness, whose course
is in turn determined, in proper Marxist fashion, by commodity
relations. People moderately expert in modern physics and minimally
familiar with its history will not find such pronouncements plausible in
the slightest, nor will they concede very much to the supporting
arguments. The latter merely decorate a compressed version of the
standard history of modern physics with bizarre assertions to the effect
that throughout it all, the desperate bourgeois ego was frantically
supervising developments, a sort of crazed dramaturge. Such
propositions have all the explanatory power of the Tooth-Fairy
Hypothesis. Still, hundreds of left-wing social theorists dote on them.
Quite naturally, cultural constructivismin its strong formis
one of the starting points and chief ideological mainstays of the
feminist critique of science. Likewise, it fuses with the spectrum of
doctrine and attitude that comprises the so-called postmodern
intellectual stance, when that viewpoint attempts to give its own
account of the sciences. We shall, however, address both the feminist
and postmodernist analyses of science in separate chapters, recognizing
that this involves quite arbitrary distinctions. Here we consider strong
cultural constructivism as it is practiced by historians, sociologists, and
other students of natural science as a social phenomenon. Most of these
are committed to a leftist political position; they regard their study of
science as part of an overall program of radical analysis and
demystification of bourgeois sacred cows.
We shall not attempt immediately an exploration of why this
should be so; but some points are clear enough. First of all, in the face
of an increasingly monolithic social and political structure, whose
capacity for self-perpetuation and extension seems endless, it is
difficult for radical intellectuals to accord an exceptional status to
science, leaving it exempt from what they regard as the omnivorous
tendencies of capitalism. They are highly unwilling to view science as
an activity of the autonomous and unfettered intellect. It is easy to see
their point. Science is, after all, well integrated into the technological,
industrial, and military machinery of the capitalist system; in turn it
relies on that system for the material basis of its continuing progress, at
least in those fields where a substantial investment of money is
necessary for fruitful research. For working scientists in the belly of the
beast, of course, the situation seems far more subtle than that. In fact,
from a variety of perspectives, scientists and intellectuals in general
might honestly (and correctly) view the present culture as a historical
paragon, to the degree that it fosters and encourages autonomy of
thought and freedom of ideas. On the other hand, the social critic who
identifies with a long tradition of militant intransigence, and for whom
positive social change invariably requires discontinuity, remains
unmoved by such considerations. This critic views the scientists
claims to independence as part of the constructed ideology that
imprisons and in the end directs him. To the analyst of cultural
constructivist bent, matters of scientific truth are always and
everywhere matters of social authority.
Furthermore, to the extent that conventional science can be
deposed from its position as a uniquely accurate way of finding out
about the world, contending perspectives, especially those arising from
the demotic substructure of society or from oppositional movements,
rise at once to a higher epistemological dignity. Belief systems that, on
the scientific view, are little more than superstition are at least
provisionally validated by the cultural constructivist hypothesis, while
the results arising from scientific investigation, if ever they appear
irritating or unwelcome, become contestable.
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 constructivist view either in the strong form outlined
above or in some of its more qualified but still erroneous versions. Nor
are we obligated to do so: serious philosophers of science have been at
it for decades. Nevertheless we record now, as scientists of long
experience who have not been indifferent to philosophical questions,
our emphatic rejection of that view. In our opposition, we undoubtedly
have the concurrence of the majority of practicing scientists over a
broad range of disciplines. Still, a sense of honor compels us to sketch
at least one common argument against the constructivist view.
Consider how the theory itself is built up and defended. There is
an obvious appeal to rather conventional veridical standards. A model
of a phenomenon is proposed and given coherent logical form.
Evidence for that model is adduced with every indication that it is
evidence of a specifically factual kind.
This putative evidence is made to articulate with the presumptive
model by means of arguments whose canons of logic and relevance are
entirely unexceptional. Inferences from the modelspecifically, those
inferences we have summarized as constituting the core of cultural-
constructivist doctrineare likewise arrived at by the presumed
application of ordinary logic, that is, deduction. Thus, the cultural-
constructivist case is brought into being by an intellectual process that
implicitly accepts the same methodological paradigm as the empirical
sciences it presumes to analyze!
This is not to suggest that the paradigm is particularly well served
in this instance. In fact, the logic of cultural constructivists seems to us
sloppy and full of holes in the matters under discussion, their evidence
dubious, and their case corrupted by special pleading and covert
appeals to emotion and the prejudices of a certain audience. These
objections aside, however, we note that the very form of their argument
makes the cultural constructivists self-subverting. They appeal to the
same canons of judgment that their argument seeks to condemn.
There is, of course, a smug habitual rejoinder to the foregoing. We
are challenged to consider that if in fact the empiricist logic that
undergirds the sciences can be demolished by an application of the very
same logic, then there must be something wrong with empiricism in the
first place. It, rather than cultural constructivism, must be the locus of
self-contradiction. This is glib, but entirely unconvincing. It assumes
that the arguments put forth by the cultural constructivists are airtight
from both the formal and evidentiary point of viewa point, as we
have said, that hardly needs to be conceded.
We invite the reader to judge where comparisons must ultimately
be made. The cultural-constructivist thesis seems at first to be arguing
against epistemological justifications of science, against attempts at
finding foundations. Yet, inasmuch as the specific content of the thesis
challenges the reliability of scientific conclusionsthis is what it
asserts in the final analysis, and not merely the inadequacy of
foundational argumentsand inasmuch as it does so, roughly speaking,
on the basis of the same argumentative paradigm as scientists use in
practice, the logic, evidence, and pertinacity of the thesis must be
weighed against that of specific scientific arguments.
In other words, in order to claim that they have made their case,
cultural constructivists must demonstrate that their arguments for
unreliability outweigh those of conventional scientific papers for
reliability in the realm of phenomena addressed by the latter . They
must show that their arguments are stronger than those put forth by
Professor X in his paper on the role of transforming growth factor beta
in the morphogenesis of the optic tectum, while simultaneously
outweighing those of Dr. Y in his monograph on the classification of
compact Lie group actions on real projective varieties! If they are to
demonstrate that their arguments contra science are anything but sheer
bluff, then clearly they must play on the scientists court. At this point,
we think a simple res ipsa loquitur is in order. There surely are
scientific papers that are inaccurate for reasons more or less implicit in
the cultural constructivist hypothesis, but these are on the whole rare
and exceptional; they cannot be used to prove a hypothesis of such
stupefying generality. To put the matter brutally, science works.4
We do not present this as a complete critique. Many other lines of
analysis are available.5 But there is no need. The state of affairs is best
summarized, probably, by the philosopher Paul Feyerabend, one of the
thinkers directly responsible for initiating the chain of ideas leading to
the cultural constructivist view of science (and, next to Thomas Kuhn,
the most often cited), who now expresses deep reservations about the
outcomes of this line of thought. How can an enterprise [science]
depend on culture in so many ways, and yet produce such solid
results? he asks. Most answers to this question are either incomplete
or incoherent. Physicists take the fact for granted. Movements that
view quantum mechanics as a turning-point in thoughtand that
include fly-by-night mystics, prophets of a New Age, and relativists of
all sortsget aroused by the cultural component and forget predictions
and technology.6
Whom does Feyerabend have in mind? Many, certainly, among
those thinkers on the left end of the political spectrum who have
developed a cultural constructivist (or relativist, or contextualist, or
perspectivist) critique of science with a view to extending their general
indictment of Western capitalist social structure. We turn to a series of
examples, work well known in the community that views the cultural
constructivist program as both path-breaking and fully credible. Our
exposition must be brief, yet we hope that our objections rise to a
higher level than mere amour propre.

Science as Power

A paradigmatic example of the constructivist program may be found in

the recent work of Stanley Aronowitz, a sociological theorist whose
wide interests reflect many of the concerns, trends, and attitudes
prevalent on the academic left. Aronowitz has long been active in the
causes embraced by the left; indeed, he has the distinction, almost
unique among university-based theoreticians, of having worked in the
trenches as a union organizer and shop-floor politician. He is a leading
figure in the Democratic Socialists of America, 7 an editor of such
theoretical journals as Socialist Review and Social Text , and a
ubiquitous presence at leftist symposia. His interest in science is
relatively new but characteristically sweeping and ambitious, despite
the fact that he has little formal training or technical facility in any
branch of it. He is a professed admirer of Feyerabend, which makes it
all the more ironic that Feyerabends strictures fit him so well.
Aronowitzs major work on science is a turgid and opaque tract
entitled Science as Power. It constitutes a major attempt to justify the
cultural (or social) constructivist viewpoint and is clearly motivated by
the belief that since science and technology are key elements in the
substructure of modern capitalism, it is one of the duties of the
oppositional social critic to demystify science and topple it from its
position of reliability and objectivity. The major premise from which
this work of demystification proceeds is that science is situated
knowledge, conditioned by the historical circumstances that engender it
and reflective of the ideological patterns of dominance and authority
that prevail in the society.
Ambition, however, is one thing and achievement quite another.
Aronowitzs book is notably clumsy in its approach to argument. Its
chief method seems to be to invoke from the philosophy of science as
many names as possible, in as small a space as possible, and to present
their views, as paraphrased by Aronowitz himself, briefly and
cryptically, cementing the whole business together, finally, with a wash
of the authors pontifications. Very few specific 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 Arono-witzs views. This
is done in a context emphatically illustrative of the pertinence of
Feyerabends remarks. Science as Power certainly does get highly
aroused by the cultural context of science; it is intent on taking the
development of quantum mechanics as a solemn turning point for
Western science; it is unblushingly relativistic as to underlying
philosophical doctrine; and it is, when all is said and done, incoherent.
We begin by considering the treatment of quantum mechanics and
its philosophical implications. Aronowitz devotes an entire chapter,
History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, to this issue.
Unfortunately, this treatment is greatly marred by the authors evident
(at least, this seems the obvious inference from the text) ignorance of
the particulars of physics. Despite the chapters self-confident title, the
reader who knows little of twentieth-century physics going in will
remain, in point of specific knowledge, equally (or perhaps more)
ignorant on his way out.8 Here and elsewhere in the book what we get,
instead of a pertinent history of contemporary (that is, seventy-year-
old) physics, is a series of solemn and fetishized invocations of the
uncertainty principle and, more generally, the quantum-mechanical
challenge to classical determinism.
Now, the uncertainty principle is undoubtedly one of the
cornerstones of quantum mechanics and one of the most
philosophically provocative developments in the history of science.
Under Aronowitzs description, however, it seems rather to refer to a
kind of epistemological and spiritual malaise, plaguing the minds and
souls of contemporary physicists. The argument, roughly but accurately
paraphrased (and all too familiar from New Age tracts, among other
things), is that since physics has discovered the uncertainty principle, it
can no longer provide reliable information about the physical world,
has lost its claim to objectivity, and is now embedded in the unstable
hermeneutics of subject-object relations. This, alas, demonstrates
depressingly well the connotative power of words when they are
allowed to drift apart from their contextual meaning. If Heisenberg and
company had chosen a less evocative term, an awful lot of nonsense of
this sort might never have seen the light of day. Philosophical and
pseudophilosophical posturing has dreadfully befuddled discussion of
the issue addressed to nonspecialists.
Once obscurantism has been stripped away, we recognize that the
uncertainty principle is a tenet of physics, a predictive law about the
behavior of concrete phenomena that can be tested and confirmed like
other physical principles. It is not some brooding metaphysical dictum
about the Knower versus the Known, but rather a straightforward
statement, mathematically quite simple, concerning the way in which
the statistical outcomes of repeated observations of various phenomena
must be interrelated. And, indeed, it has been triumphantly confirmed.
It has been verified as fully and irrefutably as is possible for an
empirical proposition. In other words, when viewed as a law of physics,
the uncertainty principle is a very certain item indeed. It is an objective
truth about the world. (If that were not so, there would never have been
so much fuss about it!)
Aronowitzs incoherent account completely occludes that simple
fact. He insists on adverting only to the most mystical views of the
matter (those of Heisenberg qua philosopher-oracle, for instance) and
ignores the particulars of the lively debate among physicists attempting
to clarify what the predictive success of quantum mechanics really tells
us about the physical universe. He naively echoes, for example, the
view that the causal and deterministic view of things implicit in
classical physics has been irrevocably banished. This is simply wrong.9
He propounds, moreover, the undocumented and egregiously unlikely
notion that the source of these developments lies in a general malaise
that afflicted European culture in the wake of World War I. On
Aronowitzs account, the pioneers of quantum mechanics were merely
clever artificers obedient to the societys peremptory demand for an
abolition of determinism and causality. Genuine familiarity with the
history and content of the work of Heisenberg, Schrdinger, von
Neumann, de Broglie, and others makes such a proposal hallucinatory.
Aronowitzs treatment, in short, gives no indication that he really
understands the underlying physics and mathematics of the situation.
He seems to be expostulating on the basis of dilute paraphrases or
worse, vulgarizations of paraphrases. It undoubtedly seems snobbish to
say so, but this field of speculation is notoriously unkind to amateurs.
Feyerabend has in fact understated the casegetting aroused about the
cultural component of physics has not only led Aronowitz to forget
about technology and prediction, but has induced him to ignore the
physics as well.
At a later point in the book we find the dictum cited as an epigraph
above: The point is that neither logic nor mathematics escapes the
contamination of the social.10 The argument leading to this emphatic
conclusion precedes it and gives us an excellent opportunity to examine
the coherence of Aronowitzs own logic, approvingly borrowed from a
certain David Bloor. Bloor, a sociologist identified with the Edinburgh
School of unyielding cultural constructivists, points out that by report
of the anthropologists, certain tribal peoples reason thus: Everyone,
without exception, is a witch; on the other hand I know lots of people
who arent witches. Bloor and Aronowitz deny that this is a logical
error: it is merely the logic of another culture! Aronowitz goes on to
insist that our own culture has its own weird logic, largely
unacknowledged. Here is what he supposes to be a telling example: We
define murderers as people who deliberately kill people; bomber pilots
deliberately kill people; yet we deny that bomber pilots are murderers.
Thus our own culturally generated logic is skewed and is not the
disinterested thing claimed by defenders of the ideational autonomy of
mathematics!
The confusions evident in this passage are comical. Observe, first
of all, that in this culture we dont define murderers simply as people
who deliberately kill people. A woman who shoots and kills a potential
rapist is not a murderer in this culture, nor is a shopkeeper who
dispatches a holdup man with the .38 he keeps under his cash register.
A psychotic who kills a nun under the belief that she is a five-foot
penguin is not a murderer either. Nor is a member of the military who,
under official orders, kills large numbers of people, including innocent
civilians. Indeed, in the last example, the person becomes a criminal if
he refuses to kill other people. From an ethical or religious viewpoint,
it is quite possible to quarrel with this exemption from the category
murderer; but that dispute is about ethics: formal logic has nothing to
do with it!
On the other hand, examples of the error made by the cited
tribesmen can easily be found in this or any other culture. An
anthropologist from the Death Planet, in disguise as one of us,
recruiting informants from the shoppers at a typical suburban mall, will
surely find someone who says something like the following: All
politicians are crooks, without exception; President Clinton is certainly
a politician; but President Clinton is not a crook since hes the
commander-in-chief. The point of course is not that logic (and
therefore mathematics) is culturally contaminated, but that cogent,
self-consistent, logically coherent thinking is not ubiquitous. Many
people shrink from it, in fact. It is an art and a skill that must be
mastered; and it requires patience, diligence, humility, and intellectual
energy. That it is not universally practiced is a fact that does nothing to
uphold Aronowitzs thesis.
 There is a further point to be made about Aronowitzs argument,
howeverrhetorical rather than logical. The example about the bomber
pilot is advanced precisely on account of its capacity for moral
intimidation. The lurking suggestion is that if the reader fails to accept
this argument, then he is implicitly condoning the bombing of innocent,
Third World civilians by imperialist U.S. pilots. In left wing circles,
such forensic flim-flam has considerable weight, despite its being
worthless in logical terms. This sort of trick alone accounts for much of
the popularity of cultural constructivism on the academic left.
Apart from his book, Aronowitz continues to speak out on
questions regarding science. His newest statements do not reflect a
chastened or cautious mood. He remains a true believer in the strongest
form of the cultural constructivist dogma. A recent lecture, 11 for
example, was studded with bizarre pronouncements unsupported by
evidence or plausible argumentation, but delivered with that
combination of blithe self-assurance and moralistic bullying that
audiences with strong political sentiments but weak backgrounds in
science find so intimidatingor exhilarating. To take but one example
from among several dozenand we stress that it is entirely typical in
its pugnacious illogicwe hear Aronowitz denounce the idea that
Einstein conceived special relativity by sitting around the cafes of Bern
and meditating upon the Michaelson-Morley experiment. It is an idle
legend, Aronowitz asserts, a mystification designed to conceal how the
social, political, and economic currents of late-nineteenth-century
European capitalism and imperialism brought to birth the theory now
famously associated with Einstein. Similarly, he tells us how the
development of celestial mechanics by upper-class gentlemen-
scientists such as Newton cannot be understood apart from an analysis
of seventeenth-century mercantilism. Aronowitz is probably right on a
couple of pointsbut for reasons that do him no credit whatsoever. As
it happens, it is most likely that Einstein did not know of the
Michaelson-Morley experiment at the time he was working on special
relativity.12 Aronowitz is childishly wrong on other points (the class
origins of Newton, for instance). But these are minor matters. What is
staggeringly silly is the essence of his thesis.
The history of calculus, mechanics, and relativity and the
biographical details of Einsteins and Newtons lives have been studied
and documented at sufficient length for us to know very well that the
Bern cafe myth is true in its essentials, as is the story of the solitary
Newtons incredible burst of creativity during the Plague Year, 1665,
when he invented modern mathematics and modern physics
simultaneously. This is apparently not good enough for Aronowitz; for
him, it is vital that both these achievements be seen somehow to
encode, in a quite literal sense, ideological and social perspectives. He
never makes it clear how this is supposed to have worked. Neither his
book nor his lectures set forth a coherent account of the putative
transcription process.
What is needed to make a theory of this sort even weakly plausible
is a demonstration of specific intellectual correspondences between the
details of the physics and the hypothetical complex of social or
economic attitudes. As well, some kind of argument would have to
emerge that these correlations were at least comparable in importance
to the internal logic of physics and mathematics as it influenced
Einsteins thought or Newtons. No such case is to be found in
Aronowitzs work, if only because the physics is terra incognita to him.
What takes its place is the arrogance of the dogmatist. This is a
common failing in cultural constructivist histories of scientific
achievement.
 The notion that such work as that of Newton and Einstein was
needed by the technological infrastructures of their respective
societies is plain nonsense. Seventeenth-century merchants and
navigators needed innovation in the form of an accurate chronometer,
not an explanation of Keplerian ellipses in terms of the inverse square
law. Turn-of-the-century industrialists were not sending out desperate
requests for a more subtle understanding of the invariance of physical
law under change of inertial frame. To offer this sort of explanation
as an account of profound intellectual developments is to show
unlimited contempt for the very notion of explanation, as well as a
boundless ignorance of the phenomena one is trying to explain.
Aronowitzs thesis is no more than an unsupported dictum that
declares, in effect, that by some mystifying process, the Zeitgeist Fairy
of 1665 contrived to tickle Newtons brain cells with her magic wand,
while her counterpart of 1905 did the same for Einstein! This is not
intellectual history, sociology, philosophy, or anything else worth a
scholars serious attention. We leave the last word on Aronowitzs
work to Michael Sprinker, a sophisticated Marxist who still hopes to
retain a place for Marxist notions in discussions of the philosophy of
science. He has the good sense to understand that this involves putting
oneself at a considerable distance from the naive and uninformed
constructivism evinced in Science as Power. His caustic review of that
book goes to the heart of the matter. If we are to doubt the findings of
the empirical sciences, we need to be given better reasons than that
they have arisen from and been a necessary adjunct to capitalist social
relations.13

Explanation
In general, even when cultural constructivists make a more serious
effort to put forth an account of what is supposed to go on during this
process of cultural construction there is a strong flavoring of
circularity. It is assumed ab initio that cultural construction has taken
place. Thereupon, the historical and scientific record is subjected to a
strained and arbitrary reading that decodes it with the help of a great
deal of interpretive contortion and hermeneutic hootchy-koo. At last an
account is produced that explains how the culture has constructed the
theory. This is then put forth as a confirmation of the cultural
constructivist hypothesis. In form and soundness, this procedure
closely resembles the methodology through which the tenets of
psychoanalysis are confirmed by the interpretive prowess of the
psychoanalyst.14 In both instances, circularity and special pleading rule
the day, and little worthy evidence emerges.
In saying this, we are not trying to deny that social interests and
nonscientific belief systems often enter into the very human business of
doing creative science, sometimes to catalyze the process, more often
to retard or deflect it. The work of Stephen J. Gould15 (who must be
recognized as holding strong leftist views) is replete with incisive
essays on examples of this, presented in minute detail. But Goulds
well-informed work is by no means comparable to the cultural
constructivist program. Gould knows perfectly well that in the long run
logic, empirical evidence, and explanatory parsimony are the masters
(with apology to our feminist friends for the metaphor) in the house of
science. In this he echoes Thomas Kuhn,16 whose work has so often
been vulgarized and distorted by the cultural constructivist school.17
Cultural constructivism, at least in the full-blooded version of
ideologues like Aronowitz, is a relentlessly mechanistic and
reductionistic way of thinking about things. It flattens human
differences, denies the substantive reality of human idiosyncracy, and
dismisses the ability of the intellect to make transcendent imaginative
leaps, in a way that OBrien, 1984s master manipulator of
consciousness, would cheerfully approve. According to the
constructivist canon, all are puppets of the temper of an age, and
science is just another inadvertent ratification of its ideological
premises. Only the cultural constructivists themselves (of course) are
licensed to escape the intellectual tyranny of this invisible hand. For
their part, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists must all
succumb.
Aronowitz represents cultural constructivism with all its
philosophical and political cards on the table, so to speak. His program
is maximalist in both respects and forthrightly asserts its prescriptive
ambitions even as it makes its sweeping descriptive judgments. Other
theorists and publicists of the constructivist school are more
circumspect in their claims and cagier in their tactics. They are content,
for the time being, to conduct an irregular guerrilla war on behalf of
their doctrine, while Aronowitz insists on undisguised frontal assault.
Typically, in the face of all-out challenges from scientists and
philosophers armed to do intellectual battle, they edge away from the
strong version of the constructivist claim and retreat to the proper
territory of sociology or history. In the presence of a different audience,
one primed to hear science contextualized, relativized, and revealed as
the deformed offspring of capitalist hegemony, the constructivist claws
come out once more.

Science as Power Struggle

In this respect we cannot avoid citing the work of Bruno Latour, a
sociologist, anthropologist, and social philosopher whose work on
science as social practice has been as much of an inspiration to the
constructivist camp as that of Thomas Kuhn. In contrast to Kuhn,
however, this does not reflect any inadvertence on Latours part. He
clearly relishes his role as self-appointed heretic and gadfly. His
reputation and the substance of his claims rest on his record as an
anthropologist of science, who does fieldwork at research facilities
rather than among the denizens of New Guinea. He is not loath to let it
be known that he has brought back amazing tales from his sojourn
among the troglodytes. He claims, with no particular modesty, to be the
first modern thinker to discover what scientists actually do, as opposed
to what they say they do or think they do. His tools are those of the
microsociologist; in his primary research he concentrates on small
groups and personal interactions in which quirks, prejudices, and local
hierarchies obviously play a role. Consequently, unlike theorists such
as Aronowitz, who derive from a Marxist tradition that reifies such
grand abstractions as relations of production and who impute far-
reaching powers to them, Latour works in the interpersonalist tradition
of Erving Goffman and his disciples, as well as that of field
anthropology in the classical mode.
What provokes and titillates in his work is that he places full-
fledged members of the scientific and technological elites in the
object-of-study position usually reserved for inhabitants of the
Trobriand Islands or the headwaters of the Orinoco. For Latour, the
Heart of Darkness is the solid state physics laboratory. Notwithstanding
the specificity and locality of his direct investigations, Latour is eager
to emerge with far-reaching generalizations and epistemological laws.
These are embedded in an expository style as unconventional as the
theses it propounds. His major work, Science in Action, is studded with
aphorisms, diagrams, cartoons, and doodles, and is characterized by a
mercurial, gnomic wit; but his purpose is seriously iconoclastic. Here,
for instance, is his Third Rule of Method: Since the settlement of a
controversy is the Cause of Natures representation, not the
consequence, we can never use the outcomeNatureto explain how
and why a controversy has been settled.18 This would seem to be an
instance of unbending relativism and antirealism. What it seems to say
is that nature is purely a social convention, and that scientific
controversies are settled by a dialogic process within a scientific
community resulting in a general agreement about the details of that
convention. Thus, to read this as it applies to a concrete situation, we
must believe that William Harveys view of the circulation of the blood
prevailed over that of his critics not because blood flows from the heart
through the arteries and returns to the heart through the veins, but
because Harvey was able to construct a representation and wheedle a
place for it among the accepted conventions of the savants! In other
words, it is not to be admitted that nature might provide a template in
conformity to which these representations are tightly molded.
A homely example will serve to clarify this point. Imagine that a
few of us are cooped up in a windowless office, wondering whether or
not its raining. Opinions vary. We decide to settle the issue by
stepping outside, where we note that the streets are beginning to fill up
with puddles, that cars are kicking up rooster-tails of spray, that
thunder and lightning fill the air, and, most significantly, that we are
being pelted incessantly by drops of water falling from the sky. We
retreat into the office and say to each other, Wow, its really coming
down! We all now agree that its raining. Insofar as we are disciples of
Latour, we can never explain our agreement on this point by the simple
fact that it is raining. Rain, remember, is the outcome of our
settlement, not its cause! Baldly put, this seems ridiculous.
Nevertheless, if we accept the validity of Latours putative insight, we
are ineluctably obliged to accept this analysis of a rainy day.
It is clear that a rather light-footed style is needed to get away
with such stuff, which drives more earnest and responsible
philosophers of science into paroxysms of disgust when confronted
with it. (Scientists themselves, less oppressed by a professional
obligation to grapple with every piece of gaudy nonsense that comes
down the highway, simply go about their business.) The idea that
Latours reports on the activities of scientists are to be accorded factual
status, while scientists reports on nature are not, involves a
metaphysical conceit (in both senses of the word) of astounding
proportions. True, no one can object to the observation that the world of
science is a human world, and that laboratory politics plays a
significant role in it from time to timealthough this is hardly a new
insight. But Latours sanctimonious insistence that such politics
accounts for science as such and is the real story behind the emergence
of scientific theories is in itself a signal instance of politics dictating
theory.
Latours picture of science is bleak and ominous: a war of all
against all! Science is presented as a savage brawl in which, from day
to day, the dominant chieftain is he who assembles, by dint of wealth,
prestige, and warrior cunning, the biggest and nastiest gang of
henchmen (i.e., a network, in Latours parlance). We must remind
ourselveswith a pinch if necessarythat this process is alleged to
account for the emergence of celestial mechanics, Maxwells
equations, the periodic table of the elements, plate tectonics, the
genetic code, algebraic topology, quantum mechanics, massive parallel
processing, and a million other insights and advances, modest as well
as exalted. Empirical verification is dismissed as a species of bluster,
or as a kind of collective hallucination of the power-crazed.
From the example above, it is easy to see why Latour has
frequently been classified as an unreconstructed constructionist.
Nonetheless, to say this is to miss an important aspect of his
intellectual cunning and his seductive charm. Latour is always ready to
recast and, in effect, retract what he has previously said. In other
contexts he will, with an apparently straight face, admit that there is a
natural universe out there and that scientific theories are shaped by it
in important ways. Simultaneously, he will censure rigorously the
dogmatics of strict cultural constructivism. Just as he pictures
(literally) the mind-set of science as a Janus-faced dualist, he too is
constantly springing from one side of a dichotomy to the other.
An interesting instance comes directly to hand in connection with
the very example (used by Stanley Aronowitz) we evaluated above, that
of the supposed parity between the tribal people who cant reason
syllogistically from the proposition that everyone is a witch and
Westerners who exhibit the same deficiency with respect to the
proposition that all who kill are murderers.19 Latour criticizes the
analysis on which Aronowitz relies, and he does so by dint of
arguments that overlap, in most ways, the ones we advanced above.20
He acquits the Westerners of illogicality on the very same grounds we
cite. In fact, he goes further and acquits the primitives as well,
asserting that it is the anthropologists ignorance, rather than that of his
subjects, that engenders the example! On this view, the ethnographic
researcher has been guilty of insufficient familiarity with the nuances
of the culture, of the implicit subtleties and unstated exceptions that his
informants tacitly invoke when they discuss certain cultural categories.
Thus, to some extent at least, Latour seems to be arguing that canons of
logic really exist, andthough one might regard this as rather hopeful
that all sorts of people are reasonably good at adhering to them.
Understandably, one might tend to view this position, of itself, as an
argument contra relativism. But then, putting a characteristically
paradoxical twist on the matter, Latour pushes on to the conclusion that
people are hardly ever irrational! In particular, he argues that refusal to
accept scientific argument or evidence is virtually never grounds for
impeaching a position or those who hold it as irrational. Thus his so-
called Fifth Principie: Irrationality is always an accusation made by
someone building a network over someone else who stands in the way;
thus, there is no Great Divide between minds, but only shorter and
longer networks; harder facts are not the rule but the exception, since
they are needed only in a very few cases to displace others on a large
scale out of their usual ways.21 The net result, of course, is that the
most indulgent relativism is now back with a vengeance, and adherents
of faith healers, palm readers, cancer quacks, and creation scientists
may now go their waycourtesy of Latour and the Harvard University
Pressin the full assurance that they are every bit as rational as their
scientific critics.
This example illustrates an important aspect of current intellectual
life, especially among the trendier doctrinal movements to which the
academic left has proved susceptible. Self-consistency is no longer
considered to be much of a virtue; and logical coherence, in the version
that working scientists are obliged by their peers to honor, is viewed as
a chimera. One must understand that a large part of the reason for
Latours success and celebrity is rhetorical. He provokes and
challenges with his insistence on paradox and contrarian whimsy. His
reader is constantly reminded that to reject Latours maxims is to mark
oneself as hopelessly stodgy, humorless, and tradition bound. It is no
accident that his style stands in such contrast to the single-minded,
rather ponderous linearity of the papers and monographs of the
scientists he studies. He is, despite his proclaimed fascination with
science and technology, a Panurgian imp, come to catch all those
solemn scientists with their pants down, a project that delights his
largely antiscientific audience.
Questions must be raised, however, not only about the depth and
accuracy of Latours claimed insights, but about the soundness of his
own observational technique. This is best illustrated, in our view, by
lectures, dealing with his work, sponsored by the French government,
on a social analysis of the Aramis project. Aramis was the
glamorous code name for an ill-fated attempt to build a high-tech
public transportation system for Paris. The basic idea involved the
construction of an elaborate network of trackage, full of switches and
cutoffs. These were to accommodate not trains but a fleet of six-
passenger self-propelled tram cars, each controlled by computer. The
idea was that the traveler, upon entering a station, was to signal his
presence and his destination to the central computer. Thereupon, a
nearby car with a compatible itinerary would come by to pick him up
and carry him to his target station, picking up and dropping off other
patrons along the way as convenience and capacity dictated. Thus,
Aramis was a kind of automated van service.
Attractive as the idea might be on paper, Aramis was from the
start a troubled and problem-plagued project. Yet it continued under
high-level funding for about a dozen years before being supplanted by a
much more conventional urban railway system. Why was it so durable?
For much the same reasons that any boondoggle hangs on long past the
point at which its wastefulness becomes clear. It provided jobs for
technical and industrial workers, research funds for high-tech consortia,
power for bureaucrats, and photo-ops for politicians eager to show their
commitment to a high-tech future. One would think that a highly
politicized sociologist like Latour would positively salivate to sample
the delights of this particular pork-barrel, and to tell us where all the
money went. But he barely touches the issue; certainly not enough to
embarrass anyone. By the usual muckraking standards, this is a pretty
poor performance.
Why did the project fail? To us there seem to be two obvious
reasons (there may be many others, of course). The first is technical. In
a proposed system like Aramis, the chief head-ache will inevitably be
software. Real-time algorithms must be devised for running such a
system efficiently, which means minimizing station-to-station travel
time for each passenger, maximizing utilization of each car, and
avoiding the sort of instabilities that cause cars to bunch up in one
region, leaving others bereft of service. This is a formidable
undertaking! It involves all the notorious difficulties of the traveling
salesman problem, the paradigmatic holy grail of combinatorics and
operations research. Compared to this, the hardware problems of
building trackage and computer-controlled cars are trivial. How does
Latour deal with this (or any other relevant technical question)? He
ignores it completely.
There is, on the other hand, an important social reason for the
impracticability of Aramis that the reader without any technical
background will recognize immediately. Picture yourself riding, late at
night and all alone, in one of these little Aramis cars. It stops at a
stacion and two men get on, nasty-looking types with what look like
ten-inch lengths of lead pipe bulging in their pockets We rest our
case. What has the sociologist Latour to say about such inherent
problems of social interaction? The matter does not seem to have
occurred to him at all.
Well, what, then, does interest Latour about Aramis? He seems
very excited about the semiological aspects of the thing, the fact that
information and control are such important metaphors for it. He is
intensely aroused by the fact that the cars are to be connected by
information but not physically, as though hed never heard of
radio-controlled toys. He studies the evolving shapeeven the color
of the prototype cars as aspects of the social representation of
technology. In short, he indulges in all the ex-Gallic, jargonistic
mumbo-jumbo about signification, and about social metaphor, that the
devotees of cultural criticism have come to expect, without saying
much of interest about the scientific or social reality. Eventually, his
epistemological conceits emerge, decorated with the usual doodles and
diagrams. It is hard to see what they have to do with Aramisor any
other episode in the history of science and technologybut they are
very dear to Latour.
Some of the glaring gaps in Latours analysis of the Aramis
project are characteristic of his work as a whole. Mathematics is a
symptomatic weak point of his. His discussion of Aramis avoids it
completely, as we have seen, but, even worse, his discussion in Science
in Action of the mathematical nature of scientific theories,22 and the
invocation of formal mathematics in order to express them, is naive
and obtusehe has a tin ear for mathematics. His account completely
fails to resonate with the thought of mathematical scientistsa term
that goes well beyond those formally described as mathematicians
and is deaf to how they reason with and persuade each other. The one
reference to an actual piece of mathematical research manages to
misunderstand an anecdote utterly. 23 The brief discussions of
correlation coefficients24 and Reynolds numbers25 are mere occasions
for sneering that completely avoid serious engagement with the deep,
and enormously fruitful, concepts involved. Indeed, Latour fervently
minimalizes and trivializes formalization, abstraction, and
mathematization. His discussion of the matter is a series of flippancies,
whose intended point is that the deep and surprising predictions about
the real world that emerge from exacting logical analysis of abstract
models are really no more than tautological parlor tricks.26 Here,
Latours resentment of science seems to become overpowering. It
should hardly need saying that this stubborn inability to deal
accurately, comprehensively, and honestly with this central and most
characteristic aspect of modern science effectively disbars the most
grandiose claim of Latours bookthat it instructs the sociologically
sophisticated how to follow scientists and engineers through society.
We recall Latours own imprecations against the anthropologist
who failed to grasp the nuances of a tribal peoples categories of
witchhood and non-witchhood. His own evident failure, as a
would-be anthropologist of science, to grasp the categories in which
scientists think and through which they judge and decide convicts him
of a similar offense, and on a much larger scale. Latours work is thus a
very inadequate prop for any radical attempt to rethink scientific
epistemolgy, or to indict science for unwitting relativism or
perspectivism. Its appeal is almost wholly a matter of style, not of
substance. It is a prime example of Feyerabends cantankerous
description.

Plutocrats
Cultural constructivist theories of science have lately infested the
usually staid domain of the history of ideas. One well-known example
is the work of Shapin and Schaffer, whose book Leviathan and the Air
Pump has a wide circle of admirers. This work is rather more orthodox,
on a superficial level, than Latours. It is an intellectual history of some
of the resounding disputes that surrounded the birth of experimental
sciencephysics in particularin the last half of the seventeenth
century. What particularly concerns Shapin and Schaffer is the quarrel
between some of the most prominent founders of the Royal Society
Boyle, Hooke, and their circleand the philosopher Thomas Hobbes,
author of Leviathan. This is the fulcrum upon which they attempt to
push the case that, contrary to its flattering image as a uniquely wide-
open and tolerant enterprise, welcoming of all new facts, information,
and ideas that bear upon its investigations, modern science has been
from the first the province of a tightly organized, well-insulated
coterie, jealous of its prerogatives and hostile toward outsiders who
intrude without the proper credentials. Moreover, this self-appointed
scientific aristocracy is seen as organically connected to the ruling elite
of Western society. Its views are derived, albeit subtly, from the
dominant metaphors of that elite. By the same token, its prestige,
authority, and epistemological monopoly are guaranteed by the power
of the state and the social formations it principally serves. The
argument between Hobbes and the adherents of the Royal Society is
offered as an instance of this phenomenon:
The restored regime [i.e., that of Charles II] concentrated upon
means of preventing a relapse into anarchy through the discipline
it attempted to exercise over the production and dissemination of
knowledge. These political considerations were constituents of the
 evaluation of rival natural philosophical programmes [i.e., that of
the Royal Societys experimentalists, as opposed to the a prioristic
rationalism of Hobbes].
Thus the disputes between Boyle and Hobbes became an issue
of the security of certain social boundaries and the interests they
expressed.27

The heart of the matter, as far as Shapin and Schaffer are

concerned, is that the confrontation illustrates the degree to which
Boyle and his friends were concerned not only with scientific issues, in
the narrow sense, but also with the question of credentials. Their
supposedly empirical rules, it is said, constituted a specific social
practice. They were preoccupied with the question of who should count
as a scientific authority, whose judgment was to be respected in
scientific disputes, whose evidence was to be accepted as reliable,
whose minds were to be acknowledged as sufficiently unpolluted by
common prejudice that their observations could be taken at face value.
If we are to believe the Shapin-Schaffer thesis, worthiness to
participate in learned discussion of experimental philosophy was
closely correlated to rank, wealth, religious orthodoxy, and, in terms of
Restoration doctrine, political reliability. This exclusivity was
reinforced not only by the money, status, and political connections of
many of the members of the Royal Society and their patrons, but in
addition by their exclusive possession of the physical instruments of
the new experimental method. The air pump of the title was not a
common device. Only a handful existed during the 1660s, and thus the
possibility of investigating experimentally the emerging theories of the
weight and pressure of gases, now associated with Boyles name, was
limited to the corresponding handful of people who had access to one.
Hobbes, ever the gadfly and eager controversialist, was only too
happy to point out this flaw in empiricism. The viciousness of the
response to his challenge is to be explained not simply by the
theoretical threat it posed to the self-assumed authority of Boyle,
Hooke, Oldenburg, and the rest, but, as well, by Hobbess dark
reputation as atheist, philosophical materialist, and general subverter of
the sanctity of authority. He was the natural target of distrust because
of his lingering reputation as a duplicitous sycophant, willing to flatter
either crypto-Catholic king or radical Protestant regicide as the
opportunity of the moment suggested. Even more important was his
enmity toward religious orthodoxy, and therefore toward the stability
of a hierarchical society. The attempt to exile him from the realm of
Natural Philosophy therefore must be seen as an act of political
prophylaxis.
On this, the Shapin-Schaffer view, the nascent Royal Society was,
from the first, the creature and deputy of a political and social
viewpoint. The societys supposedly objective science is thus to be
read, in large part, as a construction of its ideological commitments,
which rejected simultaneously the republican sentiments and leveling
enthusiasm of the most radical Puritans and the unconstrained
absolutism of the Stuart monarchy. Shapin and Schaffer accept the idea
that Hobbes was identified with both kinds of threat.28 As a defender of
absolutism, he could be read as the proponent of a government of
unconstrained sovereign power. Yet his fierce independence, which
devolved at times into a taste for rancorous disputation, was
reminiscent of the intellectual licentiousness of the religious and social
radicals of the Civil War period. Given this perspective, the scientific
community led by Hooke and Boyle, which echoed the aspirations of a
moneyed class that sought immunity from the whims of royalist
autocracy while casting a suspicious eye on the tumultuous mass of the
unpropertied, had no place for the likes of Thomas Hobbes.
It is not hard to transcribe this view to a contemporary context, as
Shapin and Schaffer undoubtedly wish us to do. The analogies are clear.
Modern orthodox science is also obsessed by credentials in the shape
of formal training, academic degrees, and a long period of acclimation
to the reigning paradigms. It polices dissidence and safeguards its
monopoly by an elaborate educational system and a forbidding
insistence on peer review. It flourishes with the connivance and
support of the organized forces of wealth and authority as constituted in
the state, in huge corporations, and in supposedly philanthropic
foundations. It has exclusive control over the instruments of empirical
investigation, some of whichlike multibillion dollar particle
accelerators and orbiting observatoriesare far less accessible to the
uninitiated than was Boyles air pump. And it has its heretics.
Here is Shapin and Schaffers last word on the general epistemic
principle that their particular historical study is supposed to illustrate:
As we come to recognize the conventional and artificial status of our
forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is
ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know.29 So, in
the end, we come back to the dichotomyfallacious in that it posits
total opposition between reality and convention where there is, in
fact, intense and continuing interactionso favored by Latour and
other constructivists.
The questions raised by Leviathan and the Air Pump are serious
and genuine. No intellectually astute history of the interplay between
science and its supporting social matrix could afford to ignore them.
The flaw, however, lies in attributing a deep and irretrievable source of
error to what is ephemeral, local, and inconsistent in its operation. Let
us examine the particular picture of seventeenth-century scientific life
offered us by Shapin and Schaffer.
Were the panjandrums of the Royal Society really so rigid and
intolerant in deciding who was to be accepted as a Natural Philosopher
in good standing? Was it true that the social order implicated in the
rationalistic [i.e., a prioristic] production of knowledge threatened that
involved in the Royal Societys experimentalism? 30 Its hard to
believe! Recall the roster of thinkers, Continental and English, who
were heard with deep respect in the scientific and philosophical debates
of the period: In addition to Boyle and Hooke, we have Descartes, a
French Catholic; Spinoza,31 a lapsed Jew doubtful of all religious
orthodoxies; and the Royal Societys own Halley, undoubtedly an
atheist. Above all, we have Newton himselfby no means a man of
property, having little in the way of family connections, and a radical
Protestant of fanatical intensity. Newtons singular religious views, be
it recalled, prevented him from seeking ordination in the Established
Church, a step he diplomatically avoided by becoming Lucasian
Professor at Cambridge. Newton was, in fact, an abjurer of the doctrine
of the Trinity and thus from many points of view a heretic. He was a
hostile, secretive, jealous recluse suffering intermittently from mental
instability, an unrelenting enemy to the Stuart monarchy in its attempts
to sponsor Catholic scholars at Cambridge (thereby opposing its
attempts to exercise discipline over the production and
dissemination of knowledge). To top it all, he was probably
homosexual.
Yet consider the celerity with which he was not only embraced but
virtually deified by the English intellectual elite, once it became clear
that his incomparable mathematical skills had led him to those insights
into the nature of physical reality that to this day remain staggering to
comprehend. Consider, in particular, the rather touching story of the
publication of the Principia. It will be remembered that Halley had to
drag it out of Newton by main force (imagine a comparable situation
involving a contemporary scientist). And Halley, a man of no wealth,
put up his own money to see the work through press, taking his
compensation in the form of copies, which he had to sell himself.
Recall, once more, that Halley was, in fact, an atheist, while Newton,
on his own testimony, hated atheism above all things! Clearly, there is
more to be said about rigidity and latitudinarianism, intolerance and
liberty of opinion, in the seventeenth-century scientific community
than that the Royal Society constituted a kind of thought police.
Consider again the question of Hobbess banishment from the
circle of the scientific elect. How accurate and complete is Shapin and
Schaffers analysis of the dispute between Hobbes and his foes in the
Royal Society? From time to time, they advert to Hobbess drawn-out
fight with the Oxford mathematicians Ward and Wallis, as though its
technical aspects were peripheral to their central thesis. They note the
existence of the acrimony, and the readiness of the devout Wallis to
bring Hobbess ostensible irreligion into it; but they say nothing about
the mathematical substance, claiming that it would carry them too far
afield! But of course this is a central and highly illuminating question!
Hobbes, be it recalled, had little mathematical training in his
youth. He took up the study of Euclidean geometry for the first time in
his forties (mathematicians are often said, with some justice, to be
washed up at the age of forty) and was an old man at the time of these
controversies. Wallis, on the other hand, was, aside from Newton
himself, the greatest English mathematician of the seventeenth century.
A partisan of Parliament during the Civil War (in anticipation of Alan
Turing,32 he served as code breaker for the Puritan forces), Wallis was
an ordained cleric, though of Presbyterian, rather than radical Puritan,
leanings. He opposed the execution of Charles I, however, and migrated
politically to a position of support for the Restoration settlement.
Politics and theology aside, Wallis was a superb, creative
mathematician, in contrast to Hobbes, who was, to put it bluntly,
incompetentutterly out of his depth in dealing with subtle
mathematical matters.
The controversy between Hobbes and Boyle on the weight and
pressure of air must be viewed to a considerable extent as an episode in
the twenty-year wrangle between Hobbes and Wallis. It was Wallis who
published the most pointed rejoinders to Hobbes, not Boyle himself.
The animus between the old philosopher and the Oxford mathematician
had arisen from Hobbess futile criticism of Walliss mathematics
particularly his great work on infinite serieswhich antedates the
experimental philosophy dispute by a number of years. Subsequent to
the attack on Boyles physics, Hobbes once again turned his guns on
Walliss mathematics. But the most revealing, as well as the most
comical, quarrel arose when Hobbes published his incorrect solutions
to the ancient problems of squaring the circle and duplicating the
cube.33 Wallis, of course, demolished the poor old philosophers
pretensions, and Hobbes compounded the sin, in the eyes of posterity,
by being unable (or unwilling) to see the point of Walliss refutation.
The relevance of these facts to the Shapin-Schaffer hypothesis is
that this long and (to Hobbess admirers) lamentable history provides a
concrete and substantive reason, in contrast to an ideological one, for
Hobbess notoriety in scientific circles. So far as mathematics is
concerned, Hobbes was simply dead wrong in these exchanges, as any
competent mathematician would have seen. It is then no wonder that
his authority to pass judgment on scientific matters was not well
regarded, even if those matters had nothing directly to do with squaring
the circle or the like. He was, after all, a strenuous advocate of a
rational-deductive methodology based on that of synthetic geometry, as
an alternative to the emerging experimental empiricism. Shapin and
Schaffer emphasize this fact, but unaccountably fail to link it to the
question of Hobbess doubtful mathematical competence. 34 His
grotesque failures as a would-be geometer, however, can hardly have
been irrelevant.
Leviathan and the Air Pump would have been a rather different
book had it addressed these matters directly. The image of Hobbes as
brilliant and devastating iconoclast would have taken some hits, at the
least. Moreover, Shapin and Schaffer would have put themselves in the
position of conceding the existence of sound, objective reasons for
deciding at least some scientific controversiesthat between Hobbes
and Wallis being an important case in point. Inevitably, they would
have been led to concede that there are reasonably valid criteria for
deciding the scientific competence of individuals, for distinguishing, in
most instances, between worthwhile theorists and cranks. After all, in
terms of mathematics, Hobbes was a crank. Such concessions, however,
do not sort well with a relativist or conventionalist position, especially
one grounded on a radically antielitist politics. Shapin and Schaffer
sidestep the issues that might entail such admissions by insisting that
all such disputes are ideological.35
Leviathan and the Air Pump is exhaustively and meticulously
researched as a narrative of events and personalities during a short span
of time. Nonetheless, the ideological perspectives of its authors make it
an exercise in tunnel vision. To concentrate on the idea of empirical
science as a manifestation of cultural and political imperatives is to
omit important dimensions of the story, both human and philosophical.
The effort of Boyle and his colleagues to put science on a solid
experimental footing and to restrain the impulse toward a priori
speculative systems was a project facing substantial practical
difficulties at that stage. It is one thing to embrace empiricism in the
abstract, quite another to find practical and reliable methods for
developing and extending concrete knowledge. The early experimental
philosophers were confronted with the necessity to minimize the
effects of human fallibility and bias, and it is shortsighted to condemn
them out of hand for addressing the difficulties in language that
occasionally smacks of snobbery or political insecurity. The verdict of
history must be that they succeeded magnificently in sketching the
broad methodological outline by which the physical and biological
sciences have attained their present scope and power. To put it another
way, irrespective of the social grounding of their ideas, what more
could they possibly have done, short of inventing the theory of
experimental design and developing the techniques of mathematical
statistics and error theory that underlie it?
Furthermore, it is false to read their rejection of Hobbes as a
blanket denial of the value of speculative and deductive thought. Such
reasoning was eagerly received when it was the product of genuine
intellectual competence, as in the case of Huygens and, of course, of
Newton himself. The singular genius of the period was to exploit new
and powerful mathematical reasoning in the service of physical science
without falling into the trap of contempt for mere experience. The
authors concede that they have not quite come to understand how the
experimentalism of Boyle was made to dovetail with the mathematical
science of Newton; but this may well be because they have been
celebrating the wrong hero. Hobbes, the mathematical dilettante and
bumbler, simply does not belong in the same pantheon with Descartes,
Huygens, Newton, Leibniz, and Bernoulli. His misadventures are
tiresome and, in the last analysis, uninstructive.
A final word about the rhetoric of the book: Once more, we find an
argument designed to appeal to a certain kind of readership on grounds
other than strict logic and evidence. To side with Boyle and the Royal
Society crowd, as the book presents them, is to side with snobbish,
purse-proud, rank-conscious plutocrats in their fear of the disorderly
masses. If Hobbes cannot be construed as radical democrat (as indeed
he cannothis motivations are markedly authoritarian), then at least he
can be made to stand for the voiceless and excluded massesand the
intellectuals without serious scientific trainingto whom science is an
inaccessible mystery, seemingly beyond human control. Thus we are
forced in our reading of the book to see it as a parable, whose fulsome
celebration of Hobbes conveys the implication that philosophers who
are not professional scientists (for which we must read historians and
sociologists) should have the authority to pronounce, or even to
prescribe, on scientific questions. As we have observed before, this
kind of stacking of the emotional deck has great persuasive force on the
academic left, irrespective of the soundness of the argument that
encodes it.
 Cultural Constructivism as a Political Code

We close by once more denying any covert program on our part to

exclude historians, sociologists, or even anthropologists from the study
of science and technology as social phenomena, whether on the grand
scale or on the level of interpersonal relations. We cheerfully allow that
such work might well incorporate a passionately held leftist (or, for
that matter, rightist) point of view. The fact that much of the best of it
comes from natural scientists such as Stephen Gould does not
inevitably put similar effort by social scientists in the shade. Historians
with a left-wing perspective, such as Marc Bloch36 and Gar
Alperovitz,37 to take but two vastly different examples, have certainly
made their respectable mark. But a political point of view is one thing;
the pursuit of philosophical phantoms in order to give leverage to
doubtful ideological claims is quite another. We insist on making the
distinction. The central ambition of the cultural constructivist program
to explain the deepest and most enduring insights of science as a
corollary of social assumptions and ideological agendais futile and
perverse. The chances are excellent, however, that one can account for
the intellectual phenomenon of cultural constructivism itself in
precisely such terms.
The doctrine, whether nakedly asserted without much attention to
historic and scientific detail (as in Aronowitz), or built on a minute, but
overly restrictive, examination of the social and historical record (as in
Shapin and Schaffer), is clearly designed to flatter a certain political
perspective, and to assert the sovereignty of a certain kind of political
alertness over the domain of history and philosophy of science. Even
apart from ideology, in the narrow sense, it functions politically (as
universities understand these things) to redress the grievances of the
social scientists, and to elevate their knowledge claims to the level
historically enjoyed by physicists and chemists. Thus, the insights of
the constructivists are ripe to be turned against them. One must
scrutinize their precepts and their practices for signs that their theories
are value-laden to a considerable, perhaps an unacceptable, degree.
The evidence is there, we submit, and reveals far more about the nature
of the constructivist program than that program has ever revealed about
the nature of science.
 CHAPTER FOUR

The Realm of Idle Phrases:

Postmodernism, Literary Theory, and
Cultural Criticism

If youre anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line

As a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms
And plant them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases
Of your complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesnt matter if its only idle chatter
Of a transcendental kind.
W. S. GILBERT, BUNTHORNES SONG FROM PATIENCE

The Ascent of Postmodernism

Future historians, composing a chronicle of the life of the mind in the

United States during the period 197590, may well feel obliged to pay
close attention to the role of academic humanists and social scientists.
Assuming that they do, they will have to contend with the curious
phenomenon of postmodernism, a stance that has inflected the thinking
of hosts of scholars in these areas. Postmodernism flourishes chiefly in
departments of English, comparative literature, art history, and the like;
but anyone familiar with contemporary American universities is well
aware of how far it has spread into such unlikely areas as sociology,
history, political science, anthropology, and philosophy.
To give a concise statement of postmodern doctrine would be an
almost impossible task. It is too variegated and shifty to allow easy
categorization, and too willfully intent on avoiding definitional
precision. There is even a risk of misleading in calling it a body of
ideas, for postmodernism is more a matter of attitude and emotional
tonality than of rigorous axiomatics. Nonetheless, as critics of
postmodernism in one of its currently most vigorous formsscience
criticismwe owe the reader some sense of how we understand the
term.
Perhaps the easiest entry into this body of ideas (and prejudices) is
to understand it as a negationparticularly as the negation of themes
that have reigned in liberal intellectual life of the West since the
Enlightenment. If we accept the notion that there is a generalized
intellectual project of the Enlightenment, one that is intent upon
building a sound body of knowledge about the world the human race
confronts, then postmodernism defines itself, in large measure, as the
antithetical doctrine: that such a project is inherently futile, self-
deceptive, and worst of all, oppressive.
Contrasted to the Enlightenment ideal of a unified epistemology
that discovers the foundational truths of physical and biological
phenomena and unites them with an accurate understanding of
humanity in its psychological, social, political, and aesthetic aspects,
postmodern skepticism rejects the possibility of enduring universal
knowledge in any area. It holds that all knowledge is local, or
situated, the product of interaction of a social class, rigidly
circumscribed by its interests and prejudices, with the historical
conditions of its existence. There is no knowledge, then; there are
merely stories, narratives, devised to satisfy the human need to make
some sense of the world. In so doing, they track in unacknowledged
ways the interests, prejudices, and conceits of their devisers. On this
view, all knowledge projects are, like war, politics by other means.
It is fascinating that postmodernism, a point of view that must flirt
continuously with nihilism, has become so conspicuously identified
with radical scholarship and campus political activism on behalf of
left-wing causes. As much as anything can be, postmodernism is the
unifying doctrine of the academic left, having largely supplanted
Marxism, except to the extent that the latter has been able to cover
itself in postmodern dress. In a new and highly politicized area such as
womens studies, for instance, virtually every scholar and student pays
tribute to the supposed depth of postmodernist insight and the richness
of postmodernist methodology.
The realm of cultural studies, only a few years old, and yet the
virtual center of current left-wing theorizing, is to all intents the
institutional embodiment of postmodernism. This is not to say that all
feminists or all left-academic cultural critics are committed to the most
caustic forms of postmodern skepticism. Some such scholars are at
pains to make clear their doubts and reservations. Nevertheless, and
however reluctantly, they almost inevitably find themselves aping the
language and style of postmodernist prototypes, and drawing upon the
manifestos of noted postmodernist thinkers, to lend authority to their
own musings. As historian John Patrick Diggins notes in his
comprehensive chronicle of the American left, Entering the academic
world, New Leftists would find in various poststructuralist theories
ready-made answers to their defeat and disillusionment.1 For
poststructuralist here, read postmodernist (see Chap. 1, n. 2).
There is a paradox in all this. In scorning the Enlightenment, the
postmodern left is clearly cutting away the roots, emotional as well as
intellectual, that formed and sustained its most deeply held egalitarian
ideals. In embracing the brittle skepticism of postmodern thought,
would-be leftists are never more than an inch away from passivity,
ineffectuality, and cynical despair. A criticism frequently advanced by
opponents of postmodernismjustifiably, in our viewis that the
doctrine, at its most virulent, is hardly distinguishable from the moral
blankness, the Viva la muerte!, upon which fascism was erected in the
first half of this century.
Yet the seductions of the postmodern stance are also obvious. In
an earlier day, Marxism, in the form of a disciplined Communist
movement, lured intellectuals by offering them the illusion of
membership in a priesthood, an inner circle of initiates privileged to
understand, by means of esoteric doctrine, the secret inner workings of
the world, a coven of hierophants signaling to each other in an arcane
jargon impenetrable to outsiders. It was the promise of numinous
power, inherent in arcane doctrine and obscure lexicon, that convinced
instinctive radicals that Marxist communism alone had the potential to
purge the world of its indwelling evils. The melancholy chronicle of
Communism in America, and its horror-laden history in those parts of
the world where it has at one time or another actually held power, have
by now demolished its intellectual prestige beyond hope of
resurrection.
Nevertheless, if we examine the popularity of postmodernism with
a view to understanding its appeal to the politically discontented, we
see that psychological factors are at work echoing those that lured
previous generations to Marxism-Leninism. Again, what is offered is
the possibility of becoming an initiate, part of an elect whose mastery
of a certain style of discourse confers an insight unobtainable
elsewhere and authorizes a knowing (and often smug) attitude. The
promise of power to mold the world in accordance with ones sense of
justice is far more qualified and ambiguous than was the case with
hard-line Marxism. All the same, that promise, however muted, is still
there.
Resistance, subversion, and transgression are among the most
popular postmodernist nouns, and the sense in which they are used
clearly conveys the idea that bourgeois society, founded on racism,
sexism, and the enforcement of rigid social roles, is under attack, its
vulnerabilities being exposed. Moreover, the peculiarly quixotic view
of the antagonism between representation and reality that is so
thematic in postmodernist thought vouchsafes its practitioners an eerie
absolution from having to measure their theories against the unyielding
matrix of social fact. If one holds, as most postmodernists do, that
reality is chimerical or at best inaccessible to human cognition, and
that all human awareness is a creature and a prisoner of the language
games that encode it, then it is a short step to the belief that mastery
over words, over terminology and lexicon, is mastery over the world.
As Diggins says, to the extent that the Academic Left partook of
various structuralist theories, reality eluded its vocabulary. Such terms
as power and hegemony and domination and discourse marked a
shift from labor to language in which text, speech, and other forms of
communication came to be seen as more refined systems of control,
with power ubiquitous and anonymous.2 In the cold light of day, such
a creed seems pathetic as well as futile, a desperate amalgam of
solipsism and magical thinking. But the world of postmodern thought is
well provided with devices for keeping out the cold light of day.
The idea that close attention to the words, tropes, and rhetorical
postures of a culture gives one transmutative power over that culture
finds acceptance for a number of reasons. First of all, it shifts the game
of politics to the home turf of those who by inclination and training are
clever with words, disposed to read texts with minute attention and to
attend to the higher-order resonances of language. At the same time, it
allows scholars of a certain stamp to construe the pursuit of their most
arcane interests as a defiantly political act against the repressive
strictures of society. This is exhilarating: it is radicalism without risk.
It does not endanger careers but rather advances them. It is a radicalism
that university administrators and even boards of governors have found
easy to tolerate, since its calls to arms generally result in nothing more
menacing than aphorisms lodged in obscure periodicals. It is, finally, a
politics upon which the wear-and-tear of ordinary political life can
have little effect. If something bad happens, ones doctrine is
confirmed: if something good happens, it is vindicated.
One startling aspect of postmodernist thought is its belief in its
own omni-competence. It pronounces with supreme confidence on all
aspects of human history, politics, and culture. If there is a prototype of
postmodernism, a previous thinker whose sweep and ambition are
mirrored in its swagger and whose corrosiveness is echoed in its
skepticism, it is probably Nietzsche. Whatever one thinks of Nietzsche
as philosopher and cultural critic, he is obviously a talismanic figure.
From his nominal base in an obscure and hermetic discipline (classical
philology), he reaches out with searing criticism of society and its
follies, strips away its pretenses, and flays its complacency.
Contemporary postmodern critics, themselves situated, by virtue of the
extreme specialization that prevails in the training of academics, in
scholarly pigeonholes, consider themselves similarly called upon to be
philosopher-kings. Postmodernism is, among other things, a device for
amplifying the special insights of a narrow area of literary criticism or
rhetorical analysis into a methodology for making judgments of the
entire cultural spectrum.
Necessarily, this entails considerable intellectual coarseness. The
confidence of the postmodern cultural critic is the confidence of a
generalizer who excuses himself from many of the usual obligations of
erudition. Under this dispensation, a wide variety of disciplines may be
addressed and pronounced upon without requiring a detailed familiarity
with the facts and logic around which they are organized. A recent
article by Heather MacDonald wryly analyzes this phenomenon, which,
in its most impudent form, generates scholarly essays that seem to have
as their subject everything in general and nothing in particular, and
which, under the postmodernist regime, are equally suitable for
symposia in literature, history, sociology, or feminist theory. She
writes specifically about a recent forum devoted nominally to the
history and analysis of twentieth-century art, many of whose
participants turned out to have no particular knowledge thereof. This is
not an anomalyit comes closer to being characteristic of scholarly
life among contemporary humanists. Notes MacDonald:
Concurrently with its internal colonization of academic
disciplines, [postmodern] Theor-ese broke down the institutional
barriers between them. The growth of interdisciplinary studies
 in the university and the fascination in the non-academic creative
world with crossover work are manifestations of the
universalizing drive of Theor-ese. Its final triumph lies in the
establishment of entire academic departments devoted solely to
itselfDepartments of Critical Theory, Units for Criticism and
Interpretive Theory, and misleadingly-titled Humanities
Centers.3

American postmodernism is often accused, with considerable

justice, of being little more than mimicry of a few European thinkers,
mostly French, who rose to prominence in the midst of the
bewilderment afflicting intellectual life when the protorevolutionary
struggles in the late sixties in France, Germany, and Italy fizzled out
without having produced any real impact on bourgeois society. The
most recurrent and inevitable names in postmodernist circles are those
of two French philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
Derrida, founder of the deconstructionist school of textual analysis, has
by example fostered many of the stylistic affectations that bespangle
modern critical writingpuns, coinages, words made ambiguous by
internal parentheses and other whimsical punctuation, facing columns
of apparently unrelated text which, to the initiate, are supposed to
comment on one another. This kind of writing, as much as anything
else, has been responsible for the ambiguous reputation of
deconstruction and related critical methods.
Derridas deep epistemological pessimism has infected his
disciples as much as have his stylistic eccentricities.
Deconstructionism holds that truly meaningful utterance is impossible,
that language is ultimately impotent, as are the mental operations
conditioned by linguistic habit. The verbal means by which we seek to
represent the world are incapable, it is said, of doing any such thing.
Strings of words, whether on the page or in our heads, have at best a
shadowy and unstable relation to reality. In fact reality is itself a
mere construct, the persistent but illusory remnant of the Western
metaphysical tradition. There is no reality outside the text, but texts
themselves are vertiginously unstable, inherently self-contradictory and
self-canceling.
On the face of it, this position would seem to offer little cheer to
the would-be revolutionary or radical reformer. In the peculiarly
constricted world of leftist literary intellectuals, however, it has come
to be read as a road map for the continuation of a political struggle that
seemed, by the late seventies, to have run out of steam. Yet
deconstruction had enormous value to New Left literary academics,
explains Diggins. Having lost the confrontation on the streets in the
sixties, they could later, as English professors in the eighties, continue
it in the classroom. A new nemesis haunted the Left. Everything wrong
with modern society would be explained no longer by the mode of
production but by the mode of discourse.4
Derrida and deconstruction (in the strict sense) have seen their
prestige erode somewhat in the past few years. This is not due, for the
most part, to philosophical or political rebuttal of Derridas ideas
(although, in contrast to literary critics, few serious philosophers have
had much use for them). Rather, the reason is the adventitious exposure
of two figures closely associated with Derridaone as disciple, the
other as philosophical forebearas having behaved abominably during
the heyday of Nazism. Derridas chief American follower, Paul de Man
of Yale University, was posthumously disgraced by the revelation of
his pro-Nazi writings as a literary journalist in occupied Belgium. This,
moreover, turned out to be just one episode in a life filled with
dissimulation, opportunism, and betrayal.5 At about the same time, new
facts came to light concerning the enthusiasms of the influential
philosopher Martin Heidegger for Nazi doctrine, enthusiasms that now
appear to have been heartfelt, and that led Heidegger, as rector of his
university during the thirties, to perpetrate unforgivable acts of
repression.6 Since Derrida had always claimed derivation of his thought
from Heidegger, his own credibility as a liberatory thinker came under
challenge.
Derridas declining prestige was not, however, merely a matter of
guilt by association. In trying to defend de Man and Heidegger, Derrida
and those closest to him sent forth a stream of polemic and vituperation
that stupefied many of its readers by its unreason and its resort to
special pleading. What is more, Derrida fell into the ironic position of
insisting that texts, especially his own, have quite determinate
meanings which he, as author, was uniquely privileged to understand,
and that history and facts were on his side. Thus, at a crucial point, the
panic-stricken deconstructionists ran headlong from the implications of
their own doctrine, which had loudly proclaimed the death of the
author and had despised appeals to historical fact.7
If we turn to Michel Foucault, we find a more sympathetic, but
still disturbing, figure. Foucault was, primarily, a philosopher of
history, whose thinking led him to ever-deeper and more pessimistic
considerations of the role of language and discourse in constructing the
conditions of human existence. To Foucault, life is built around
language, but language itself is not neutral. Rather, it is structured and
inflected by the relations of power and domination in a society. In fact,
language itself creates power and social authority. We are irremediably
trapped in a linguistic web that determines not only what we can say
but what we can conceive. All systems of thought, then, are artifacts of
the prison-house of language and thus stand in a questionable relation
to the real world.
Like Derrida, Foucault is a thinker whose appeal has been mainly
to social theorists and literary intellectuals, rather than to philosophers,
who are less swayed by the emotive aspects of his writing, and who
tend to regard it as a kind of poetry, rather than as philosophy proper or
sound history. For one thing, Foucaults epistemological relativism
arises from a study of the presumably exact facts of social history,
which his best work examines minutely. 8 Thus, despite himself,
Foucault is ultimately tied to the postulate of a real world, definitely
knowable in at least some of its aspects. Moreover, his reputation, too,
has been attenuated of late, perhaps unfairly, by revelations of his
deeply neurotic and self-despising personal life which, one cannot help
feeling, dictated the tone of his speculations, as well as giving them
their peculiar emotional force.
Notwithstanding these reversals, the influence of Derrida and
deconstructionism, of Foucault and his ideas of consciousness and
domination, remains strong. One particular aspect of their style that
continues to command imitators is their assurance that they are capable
of profound insight into anything and everything. This style of
philosophizing had been in eclipse during most of the twentieth
century, abandoned in favor of a technical mode of analysis that
focuses with precise intensity on narrow questions and fine
distinctions. But with Derrida and Foucault, among others, we see the
rebirth of the philosopher as comprehensive sage.

The Conscription of Science as Metaphor

Science, arguably the dominant mode of thought in the contemporary
world, has thus come under the scrutiny of Foucault, Derrida, and their
followers. In the case of Foucault, skepticism is expressed in the form
of doubts about the human importance of scientific truth, rather than on
the possibility of achieving it. Nonetheless, his basic idea, that a mode
of discourse is inevitably a code of power relations among the people
who use it, has profoundly influenced other postmodern skeptics and
has contributed importantly to the notion that science is simply a
cultural construct which, in both form and content, and independently
of any individual scientists wish, is deeply inscribed with assumptions
about domination, mastery, and authority.
For their part, Derrida and his epigones take a curiously
ambivalent position toward science. On the one hand, scientific texts
enjoy no special dispensation from the deconstructionist view of
textuality. They are, it is asserted, just as indeterminate, as ultimately
self-contradictory as any other text. The privileged status of
scientific discourse is yet another illusion deriving from the conceits of
Western metaphysics, and must therefore be rejected. Moreover, it has
been put forth seriously that literary scholars trained in deconstruction
or some related methodology are capable of a deep reading of
scientific texts, a reading that reveals aspects of meaning and
unconscious intent invisible to the scientists themselves. Later in this
chapter we examine what some of these claims amount to.
On the other hand, deconstructionists, as well as other postmodern
thinkers, have been eager to point out how modern science supposedly
generates insights that confirm their own view of the universe. Kurt
Gdels celebrated incompleteness theorem is a constant point of
reference. The argument is that this deep and startling result, which
shows that no finite system of axioms can completely characterize even
a seemingly natural mathematical object (that is, the set of whole
numbers and its familiar arithmetic), can be taken to imply, in some
sense, that language is indeterminate. Mathematicians and logicians
are dubious about such vague analogies, but many literary scholars are
deeply impressed by them and recur to this particular example in paper
after paper, even though it is doubtful that very many of them have any
exact idea of what Gdels result says, or any sense of how it is proved.
They have fallen into the trap described by George Steiner, who
understands, as few of the new cultural critics seem to do, that deep
scientific ideas must be comprehended, first of all, on their own terms:
Having no mathematics, or very little, the common reader is excluded
[from science]. If he tries to penetrate the meaning of a scientific
argument, he will probably get it muddled, or misconstrue metaphor to
signify the actual process.9
A further sense of Derridas eagerness to claim familiarity with
deep scientific matters can be obtained from the following quotation,
which also gives one some sense of how seriously to take such claims:
The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, not a center. It is the very
concept of variabilityit is, finally, the concept of the game. In other
words, it is not the concept of some thingof a center from which an
observer could master the fieldbut the very concept of the game.10
The Einsteinian constant is, of course, c, the speed of light in vacuo,
roughly 300 million meters per second. Physicists, we can say with
confidence, are not likely to be impressed by such verbiage, and are
hardly apt to revise their thinking about the constancy of c. Rather, it is
probable that they will develop a certain disdain for scholars, however
eminent, who talk this way, and a corresponding disdain for other
scholars who propose to take such stuff seriously. Fortunately for
Derrida, few scientists trouble to read him, while those academics who
do are, for the most part, so poorly versed in science that they have a
hard time telling the real thing from sheer bluff.
This is not, we assure the reader, an isolated case. In various other
Derridean writings there are to be found, for example, portentous
references to mathematical terms such as differential topology, 11
used without definition and without any contextual justification.
Clearly, the intention is to assure readers who recognize vaguely that
the language derives from contemporary science that Derrida is very
much at home with its mysteries. An even more egregious and
unambiguous example of the same sort of pretentiousness occurs in a
piece by a young scholar writing in the important postmodern journal
October: The discourses of philosophy, linguistics, and sociology
must be supplemented in a truly psychoanalytic account of AIDS by
concepts drawn from the discourse of mathematics, principally post-
Euclidean geometry, which provides for topological mappings based on
a non-Euclidean concept of space.12 Scientists who are genuinely
familiar with the terminology invoked by declarations of this sort have
no choice but to regard the whole business as a species of con game.
This kind of pretentiousness is not limited to Derrida and his
clones. It seems to have become a habit with many postmodern
thinkers. Jean Baudrillard, for example, tells us that there is no
topology more beautiful than Moebius to designate the contiguity of
the close and the distant, of interior and exterior, of object and subject
in the same spiral where the screen of our computers and the mental
screen of our own brain become intertwined with each other as well.13
This is as pompous as it is meaningless; but it is well contrived to
impress readers whose knowledge of mathematics is superficial or
nonexistent. Jean-Francois Lyotard is another celebrated postmodernist
thinkerhe is chiefly responsible for the popularity of the termwho
has pontificated about science at great length. Lyotard lets us know that
the games of scientific language become the games of the rich in
which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right.14 Not
all Lyotards readers, even among nonscientists, are eager to accept his
scientific authority, however. In his book A Blessed Rage for Order:
Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos, Alexander J. Argyros takes note
of Lyotards propensity to play a similar game:
Lyotards postmodernism is not to be understood as ideological or
theoretical fiat, but, we are led to believe, if only by implication,
as the consequence of new developments in the natural and
mathematical sciences. Therefore, Lyotard enlists such allies as
Gdel, Thom and Mandelbrot in his campaign to reduce ethics to
paralogy ... I think Lyotards appropriation of mathematics and
science is biased and tendentious in general.15

Even if we stick to mathematics alone, it is not hard to find other

examples of postmodern thinkers whose urge to pontificate on science
far outruns their competence to do so. The recent compendium ZONE 6
Incorporations16 is replete with examples. This is a volume of
meditations on science, technology, and culture by a throng of well-
known postmodernists. In perusing it, we find papers by Gilles
Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon, Peter Eisenman, Alluquere Roseanne
Stone, Frederick Turner, and Manuel de Landa, wherein they attempt to
make references to deep mathematicssome of them at length, others
just in passing.17 In each case, there are amateurish errors or efforts to
pass off mere verbal tinsel as mathematical knowledge. Biology is
similarly ill served.
We do not claim that all of the named writers are hostile to
science: many of them, indeed, profess to admire it greatly. Moreover,
a number of them are at best equivocally postmodern, under the
meaning of the term as we have defined it. Nonetheless, whether
deliberately or by inadvertence, they help to set the stage for a kind of
hostile science-criticism which assumes that a grounding in the
postmodern critical style, with its formulary, its litany, its rhetorical
gimmicks, provides by itself sufficient intellectual leverage for insight
into the workings of science, for criticism of it, and avoids the
necessity of actually learning it.
How much has science itself been affected by these goings-on
among the humanists? To this point, in the hard sciences
mathematics, physics, chemistry, and most of biologythe effects
have been minimal or indiscernible. The same holds for applied science
and engineering. Despite sweeping postmodernist claims of paradigm
shifts and radical breaks in the reigning episteme, scientific practice
in the more rigorous disciplines goes on as usual, driven for the most
part by the internal logic of the subject and the unyielding contours of
reality. The alarums and excursions that have shaken the halls of
English and comparative literature departments have reached scientists,
even those strictly within the academy, only as vague and amusing
rumors.
In the social sciences, however, the effects have been drastic. The
notion of cultural critic, in its postmodern form, embraces a certain
kind of sociologist as well as a certain kind of literary scholar. They
publish in the same journals and appear at the same symposia, speaking
the same language and sharing the same attitudes. According to the
eminent cultural anthropologist Robin Fox, his own discipline has been
permeated by jargon, philosophical dogma, and political attitudes
drawn from the world of postmodern literary criticism:
 English literature departments are reconstituting themselves as
cultural studies departments and are trying to take over the
intellectual world. Its a heady time for them and a scary time for
science My own interpretation is that lazy minds are happiest
with the mere voicing of opinion, or with the easy task of dressing
this up to make it look plausible. In modern literary criticism they
have found the perfect model of this, along with a new doctrine of
extreme relativism that says that everything is only opinion
anyway, to justify it. Thus the otherwise odd vision of thousands
of social science children cavorting after the Pied Piper of Lit.
Crit. and discourse analysis.18

Cultural anthropologists, Fox reasons, were particularly

susceptible to this invasion because it makes a good excuse to dodge
the rigors of sciencethe demand for verification and falsification
and promotes the relativism with which the social sciences have always
sympathized.19 Moreover, those whose politics inclined toward the
left were all too happy to have a rationale for reconstituting their
discipline as part of a social movement to champion the oppressed
races, castes, genders, and sexual outcasts of the earth, freed of any
need to analyze their situation objectively. In Foxs view, however,
many of the peoples whom this strategy is designed to help are, in the
end, poorly served: Science, with its objectivity remains the one
international language capable of providing objective knowledge of the
world. And it is a language that all can use and share and learn The
wretched of the earth want science and the benefits of science. To deny
them this is another kind of racism.20 It is difficult to judge whether
Fox overstates the extent of the damageor understates it. The
necessary census has not been taken. There certainly has been damage,
and plenty of it. We hope that we shall not be obliged to compose a
similar lament for polymer chemistry or biophysics in the near future.

The Political Temptations of Theory

Professors in the humanities are not, by and large, any more feeble-
minded than the general run of humanity, nor are they particularly
feckless in the affairs of day-to-day life. Moreover, despite the hopes of
readers of the National Review or the American Spectator, left-wing
political opinions are not especially inconsistent with high intelligence
either, nor do they lead to a generalized susceptibility to muddled
thinking. Why, then, has so large a proportion of the left-wing
professoriate in literature and adjacent disciplines been so ripe for
seduction by the potpourri of viewsdeconstructionist, Foucauldian,
and otherwisetraveling under the catchall term postmodernism?
Deconstructionism in its pure form would seem to be an unlikely
candidate for such popularity. It is a uniquely disenchanted and
crepuscular philosophy, carrying the reek of a decadent mandarinate
that has seen everything once too often. To toy with ideas in such an
idle and self-vitiating fashion would seem to confess a lack of interest
in bringing about salutary change in human affairs. For its part,
Foucauldian analysis, despite the tender-heartedness of some of its
instincts, seems equally to lead to resignation and quietism. If
consciousness is such a prisoner of powerand Foucault seems much
more gloomy than Marx in this respectthen hopes for a break with
the oppressive past must be futile indeed. Notes Alan Ryan, Princeton
professor of politics:
It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to
 embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority
view was always that power could be undermined by truth Once
you read Foucault as saying that truth is simply an effect of power,
youve had it But American departments of literature, history,
and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who
have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political
radicalism, and are in a mess.21

The well-known Marxist literary critic Frank Lentricchia voiced

similar doubts with respect to Paul de Man (this before the revelation
of de Mans shabby political history): De Man, unlike Schiller or
Wordsworth, has no desire to employ the literary in the redemptive
work of social change ... his talk of critical crisis is academic in the
most debilitated sense of the word; it can only interest professors of
literary theory.22 Though less disdainful of Foucault, Lentricchia is in
the end disenchanted with that thinkers beatification: Foucaults
theory of power, because it gives power to anyone, everywhere,
provides for a means of resistance but no real goal for resistance In
this version, the economic version of exploitation seems
insignificant.23 An even more sweeping uneasiness is expressed by
Bogdan Denitch, influential political scientist and co-chairman of the
Democratic Socialists of America: Politics of identity and mechanical
imports of French intellectual fashions have trivialized and decentered
attempts to build genuinely broad coalitions that could provide an arena
for a resurgent left.24
Even those among leftist intellectuals who have in part accepted
the stance or methodology characteristic of postmodernism are left
with a degree of unease. Alexander J. Argyros, in the statement of
purpose that begins his book, flatly asserts: Since it is essentially a
negative methodology, when deconstruction is called upon to address
concrete issues, such as political ones, its penchant for eliding
commitment and its resistance to postulating scales of value render it
ineffectual at best and reactionary at worst.25 In the important
theoretical journal New Left Review, Elizabeth Wilson, defending
herself against a charge of abandoning the rationalistic legacy of the
Enlightenment, writes: As someone who still finds Marxism highly
relevant in the present world I absolutely reject, however, any attempt
to align me with, the likes of Rorty, et al. 26 And, in a similar vein, the
radical-feminist philosopher Kate Soper proposes exploiting
postmodern skepticism without being overwhelmed by it, and
advocates combining alertness to the deficiencies and crudities of
much traditional value-discourse with alertness to the self-defeating
quality of the attempt to avoid all principled positions in theory. 27 As
will be evident from a days skimming the unbound periodicals in any
university library, such cautionary voices are in general not being
heard. The impulse to embrace postmodernism and to adopt the
velleities of its chief figures in ones polemical language has run
powerfully among left-wing intellectuals whose academic anchor is in
the humanities.
A curious apology for this infatuation can be found in a paper of
Kate Ellis, a radical-feminist literary scholar. 28 Her argument for
embracing deconstruction, or some partially non-Derridean variant of
it, is, roughly, that in instructing (or rather, indoctrinating) her
womens literature students in the virtues of a radical feminist critique
of society, she finds herself obstructed. Her problem is the tendency of
those students to construe situations in fiction, and presumably in life,
with reference to a narrative model emphasizing redemption (in the
bourgeois-liberal mode), self-realization, and autonomy, by seeing
those as the outcome of a sufficiently strong will and the ability to
make the right choices. In Elliss view, feminism requires a more
strongly destabilizing view of things, which deconstruction fosters: It
means that no one person or group has the power of totally constitutive
speech, and that no subject position can guarantee the truth of the
speaker.29
As is usual with rationales for deconstruction, the linear logic of
Elliss argument is an implicit rejection of the very position it argues
for. Beneath that there lurks a still more curious paradox, for upon
analysis, Elliss rhetoric reveals an underlying cast of mind flagrantly
inconsistent with the cool pose of deconstruction. What is undeniable is
her strict and unassailable moralism, as steadfast as that of any Sunday-
school teacher. For Ellis, gender oppression and class oppression are
absolute evils; all her theoretical moves are made with the intent of
abolishing them. Whatever persuasive force can be found in her piece
derives from her appeal to these values, whose epistemological
standing for her is, of course, beyond question. They are so much a part
of her that she is hardly conscious of them; she would scarcely allow
them to be regarded as a mere casual consequence of her position in
the discursive field or some such. The odor of unassailable rectitude
that pervades what is supposed to be a case on behalf of untrammeled
relativism is what makes this essay a little ridiculousand just a bit
admirable. Such emphatic ethical commitment, when all is said and
done, puts to flight the formal skepticism being conscripted on its
behalf.
As is exemplified by Elliss work, the postmodern stance and its
attendant philosophical buzzwords have become obligatory on the
academic left, save for unrepentant die-hard Marxists. There is no one,
overriding reason for this; a number of mutually reinforcing factors
seem to have come into play. First of all, postmodern philosophy, in its
guise as literary theory, flatteringly concedes a high degree of power to
the skills and habits of mind of literary critics. The practice of close,
exegetical reading, of hermeneutics, is elevated and greatly ennobled
by Derrida and his followers. No longer is it seen as a quaint academic
hobby-horse for insular specialists, intent on picking the last bit of
meat from the bones of Jane Austen or Herman Melville. Rather, it has
now become the key to a full comprehension of the profoundest matters
of truth and meaning, the mantic art of understanding humanity and the
universe at their very foundations. At a stroke, the status of literary
studies as a genteel backwater of the world of affairs is reversed; and
the image of the sophisticated critic as a new Dr. Faustus, conjuring
secrets from the remotest circles of heaven and hell, is set in its place.
Like all great con men, the high priests of deconstruction and the like
are flatterers.
Secondly, postmodernism, whether chiefly derived from one
philosophical source or drawing eclectically on a flock of them
Lyotard, Baudrillard in addition to Derrida and Foucaultis, in its
skepticism about everything save itself, an incarnation of the anti-
Philosophers Stone. Everything it touches is drained of value,
authority, validity, and even the right to stand for what it has always
stood for and to be understood as it has always been understood. Thus,
in the game of intellectual subversion, which is always important to the
academic left (though the wider world goes on much as usual), it is felt
to be the instrument for dethroning the proudest symbols and most
sublime achievements of Westernthat is to say white, patriarchal,
violent, imperialistic, capitalistic, greed-riddencivilization. Notes
Vincent Pecora, a literary critic of emphatic left-wing sympathies but
scornful of deconstruction and its political consequences: To many of
Derridas critics, the deconstructive rejection of humanism and the
Enlightenment has seemed mere nihilism. But it is precisely this
anti-Western stance that has been the key, I think, to the influence
Derridas work has had on a broad spectrum of the academic left.30
Everything by which that civilization contrives to hold itself in
high regardShakespeare and Dante, Descartes and Kant, Locke and
Jefferson, Newton and Einstein, Mozart and Beethovenwilts under
the deconstructive gaze (at least in the minds of those doing the
gazing). It is a heaven-sent device for avoiding close argument and the
analysis of particulars. Once a postmodern critic has at hand a license
to read every proposition as its opposite when it suits his convenience,
analytic skills of the more traditional sort are expendable and logic is
effaced in the swirling tide of rhetoric. Once it has been decided that
determinate meaning is chimerical and not worthy of slightest
deference from the well-honed poststructuralist postmodernist, the
entire edifice of hard-won truth becomes a house of cards. Once it has
been affirmed that one discursive community is as good as another, that
the narrative of science holds no privileges over the narratives of
superstition, the newly minted cultural critic can actually revel in his
ignorance of deep scientific ideas. That this is a canny political act is
accepted as an article of faith, no matter how much it seems to elevate
wishful thinking over hard social fact.
The feeling that the postmodern critique is inherently political in a
fashion helpful to the left is made evident in the recent rise of what has
come to be called cultural studies on the campus. This term covers a
multitude of freeform speculations about social institutions current and
past. It is a recombination of social history and sociology, practiced
largely by scholars whose background is in literary studies, when it is
not in womens studies or something of the sort. It combines a
pugnacious vindication of the demotic and popular cultures with a
truculent interrogation of anything that issues from the high culture of
the elite or from the dominant attitudes of the bourgeoisie. In that
sense, it is a Foucauldian project on its face. The role of the skepticism
and relativism of the deconstructionists is also clear; if no text is
privileged, no narrative tradition closer to ethical, aesthetic, or
historical truth than any other, then there are no grounds for regarding
the traditional venues of humanist scholarshigh literature and high
artas sacred ground. Thus, it becomes permissible for professors of
English to inquire solemnly into what are by tradition (and in fact)
trivial matters, and to festoon those inquiries with the abundant
neologisms of the postmodern lexicon, giving thereby further assurance
that the subject at hand, be it rap music or professional wrestling, has
deep implications for theory.

Philosophical Revenge

While many scientists in and out of the academic community hold

progressive and leftistsometimes emphatically leftistviews on a
variety of questions, the postmodern stance has made little headway
among them and seems, when they become aware of it, to evoke
indifference or amused contempt. To the extent that contemporary
theory, as it is understood by the humanists, is likely to influence
scientists at all, the effect will probably be to drive them further from
active political engagement along the lines hoped for by the left. This
fact rarely deters the postmodern left from pursuing its favorite will-o-
the-wisps; if anything, the humanist radical is persuaded by the
opposition or indifference of scientists that he must be on the right
track. We suspect that this phenomenon is partly rooted in intellectual
trends that were manifest in university life three or four decades ago.
At that time, the no-nonsense logical positivism adumbrated in
such influential books as A. J. Ayers Language, Truth, and Logic was
widely discussed and supported. It is safe to say that some version of
this viewpointwith Popperian addendais still embraced, at least
tentatively, by most working scientists who have reflected at all (as
most have) on the issues of knowing and truth. As it was made known
to the academic community, however, positivism, while flattering to
physical and biological scientists, was devastatingly hurtful to the
amour propre of traditional humanists, and hardly more comforting to
social theorists. This philosophical doctrine imposes severe tests of
meaningfulness on all sorts of propositions. Statements in the language
of academic, as well as everyday, discourse that seem, on their face, to
be making some kind of factual assertion about the world are, in the
harsh glare of positivism, often dispossessed of such pretensions.
The propositions of science, by and large, escape humiliation,
while those of the humanities, including such venerable philosophic
areas as ethics and aesthetics, emphatically do not. Thus, while
statements about the emission spectra of planetary nebulae are
perfectly meaningful for the positivist, the assertion that Racine is
superior to Corneille (or Schubert to Mendelssohn, or that the
Napoleonic Code is ethically inferior to Anglo-Saxon common law)
collapses into meaninglessness. The latter is understood as an example
of emotive utterance, to which truth-value cannot properly be
ascribed.
Given that humanistsand, in particular, literary scholars of the
traditional sorthave always labored just as hard, examined the
relevant data just as minutely, and argued as exhaustively in reaching
their judgments as physicists and mathematicians do in reaching theirs,
the news that their conclusions cannot, in principle, even be wrong (in
the sense that the contrary proposition is right) was a sour revelation
indeed. The fact that scientists tended to accept it more or less
complacently cannot have been much comfort to professors of English
and art history.
A further source of unhappiness was the reaction of a good part of
the social-science community, which responded to the logical-positivist
critique (or to its vulgarization) with various attempts to introduce
quantitative methods, mathematical models, replicability, and
falsifiability into sociological work. Many of these attempts were
brutally reductionistic and flew in the face of common sense, obtaining
results that were either painful elaborations of the obvious or, even
worse, procrustean absurdities. As the acerbic Stanislav Andreski puts
it:
The recipe for authorship in this line of business is as simple as it
is rewarding: just get hold of a textbook of mathematics, copy the
less complicated parts, put in some references to the literature in
one or two branches of the social studies without worrying unduly
about whether the formulae which you wrote down have any
bearing on the real human actions, and give your product a good-
sounding title, which suggests that you have found a key to an
exact science of collective behavior.31

This sort of thing, while for the most part unimpressive to the
scientists, tended to convince many humanistsand a good part of the
social-science community as wellthat a craving for methodological
respectabilityscientism or physics envy as it was sometimes
calledmust lead to a sterile (and politically reactionary) view of
human affairs, denying ineluctable truths about the human situation.32
Thus it probably came to pass that when the brutally skeptical
views of the postmodernists began to gain currency some years later,
many humanists, and many social scientists as well, were quick to lay
hold of them as instruments of revenge.33 If the carefully crafted
opinions of literary experts were to be consigned to epistemological
limbo by analytic philosophy, those experts and their academic progeny
now had in handor so they thoughtan instrument that could drag
down the scientists and other pursuers of objective knowledge with
all the rest. This view accounts at least in part for the paradox that on
embracing postmodernism, humanist scholars have in many instances
cruelly repudiated the accomplishments of their own disciplines, even
to the point of denouncing their own earlier work.
However varied the reasons for the embrace of postmodernism in
the universities, it is clear that the phenomenon is almost wholly
associated with the self-described political left. As far as the
ideological right is concerned, the situation presents it with welcome
opportunities for polemical sallies, counterblows that avoid the
necessity for justifying the illogical or evil practices of their own
heroes and of whatever world (usually of the recent past) they like to
think of as the best of all possible worlds. With postmodernism the
target, conservatives easily move the discussion onto the loftier plane
on which the relativist caprices of Derrida, Lyotard, and the rest are the
principal focus. Roger Kimballs Tenured Radicals adopts this strategy
in part, but its underlying politics are relatively transparent, compared
to arguments that seem never to stray in the slightest from disinterested
philosophical inquiry. 34 It is often hard to read the writers political
position from such critiques, and some of them, in fact, issue from
impeccably left-wing thinkers.
For the first time in modern American history, right-wing theorists
seem on the point of establishing themselves upon the ethical and
philosophical high ground, thanks to the postmodern contortions of the
left. This fact, however, has little penetrated left-academic discourse;
the entanglement of would-be progressive intellectuals with the
conceptual freak show of postmodernism continues to isolate and
neutralize them, at least outside the hothouses (i.e., academic
departments and conferences) in which they flourish. One will cheer or
deplore this fact as ones political tendencies dictate.

Cultural Studies: Playing Intellectual Hooky

We can now come to the question of the relation between the

postmodern styles pervading so much of current humanist thinking and
the traditional scientific disciplinesmathematics, physics, chemistry,
biology, engineering. It would have been idle to hope that the ambitions
of postmodernism would be satisfied by a revision of the standard
modes of analyzing literature and the arts, and by a new methodology
for thinking about sociology and social history. The mentality of
postmodernism has an emphatically totalizing component, even as it
pretends to denounce the totalizing propensities of whatever it wishes
to attack. The centrality of science to the contemporary world, its
crucial role in shaping the material conditions under which we live as
well as many of the assumptions we bring into our discussions of the
world, guaranteed that sooner or later postmodern dialecticians would
feel bound to turn their guns on it.
It may be argued that in revolutionizing literary criticism,
postmodernism will have created a valuable legacy, although many
people (including students) who simply love literature and look to
academic criticism for relevant inspiration and deeper insight about it
have been cruelly disappointed. Still, the analysis of social questions
may have benefited from postmodern intellectual strategies, however
susceptible to subjectivism and giddy pontifications they may be. In the
area of the hard sciences however (and we hold to the usage,
anticipating the jeers of Derridean or Foucauldian skeptics), it has by
now become clear, after a few short years, that criticism and analysis
informed by postmodern attitudes has been, by and large, an irrelevant
botch.
We could not wish for a more straightforward example than the
following paragraph, appearing in the recent volume Cultural Studies, a
massive tome clearly intended to be a sourcebook and text for the
hordes of anticipated students in this newly delivered academic hybrid.
The quotation is taken from the essay New Age Techniculture by
Andrew Ross, professor of English at Princeton, editor (with Stanley
Aronowitz) of the fashionably postmodern-leftist journal Social Text ,
and glamorous cult-figure in the movement.35 Despite its length, it is
worth quoting in full:
In this respect [i.e., the distinction between authentic science and
pseudoscience] it is worth drawing an analogy between the
demarcation lines in science and the borders between hierarchical
taste cultureshigh, middlebrow, popularthat cultural critics
and other experts involved in the business of culture have long had
the vocation of supervising. In both cases, we find the same need
 for experts to police the borders with their criteria of inclusion and
exclusion. In the wake of Karl Poppers influential work, for
example, falsifiability is often put forward as a criterion for
distinguishing between the truly scientific and the
pseudoscientific. But such a yardstick is no more objectively
adequate and no less mythical a criterion than appeals to, say,
aesthetic complexity have been in the history of cultural criticism.
Falsifiability is a self-referential concept in science inasmuch as it
appeals to those normative codes of science that favor objective
authentication of evidence by a supposedly objective observer. In
the same way aesthetic complexity only makes sense as a
criterion of demarcation inasmuch as it refers to assumptions
about the supposed objectivity of categories like the aesthetic
refereed by institutionally accredited judges of taste.36

So much, then, for three thousand years of struggle to develop a

systematic method for getting reliable information about the world! So
much for the notion that refutation by experience is good grounds for
abandoning a theory, or at least taking it in for major repairs! To see
whether this petulant paragraph says anything, we have to strip away
the irrelevancies concerning the relative nature of aesthetic judgments
and resolutely ignore the dreaded Culture and Science Border Patrol in
order to get at it. Doing so, we seem to be left with something like:
Science backs up its claims, whereas pseudo-science doesnt, but I
dont care about the difference. Perhaps, however, we are being
uncharitable. If we work on it for a while, it is just possible to construe
Ross as meaning to say, The empiricist philosophy by which science
proceeds cannot be justified by an appeal to empiricism. We cant
solve the Problem of Induction by appealing to inductive inference.
 Welcome to freshman philosophy! True, there is a serious point
here, one with which most scientists are quite familiar. But it does
nothing to elevate pseudoscientific nonsense to the epistemic dignity of
genuine science. In our minds eye we envision this paragraph leaping
from the occult-New Age section of the bookstore, where, no doubt, it
graced some puffery about channelers or healing crystals, to the
spanking-new cultural studies section where, thanks to Professor Ross
and the editors of Cultural Studies, it takes on a new life as a
contribution to learned discourse.
Rosss piece in Cultural Studies is largely incorporated into his
Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of
Limits. This work studies contemporary popular subcultures that
vulgarize standard science while, to some degree, challenging its
authority. Ross is for the most part in sympathy with these
enthusiasms, which include the New Age movement, alternative
health care regimens, science fiction (especially of the cyberpunk,
feminist, or gay variety), computer hacking, and visionary radical
ecologism. He celebrates them as possible nuclei of resistance to a
monolithic, global, capitalist techniculturea monster, as Ross would
have it, sustained by modern science and sanctified by its canons of
validity. Strange Weather is Rosss magnum opus, and it enlarges his
claim to be expert on matters of science and technology. It does so,
however, on the basis of an argument that is thin and irresolute,
unwilling even to try to formulate a clear and consistent case against
the putative scientific world view, but reflecting a desperate
unhappiness that science is such a powerful force, materially and
intellectually, in contemporary life.
Predictably, the sociologist Bruno Latour is one of Rosss gurus,
and the ideas of Stanley Aronowitz are called upon as well. Equally
predictably, Ross parrots all the New Age mystifications of quantum
mechanicswithout, however, displaying any but the vaguest
understanding of physics in general or quantum mechanics in
particular. This is a book that is content, in the main, to posture, rather
than to argue. It is driven by resentment, rather than by the logic of its
ideas. Ross doesnt know what he wants to do about science. He doesnt
like it, buthe wistfully allowshe might be persuaded to like it if it
were to change into something that will be publicly answerable and of
some service to progressive interests.37 Of some service to
progressive interests seems reasonably clear, if frighteningly Stalinist
in tone and at root. One infers, however, that a publicly answerable
science is the sort of thing that the common man or woman can do
pretty much at will, the sort of thing that involves not too much by way
of hard work or thought, of deep analysis or difficult concepts. Above
all, that old demon, rationalism, must be banished. How, asks Ross,
can metaphysical life [i.e., New Age] theories and explanations taken
seriously by millions be ignored or excluded by a small group of
powerful people called scientists?38
Strange it is that a well-known scholar at one of the worlds most
distinguished universities should write a lengthy book upon a subject
about which he knows, evidently, virtually nothing. It is stranger still
that he can boast of his ignorance in the very first words. This book is
dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have
been written without them. Such hubris, such eagerness to put on an
antic disposition and yet be taken seriously, speaks volumes on the
canons of acceptable scholarship under the postmodern dispensation. In
the end, however, it is less appalling than Rosss confident assumption
that he and his coterie know whats best for the human race politically
and socially, an assumption that presumably licenses this silly attempt
to declare Western science ripe for overthrow.
Note well that the nonsense Andrew Ross propounds is a
predictable, in fact a near-inevitable, consequence of applying to
questions of scientific validity the sophomoric skepticismand the
visceral urge to champion the demotic whenever it comes in conflict
with official culturethat characterizes the postmodern stance as
absorbed and refracted by left-wing academics. Note also the way in
which Rosss manifesto serves the impulse to inflict retribution on
those recent modes of philosophy that are flattering to the claims of
science and dismissive of literary criticism and the like as mere
opinion-mongering. Clearly, resentment is in the saddle here, and it is a
disastrous methodology, one that propounds ostensibly deep thoughts
on shallow aspects of science and culture, while generating shallow
thoughts on their deep aspects.

Chaos Theory: A Brief Guide

We are obviously not able to consider here each and every intellectual
curio that arises from the now widespread effort of postmodern
theorists to bring science under their scrutiny. A few of the more
redolent examples must suffice to illustrate the general tendency. For
the sake of unity, and to reserve discussion of other sciences for later
chapters, those we consider here have to do with a certain recent
development in the mathematical sciencesso-called chaos theory
that has drawn an unusual (for a mathematical subject) amount of
public interest. Quite naturally, it has been a proving ground for
postmodern critics eager to try their apparatus in the venue of modern
scientific thought, and eager to justify their philosophic maxims by
appeal to ostensible paradigm shifts in science. This tactic is not so
rudely dismissive of science and scientists as Andrew Rosss frontal
assault. Nonetheless, in positing the emergence of a postmodern
science which, it is claimed, illustrates the validity of the postmodern
weltanschauung, these analyses in effect derogate the reliability and
accuracy of standard science, and snidely disparage those scientists
that is to say, the vast majority of all scientistswho have been
oblivious to this ostensible revolution in thought.
Any but the briefest description of chaos theory would be out of
place here. The term refers to developments in pure and applied
mathematics, particularly to a branch named dynamical systems
theory: the study of systems that change with time. Typically, these are
deterministic; that is, the state of the system at one instant completely
determines its state at all subsequent moments. The locus classicus of
dynamical systems theory is the great work of Isaac Newton on
celestial mechanics, that is, the theory of how stars, planets, moons,
asteroids, comets, and so forth move under the influence of gravity.
Chaos theory essentially addresses this conundrum: knowing that a
system is in theory deterministic is by no means equivalent to having
an effective means for predicting its behavior as a function of an initial
condition, namely, the state of the system at one particular time. The
optimism of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
mathematicians, astronomers, and physicists that practicable methods
of computation would become available for making such predictions in
all reasonably simple cases turns out to have been premature, although
it inspired brilliant work sufficient to handle many such problems,
including most that have to be dealt with in engineering and day-to-day
science. As it happens, however, there are very simple systems, in the
sense that they involve a small number of parameters and a very
straightforward law of evolution, where prediction becomes
essentially impossible beyond a short period of time. Whats more,
there are significant qualitative as well as quantitative aspects to
this inability. For instance, the trajectories of evolution of two systems
that start out microscopically close, as far as their respective initial
conditions are concerned, can diverge wildly, not only in a numerical
sense but in their geometric aspects. Thus, to make matters more
concrete, an astronomer may find that it is impossible to make a good
prediction about the qualitative behavior of a planetary system because,
first of all, the methods at hand for solving the relevant differential
equations are far too inaccurate, and furthermore, even if the first
difficulty could be got round, a tiny error in determining the initial
condition (which is of course inevitable) can result in a gross
qualitative error in characterizing the long-term behavior of the
system.
Dynamical systems theory is a very geometric subject, as modern
mathematicians understand the term, and, in consequence, many of
these bizarre phenomena can be illustrated, with the aid of computer-
generated graphics, by weird and beautiful pictures. This alone
accounts for much of the public interest in these developments. (It
accounts as well, we must admit, for much of the popularity of the
subject among mathematicians themselves, not to mention legions of
computer-users with skill at graphics.) Nonetheless, despite their
didactic value, the accessibility of such pictures may have the effect of
deceiving the intelligent layman into believing that he grasps the
subject better than he really does. To be undiplomatic, a solid
understanding of what is really involved requires a considerable
amount of formal mathematical knowledge.
The foundations of the subject were laid at the end of the
nineteenth century by the great mathematician Henri Poincar, and in a
sense modern chaos theory represents a resumption of this work after a
long hiatus. The reasons for this slumber are as follows:
1. The attention that Poincares work should have attracted from
physicists and mathematicians was understandably diverted by the
stunning developments in theoretical physics that took place at the
beginning of the twentieth century (special and general relativity and
quantum mechanics). These quite naturally absorbed the lions share of
intellectual energy of those best placed to follow up Poincars
implications. (It is worth noting in passing that, even had Einstein
never been born, Poincar would almost certainly have come up with
relativity on his own at about the same time.)
2. The possibility of developing chaos theory as a mathematically
consistent subject depends on a huge body of foundational
mathematical work in such areas as topology, differential geometry,
and the theory of computational complexity, most of which was done
long after Poincars day.
3. Mathematical theories cannot grow without a host of specific
examples on which the mathematician must rely to sharpen and modify
his intuition before setting out to erect a systematic mathematical
structure incorporating them. So far as chaos theory is concerned, most
of the paradigmatic examples cannot be worked out by ordinary pencil
and paper computations; nor can geometric pictures easily be drawn by
relying solely on naive intuition. These examples were forthcoming
only after the development of high-speed electronic computers in the
1950s and 60s and the subsequent refinement of computer graphics
techniques.
The best-known book on the subject is James Gleicks ChaosThe
Birth of a New Science. While commendably accurate on the
underlying mathematical principles and their relevance for a host of
scientific questions, Gleicks book, perhaps inevitably, overdramatizes
the history of the subject in trying to make its protagonists fascinating.
In point of fact, there is nothing, on the level of personal idiosyncracy,
that can be said to distinguish specialists in chaos theory from other
mathematicians and theoretical physicists. They are not pointedly more
heretical in temperament. They just happen to work on dynamical
systems theory, as opposed to low-dimensional topology or geometric
measure theory or Hopf algebras. Moreover, chaos theory, for all its
beauty and scientific relevance, is not the dominant theme in
contemporary mathematics, for the simple reason that nothing is.
Mathematics is stupendously vast and varied, and every year results
appear in one specialty or another that are just as delightfully
surprising and involve just as great intuitive leaps as those of chaos
theory. So far as physics and the other mathematical sciences are
concerned, chaos theory is certainly a helpful source of new techniques
and insights, but it cannot by any means be said to put everything else
in the shade. If one insists on calling the development of chaos theory a
paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense of the term, it probably does no
harm, as long as it is kept in mind that within the scientific community
there is not much sense of foundations being overturned. A more apt
metaphor is that a bright light has been turned on, better illuminating
what we already knew, making visible some fascinating fine detail, and
revealing promising paths for further investigation. There has been
very little in the way of culture shock.
We point out that some contemporary popular myths about chaos
theory are corrected in the book by David Ruelle,39 one of the founders
and accomplished masters of the subject. For those who want a brief
and clear exposition of the basic notions, we recommend also Harmke
Kammingas essay in, of all places, New Left Review.40 (This may
reassure some on the left who misunderstand the polemical intentions
of this book. On the other hand, even the most conservative reader will
be able to get through Kammingas piece without elevation of blood
pressure.) Kamminga wisely chose to write her exposition in
consultation with a number of experts, and she observes prudently that
chaos and nonlinearity may be in danger of being seen as the solution
to everything. Uncritical use of the notion of the butterfly effect and
glib assertions that life is a strange attractor threaten to turn chaos
theory into a new mysticism. Ruelle would certainly agree, as would
most mathematicians and physicists. This has not forestalled the
emergence of a fad among historians, social theorists, and literary
intellectuals, a number of whom are given to studding their essays with
knowing references to chaos theory as a way of dressing up truisms
about the complexity of life, art, and human experience.41

Chaos as Nonsense I: Steven Best

Kammingas piece and the publication of it in a staunchly ideological

journal are ample evidence that left-wing political commitment is not,
of itself, inconsistent with a healthy and productive interest in various
aspects of modern life, science included. However, there are in contrast
examples of attempts to deal with the same subject that rely for their
doctrine and methodology on the arcana of full-blown postmodern
theory. The results are grotesque. They illustrate both the
megalomaniac pretentiousness and the utter impotence of
postmodernism under full sail as it attempts to engage itself with the
world of honest science.
Steven Best is a fledgling philosopher and co-author of
Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, a well-received and
approving account of the trends in current intellectual life grouped
under this term. He has also written a curious and turgid essay, Chaos
and Entropy: Metaphors in Postmodern Science and Social Theory, for
Science and Culture, a journal that focuses on the relation between
science and society from a left-wing, often quite explicitly Marxist,
point of view. However, Marx is very much in the background so far as
Best is concerned; his heroes are the usual suspectsFoucault, Derrida,
Lyotard, Baudrillard, und so weiter. His version of postmodernism is in
the standard mold: Postmodern social theory vigorously rejects every
key axiom of modem philosophy and sociology: it renounces
foundationalism and representational epistemologies. Postmodernism
stresses the relativity, instability and indeterminacy of meaning; it
abandons all attempts to grasp totalities or construct Grand Theory.42
In his paper, Best attempts to describe and (more or less) to serve
as advocate for something he refers to as postmodern science. This,
one is given to understand, has as its mission the overthrow, rather than
the fulfillment of modem science: Like postmodern social theory,
postmodern science sees modernity and modem reason as inherently
repressive. In other words, hidden beneath the relativistic pose, there
lurks a stiff-necked moral-ism. Postmodernism in general and
postmodern science in particular have come to liberate us from
repression. This mission is especially crucial since only postmodern
science can save us from the ecological catastrophe into which modem
science is driving us: Postmodern science draws the conclusion that a
new, postmodern paradigm is necessary, one which is philosophically
sophisticated, scientifically complex, ethically sensitive, spiritually
aware, and ecologically sane.43
The reader may be inclined to characterize these dicta as a Very
Grand Theory indeed, which would seem to subvert ab initio their self-
proclaimed postmodemity, within which there is supposed to be no
Grand Theory. Letting this pass, however, we ask what is thought to
constitute postmodern science. Best gives us this categorical
description of it: Within its own discipline, postmodern science has
three main branches of influence: thermodynamics quantum
mechanics and chaos theory. That, now, is a very curious amalgam
for something forthrightly claiming to be postmodem: it covers a
period in the history of physics from the 1820s to the present day, but
mysteriously omits both special and general relativity. (Perhaps, not
having Jacques Derridas credentials in these latter subjects, Best
thinks it best to steer clear of them.)
One would think that the much-trumpeted emergence of self-
conscious postmodernism in the two decades past would have produced
a generation of explicitly postmodern scientists proud to identify
themselves as such. Strangely enough, the examples Best comes up
with are unimpressive. Noted chemist Ilya Prigogine is among them, of
course (his name keeps coming up in postmodern discourses with
depressing frequency); but a realistic view of Prigogines science
would have to come to terms with the fact that serious contributions
have not been forthcoming for a couple of decades, and that he has
slipped into habits of speculation that involve him in very shaky
science and even shakier mathematics. Bests other paragon of
contemporary post-modem scientific thought is Jeremy Rifkin, author
o f Entropy, Algeny , and Beyond Beef, among a series of books and
pamphlets devoted to imminent environmental catastrophes. While it is
possible that Rifkins high-pitched rhetoric performs some service in
alerting a sluggish public to the existence of ecological problems, it is
widely felt, even by those scientists most passionately committed to
environmentalism, that Rifkins unrelieved alarmism rests on ill-
founded and unscientific theorizing, and that his distortions and
fantasies damage the political cause he seeks to inspire.44
In contrast to such dubious champions, undisputed masters of the
most startling ideas in current scientific theoryHawking, Witten, and
Guth for instanceare very much out of Bests picture. This is hardly
surprising, given Bests evident incompetence at understanding the
scientific and mathematical ideas he tries to cite in his favor. His
understanding of chaos theory in particular is shallow and confused,
and apparently arises from a botched reading of popularizations like
those of Gleick and Kamminga. Certainly, he fails to take heed of
Kammingas warning (cited above); and in his account, chaos theory
does indeed become a new mysticism.45 This is a grave charge; but
here are some examples to substantiate it.
Best asserts, for instance, that in the systems studied by chaos
theorists, the inability to determine initial conditions exactly frustrates
prediction because errors made at that level will be exponentially
magnified in subsequent calculations. Certainly, this is often true for
these so-called nonlinear systems; but then again it is equally true for
the most classical of nonchaotic linear systems as well. For instance,
the differential equation of exponential growth, y = ky, k > 0, which is
usually studied in elementary calculus courses, exhibits the behavior
prototypically, and it has no hint of chaos. As any competent freshman
can see, if the initial condition is approximated erroneously by even the
smallest amount, the subsequent error will grow exponentially with
time. On the other hand, for a nonlinear equation like y = ky1/2 this will
not happen; over time, initial errors are amplified at a less than
exponential rate.
Bests physics is similarly shaky. He solemnly intones: The
dialectic between order and disorder also suggests a revaluation of the
Law of Entropy, no longer viewed simply as system decay and
breakdown but as creations of new forms of order. 46 Unfortunately for
the gravamen of his argument, this realization represents no
breakthrough inspired by chaos theory. The formation of the orderly
arrangement of a snowflake, for instance, from an unordered collection
of water molecules is, in fact, an entropy-increasing process, a fact that
is quite well understood in classical thermodynamics and is, again,
taught in elementary courses.47
This error, absurd as it is, is merely symptomatic of an even
deeper ignoranee. Best begins an ill-advised attempt to inform the
reader of the difference between linear and nonlinear mathematics
with the clause, Unlike the linear equations used in Newtonian and
even quantum mechanics.48 This is a howler; for, whereas the
fundamental equation of quantum mechanics (the Schrdinger
equation) is what is technically known as a linear partial differential
equation, the Newtonian laws of celestial mechanics are expressed by a
decidedly nonlinear system of ordinary differential equations (which is
why such classical conundrums as the Three-Body Problem have been
such a headache since the seventeenth century).
Best is likewise in deep trouble when it comes to understanding
what he offhandedly describes as the Newtonian paradigm. Newtons
equations of planetary motion are, of course, nonlinear, for which
reason some of the most interesting examples in chaos theory occur in
classical celestial mechanics. Thus the theory represents, in a major
sense, the triumphant reemergence of Newtonian mechanics, not, as
Best would have it, its overthrow. What we have in chaos theory is a
recommitment to taking seriously some deep old issues, such as the
structural stability problem.
Bests paper is rife with similar errors, historical as well as
narrowly scientific. Yet his deepest misunderstandings are not of the
kind that can be remedied by a quick refresher course in elementary
math and physics. They arise, when all is said and done, from the
metaphysical hubris of postmodernism as such. As a thinker, Best is ill
equipped to draw inferences of any kind from his contemplation of
chaos theory (or quantum mechanics or thermodynamics) simply
because his grasp of these matters is so rudimentary and so tied to
secondhand paraphrases. That he plunges, notwithstanding these
difficulties, into vaporous pontifications is evidence of the conceit with
which postmodernism infuses its acolytes. Nothing is excluded from
the sweep of their judgments; the sententious generalities that
constitute the core of their doctrine are held to excuse them from the
necessity of actually learning the particulars of the disciplines they
criticize. The inevitable result is the philosophical styrofoam of Best
and those who theorize along the same lines.

Chaos as Nonsense II: N. Katherine Hayles

Among these is the literary scholar N. Katherine Hayles, whose

specialty is the relations among science, literature, and contemporary
literary theory. She too is committed to the idea that chaos theory is
somehow pardigmatic of the postmodern condition, but unlike Best she
tries to illustrate this, not in reference to some presumed political ideal,
but rather by arguing for deep parallels and assonances between the
mathematics of chaos and the theoretical practices of textual critics
loyal to the tenets of postmodernism. (Best, for his part, advances a
similar claim in passing.49) Her recent book, Chaos Bound, is devoted
to promulgating this odd hypothesis.
Hayless underlying assumptions seem curiously Hegelian. The
cultural moment, she reasons, has brought forth chaos theory
simultaneously with Derridas Of Grammatology and de Mans
Allegories of Reading, and hence, some unspecified mechanism of the
zeitgeist must be responsible for both developments. This is a bizarre
thesis. Why should the theory of dynamical systems be more closely
related to the gyrations of literary exegetes than it is to major league
baseball or Jane Fondas workout tapes? Aside from the irrelevant fact
that both kinds of theorizing take place, for the most part, on university
campuses, there is no ground for positing any kind of conceptual
relationship. Hayless arguments, such as they are, are based on
subjective and shoddy analogies, leaky metaphors, and (not unusual for
work immersed in postmodern theory) flat and unsupported assertions.
She is one of those who are eager to tell you, earnestly and at length,
precisely why a raven is like a writing deskespecially if a publication
can be got out of it. Her comparisonslike that of Derrida to the
mathematician Mitchell Feigenbaum,50 to take but one exampleare
strained and arbitrary and informed by a logic that would make
everything a metaphor for everything else. Why not compare Derrida to
Charles Manson, or the Feigenbaum number51 to Roger Clemenss
earned-run average? Why not compare the unexpectedness of chaotic
phenomena to the surprising twists and turns in Haydns string quartets,
icons of the Enlightenment though they be? It would make easily as
much sense. What Hayles does is not analysis. It is name-dropping.
Even philosophers who see some parallels between deconstructive
literary theory and the mathematics and physics of chaos theory are
loath to push the comparison as far as does Hayles. Alexander Argyros,
commenting on Hayless work, notes: I suspect that this apparent
compatibility may be implying to literary theorists that chaos is a
validation of deconstruction. My own view is that such a claim is, for
the most part, wrong While it is certainly true that deconstruction
and chaos are both interested in highlighting non-linearity, to claim
that they are fellow travellers is, I believe, to make an unwarranted
assumption.52 (Of course, there is the further question of what non-
linearity means to a mathematician, as contrasted to what it might
signify to a postmodern literary theorist. We address this point below.)
In trying to grasp what chaos theory is and how it relates to other
aspects of mathematics and the physical sciences, Hayles falls into the
same kinds of amateurish errors that plague Bests paper. It is clear,
over and over again, that she really doesnt know what linearity
means in a mathematical context. In that her book is so much longer,
her mistakes are correspondingly more numerous. They are all the
more embarrassing as well because she genuinely attempts to give an
expository description of some deep mathematics and physicsfractal
geometry, nonlinear dynamics, Gdelian incompleteness, information
theory, and so forth. Naturally, the usual doodles are presentfractals,
Cantor sets, the Lorenz attractor, bits and pieces of the Mandelbrot set
(no diagram of the Peano space-filling curve, mores the pity)but in
this context, they are no more than intellectual tinsel, since they are
unilluminated by genuine understanding or exposition. Hayles
repeatedly if unwittingly illustrates the everlasting soundness of Popes
axioma little learning is a dangerous thing.
Unlike most of the works we have examined, Chaos Bound is not
primarily concerned with leftist political agenda. Nonetheless, Hayles
cant resist dropping portentous hints about the transformative political
significance of both postmodern literary theory and nonlinear
topological dynamics, especially when they are viewed as
manifestations of the same putative eructation of the guts of the
culture. As well, there are the predictable genuflections to the feminist-
critique-of-science mafia, especially to Donna Haraway. Mercifully,
however, the explicit political claims are muted. Or perhaps it would be
better to say that they are diluted by a sea of muddy abstractions.
Hayles provides a chapter entitled The Politics of Chaos, filled with
ruminations on such themes as tensions between local and global,
contingent versus universal, laden with the sense that these are vibrant
with political significance. Of course there is the tendency to conflate
the mathematical terms local, global, and universal with the same
words as they occur in poststructuralist discoursean impermissible
tendency in our opinion, and one that rests on Hayless shallow
understanding of how mathematics really uses such terms. The deeper
trouble, however, is that the word politics itself is used so abstractly
that one has no sense of what all this introspection is supposed to
signify for those aspects of human existence usually covered by the
term.
One might argue that Hayless analysis, in contradistinction to
most of the critiques of science emanating from the academic left, has
at least the virtue of regarding science as, on the whole, liberatory and
politically progressive. But this approbation comes at the cost of such a
distended misreading of science, in equal measure grotesque and
condescending, that it is hardly distinguishable from hostility. In any
event, Hayless subsequent work 53 reverts to the tone of orthodox
radical feminism and rails at physics (fluid dynamics in particular) as
deriving from a worldview deeply tainted by sexist imagery. We shall
not comment on this latest exercise in self-righteous hermeneutics,
except to observe that it is tendentious and strained to the point of
absurdity.
It would be an endless task to compile a detailed list of Hayless
solecisms. A very few examples will have to suffice. On one page, for
instance, we find that The special theory of relativity lost its
epistemological clarity when it was combined with quantum mechanics
to form quantum field theory. By midcentury all three had been played
out or had undergone substantial modification. This will come as a
terrible shock to physicists! Special relativity and quantum mechanics
are as solidly confirmed as it is possible for physical theories to be.
While there may be some lingering doubts whether general relativity is
quite the right model on the cosmological scale, the special theory has
always triumphantly passed every empirical test. However physics
develops in the future, any modification must subsume rather than
displace special relativity, just as special relativity subsumed
Newtonian mechanics. The story is much the same for quantum
mechanics, with the additional element that theorists (John Bell for
instance) are in the habit of deriving wildly counterintuitive
conclusions from the quantum mechanical formalism, only to have
these confirmed in the laboratory as soon as the experimentalists can
think of a way to test them! As for quantum field theory, one
mathematical aspect of the great project to provide a truly unified
framework for both relativity and quantum mechanics, this is an
ongoing project that engages the deepest and liveliest intellects in
physics and mathematics. Played out? The best that can be said for
Hayles is that she confuses the fact that physics is very much a
continuing discipline, and, therefore, has fascinating foundational
problems left to solve, with some kind of philosophical and spiritual
exhaustion. If anything is played out, it is the postmodernists
pretension to have something interesting to say about physics.
Hayles is similarly at sea when it comes to philosophy. On the
same page a few lines further on we find that logical positivism had
its heyday in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, which is
rather like saying that Babe Ruths career was at its height in the
closing decades of the nineteenth century. Logical positivism was, of
course, the philosophical school devised in the late twenties and early
thirties of this century by the so-called Vienna Circle, a group of
philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists who sought to
accommodate the mind-stretching, and then still-recent, developments
of relativity and quantum mechanics. In the English-speaking
countries, it gained great influence through the work of A. J. Ayer, and
the fifties and sixties were, as previously noted, its real heyday. Nor is
it a dead letter, even today: its critics, such as Rorty and Feyerabend54
are the ones who now seem to be in at least partial retreat. In charity,
perhaps we should assume that Hayles has confused Carnap55 with
Comte.
All this is embedded in a discussion of scientific work that might
be read as attempts to find something like absolute grounds for
knowledge. The Principia Mathematica of Bertrand Russell and Alfred
North Whitehead is cited, reasonably enough, as such an attempt, but so
is Einsteins special relativityat least that seems to be Hayless view
of the matter. This ignores the stunning and immediate philosophical
implication of relativity, apparent from the very first, namely that such
quantities as size and duration, which common sense had always held
to be absolute properties of things and events, are in fact relational, not
absolute. The real point is not that relativity provides an overarching
framework within which observations from different inertial systems
could be reconciled, but that relativity theory discovers the previously
unsuspected fact that some such reconciliation might be necessary!
Hayles then cites the Gdel incompleteness result as the
deathblow to the Russell-Whitehead program (although, of course,
there is no corresponding reference to any analogous demolition of
relativity, since there hasnt been one). This is intended to figure the
movement away from post-Enlightenment ideals of universal
knowledge to postmodern skepticism, which regards knowledge merely
as representation conditioned by the local culture. Hayles seems
unaware, however, that Russells own skepticism, expressed in such
works as Our Knowledge of the External World, is in some ways close
to postmodern ideas of representation (albeit Russell is far keener
and far, far less windy than the postmodern heavyweights), while
Gdel, qua philosopher, was a fervent believer in absolutes! Gdel
turned out to be an unadulterated Platonist, and apparently believed that
an eternal not was laid up in heaven, where virtuous logicians might
hope to meet it hereafter.56
It becomes clear that Hayless cultural constructivist prejudices,
her convictions that even the most abstract scientific ideas are closely
tied to the zeitgeist, are responsible for such distortions. Her egregious
remark about logical positivism is embedded in the following context:
If we think of these projects as attempts to ground representation
in a non-contingent metadiscourse, surely it is significant that the
most important work on them appeared before World War I.
Einstein published his papers on the special theory of relativity in
1905 and the general theory in 1916; the Principia Mathematica
volumes appeared from 1910 to 1913; and logical positivism had
its heyday in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. After
 World War I, when the rhetoric of glorious patriotism sounded
very empty, it would have been much more difficult to think
language could have an absolute ground of meaning.57

Her point seems to be that the Principia and the special theory are
products of the halcyon times of pre-World War I Europe (a conceit
that leads to the gaffe on logical positivism). This ignores the fact that
both efforts are the result of extreme intellectual crises, albeit crises of
which the general culture, and even the rarefied cultures of
philosophers and the literary intelligentsia, were entirely unaware. The
Principia sprang from Russells discovery of the set-theory paradox
that bears his name, which rendered unsatisfactory the prior work of
Cantor and Frege on the foundations of mathematics. Relativity derived
from Einsteins realization that the mathematics of Maxwells
equations raised serious questions about classical notions of absolute
time and space. These crises were known only to a handful of
mathematical scientists. The idea that something in the ambient culture
whether under Hayless interpretation or some competing version
stressing the subterranean tensions that led to World War Igenerated
these magnificent works is thus wildly implausible.
Correspondingly, Hayless idea that such intellectual projects as
the Principia, relativity, and logical positivism would have been far
more difficult after the war (ignoring even the fact that logical
positivism was one of the most characteristic such postwar projects) is
a febrile delusion of doctrinaire reading. The silliness of the cited
paragraph is perhaps most apparent when one considers that both
Einstein and Russell were highly conscious of the emptiness of
patriotic rhetoric long before the war, even as they were in the midst of
their great work on the foundations of physics and mathematics
respectively. The lesson to be learned, then, is that cultural
constructivist theories of science deserve to be treated with the gravest
suspicion, whether they derive from sociology, Foucauldian
historicism, or deconstructive literary theory.
All the strange pronouncements upon which we have focused
occur, as we note, on one page. There is nothing particularly special
about that page. This book is stuffed with similar solecisms, which
makes reading it a painful experience. Yet the work is published by a
distinguished university press and has garnered Hayles a substantial
degree of recognition, including an endowed chair at a major
university, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the presidency of the Society for
Literature and Science, and the chairmanship of the literature and
science committee of the Modern Language Association; so we ought
not to conclude that this is some kind of crackpot tract of the New Age
movement (although the word crackpot unkindly leaps to mind when
one has to read it). This is very much in the academic mainstream, as
commandeered by the votaries of postmodernism.
The point, finally, is not to berate Haylesor Best, for that matter
for mathematical subliteracy. That, in itself, is nothing like a
disgrace. Hundreds of millions of bright, able, and accomplished
people share this minor affliction (and quite a few mathematicians are
weak, to say the least, on postmodernist thought). But when such
solecisms as we find in these writings are confidently put forth as
scholarly discoveries, with every assurance that something profound is
being uttered, one must wonder about the systemand the ideology
that nurtures and rewards them. Whence, we must ask, does such
grossly misplaced intellectual self-confidence come? The smug,
hermetic, self-referential atmosphere of politicized academic
postmodernism obviously has a great deal to do with it. In this milieu,
there is not much thought given to simple scientific accuracy. The
caution and scrupulousness that working scientists are conditioned to
expect are swept aside, because, in the final analysis, postmodernist
work is in great measure prophetic and hortatory, rather than analytic:
it announces and cheers on a sweeping paradigm shift within our
civilization, a change that is supposed to liberate us all.
We suspect that the reader who has followed this brief survey will
be left with a few questions. First of all, why is the technical question
of mathematical linearity versus nonlinearity so intriguing to
supposed experts in culture and literature? Of course, as we have noted,
the success of Gleicks book on the emergence of mathematical chaos
theory and its scientific applications has left much of the literate but
scientifically inexpert public with a somewhat distorted sense of the
overall configuration of the mathematical sciences, of the enormous
compass of contemporary mathematics, both pure and applied, and of
the relative importance of various ideas within that field. The very
accessibility of Gleiks work, and subsequent efforts in the same line,
have thus had the unintended consequence of calling forth portentous
pronouncements from cultural critics, whose knowledge of the
relevant science is largely limited to these necessarily oversimplified
accounts.
Beyond this, however, there is a deep confusion of categories, and
a surprisingly naive sense that the use of the same English word in
widely separated contexts assures that there are deep thematic
similarities. To a paid-up member of the postmodern academic left, the
word linear, for example, carries negative connotations. It suggests
relentless sequentiality, unbending purposefulness, singlemindedness,
the triumph of the instrumentalin other words, the mentality that is
held to underlie the predicated Western ethos of conquest, domination,
objectification, and rigid delineation of oppressive categories via
binary oppositions.58 Inevitably, nonlinearity is seen by contrast to
have liberatory implications. It suggests many-sidedness,
multiculturalism, diversity, polymorphism, the effacement of
boundaries. Thus the revolution for which the postmodernist yearns,
realistically or otherwise, is one in which the linear regime of late
capitalist society will be supplanted by a nonlinear ethos, in which
multiplicity reigns in the cultural and sexual realms, and in which all
sorts of boundaries may freely be crossed.
It shouldbut obviously does notgo without saying that the
mathematical notion of linearity, or its absence, in regard to functions,
differential operators, dynamical systems, or whatever, while
technically indispensable, has nothing whatsoever to do with such
sociocultural questions. Of course, anyone is free to read pictures of
fractal geometry and the like subjectively as emblems for a revolution
in sensibilityor in politics, for that matter. The point is, however, that
this is utterly subjective; it is poetry of the most idiosyncratic sort.
Postmodern cultural transformation is no more inscribed in the
mathematical peculiarities of nonlinear dynamical systems than Nazi
doctrine is to be read in the geometric configuration of the swastika. To
hold otherwise is to revert to the magical, emblematic thinking of
premodern (rather than postmodern) times. It certainly doesnt deserve
the name of scholarship.
It is also useful to consider the sense in which these theoretical
extravagances of would-be philosophers of culture are hostile to
science and to scientists. Obviously, there is some subtlety here. Some
of these critics seem, after all, on the face of things, to be celebrating
science, or at least some of its recent achievements. They see certain
new themes in the sciences as harbingers of a desirable cultural change.
Hostility is there, however, and its presence becomes clearer when we
take note of the moralizing undertone. What is really being asserted is
that there is a modern science, linked to phallogocentric thought
and the mechanisms of capitalist-racist-patriarchal dominationin
other words, the science that William Blake, in an earlier era, decried
as single vision and Newtons sleep. By contrast, there is supposed to
be an embryonic postmodern science that points to the overthrow of
the old order. This theme can be traced in the continued insistence that
the chaos theory postmodernists think they are talking about is post-
Newtonian (even though it is perfectly clear to the mathematically
literate that Newtonian themes are central to these new developments,
whether they address Newtonian celestial mechanics or the fractal
geometry of the basins of attraction of the roots of a polynomial that
appear when Newtons method is applied in the complex plane). 59 The
Newton that postmodern cultural critics are trying to escape is
Blakes figment, not the preeminent mathematician and physicist of the
same name.
We conclude that hostility to science is, after all, an inextricable
element of these postmodern philosophical excursions. It takes the
form of the good guys (persons?) versus bad guys scenario that the
critics impose relentlessly on the history and sociology of science. It is
mirrored in the remarkable arrogance with which postmodernists
address these issues. Virtually all of them claim to discern important
intellectual themes and political motifs in past and current science,
themes and motifs that are quite invisible to the scientists themselves.
These supposed insights rest, as we have seen, on a technical
competence so shallow and incomplete as to be analytically worthless.
Their arrogance, then, is comparable to that of creation scientists in
addressing evolutionary biology, or to that of Galileos persecutors
within the Inquisition in their response to his cosmology. We probably
dont need to fear for the safety or intellectual freedom of the sciences
on the basis of these bizarre lucubrations: but that is not the issue.
What does concern us is that these intellectual misadventures are so
well received in nonscientific academic circles, especially on the left,
and that they provide the route to publication, tenure, reputation, and
academic authority for a growing body of would-be scholars.
We must hope that the painful bolus of postmodernism will pass
through the costive bowels of academic life sooner rather than later.
Pass, of course, it will eventually. 60 Keeping the hard sciences from
contamination should not be impossible, provided that the scientists
resistance to jargonistic snow jobs is as high as it ought to be. We do
worry about that, however. In the meantime, unfortunately, the
postmodernists will be out there trying to dominate every intellectual
conversation. Have they not imbibed the wisdom of the sage?
And everyone will say
As you walk your mystic way
If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man
This deep young man must be!
 CHAPTER FIVE

Auspicating Gender

Would not physics benefit from asking why a scientific world view
with physics as its paradigm excludes the history of physics from
its recommendation that we seek causal explanations of everything
in the world around us? Only if we insist that science is
analytically separate from social life can we maintain the fiction
that explanations of irrational social belief and behavior could not
ever, even in principle, increase our understanding of the world
physics explains.
SANDRA HARDING, THE SCIENCE QUESTION IN FEMINISM

Feminist Success

American universities have adopted feminism. History, literature, art

criticism, psychologyall have had to come to terms with a militant,
sometimes angry challenge to their settled ways of doing business. In
its obvious form, feminism has concentrated on educational
opportunity and careers, demanding an end to practices that have
excluded women, and strong remediation, which includes not only
affirmative action but also the establishment of womens studies
programs and womens centers. On the conceptual level, it has forced a
rvaluation of scholarly practices and opened neglected questions of
the history, status, and particular interests of women. It has resurrected
the work and built the reputations of some women artists and thinkers
whom history and male indifference had discounted.
The natural sciences take their share of the heat. In point of
opportunities for women, the traditional recruitment and apprenticeship
system has been unfair and exclusionary. Strenuous pressure for change
has been the predictable result, as women claim their right of equal
access to any vocation, no matter how long tradition has regarded it as
a province of the male intellect. Until recently, however, the substance
and the cognitive style of science per se had not been the target of
much feminist complaint. The main demand was for a fair chance at
careers, in and out of academic lifea just claim, unproblematical in
its philosophic standing if not immune to vexations. Aspiring women
chemists and physicists were not insisting upon a female
thermodynamics; women mathematicians did not struggle to relate the
Mittag-Leffler theorem to gender.
Lately, however, a new academic industry has sprung up: feminist
criticism of science. This criticism is not limited to the discovery and
censure of discrimination, although, needless to say, those are recurrent
elements. The new criticism is far more sweeping: it claims to go to the
heart of the methodological, conceptual, and epistemological
foundations of science. It claims to provide the basis for a
reformulation of science that reaches deeply into its content, its ideas,
and its findings. The key process of this critique is insistence that
inasmuch as science has until now been a male enterprise, it is ipso
facto biased by unacknowledged assumptions derived from the
patriarchal values of Western society. On the other hand, the argument
continues, a body of insights, attitudes, and sympathies corresponding
to the suppressed female culture has been unable to penetrate official
science, depriving it therefore of alternative points of view and
condemning it to distortion. Such a position has been promulgated with
extraordinary success in the humanities and social sciences, even in
legal education and research. (Economics has seemed, for some reason,
relatively resistant.) The only surprise about the assault on science is
that it was so long delayed.
This literature grows with astonishing speed. In the university
where one of us works, the reserve reading section of the undergraduate
library, alone, lists at the time of writing 143 items on science and
feminismduring the quiet of summer vacation. Not only are the
books being produced; increasingly, college courses adopt and are built
around them. The best-known critics are accepted as legitimate
historians and philosophers of science, in circles far wider than their
feminist peers. They receive generous academic emoluments, large
grants, distinguished lectureships, well-subsidized visiting positions,
and tenured professorships at leading universities. In at least one
discipline, women scientists, inspired by these analysts, convened a
conference from which men were excluded on the ground that the
particular relevance of female life-histories needed to be brought to
bear on their research, free of male interference.1 In that perennial
horse-trade of curriculum revision there now arise without fail
proposals to redesign science instruction so as to accommodate the
ways of knowing available to women.2 By any reckoning, therefore,
although it is in its early stages, the feminist attack upon science has
attained a position of respect and influence.
The central argument varies from one critique to the next,
depending upon which of the sundry standpoints within feminism the
critic represents.3 Nevertheless there are broad agreements. The firmest
of these is that feminist insight and practice must, by definition,
improve the range and depth of scientific theory, and must by
definition eliminate errors arising from unconscious commitment to
patriarchal assumptions. Thereby, the validity of science, as well as its
scope, are to be enlarged. On the other hand, the influence of
postmodernist theorizing is not absent: many feminist tracts accept and
defend the notion that there is no objective science, merely a variety
of perspectives, one of whichpatriarchal sciencehas been
valorized and empowered so as to preclude until now the
possibility of a feminist science. On occasion, finally, feminism joins
hands with New Age attitudinizing, yearning for the rebirth of a
prelapsarian golden age, wherein the human race knew and worshiped a
goddess-nature, without artificial categories, tortuous cerebration, and
the elaborate physical devices of male technology. The editors of a
collection called Women, Knowledge, and Reality explain,
We point out that the practices of science have a broad variety of
gender implications, ranging from the structure of laboratory work
to the most fundamental scientific concepts. We examine
androcentric bias in its myriad forms in theories, models, and
experiments. We ask whether science can serve what Sandra
Harding calls emancipatory ends for gender, race, and class.
Flowing from the critique of the gendered character of science, we
raise many epistemological questions about objectivity, about
rationality, about the possibility of a value-free science, and about
the ways in which beliefs and knowledge are related to social
experience.4

Cultural constructivism is the underpinning of all these attacks,

even when they are made by self-styled empiricists. All the familiar
and some original forms of relativism are found in the copious
literature and in the classrooms where it is taught. Most of the analyses
insist that a feminist or womens science isor should be, or will be
different from and much better than the kind we have now. The
announced goal, upon which feminists of the most disparate schools
agree, is a science transformed, purged of sexist, racist, classist,
homophobic taint.5 The self-assigned task of feminist critics and their
growing band of followers is to administer the purgative. The earlier,
less controversial goal of uncovering past and present discrimination,
of bringing to light neglected contributions of female scientists, has
been subsumed under this enormously more ambitious project: to
refashion the epistemology of science from the roots up.
The favorable reception these polemics get in universities is due in
large part to their origins in a morally unobjectionable ambition: to
recognize and rebuke misogynist practices that have plagued Western
science as they have most Western (and, indeed, non-Western)
institutions. The record of science, until recently, isin its social
aspecttarnished by gender-based exclusions (and, as well, of course,
by class snobbery, anti-Semitism, racialism, and vulgar nationalism).
At times, baseless paradigms in medicine and the behavioral sciences
have been pretexts for subordinating women. Pseudoscientific doctrines
of innate inferiority and moral frailty have been used to discount
female capacity for achievement and to confine women to subservient
roles. All this is beyond dispute and generally recognized in intellectual
circles, even those of the most conservative bent.
Inevitably, there is not only a thirst among women (and not just
militants) for justice and for reparations, but more broadly an
atmosphere that allows a truly remarkable latitude to feminist
intellectuals. To put it bluntly, the reigning posture is that the weight of
mens historical misdeeds is so great that it is bad form, in fact
indecent, for male academics to object, even to the most aggressive and
speculative announcements of their feminist colleagues. As a result,
womens studies (like multicultural programs generally) has
almost everywhere a sacrosanct status, an unprecedented immunity to
the scrutiny and skepticism that are standard for other fields of inquiry.
Feminist criticism of science (and of culture in general) has become, to
borrow a favorite item of lit-crit palaver, privileged within the
academy.

Sexist Discrimination Today

What are the realities of discrimination against women in science

today, at least in the American universities? We take a position that is
not likely, in the climate described, to endear us to a majority of our
colleagues in or out of the sciences, or to the political and
administrative avant-garde. It is that sexist discrimination, while
certainly not vanished into history, is largely vestigial in the
universities; that the only widespread, obvious discrimination today is
against white males. These days, nearly half of all medical students are
women, and the ratio is accurately reflected in the proportion of women
among residents in training and among younger practitioners. A similar
situation is found in biomedical research. The numbers are comparable,
furthermore, in psychology and anthropology. In the harder sciences
mathematics, physics, chemistry, computer sciencethe proportion
of women is much smaller, but it is growing. One of us teaches in a
major university mathematics program where half of the graduate
students are wornen. In engineering the numbers of women are still
quite low, but there too the trend is upward. The multitude of
affirmative action and equal opportunity strategies in use at
universities across the country makes it unlikely that any young
womans scientific ambitions and talent will go unencouraged. Science,
the premier and most widely read general science journal for scientists
and engineers, dedicates a second annual issue (16 April 1993) to
Gender and the Culture of Science. It comes to no conclusions on the
weighty issues to be mined below; but it is deeply and positively
concerned to encourage every possible effort to recruit women to
science. Within recent memory, no social and political movement other
than feminism has had such an approving, and massive, exposure in
Science.
The overwhelming majority of active scientists neither practice
nor condone discrimination. Their attitudes toward political and social
questions involving gender and womens rights place the majority at
the feminist end of the spectrum. Special programs for recruiting
women (and minorities, as defined ad hoc) into the sciences have solid
support from working scientists, granting agencies, and all the national
scientific societies; and so do other programs intended to undo the
discouragement young women scientists are said to meet in the wider
society. The pieties of affirmative action are supported, not merely
tolerated, although enthusiasm for them is tempered in practice by an
abiding respect for meritocratic standards (a respect shared by most
accomplished women scientists). We would be greatly surprised if, in
any current, major American university search for a scientific leader
professor, department chairperson, deanthere were not some
mandatory step in the process at which the search committee must
justify the absence of women (and of minorities), if such is the case,
from its short list.
 Whatever the actual sex ratio in various fields, the attempt to
explain lower numbers of women by the indictment of contemporary
male scientists as sexist malefactors is naiveor worse. The truth is
much more complicated. That doesnt prevent, of course, the charges of
male evil-doing being made, published, and honored, even by males.
Facts and logic are one thing. Guilt feelings are quite another. Of
course these remarks violate the feminist metaphysics according to
which every institution of this society is irremediably sexist, and every
male, even the most sympathetic, ineradicably guilty by association
with it. Some positions, even among persons brought up in the
logophallocentric West, are well beyond the reach of rational argument.
Feminist fundamentalism shares that distinction with other
dogmatisms, such as religious fundamentalism; and when all is said
and done, similar mentalities give rise to both.
Recent feminist theorizing about the sciences therefore contains
heavy doses of dogma. The claims are immensely strong and usually
counterintuitive; it would seem that a correspondingly powerful case,
built upon incontrovertible evidence and bound together with iron
logic, would be required to make them credible. We would have to be
shown that there are palpable defects, due to the inadequacies of a
male perspective, in heretofore solid-looking science and that the
flawed theories can be repaired or replaced by feminist insights . The
issue before us is knowledge, scientific knowledge specifically, and the
extent to which the prevalent feminist critique, as agent of
methodological or conceptual change, is relevant to its advance. To
examine the issue we need (and are led by feminist authors to expect)
not just stories of past or present discrimination, but examples of
scientific knowledge informed, reformed, enhanced by feminism. As
far as we are aware, there are as yet no examples. Its that simple.
 A principal reason for the absence of examples, of even the effort
to identify examples, may lie in the conceptual roots of feminist
science-criticism. Not surprisingly, given the academic backgrounds or
venues of many of its champions, the feminist critique is
overwhelmingly concerned with metaphor, rather than with the logical
content and analysis of scientific results. But scientific results, we must
insist, are not simply metaphors. If they survive, they do so because
they work,6 for a large number of people of hugely varied backgrounds
and interests, that is, they function as distinctly more than images or
figures of speech, and their values are, likewise, more than merely
figurative. What we learn from these critiques is unexceptional and
also not in the least surprising: that men have traditionally dominated
the upper reaches of science (and nearly everything else); that their
idiom, especially in informal speech, has reflected that dominance.
This is not a trivial fact and we dont mean to diminish it. But it is
not new. Why it is a fact remains a question of modest interest (if
properly asked); but the fact itself provides no useful gauge of quality,
or utility, or even of representational value in science. Incessant
linguistic criticism has not yet produced a single revision of the body
of serious science. Feminist cultural analysis has not yet identified any
heretofore undetected flaws in the logic, or the predictive powers, or
the applicability of mathematics, physics, chemistry, ormuch
complaining to the contrary notwithstandingbiology. Of course, a
superficial reading of the feminist literature, and indeed of cultural
criticism in general, leaves quite the opposite impression. But, as
seems to have been forgotten in the current rise of antifoundationalism,
assertion is not evidence. We cannot in any practical sense prove that
no old science has been effectively dismissed, nor any new science
produced, under the influence of feminism. Proving such a negative
would require inspection of every potential counter-example. We can,
however, following our adopted practice, examine some characteristic
products of feminist science criticism, for which there has been
fulsome praise and from which there come typically strong claims. We
can show, in a progress from light to heavy samples, why we think the
products and the associated claims fail to stand up to honest evaluation.

Feminist Algebra

Our initial sample is drawn from feminist criticism of mathematics, an

area where one might imagine it hardest to draw connections between
the content of the field, abstract as it is, and social and sexual attitudes
of the circumambient society. One therefore expects analysis of some
depth and subtlety, analysis of a kind it would be unjust to demand in a
feminist examination of, say, the behavior of obstetricians. The
example we have before usToward a Feminist Algebra, by
Maryanne Campbell and Randall K. Campbell-Wright 7is, however,
remarkable for its absence of subtlety and for an ideological fervor
more appropriate to an old-time camp meeting than to analysis of
any kind. What passes for the idea behind this piece is that women and
other disempowered groups are discouraged in the study of
mathematics because most of the concrete problems they encounter
word problems or narrative problems of the if-a-man-and-a-
half-makes-a-dollar-and-a-half-in-a-day-and-a-half varietyrefer to
situations that are sexist, racist, class-bound stereotypes. Thus the
authors would doubtless condemn the man-and-a-half problem
because it encodes the assumption that men work, and it therefore
implies slyly that women dont, or shouldnt.
 It may seem to innocent readers, if any such remain, that we are
putting words in the authors mouths; but no: they disapprove of a
particular problem in which a girl and her boyfriend run toward each
other (even though the girls slower speed is carefully explained by the
fact that she is carrying luggage) because it portrays a heterosexual
involvement. They object to a problem about a contractor and the
contractors workers (sex undeclared), because they assume that the
student will envision the workers as male. On the other hand, they offer
for our approval a problem about Sue and Debbie, a couple financing
their $70,000 home.8 Their general maxims call for problems
presenting female heroes and breaking gender stereotypes and
analyzing sex similarities and differences intentionally and
affirming womens experiences. All this, mind, is to be done in an
algebra class.
The underlying pedagogical theory is a commonplace, and it is
shaky. It holds that a proper social context stated or implied in little
problems of this sort is crucial in making disempowered students
comfortable, enabling them to solve such problems, or at least to give
them serious attention. Thus, women (dare we say girls?) will do better
if problems involve powerboat races between Hortense and Maxine,
rather than Fred and Algernon, and black kids will be more inspired if
Johnny is allotting the money he has saved up for Kwanza, rather than
for Christmas. The empirical basis for such an assumption is, as we
say, dubious in the extreme. Generations of Jewish kids have done quite
well at these problems, despite having to concern themselves with
Johnnys Christmas money, rather than Menachems Chanukah gelt;
and in recent decades an even greater cultural dissonance has done little
to trip up vast numbers of young algebraists of Chinese, Korean, or
East Indian background.
 Nonetheless, such alterations would seem to be at worst harmless.
In themselves, they are unobjectionable, although they will almost
certainly turn out to be futile. Concentrating on such matters ignores
the nub of the teachers difficulty, which is precisely to train students
to ignore the superfluous context of such problems in order to extract
their mathematical and logical essence. When one is doing such
problems correctly, Sue and Debbies sexual arrangements are neither
here nor thereat least until one gets the answer. An excellentand
famouscounter-example to the educational psychology propounded
here can be found in Lewis Carrolls books Symbolic Logic and The
Game of Logic,9 which, in whimsical Carrollian fashion, teach the
student to work in the efficient realm of abstraction by presenting
concrete situations that are delightfully absurd.
Toward a Feminist Algebra, as we have thus far characterized it,
may appear to be no more than an overly solemn formulary for
teaching simple mathematics; and the reader may be forgiven for
wondering why it should be invoked as an example of feminist
criticism of serious science. First of all, the authors insist they are
speaking of college algebra. In less perplexing times, we might have
been able to point out that the material they so designate is properly
high school, or better, junior high school algebra, the term college
algebra being reserved for a study that begins with the theory of
matrices and vector spaces, and continues with abstract algebraic
systemsgroups, fields, rings, and the like. Today, however, this
simple material is routinely taught in many universities, with only the
barest whisper that it is remedial work. That is a minor point, however.
More importantly, this paper insists that it is making deep and
serious points about the mature science of mathematics as it has
developed in the past few hundred years. It strongly suggests,
moreover, that the changes proposed in the wording and social
context of simple exercises will somehow induce more women to
become mathematicians. That latter is the worthiest of goals. However,
even if we grant the pedagogical efficiency of feminist-approved
terminology, and concede that it might help some reluctant young
women to handle simple algebra, the fact remainsand it is a fact
that anyone beyond the age of twelve or thirteen who has real difficulty
with such problems, no matter what the social connotations of their
wording, is simply not destined to be any kind of mathematician. A
young lady who makes a game stab at Maude and Mabel problems
but balks at Joe and Johnny versions of the same is almost certainly
without the knack for abstraction that is an indispensable ingredient of
mathematical talent.
If the problematical assertions of Toward a Feminist Algebra
went no further than this, it would be a little silly, but not ridiculous.
However, there is a far more solemn proposal being made here, one that
insists that serious mathematics, higher mathematics, is saturated
with sexist ideology. It is this, rather than concern with pedagogical
efficiency, that really prompts the authors obsession with the gender-
hermeneutics of speed-and-distance or principal-and-interest problems.
One understands their predicament. It is possiblethough tendentious
to impute sexist intent to a simple algebra problem in which Peter is
meeting his girlfriend Melissa at the airport.10 Its a rather more
difficult trick to find sexism if the problem reads Prove that a i-
connected closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to S3.11 Nevertheless,
Toward a Feminist Algebra is determined to have us believe that one
attribution supports the other.
The paper is not without further arguments in this direction, but
they are equally weak. There is some reliance on the clichs of cultural
constructivismmathematics is the product of a certain social order,
thus contaminated by its ideological transgressions, especially sexism,
and so on. Appeal is made to feminist thinkers such as Sandra Harding
and Evelyn Fox Keller (of whom more below). This is reinforced by
mechanistic applications of postmodern literary dogma: Mathematics
is portrayed as a woman whose nature desires to be the conquered
Other.12 (Language like this makes it difficult to forget that one of the
authors is in an English department.)
This strange notion of mathematics as the willing victim of date
rape is, we must admit, a new one on usand one of us has been
earning a (marginal) living at it for thirty-five years! Such peculiar
ideas are supposedly bolstered by a purported examination of the
language in which mathematics is couched. If you torture the data it
will confess is cited as a typical example of violent mathematical
rhetoric.13 The trouble is, we have never heard anything remotely like
it spoken! True enough, such denounced terms as brute force and
grinding it out are common mathematical slangbut Campbell and
Campbell-Wright neglect to inform us that these are universal terms of
disparagement; grinding the answer out by brute force is what one does
if one is not clever enough to think of something efficient and elegant.
(Campbell-Wright should know better: he is supposedly a
mathematician). Easily the most absurd part of this indictment is the
insistence that terms such as manipulate (manipulate an algebraic
expression), attack (a problem), exploit (a theorem) are evidence that
mathematics at all levels is a foul nest of aggression, violence,
domination, and sexism.
All this reveals a mind-set we shall encounter again and again in
feminist science-criticism. Metaphorical language is scrutinized
microscopically for evidence that the science in which it occurs is
tainted by sexist ideology. Metaphor is one of the subheads of the
Campbell/Campbell-Wright essay, and it labels a section beginning:
Metaphor plays a central role in the construction of mathematics.14
No! It does notcertainly not the kinds of metaphors this paper alludes
to. One of us, speaking as a mathematician who has seen an awful lot of
mathematics constructed and has constructed some himself, can
testify to the uselessness of metaphor in mathematical invention,
although analogya rather different notioncan be of some help.
Mathematical intuition is something much more mysterious than
metaphor.15 True enough, mathematicians have their informal slang
what clan does not?but that is quite another matter.
Metaphor mongering is the principal strategy of much feminist
criticism of science. It is invoked to accomplish what analysis of actual
ideas will not. Toward a Feminist Algebra is a particularly childish
example of this, although we shall see others, more sophisticated,
shortly. The worst thing about this paper, however, is not its shoddy
theory of mathematical epistemology. It lies, rather, in the fact that the
ultimate aim of the authors is not really to advocate devices for
improving the mathematical education of women and other
disempowered classes. Rather, one finally discovers, the purpose is to
justify the use of mathematics classrooms as chapels of feminist
orthodoxy. The purpose of the carefully tailored feminist language and
imagery is not primarily to build the self-confidence of woman
students, but rather to convert problems and examples into parables of
feminist rectitude. It is, at bottom, not different from an imaginary
Christian fundamentalist pedagogy requiring that all mathematics
problems illustrate biblical episodes and preach evangelical sermons.
Campbell and Campbell-Wright really want mathematics instructors to
act as missionaries for a narrow, self-righteous feminism. That is far
more disturbing than bad philosophy of mathematics! Sermonizing
Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or feministis not the function of
science instruction. It is a strange world in which two would-be
pedagogues can advocate such a program, in the belief, doubtless
justified, that some of their colleagues will take it seriously.

Haploid Hermeneutics

Our next example, less blithely outrageous than Toward a Feminist

Algebra but no less reliant, in the end, on metaphor mongering, comes
from biology. No fewer than nine co-authors, calling themselves The
Biology and Gender Study Group,16 have collaborated to show us
what feminist critique can do for biology. At least one of the authors
is a well-known practicing biologist: Scott Gilbert has written a
distinguished and best-selling textbook in developmental biology
(which one of us uses in the classroom) and writes on the history of
biology as well. If any group can speak to the improvement of science
via feminist epistemology, it is presumably one like this.
We take the liberty of summarizing some of the claims of the
BGSG (taking care to segregate those from the abundant self-
congratulation) in The Importance of Feminist Critique for
Contemporary Cell Biology. The introduction sets forth the standard
claim of feminist theory with respect to biology:
Gender biases do inform several areas of modern biology and
these biases have been detrimental to the discipline. In other
words, whereas most feminist studies of biology portray itwith
some justiceas a privileged oppressor,17 biology has also been a
victim of the cultural norms. These masculinist assumptions have
 impoverished biology by causing us to focus on certain problems
to the exclusion of others, and they have led us to make particular
interpretations when equally valid alternatives were available.
(Emphasis added.)18

Without equivocation, we are here promised evidence, from

people who work in the scientific discipline they are talking about, of
(1) bad science that would be better if it were opened to feminist
insight, and (2) good science (equally valid interpretations) made
possible or generated by such insight. This seems to guarantee a
measured assessment of scientific results, rather than the usual
linguistic, cultural, psychoanalytic, or political auspication. The hope
proves, alas, to be bootless. The article starts by referring to seed-and-
soil cosmological myths from Aristotle to the eighteenth century. That
Aristotle harbored opinions we would nowadays dismiss as sexist is
probably true; but that is hardly something new and it has no relevance
for contemporary biology, in which Aristotle is no authority figure. We
come next to Sperm Goes ACourtin, which turns out to be an
indignant attack on a book published in 1890not a technical book at
that, but a popularization by Sir Patrick Geddes and John Arthur
Thomson dealing with sexual physiology. This was published soon
after the discovery of syngamic fertilization (sperm-egg fusion), but
before the discovery of chromosomal sex-determination. It contains
much talk about metabolism, about the anabolic (building-up, nutritive,
vegetative) qualities of eggs vis--vis females and the catabolic
(breaking-down, active) qualities of spermatozoa vis--vis males.
These notions are related by the BGSG to the masculine British ritual
of the hunt (which we might have thought to be concerned with class,
rather than sex), and back to an Aristotelian emphasis on nutrition (of
course most eggs do contain nutritive yolk, while the male gamete does
not), all this with appropriate feminist aspersions.
We readers are supposed to join in the derision of Geddes and
Thomson, even though they were in fact of no importance to the
science they wrote about. It is hard to see why derision is called for.
Metabolism (not just nutrition) was then in the air within the fields of
biology and medicine. It was and remains an important concept, and
there was in those days new knowledge about it. The science that was to
mature as physiological chemistry and, later, as biochemistry was
being built. Moreover there was the hard fact that sperm are motile:
they swim actively; eggs do not. Everybody in those days related
everything to these jots of new knowledge, just as everybody who is
anybody in biology today relates everything to the nucleotide
sequences in DNA19 (and just as everybody who is anybody in cultural
criticism relates everything to overdetermined figuresor to
Madonna; everybody in literary criticism to the indeterminacy of the
text; everybody in feminism to a universal and ineluctable
gendering). The language in this ancient book is innocuous, except to
a perfervid eye. One wonders why the authors bothered to belabor it.
The next example offered is a paragraph from a paper of C. E.
McClung, the American cytologist who discovered chromosomal sex
determination. The authors begin their critique of a McClung paper (of
1901!) by suggesting that he had been unduly influenced by Geddes and
Thomson. Using a courtship analogy wherein the many spermatic
suitors courted the egg in its ovarian parlour, McClung stated that
the egg is able to attract that form of spermatozoon which will produce
an individual of the sex most desirable to the welfare of the species.
He then goes on to provide specific gender-laden correlation. What
gender-laden correlation is that? The authors quote a long paragraph
from McClung that includes such presumably offending passages as
the ovum reacts in a way best to subserve the interests of the
species. To it come two forms of spermatozoa from which selection is
made in response to environmental necessities.
It is a mystery that the authors find any of this gender laden,
unless they mean that he attributes too much power to the egg (as he
does, justifiably in the context of his time). Of course the words refer to
sex. Thats what the research (and the writing, which is not the same
thing) were about. Of course we know that McClung wasnt quite right
about what the egg does at fertilization (which demonstrates the
continuous, self-correcting character of science); but this is not simply
because he attributed to it a stereotypical female passivity. The most
sexist, most gender-laden statements here are the paraphrases
concocted by the authors.
McClungs notions of the egg as a sperm selector are of minor
relevance to the assessment of his contribution to reproductive
biology.20 What is important is that, following up earlier work of
Thomas H. Montgomery and others, McClung was the first to
understand (from microscopical research on grasshoppers, as it
happened) the general meaning for sex determination of the accessory
chromosome. This led to E. B. Wilsons presentation of the theory
relating the sex chromosomes, sex determination, and sex-linked
inheritance.21 McClungs discovery was one of the foundations of
modern knowledge of sex determination and sexual development. His
cytological observations were rock-solid.
Where are those questions, unasked because of bias, that we were
promised by the BGSG? Where are the equally valid alternatives?
So far this critique is nothing but the all-too-familiar metaphor
mongering, likely to convince no one who is not already excited by the
idea that Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton were advocates of rape.22
The section entitled The Sperm Saga attacks statements that
treat the spermatozoon as a victor in conflict. It is concerned with
narratives in which, this time, the egg doesnt choose a suitor but is
instead the prize, for which the victor has competed with hordes of
others. The authors excoriate textbook authors who perpetuate this
epic of the heroic sperm struggling against the hostile uterus. There is
a long quotation from a once-famous introductory biology text (by
William R. Keeton), a quotation whose language is far more moderate
than that used by the authors to attack it, and whose factuality,
whatever adjectives are used, is unequivocal (e.g., that in mammalian
reproduction large numbers of spermatozoa die before reaching the
cervix).
The BGSG next moves to narratives of fertilization they
characterize as I alone am saved (referring to the successful
spermatozoon). Here they disparage an obscure manual for expectant
mothers, objecting to such images as sperm lying in wait for the
ovum, an army of spermatozoa, penetrates, electrifies, and the
like. The authors identify such images with a kind of martial gang-
rape, thus exceeding by an order of magnitude the floridity of
language of the manuals unfortunate author (who surely never had
rape in mind). The BGSG sees fit, moreover, to compose this vehement
burlesque: The fertilizing sperm is a hero who survives while others
perish, a soldier, a shard of steel, a successful suitor, and the cause of
movement in the egg. The ovum is a passive victim, a whore, and
finally, a proper lady whose fulfillment is attained.
An imaginative, deconstructive reading of the original, trivial text!
The criticism is riper by far than the criticized. There cant be many
places in the literature of science where the unfertilized egg is called a
proper lady, much less a whore. Note well that the argument has
nothing to do, so far, with the scientific results supposedly under
discussion. Nothing said or implied about the observable events of
conception in the text under attack was wrong at the time it was
written. No useful alternative science of feminist origin is suggested.
Only the desirability of a different metaphorical conceit is implied; yet
the BGSG doesnt trouble itself to give an example of how the thing
might have been said free of sexist images. (A deep foreboding afflicts
us as we try to imagine the sanitized language.) There is nothing in this
section of the paper that is a genuine case of research opportunity
missed, or a genuinely alternative interpretation of the data slighted
due to sexist bias; no improvements of biology are offered. We are still
in the realm of quibbles about incidental metaphors in secondary
books.

Cherishing the Ovum

The next section of The Importance of Feminist Critique for

Contemporary Cell Biology looks at first more serious. It concerns the
activity and passivity of egg and sperm. Here the BGSG comes up with
what is meant to be an example of the benefits in store for biology once
it has been enriched by feminist awareness. They propose that until
recently, textbooks emphasized the passivity of the egg. They then cite
with admiration a popular article on fertilization published in 1983 by
G. and H. Schatten. This account (entitled, quite reasonably, The
Energetic Egg) discusses electron-microscopic data that imply an
active role of the egg surface in attaching the sperm head and drawing
it inward. Following this are other items of information, in light of
which the eggs role in fertilization and development is anything but
passive. We are supposed to conclude, then, that without the habits of
thought provided us (and the Schattens) by feminist insight, we would
still be mired in the thought of the egg as a fat, immovable female-
vegetable of a cell, and of the sperm as a steely bearer of glad tidings, a
swift warrior.
Butand we are aware that each time we say it we lose a few
more friendsthis is nonsense. Reproductive biologists of either
gender who spoke that way would be considered by their colleagues,
and doubtless by their mates, as overdue for deep psychoanalysis. And
this is nothing new; the same would have held in the nasty old
nineteenth century. Artificial parthenogenesis was demonstrated and
announced in 1899, by Jacques Loeb. Artificial parthenogenesis is
metabolic activation of the egg, and in some systems the initiation of
embryonic development, by a stimulus other than the spermatozoon. It
was sensational news at the time, not only to biologists but also for the
lay public. Loebs unnatural, asexual stimulus was to change the
chemistry of the seawater in which sea urchin eggs were suspended.
Loeb did not have the benefit of feminist lustration such as that of the
BGSG to guide his thought, his experimental methods, ormore
importantlyhis language.23
That eggs of many species are capable of developing partly or
completely with an appropriate stimulus other than the penetrating
spermatozoon is taught in every embryology course and in most
courses of introductory biology. One of us has demonstrated it to
several generations of college students. Parthenogenetic development is
a normal option in some species (although not, so far as we know, in
ours!). There is no parthenogenetic development from sperm. Classical
developmental genetics was for a long time preoccupied with a proper
attribution of phenotypic (visible) outcomes of development to the
maternal or paternal gene-set. Among the most important (and
epistemically fruitful) kinds of gene mutations affecting animal
development have been the so-called maternal effects. This is
standard science, whose recognition and promulgation owes nothing to
feminism or masculinism, or to any other ideology.
As long ago as 1964, one of the means was discovered by which
the eggthat huge, complex, and unique cellknows what to do in the
critical, early hours following fertilization. The key is the maternal
messenger RNA, a population of stabilized genetic messages made
and distributed in the egg cytoplasm during maturation in the maternal
body. There is no such population in the spermatozoon. That story too
is standard biology, treated well and comprehensively, in fact, in
Gilberts textbook 24: these RNA molecules, acting alternately or
simultaneously with others copied from the embryos nuclear DNA, are
responsible for laying out the plan of future body development. Eric
Davidsons authoritative monograph on genes in early development,
the standard work now through three editions, concerns itself almost
exclusively with the egg.25 There is not a trace in it of the kind of
imagery in which the metaphor mongers delight.
There is thus a vast and serious science of what the egg does
activelyrelative to the sperm. It has emerged over the last thirty
years, independently of feminist or any other kind of cultural criticism.
The important contributions to it have been made by women as well as
men, and women are among todays leaders of the field. None of the
debates that have raged in it have had anything whatsoever to do with
gender or metaphor. The large literature in which the new knowledge is
embedded has, as far as we know, no significant component written in
sexist language or driven by gendered images; and even were the
academic Bowdlers to find such, it would have no effect upon the data
or the facts they represent. In short: no case has been made in this
entirely representativefield of biology for opportunities overlooked
due to sexist bias, or for valuable alternative interpretations having
arisen out of feminist (or any other brand of cultural) criticism. Not,
that is, if by interpretations we mean efforts of objective analysis that
relate empirical data, predictions, and experimental designs to one
another by means of logic. Considerations of space and balance
prohibit further analysis of this work by the BGSG. We would urge
anyone among our readers who has done the sort of college courses
taken by premedical students, and who may remember a little organic
chemistry, to search out in it the amazing unmaskings of such nasty
masculinisms as nucleophilic attack.
If there is anything of substance in the BGSG critique, it is that
writers on scienceespecially popular writersought to be careful
with figures of speech and should be vigilant in avoiding the pathetic
fallacy.26 This stricture is more appropriately addressed, however, to
feminist critics, the BGSG included, than to working scientists. What is
saddest about this well-meaning groupwe do not impugn their
sincerity or their desire for equality between the sexesis the contrast
between the decency of their intentions and the triviality of the results.
By using feminist critique to analyze some of the history of biological
thought, the authors assert, we are able to recognize areas where
gender bias has informed how we think as biologists. In controlling for
this bias,27 we can make biology a better discipline We become
what biology tells us is the truth about life. Therefore feminist critique
of biology is not only good for biology but for our society as well.
Wishful thinking is the customary name for this such analysis.

The Spin on Sexuality

No thoughtful observer of original science and its popular expositions

denies that the language of interpretation is influenced by the tastes of
the interpreter. The further the interpreter is from the original work,
moreover, the more likely those tastes are to color the statement. It is a
commonplace among relativists of all kinds to ignore or dismiss the
self-correction process by which good science survives and bad science
that which is not verifiable by others of different tastes and
tendenciesvanishes in due course. In many cases, among students, for
example, the ignorance is excusable as such. In others it is a deliberate
dismissal, and that is inexcusable.
There is always much ado among feminist science-critics, as must
now be clear, about tendentious interpretive language. These critics are
governed by the impulse to take language very seriously, even when it
is clearly metaphorical or simply whimsical. Their censoriousness
applies just as strongly to the offhand self-deprecations of the late,
brilliant Richard Feynman as to the turgid metaphors of Francis Bacon
(who did little of scientific value and goes unread by the vast majority
of scientists). The temptation to construe colloquialisms as tokens of
deep epistemological error has been a ceaseless element of feminist
criticism, and one of the most fatuous.
Nevertheless, granting that women have been discriminated
against in science, that their contributions have often in the past been
undervalued, one can justify a certain watchfulness. However
negligible the power of inappropriate metaphor may be to shape the
ultimate body of scientific knowledge, there is no great harm in
sensitizing people to it. The less so, then, is there harm in a keen
alertness to consciously politicized interpretations of science for public
consumption, that is, in the popular media. If there were any longer
anything like a hegemonic, white, masculinist slant to popular natural
and social science, denunciation of it would be proper.
The shoe, however, is now on the other foot. Anyone who gives
prime-time television a passing glance (we hope none of our readers
give it more) is familiar with todays universal spin, for example, on
womens careers. Who has not looked sidewise at the screen and seen a
beautiful young woman (political correctness in the media does not yet
frown upon lookism), high heels, lipstick and all, leaping about with
her 9-mm. Beretta held, two-handed, in the approved barrel-up manner,
dodging around corners, stalking a murderous criminal? Who has not
seen her straddle and handcuff the oaf, toward the end of the show?
Who has not seen the impenetrably tough, young woman lawyer face
down a crooked male judge in court, and then, as a sop to story line and
the connectedness of women, make a lonely phone call to her mother,
or her sister, late that night? Who, for that matter, hasnt seen the new,
standard childrens books, in which Mama Bear, like Papa Bear, goes to
work or runs a honey-packing business? Who is so asleep as not to have
noticed that Dagwood of the funnies, always an amiable idiot, is today
a bigger jerk than ever, now that Blondie is a successful
businesswoman while he remains under the thumb of his boss?
If there is any spin on popular science, it is today of that kind, and
not of the females of small brain and weak body kind. As a foil to
such hand-wringing as that of the Biology and Gender Study Group, we
cite for convenient example a special issue of Discover, the most
(deservedly) successful slick magazine of science published in the
United States. This issue28 was devoted to the science of sex, that
science to which feminist critics give their closest attention. Its
handsome, four-color cover sets forth the questions to be explored
inside, including:
Tales of a Sperm The Hermaphrodite Paradox
The Aggressive Egg Why Do We Know So Little about Human
Sex?
Evolution of the Orgasm
As is usual in popular science writing, the articles vary in detail
and fidelity to the original science and in the depth of understanding
displayed by the writers (some but not all of whom are practicing
scientists, not journalists). Some of the articles in this issue are, as
usual, perfectly sound. Some are preposterous. Without exception,
however, they embody and contribute to a certain spin on matters of
gender. It is that the new scientific knowledge of sex(uality) reveals the
rigidity and narrowness of all earlier formulations. The articles and
sidebars are replete with imagery in which metaphor mongers might
well delight; they offer speculations looked upon with great favor by
feminists.
Among them, for example, is a paean to the Bonobo, a rare
species of chimplike ape in which frequent couplings and casual sex
play characterize every social relationshipbetween males and
females, members of the same sex, closely related animals, and total
strangers. Primatologists are beginning to study the bonobos
unrestrained sexual behavior for tantalizing clues to the origins of our
own sexuality (emphasis added). This comes from the folk who sneer
at sociobiology for extrapolating from animal to human behavior! This
article, one among siblings, is replete with photographs of the charming
primates engaging in the described sexual acts. Maiko is on top, and
Lanas arms and legs are wrapped tightly around his waist. Lina, a
friend of Lanas, approaches from the right and taps Maiko on the back,
nudging him to finish. As he moves away, Lina enfolds Lana in her
arms, and they roll over so that Lana is now on top. The two females
rub their genitals together, grinning and screaming in pleasure. 29
What fun! In reconstructing how early man and woman behaved, we
are told by the author, Meredith F. Small, researchers have generally
looked not to Bonobos but to common chimpanzees. The burden of
what follows is that this was a very bad mistake. The spin is that we
have undeniable evidence already for that fondest of constructivist,
feminist fantasies: an original, genderless human society of perfect
sexual and behavioral equality, full of great games and no domination.
David H. Freedman, writing on the aggressive egg, takes an
unwitting page from the writing of C. E. McClung, whom the Biology
and Gender Study Group scourged for gender-laden imagery.
Freedmans article, near its beginning, describes the spermatozoa as a
wastefully huge swarm flop[ping] along, its members bumping into
walls and flailing aimlessly. Then, once they are in the vicinity of the
female gamete, the egg selects one and reels it in, pinning it down in
spite of its efforts to escape. Its no contest, really. The gigantic, hardy
egg yanks the tiny sperm inside, distills out the chromosomes, and sets
out to become an embryo (Emphasis added). Look on and smile,
Beretta-wielders!
The spin is conscious. Its purpose is to highlight the small size, the
prodigality, the incompetence, the misdirectedness of male gametes,
and the purposeful, dominant object that is the female. The authors
real heroine, subject of the article, is anthropologist Emily Martin, who
is reported to have set out to undo popular notions of warrior sperm and
damsel-in-distress eggs. Can biased metaphors be eliminated from
science? Freedman (and Martin) ask. Martin doesnt think so The
goal shouldnt be to clean the imagery out but to be aware that its
there. The implication (Martins and Freedmans) is that until now
nobody had heard of metaphor, or of the distinction between metaphor
and the underlying facts of science.
Not unexpectedly, this special issue of Discover includes higher-
level commentary; this by the well-known Anne Fausto-Sterling, who
insists elsewhere that nature is a peaceful socialist collective, rather
than (as in the capitalism-stained imagination) red in tooth and
claw.30 It is entitled Why Do We Know So Little about Human Sex?
Her answer, which assumes that we know much less about that subject
than we ought to, is as firm as is the denial, in her polemical book on
the subject, of significant biological differences between men and
women.31 It is that Senator Jesse Helms and Congressman William
Dannemeyer, driven by a deep-seated fear of homosexuals and
supported by constituencies of like-minded conservatives, have blocked
funding of the necessary research. This, she explains, is but the latest
chapter in a saga of repression, by which the efforts of brilliant
investigators, from Krafft-Ebbing to Kinseyand afterhave been
marginalized.
While we have no immediate objection to the blaming of
politicians for inserting themselves into the peer review process, if and
when they do, it seems to us quite unsporting not to praise male college
presidents, deans, vice-presidents for student affairs, and affirmative
action officers. Hundredsliterallyof those go daily far out of their
way to provide positions (tenure-track and otherwise), honors, and
research support for such work, and for political-cultural critics who
write about it. Their support is worth much more in dollars than Jesse
Helms could possibly subtract. But then again, sporting is an
encomium of male provenance.
Discovers spin is heavy: science, unleashed, opened to the
insights of the marginalized, can give us endless treasures of knowing,
like those so colorfully presented in the magazine. It could give us new
hope for true sexual freedom, were it not for the obstructionism of
(male) politicians and their retrograde, homophobic supporters. Well,
let a hundred flowers bloom, as the hero of an earlier left-wing
enthusiasm was wont to observe. Let us not pretend, though, that
masculinism prevails any longer in the metaphors, let alone in the
substance, of science. That substance, we are forced to report, seems
stubbornly resistant to spin applied in either direction. You may choose
to see spermatozoa as a mindless mob, each one a chromosome set
strapped to a hotrod; or you may see them as streamlined engines of
delivery for the indispensable paternal genes, without which there can
be none of the combinatorial advantages of sex. The less of such
seeing, the better the science. Neither trope matters in the slightest
when serious scientific issues are on the line. What matters is the
evolutionary consequence of sex in reproduction, from microbial to
human. What matter are the remarkable details of devices for sexual
genetic recombination. What matters is the physics, the chemistry, and
the information content of the sperm and of the egg, and what happens
when all those become the property of a new, single, diploid cellthe
zygote, the beginning of an individual multicellular life.

Dealing with Physics

Our epigraph, two sentences from Sandra Hardings influential book on

feminism and science, stands here as a signal of the bewilderment in
store for the innocent but literate explorer of the feminist critique. It
represents not only the characteristic animus, but also a style of
argument frequently employed in justifying such hostility. Hardings
success in establishing a reputation as a major thinker on science and
epistemology would be incomprehensible in an age less determined to
celebrate difference at all costs. To difference we might have added
heterodoxy, except that it is our own views that are now unorthodox,
at least to those outside of science. The success of her justificatory
strategies32 may be deserved in a society whose most celebrated
thinkers tend to be TV anchorpersons and talk-show participants. Hers
is a discursive style crafted for a certain constituency, designed to
gratify without challenging, to offer the emotional rewards of rebellion
without the actual work and dangers of combat.
Let us examine her approach to the important question of physics.
What can the quoted statement possibly mean? What can be said in
defense of it? Lets have a look at the first sentence: Would not
physics benefit from asking why a scientific worldview with physics as
its paradigm excludes the history of physics from its recommendation
that we seek causal explanations of everything in the world around us?
First of all, the sentence is freighted with assumptions. There is
supposed to be a regnant worldview, with physics as its paradigm.
Given that only a vanishingly small fraction of the worlds five billion
souls know anything about physics, it cannot be that physics is any sort
of demotic weltanschauung. If we limit our attention to what likes to
think of itself as the Developed World, the situation is hardly different.
Let us then narrow the focus to the microscopic subworld of
professional intellectuals. At least half of thoseshall we say most
humanists, most historians, a good fraction of sociologists, a surprising
number of philosophersknow virtually nothing about physics either.
Such ignorance is not a particular virtue, but neither is it a vice: it has
not precluded remarkable intellectual achievements. Humanists have
not, traditionally, felt the need to apologize for this gap in background,
nor should they (although a grain or two of embarrassment might well
be felt for the propensity of a few colleagues to pontificate on the deep
meanings of physics without having bothered to learn it).
We are left, presumably, with natural scientists and some of the
social scientists who have been trying, with variable success, to
introduce into their disciplines a measure of what is usually thought of
as scientific rigor. It is to some degree justified to assert that this
community takes physics for its paradigm, out of acknowledgment that
physics is the most successful of empirical sciences. To say that,
however, is to gloss over the important debates that engage scientists in
all fields. How and to what extent should physics serve as a model?
There is the issue of reductionism in the strict sense, the distinct
question of whether a given discipline ought to rely on a logico-
mathematical model for its theoretical structure, the question of the
degree to which constructs appearing naturally within such a structure
should be reified. These questions are as subtle as they are important.
Leading thinkers in all fields of science confront them ceaselessly.
Thus to speak of physics as a paradigm is to vulgarize the situation.
We are assured that this putative paradigm enjoins us to seek
causal explanations of everything in the world around us. Can this be
so, even for the most conceited of physicists? Would it be possible to
dredge out of the laboratory even one scientist who thinks it possible,
or desirable, to find a causal explanation of the fact that Mozart wrote
music that sounds like Mozart and not like Ditters von Dittersdorf?
Then too, the statement seems to encode a naive notion of causality. As
used by scientists, causality is hardly an unexamined idea. There has
been painstaking attention to it from almost everyone who takes
physics seriously. In fact the concept is employed with the closest
attention to fine distinctions. The relationships among causal
explanation, predictability, and verification are particularly
subtle. But Harding, as polemicist and cheerleader, is indifferent to
such questions.
So much for the assumptions of the sentence. What of its key
assertion? Does the paradigm exclude the history of physics from its
otherwise sweeping injunction to seek causes? From almost any point
of view this seems to be nonsense. Has physics been inattentive to its
own history? No: physicists seem in fact to be obsessed by it.33 History
is not some parochial hobby: great achievements have derived from it.
To take the best-known example, the meditations that led Einstein to
relativity had their origin in a serious examination of whatfrom the
nineteenth-century point of viewmight have seemed a work of purely
antiquarian interest: Galileos speculations on the invariance of natural
law from one inertial frame to another.
Does physics, then, have an explanation for the history of physics?
In one very strong sense it does: the history of physics as a collection
of ideas is largely explained by the objective nature of the phenomena
it describes and schematizes. Thus Keplers laws of motion are
explained by the fact that, to a high degree of precision, the planets
move as predicted by those laws. This seeming tautology will leave
relativists and cultural constructivists feeling quite out of sorts; but, as
explanations go, it is supremely solid and convincing.
Does this mean that the paradigm rules out attention to other
factors, social ones in particular, in explaining the history of physics?
The answer, to judge by the attitudes and interests of physicists and
other scientists, is surely No again. They would love to know why
modern sciencethat endlessly fruitful marriage of empiricism with
mathematical thinkingtook root and flourished in seventeenth-
century Europe, rather than in second-century Rome or tenth-century
China, which would have been equally likely nurseries. Scientists
welcome the sort of social explanation that examines minutely and
honestly the intellectual, attitudinal, andto be frankthe moral
preconditions of culture that encourage and sustain the practice of
science. More is the pity that academic opportunism turns some
historians of science into ideologues.
Dare we go on now to read Hardings second sentence? Only if
we insist that science is analytically separate from social life can we
maintain the fiction that explanations of irrational social belief and
behavior could not ever, even in principle, increase our understanding
of the world physics explains. What about the assumptions underlying
this statement? They are obviously dead wrong if we take science, not
unreasonably, to include such fields as behavioral psychology, cultural
anthropology, and atmospheric chemistry. We give her the advantage,
then, and take the statement to refer to pure physics. There she is
quite right. In the view of most physicists, it has been analytically
separate from social life. There have been some egregious exceptions,
such as Philip Lenard, the Nazi physicist who, in denouncing Einstein,
declared: German physics? one asks. I might rather have said Aryan
physics or the physics of the Nordic species of man. The physics of
those who have fathomed the depths of reality, seekers after truth, the
physics of the very founders of science. But, I shall be answered,
Science is and remains international. It is false. Science, like every
other human product, is racial and conditioned by blood.34
 We should be grateful that most physicists found this nauseating,
as well as unpersuasive; and we think they would find Harding equally
unpersuasive. They consider the analytic separation quite appropriate.
Arguments to the contrary, whether from Engels, Lenin, the Institute
for Creation Research, or Stanley Aronowitz, have been undone by the
absence of competent attention to the substance and logic of physical
ideas. This flaw applies to Hardings arguments as well; she doesnt
know anything about physics. (In fairness, she doesnt claim to.) How
then can she decree with any assurance what physics may or may not be
analytically separate from?
We shall try to see. She evidently wants us to accept that
explanations of irrational social belief can and do increase our
understanding of the physical world. This is an amazing notion. We
would need, at the least, some examples in order to judge. None are
provided (unless the world physics explains means something other
than the usual and agreed subject matter of physics). She wants to talk,
presumably, about social attitudes, political prejudices, discriminatory
myths, subconscious sexist assumptions. To the best of our ability to
make out her program, as set forth in the book from which the
quotation is taken, it is as follows:
1. Western society is in some measure rooted in assumptions
about the differences in worth and ability between men and
women.
2. These are irrational and harmful beliefs.
3. Such beliefs permeate all our social institutions and all aspects
of our belief systems.
4. Therefore even physics is biased and distorted by the
ineluctable influence of these irrational beliefs, and therefore
 5. analysis of this root-and-branch unreason will lead eventually to
clarification and rectification, even of the recondite world of
physics.
Points (1) and (2) are unexceptionable; (3) is partially, but only
partially true, and it is altogether too categorical; (4) is substantially
untrue as regards the actual content and methodology of physicsthere
is no plausible body of evidence for itand, consequently, (5)
represents no more than the triumph of hope over logic.
As to this last point, we surmise that Harding herself feels its
force. Elsewhere in the book, we find this remarkable admission: If it
is reasonable to believe that physics should always be the paradigm of
science, feminism will not succeed in proving that science is as
gendered as any other human activity, unless it can show that the
specific problematics, concepts, theories, language and methods of
modern physics are gender-laden.35 Fair enough! This compels, then,
a detailed examination of the logical and conceptual structure of
contemporary physics, a close analysis that must reveal, more sharply
than by mere analogy, precisely how sexist attitudes inflect, indeed
distort, the body of ideas now generally recognized as giving a cogent
view of the physical world at the level addressed by physicists. Alas:
nothing so interesting emerges. As we have said, Harding doesnt seem
t o know much physics. What we get instead is a fog of evasions and
excuses for not tackling physics directly, culminating in the amusing
solution Harding proposes to the problem she has posed: If physics
ought not to have this [paradigmatic] status, then feminists need not
prove that Newtons laws of mechanics and Einsteins relativity
theory are value-laden in order to make the case that the science we
have is suffused with the consequences of gender symbolism, gender
structure, and gender identity.36
 Not many persons with real experience of contemporary science,
taking the time to examine such arguments as this, are likely to adopt
them (except, perhaps, as articles offaith).37 If this argumentand, in a
kind of fairness, we must note that it is not quite so incoherent as is the
succeeding section, which purports to demonstrate the illusory
character of pure mathematicsrepresents the analytic method
feminists want to urge upon physics, then there is no chance the
proffered gift will be accepted, whether or not the potential converts
are women.
The reader unacquainted with radical feminist epistemology, and
especially with the flow of trendy commentary from secondary authors
(as in the public media and in various theoretical organs of postmodern
feminism), may judge that too much pressure is being placed here upon
small samples: the innocuous BGSGs metaphor mining, Hardings text
that these remarks are an unfair burden upon a few sentences. But
these are not atypical, nor are they her most redolent remarks. Her
stirring assertion to the effect that Newtons Principia Mathematica
Philosophae Naturalis is a rape manual may well have won her a
lasting admiration in doctrinaire feminist circles and even a place
among physicists. We pity coming generations of freshmen physics
students who, titillated by this famous remark, will spend long hours
thumbing through that magisterial work, looking for the dirty bits.
Lately, Harding has been enlarging her notional armament. In her
latest work, she has boarded the multicultural gravy train. She now
propounds a doctrine labeled strong objectivity. The idea is that once
proportionate numbers not only of women but of blacks, Native
Americans, Latinos, gays, lesbians, and other disadvantaged groups
join the ranks of science (whilst retaining full and unapologetic pride in
ethnos), science will become more open, more inventive, and above all
more objective. We share with enthusiasm the hope that the ethnic
and sexual demography of the sciences will come to resemble that of
the human species as a whole. But the idea that physics is in for a major
conceptual upgrade because multiethnic perspectives will be brought to
bear upon it is sheer fantasy. Recall that since the end of the eighteenth
century various groups at one or another time regarded by European
Christians as lesser breeds have come increasingly to be represented in
science. These groups include, inter alia, Jews, Indians, Arabs,
Pakistanis, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. As individuals, many of
them have made contributions of the first rank and of enormous
influence, and many have been honored appropriately. To claim that
their ethnicity left a particular stamp on the content of their
achievement is to revert to the odious ethnic essentialism of Professor
Lenard.
Expanding the pool of scientists will produce more and perhaps
better science; but it will not create African science or gay science any
more than it will womens science; nor will some new multicultural
science arise upon the ashes of the old white European male science.
We are happy to leave the last word on Hardings book and its admirers
to the philosopher Margarita Levin, whose meticulous dissection of
feminist science criticism was done half a decade ago:
One suspects that feminists themselves sense the emptiness of
their enterprise. Those confident of their product do not strain to
oversell it, yet much of feminist scholarly writing consists of
wildly extravagant praise of other feminists. As brilliant
analysis supplements Bs revolutionary breakthrough and Cs
courageous undertaking. More disconcerting is the penchant of
many feminists to praise themselves most fulsomely. Harding
ends her book on the following self-congratulatory note:
 When we began theorizing our experience ... we knew our
task would be a difficult though exciting one. But I doubt that
in our wildest dreams we ever imagined we would have to
reinvent both science and theorizing itself to make sense of
womens social experience.
This megalomania would be disturbing in a Newton or Darwin: in
the present context it is merely embarrassing.38

Science and Science Studies

That the outpouring of feminist science criticism, a part of the larger

genre of science studies, is revolutionary and of fundamental
importance is a given for the academic and intellectual left. Such works
as Hardings The Science Question in Feminism have already attained
the stature of classics; likewise their writers are widely acclaimed as
members of a new wave in scientific epistemology. Nor are they
reluctant to drape themselves in that mantle, as becomes evident to the
reader of an interview given by Donna Haraway, one of the greats of
the business. What is impossible to discover, unfortunately, is exactly
what contribution to epistemology has been made, or is being made.
The honored achievement seems to be not philosophy but cage rattling.
The interview referred to, for example, is introduced by the
journals editors with a panegyric to Haraway, which does not fail to
mention that she was trained as a biologist and that now, having moved,
presumably, up in the world, she teaches in the history of consciousness
program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. To clarify any
possible misunderstandings and to set the stage for an exposition of her
contributions to (presumably) meaning, the editors summarize
Haraways position: Her missionwhich she claims not to have
(simply) chosen but seems to thoroughly enjoyis to melt frozen
categories, rearrange the landscape, and generally mess up everything
on the map. She continually insists on the socially constructed and
politically contested nature of facts, theory, practices, and power
(emphasis added).39
Fair enough: we can expect to see some social (or cultural)
constructivism in what follows, and some sharp messing up of
arguments that fail to take it into account, or to accord it proper
respect. No such luck. In the interview proper, Haraway is asked How
is this related to your recent efforts to explode the idea of social
constructivism, to question the assumption that once youve asserted
that scientific knowledge is socially produced youve said it all?
(emphasis added). Whoa! How can she insist on the socially
constructed and politically contested nature of facts, theory, practices,
and power and at the same time be engaged in exploding social
constructivism? We confess that, though we try to be careful readers,
we are evidently not careful enough, because we cant make consistent
sense of her assertions. Her reply to the question begins on an
admirably firm note: Plainly the social constructivist argument has its
limitations, because it ends in relativism. The whole thing is set up
within a very conservative philosophical tradition. And thats very
problematic. What is very problematic, a very conservative tradition,
or relativism? What follows seems to favor the former:
I find that the most enlivening work tries to sidestep that set of
philosophical traps, that part of our analytical inheritance. Im
also trying to sidestep it, by saying that nature, at every level of
 the onion, is artefactualthat is, madebut not just by us. All the
actors arent human, all the actors arent machines.
Of course the obvious binary objection to that is no, the
worlds not made, its given. Its not a product, its a gift. It pre-
exists our actions upon it; it is matrix to our action; it is resource
to our instrumentality. Those are exactly the traditional modes of
Western philosophy. How in the world can we sidestep them,
crack them open, deconstruct them?

Advanced thought of this sort cannot be expected to be merely

linear, of course, so we must make the effort to follow the zigs and
zags as they appear. The resultant of these vectors seems to be,
roughly, that an opposition between a made world (or a made
reality) and a given one is itself not real: it has simply been taken as
such by Western philosophy, from which we had best escape. Reverting
to the original question, then, Haraways response seems to be tending,
not toward exploding social constructivism, hence relativism, but
rather toward a denial that the underlying question (i.e., How do we
know?) is necessary. This is hardly a firm position from which to
conduct epistemological sorties; but, well, it is a position. In what
follows, unfortunately, Haraway seems abruptly to become a full-
fledged relativist:
There are people in the world who dont have our problems, who
inherit other ways of imagining, who really are discursively
different, and that means materially different. But even Western
discourse isnt homogeneousits incredibly eclectic.
Hermeticism, for example, sees the world as alive, says that
matter is active but its available, and lots of people are using it
 in various ways. Certainly ecofeminist discourse relies on it.40

If Haraway judges hermeticism to be available, then presumably

she judges it as valid; and indeed the tone of the discussion makes it
clear that it, and ecofeminism, are to be considered perfectly adequate
alternatives to post-Enlightenment scientific discourse. Let the
confused reader not worry: we are confused, too; and so were the five
thoughtful people, all strongly sympathetic to feminism, to whom we
applied for clarification. They dont know, and we dont know, whether
Haraway is for or against relativism; but a vote indicates that whatever
limitations she sees in relativism, they are not fatal at every level of
the onion. For this discourseand the quoted passages are entirely
typicalon what is, after all, a quite fundamental question of scientific
epistemology, we have been able to find only one signifier: it is Peter
Mayles term, invented originally to describe certain goings-on in
Provence, especially in the season of wine tasting: delusions of
adequacy.

Justificatory Strategies

A 1989 volume edited by Anne Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, Women,

Knowledge, and Reality, prepared for use in the teaching of philosophy
and womens studies, includes a section on philosophy of science. It is,
specifically, feminist philosophy of science, the books purpose being,
one judges, to convey in compact but authoritative form the new
acumen brought to the philosophical subdisciplines by feminist
thought. The editors chose well. The three contributors on science,
Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Helen E. Longino, are
unquestionably among the leaders of the field; their papers, reprinted or
reworked from earlier contributions, represented at publication the
cutting edge of feminist thinking on the subject and are, furthermore,
good summaries of the work of each writer. Herefinallywe may
hope to find those sharp epistemic analyses that expose the
philosophical shortcomings of science, along with comprehensible
guides to such alternative ways of knowing the material world as
patriarchal science has overlooked, by its nature or as a result of
conspiracy.
We are giving her, perhaps, an unfair measure of attention, but
Harding is among the chosen here, too. Her title, Feminist
Justificatory Strategies, is revealing and in character. The strategies
discussed are to find meansany means, as we have already seenby
which to advance feminism and to defend a foregone conclusion: that
science is a social construct, sharing the deficiencies of the society in
which it has been assembled. She identifies three principal strategies in
current use. One is feminist empiricism, by which she seems to mean
ordinary empiricism disciplined by feminism so as to broaden problem
choice and to open science to alternative hypotheses. By her account,
these elements are absent from ordinary empiricism: Missing from
the set of alternative hypotheses nonfeminists consider are the ones that
would most deeply challenge androcentric beliefs, ones that emerge to
consciousness and appear plausible only from a feminist understanding
of the gendered character of social experience.41
How this absence affects empiricist procedure is not clear, unless
some definition of empiricism other than the usual is implicit or is
being attempted. One pines for a concrete instance in which the
feminist understanding that produces alternative hypotheses
challenging androcentric beliefs has had, or at least promises to have,
impact on some particularanyscientific problemhigh-
temperature superconductors, protein folding, the population biology of
herringsanything! But alas, such hopes are idle.42 But it doesnt
matter: Harding observes immediately, in any case, that feminist
empiricism is ambivalent about the potency of sciences norms and
methods to eliminate androcentric bases. While attempting to fit
feminist research within these norms and methods, it also points to the
fact that without the assistance of feminism, sciences norms and
methods regularly failed to detect these biases. Feminist empiricism
is, in short, empirical science done (with ambivalence) by feminists.
Other empiricisms are wrong; but even this one may not be right. This
conclusion is, presumably, one of the justificatory strategies for
feminism. It is certainly consistent with the radical relativism
displayed by less sophisticated voices in the movement.
Hardings second strategy is named the feminist standpoint.
Why this is distinguished from the first strategy is hard to determine.
The feminist standpoint is, as far as we can determine, the standpoint of
feminism. Harding describes it as a consequence of gender: Womens
distinctive social activities provide the possibility for more complete
and less perverse human understandingbut only the possibility.
Feminism provides the theory and motivation for inquiry.43
There follow lines about political struggle.44 The point, if there is
one, is that male empirical science cannot, even in principle, be
rectified by importing the more enlightened styles of problem selection
and hypothesis choice available in feminism. Only science done from
an entirely feminist standpoint has a chance to be true. So much for the
second strategy. But Hardings heart may now lie elsewhere. It is with
the altogether more global problem of whether there should be
feminist sciences and epistemologies at allwith the problem she
identifies as having been brought to the fore by recent discoveries of
postmodernism. This is, of course, the usual problem, for relativists, of
truth (a problem because they would be out of a job if they allowed not
onlyas they always dothat there is no necessary truth in what
others say, but also in what they say). The postmodernist-feminist way,
then, lacking only explicit nods to Derrida, Foucault, et alii, is to be
understood as follows: Feminist claims should be held not as an
approximation to truth but as permanently partial instigators of
rupture, of rents and unravelings in the dominant schemes of
representation. From this perspective, if there can be a feminist
standpoint, it can only be what emerges from the political struggles of
oppositional consciousness (emphasis added).45
How one is to pursue a career as a permanent partial instigator of
rupture is of course a mystery. Assuming that this doesnt involve
being a straw boss on a loading dock, it may mean that one is to be
some kind of epistemological Merry Prankster (although, since high
feminism is in play, there is probably strict rationing of merriment). In
any case, it doesnt seem to have much to do with taking ideas
seriouslyyours or anyone elses, scientific or otherwise.
Harding declines to choose among the three strategies because (1)
she sees some merit in each one, and (2) each remains incomplete. She
recommends for now that all three should be followed. What is needed,
in order to bring modern science up to snuff, isof coursemore
feminist research on the epistemology of science. But it must be said
that justificatory strategies such as these cut no ice. They will not
convince skeptics (among whom must be, not only scientists, female
and male, but also most philosophers of science), since that which is to
be justified is a postulate as well as the theorem. Elementary logic may
have been superseded in postmodern theorizing; but most people who
make a living from intellectual work still depend on it.
Our academic inner city is described by Kenneth Minogue as that
locale in which it is possible to combine theoretical pretension with
comprehensive ineptitude, and for that reason it has become the
natural habitat of the ideological enthusiast.46 Evelyn Fox Keller and
Helen E. Longino, however, are anything but inept, and their writing
appears at first laudably modest. Their aims are much less exotic than
Hardings permanently partial instigation of rupture; but they, too,
are iconic voices, defending ideology in the academy. In Hardings
classification (although not necessarily in their own) these two might
be feminist empiricists, attempting to build upon the achievement of
existing science (which Keller and Longino generally acknowledge) a
better, more comprehensive structure, one that will incorporate
feminist truths.
Our sampling of feminist science-criticism would be incomplete
without at least a glance at what it contains. That will be a positive
change from the follies we have encountered, from time to time, so far
in this chapter.

An die Natur

Forgive us a preparatory word about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who

lived a long, honored, and uniquely productive life and nevertheless
died a disappointed man. His scientific work, he believed, was at least
as important as his poetry. Yet at no time, outside a circle of
sycophants, did it receive the awed respect he believed was due. He had
fought a battle against the (long-dead!) Newton over color and light,
proposing in Zur Farbenlehre his own, very different theory; he had
produced an encompassing theory of plant morphology; and he had
immersed himself in comparative vertebrate anatomy. All was for
naught, in respect of the hoped-for high honors. The reasons were
examined with great elegance in an important lecture, given at Oxford
fifty long years ago by the neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington,
celebrating the bicentenary of Goethes birth.47
Sherrington, making a devastating critique of Goethes science,
found the war with Newton instructive: it was a war against abstraction
and the use of experiments and apparatus in the attempt to penetrate the
inherently impenetrable fundamental phenomena of nature, a war
against the use of mathematics to describe (or, in Goethes opinion, to
obscure) such phenomena. Goethe had attempted, with little success, to
grasp the infinitesimal calculus of Newton and Leibniz. He had tried
and failed to replicate Newtons decomposition of white light with a
prism. Goethes prisms were always cloudy; to the same cloudiness
he attributed Newtons errors.
Independently of such trials Newton was, in Goethes view, self-
evidently wrong. Light was for Goethe a fundamental entity of nature,
one of those that cannot and must not be decomposed. No prisms
allowed, and no calculations. His battle, grounded in a
Naturphilosophie that had already been displaced, insisted upon a
closeness to and a feeling for nature, an absorption in the object; a
modesty and simplicity in the encounter with phenomena.
Rhapsodizing on Die Natur, he wrote that we are in her and she is in
us Life is her fairest invention, and Death is her device for getting
more life. She sows wants because she likes movement: the game she
plays with all is a friendly game Those who will not partake of her
illusions she punishes as a tyrant would punish. Those who accept her
illusions she presses to her heart. To love her is the only way to
approach her. 48 Goethes was a self-limiting empiricism, a romantic
oneness with reality doomed to blockade at the level of the obvious
that to which he gave the ringing name Urphnomen. It was an
incapacity, as far as physical reality was concerned, and an
unwillingness, to see beyond the immediate. Closeness to,
identification with, the object, the substitution of ideals for logic and
abstraction, of unfettered intuition for analysis, was a transcendent
characteristic of romantic natural philosophy. Taken as principle, that
characteristic was a root cause of its failure to produce useful science.
It is then an irony that in the search for defining characteristics of
womens ways of knowing the most important and distinguished
feminist writers propose that just thiscloseness to, interaction with,
the investigated object, this resistance to abstractionis in fact the
essential one. Keller, responding to critics of her view that most
scientific practice is gender-valued, insists upon distinguishing
between gender and sex; but she admits also that the definition of
gender is unstable. It is nevertheless gender she identifies as causing
the unique style of which women doing science are capable, a style
rejected by masculinism: What then are we to make of the fact that so
much of what is distinctive about that [feminine] vision and practice
its emphasis on intuition, feeling, connectedness, and relatedness
conforms so well to our most familiar stereotypes of women? And are,
in fact, so rare among male scientists?49
Kellers echoes of Goethe can sometimes be uncanny. Like
Goethe, she decries scientists for torturing nature in order to extract
its secrets (although her examples of torturethe high energies to
which matter is subjected in particle accelerators, for instanceare
hardly likely to engage the attention of Amnesty International, or even
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). 50 Elaborate
experimentation and intense abstraction make her uneasy. They are
male paradigms.
Keller and Longino, one must assume, are among the writers who
reject the claim that the known divergences of early human
development cause structural and perhaps functional differences in the
brains of males and females. They are, in conformity with one of the
few widely held feminist principles, anti-essentialists. For them there
are no important differences due to gene action and physiology between
men and women, other than in their reproductive systems. Such
differences as are so obviously there, except for urogenital anatomy,
must therefore come from gender, which is a socially constructed, not a
biological category. Hence so basic a cognitive distinction as the
claimed tendency toward objectification and abstraction in men and its
diametric opposite in women must also be socially constructed: an
artifact of a gendered culture. Yet it is an exclusive connectedness with
nature (for Keller if not for Longino), with the object of study, the real
thing, that she seems to identify as the most characteristic capability of
women in science. Because women have been excluded from
androcentric science, that contribution is missing and science is
therefore one-sided, epistemologically incomplete. Keller, like other
feminists, insists that the social construction of science is well-
established:
Recent developments in the history and philosophy of science
have led to a re-evaluation that acknowledges that the goals,
methods, theories, and even the actual data of the natural sciences
are not written in nature; all are subject to the play of social
forces Social, psychological, and political norms are
inescapable, and they too influence the questions we ask, the
methods we choose, the explanations we find satisfying, and even
 the data we deem worthy of recording. (Emphasis added.)51

Those recent developments turn out to be not so recent. Chief

among them isof coursethe work of Thomas Kuhn, whose studies
of theory choice led him to conclude that major upheavals of scientific
theoryparadigm shiftsare conditioned not only by the officially
recognized cognitive processes of textbook science, but by various
social factors as well as personal whim and aesthetic considerations.52
Only the most superficial reading of this work and of subsequent
commentary by Kuhn on his critics can lend support to strong forms of
relativism, a position that Kuhn is at pains most energetically to
deny.53 He is a firm believer in scientific progress and in the power of
science to solve puzzles, while harboring doubts only about the
permanent representational value of any regnant paradigm. Moreover,
he clearly believes that the dominant factors in theory choice are,
indeed, the ones traditionally celebrated by scientists: logical economy,
explanatory parsimony, and the capacity to synthesize once-disparate
theories into a conceptual unity. Even that clarification of Kuhns
position, an epistemological progenitor of the more iconoclastic social-
constructivist critiques, is hardly a recent development, and it hardly
justifies Kellers hopes for epistemic reform, especially when one
considers that Kuhns work, well known as it is, is regarded with
considerable skepticism by a majority of contemporary philosophers of
science.54
No serious thinker about science, least of all scientists themselves,
doubts that personal and social factors influence problem choice and
the acceptance of results by the scientific community. Few serious
thinkers about science, however, outside the camps of feminists and
social constructivists, argue that the stable results of science, those that
have been subject to empirical test over time and have survived, are not
written in nature! Most know that whatever the underlying calligraphy,
self-correcting science is the best translation of it we have.
Keller knows science too wellshe, too, was trained in itto
mean all her animadversions upon male science to be taken literally.
She argues, rather, that the psychosexual development of males endows
them with certain combinations of values, for example, objectivity with
autonomy or analysis with domination, that leave androcentric science
incomplete, blind to categories of question and theory that cannot be
imagined in the cognitive context of such mixtures. She cites, but to her
credit with no great conviction, such unimpressive examples of
supposed bias as inadequate attention from the medical profession to
contraception and to menstrual cramps; an overuse of male rats by
psychologists in studies on learning (justified by the short estrus cycle
of femalesan avoidable complication); supposed misrepresentation,
via improper language, of the facts of primate sexual behavior.
Not written in nature means, on this view, presumably, that a
subtle but pervasive cognitive bias distorts science because most of its
practitioners have been men; that psychoanalytic theory has established
the origins and the dimensions of that pervasive bias:
Our early maternal environment, coupled with the cultural
definition of masculine (that which can never appear feminine)
and of autonomy (that which can never be compromised by
dependency) leads to the association of female with the pleasures
and dangers of merging, and of male with the comfort and
loneliness of separateness .
Central to object relations theory is the recognition that the
 condition of psychic autonomy is double edged: it offers a
profound source of pleasure, and simultaneously of potential
dread. The values of autonomy are consonant with the values of
competence, of mastery. Indeed competence is itself a prior
condition of autonomy and serves immeasurably to confirm ones
sense of self.55

Without attempting the quixotic journey to understanding of why

she believes, for example, that the values of autonomy are consonant
with the values of competence, of mastery, one can deduce that
Kellers psychoanalytic reveries have yielded a chain of proposed
cognitive relationships, at one end of which is autonomy and at the
other, aggression. All these characterize the male (gender), orsince
she is not so naive as to deal in dichotomiesthe male end of a
spectrum of cognitive styles. And finally, for the long-awaited
examples of epistemic failure brought about by such male
psychosexual development, she cites the central dogma of molecular
biology,56 the idea of a master moleculeDNAencoding and
directing the destiny of the living cell, its aggregates, and the
organisms those aggregates produce. For the example of alternative
science, the holist, interactionist science done by those whose
psychosexual development has been female, she refers (denying as
always that it is quite as simple a thing as womens science) to her
studies on the life and work of Nobelist Barbara McClintock,57 who
elucidated the developmental genetics of maize.
The claim is not only that McClintocks science is (or was, before
it was honored) qualitatively different from that of male geneticists,
thus condemning it to a long term of obscurity, but that McClintocks
story is diagnostic: What I am suggesting is that if certain theoretical
interpretations have been selected against, it is precisely in this process
of selection that ideology in general, and a masculinist ideology in
particular, can be found to effect its influence. The task this implies for
a radical feminist critique of science is, then, first a historical one, but
finally a transformative one.58
The suggestion is utterly unconvincing. There are no
developments in the history and philosophy of science that prove a
social (masculinist, ideological) construction of the final product of
empirical science. The best evidence of such a negative is the set of
plain truths that science (in the guise of, say penicillin) works just as
well for Australian aborigines (male and female) as it does on
Englishmen (and women); or that certain fundamentalist Christians,
firmly convinced in their social conditioning that the world is just a
few thousand years old, may nevertheless die in earthquakes, whose
underlying tectonic processes require intervals thousands of times that
long. The psychoanalytic theorizing that identifies the traditional
scientific mentality as a deformed hybrid of autonomy, objectification,
loneliness, and aggression is no firmer than any other theorizing done
in the psychotherapeutic communitywhich is to say that it is
unreliable. Even if it had a kernel of truth, as some such impressionistic
proposals do, it could not possibly establish a clear connection between
the ideal of objectivity and a desire for domination. Quite the contrary:
ask a random sample of a hundred reasonably articulate people what
they mean by an objective view of X; and they will say something
about suppressing ones prejudices about X, stepping outside oneself,
about modesty, and the like.
The idea of DNA as master molecule is not, even among the
most radically reductionist biologists, a literal one: only secondary
writers think ex DNA omnia. Nucleocytoplasmic relationships, the
system of chemical interactions by which the information encoded in
DNA (not only in the nucleus, but in the mitochondria as well) comes
to be expressed as the structure and chemistry of the entire cell, has
been for more than forty years a central concern of cell and molecular
biology. DNA as master molecule is shorthand for initial
information source, nothing more; it carries no implication of
dominance. And finally, McClintocks splendid work was (almost,
but not quite) overlooked for some years, but there is no convincing
mark on it of femininity, as McClintock herself was the first to insist.
Her closeness to the experimental material, her willingness to listen to
it, is characteristic of the work of some scientists and less so of others.
There are no data suggesting that women scientists display the
characteristic, in general, more often than do men. Moreover there is no
lack of abstraction in McClintocks work: it is solidly grounded in the
abstractions of formal genetics. She simply saw things that others
didnt see. Her finest work supports the still-powerful Popperian idea
that good science consists in framing hypotheses so that they are
refutable and then designing experiments to do just that. Good
experimentalists must be close to the experimental object in order to
make effective designs; otherwise they are unable to identify and
exclude intervening variables.
Kellers position rests upon unsupported speculations about
psychosexual developmental differences between men and women; and
its examples of consequences of such differences, in science, are
questionable at best. Yet on such a basis, an already large body of
writing has come to be taken with utmost seriousness, indeed to be
celebrated, especially among cultural critics. What is most curious,
though, is the acceptance of a form of essentialist doctrine by these
anti-essentialist feminists. Keller presumably does not believe that the
proposed cognitive differences between men and women are inborn.
But so pervasive and fundamental a pattern, if it exists, fails of
essentialism only in the feminist denial that genes are in any way
involved. In all other respects the doctrine does not differ, formally,
from the most essentialist belief in an inherent mathematical
excellence of boys as contrasted to a verbal precocity of girlsand
their weakness in spatial relations. To such beliefs (for which there is at
least some empirical support) feminists usually respond with rage.
The proposal that a new and better science will emerge from an
interactionist, holist, nurturant feeling for the organism with which
women are supposed to have been endowedby their nature or by their
genderis in its epistemic effect precisely Goethes old argument
against experiments, mathematics, and abstraction, and for die Natur. It
is Goethesand Wordsworths and WhitmansRomantic idealism
in this years Paris original. It is not likely to affect future science any
more than Goethes sputterings against Newton affected the science we
have today.

Context Ineluctable

Can there be a feminist science? This is the question that an

articulate Helen Longino sets out to answer in the affirmative. Contra
Keller, she begins her inquiry by dismissing as question begging the
strategy of simply pointing to what feminists (or women) in the
sciences do. She quotes, with astringent favor, Stephen Goulds 59
argument against that strategy in his review of Ruth Bleiers Science
and Gender:
 Gould brushes aside her connection between womens attitudes
and values and the interactionist science she calls for. Scientists
(male, of course) are already proceeding with wholist and
interactionist research programs. Why, he implied, should women
or feminists have any particular, distinctive contributions to
make? There is not masculinist or feminist science, just good and
bad science. The question of a feminist science cannot be settled
by pointing, but involves a deeper, subtler investigation.60

For Longino, the important question, among the several deeper,

subtler ones to be investigated, is why the original question is to be
entertained at all. What sort of sense does it make to talk about a
feminist science? Why is the question itself not an oxymoron, linking,
as it does, values and ideological commitment with the idea of
impersonal, objective, value-free inquiry? This is the problem I wish to
address in this essay. Her attempt is not overly respectful of other
feminist strategies. Unlike Harding, she rejects the notion that
established science is in some systemic way wrong about the
phenomena it chooses to investigate. Either feminist science is
indeed oxymoronic, seen against the standard presuppositions about
science (i.e., value-freedom), or the products of science are generally
in error. The latter, she admits with laudable honesty, is nonsense . The
former needs investigation before one can decide; and, of course, it is
important for a feminist to decide. The sticking point is those standard
presuppositions, the most important of which is the freedom of science
from values. Longino sets out to examine values relevant to science;
and she claims to have established a clear dichotomy: there are two sets
of values, distinguishable in that onethe constitution al values
refers to practice, to scientific method, while the otherthe set of
contextual valuesbelongs to the social and cultural context in which
science is done. The traditional interpretation of the value-freedom of
modern natural science amounts to a claim that its constitutive and
contextual features are clearly distinct from and independent of one
another, that contextual values play no role in the inner workings of
scientific inquiry, in reasoning and observation. I shall argue that this
construal of the distinction cannot be maintained.61
The succeeding argument reports (and purports to explain), a
claimed demise of logical positivism on the ground that scientific
hypotheses are notas a minimal form of positivism would require
simple generalizations of data statements. Hypotheses contain
language that is nowhere in the observations from which hypotheses
come and to which experiments, testing those hypotheses, are
addressed. Hypotheses contain, in short, assumptions (language!)
extraneous to data and not testable through the agency of data. Those
assumptions may be, usually are, value laden; and some of those values
may be (Longino does not insist that they must be) contextual values.
Even when contextual values are hidden in hypotheses, however, and
hence in the theories sustained by confirmation of hypotheses, there is
no formal basis for arguing that an inference mediated by contextual
values is thereby bad science. It might be, or it might not be. Each
case, as Longino sees it, has to be investigated.62
The important point of this argument is that contextual values
cannot be eliminated. Science is not even in principle free of social and
cultural values. Ergo, feminist science, science informed by the
social and cultural values of feminism, is not an oxymoron.
The conclusion of this line of argument is that constitutive values
conceived as epistemological (i.e., truth-seeking) are not adequate
 to screen out the influence of contextual values in the very
structuring of scientific knowledge The conceptual argument
doesnt show that all science is value-laden (as opposed to
metaphysics-laden)that must be established on a case-by-case
basis, using the tools not just of logic and philosophy but of
history and sociology as well [But] it is not necessarily in the
nature of science to be value-free . If we reject that idea were in a
better position to talk about the possibilities of feminist science.63
(Emphasis added.)

This is not the place to argue through the philosophical case,

which is largely a summary of Longinos earlier (and later) work. It is
sufficient to note that, unlike the arguments of other feminist critics of
science, this one does not refer endlessly and pejoratively to science as
Western or androcentric. It suggests, with a justice to which we
(and most working scientists) would readily agree, that contextual
values can, unknown to the investigator, influence the design of
experiments and the interpretation of data. It would be difficult to
reject a suggestion made in terms so qualified as to imply not only that
a feminist science has not yet been identified by anyone but that it
might not ever be identified.
Longino endorses and promises specifics, analyses that really
attend to what scientists do and how they think in detail. What remains
for her to show, however, is that this kind of analysis can lead where
she says it will; that some nontrivial, long-lasting outcomes of science
are in error because of contextual values, and that science done in a
new contextfeminismcan be both important and correct. Without
such demonstrations, her argument is so tentative as to deprive it of any
force.
 Once again we are disappointed. Among all the pressing
possibilities for a searching-out of error in important and problematic
science (e.g., the Big Bang theory, the origin of life, the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence, dark matter in galaxies, computability,
cellular signaling processes, the defeat of AIDS, the origins of human
language) the most examined case of distorting male contextual values
is that perennial feminist whipping boy, biological and behavioral
differences between the sexes. Longino reports on her earlier work with
Ruth Doell (treated later also, in Longinos recent book 64) as
demonstrating the force of contextual values in shaping the outcomes
of scientific practice, and as a specific application of her epistemology.
The studies examined are in a very large literature concerned with
differences between males and females in the prenatal synthesis of
androgenic (male) steroids and the consequent effects on central
nervous system development, and on the influence of the sex steroids
(estrogens and androgens), at normal and pathologic levels, on the
behavior of men and women. Longinos attacks on this work are not
contained in the summary article, but are detailed in earlier papers and
in her book. Here she merely states the conclusions in order to examine
them in the light of her epistemology.
We must not proceed thereto, however, without noting our opinion
that these criticisms of the literature are replete with special (highly
articulate) pleading and are grossly unfair to the scientists (many of
whom are women) who have contributed to it. Her standpoint is
rigorously anti-essentialist; from it she claims that the studies
examined are vulnerable to criticism of their data and their
observation methodologies. However, nowhere in the body of
Longinos work do we find identified specific, recognizable flaws in
the data and the methodologies. Indeed, the criticisms are not directed
toward those at all. Instead, they are either banal (e.g., the argument
that data from rodents should not be used to infer processes in people),
or indictments of the investigators for making value judgments about
departures from sex-stereotypical behaviors (of girls, for example, who
have been androgenized in utero), andalmostfor homophobia. But,
although she may detect such attitudes, we do not; nor do the
investigators themselves, most of whommen as well as womenare
probably sympathetic to feminism. Led to expect serious criticism of
data or methodologies, we find, not cooked data, uncontrolled
experiments, or statistical gaffes, but implicit attitudes claimed to have
been detectedby a hypersensitive anti-essentialist. By and large, the
logic here is that, since the conclusions are unacceptable by feminist
lights, the science must be flawed, and those flaws, in turn, are
evidence for the posited influence of contextual values.
Only one criticism is offered that addresses a possible concrete
errorthe matter of unrecognized intervening variables. This is an
error to which scientists, true believers in the standard assumptions,
are very sensitive, because in complex systems it is indeed easy to
overlook an internal or environmental process, or a feedback loop, that
affects the measured endpoint. Still, good scientists make this mistake
from time to time; and it is usually corrected by other scientists who
repeat, often as done originally and then with modifications, the
experiments. What unrecognized intervening variable does Longino
claim to find? It is that fetally androgenized girls are or may be aware
of their special condition, and that this awareness can lead to the
patterning of behaviors (i.e., they become tomboysa word that for
Longino, although for nobody else, is derogatory). If that were true,
then inferring a causal relationship between hormone levels during
gestation and childhood behavior would indeed be a mistake: subject
awareness of a gestational accident would be an uncontrolled,
intervening variable. But this simply wont do. There is no reason to
believe that any such awareness existed in general: many of the
children studied were of preschool age. And if parental awareness were
a factor, it would surely have influenced their fetally androgenized
daughters in the opposite direction, away from the behavior of tomboys
and toward that of feminine little girls.
So, the outcomes of this epistemological critique, applied to
existing science, are neither stronger nor more convincing than those of
the other feminist epistemologists. Longinos interest goes, however,
beyond mere criticism of existing science. She assumes that there is
enough of it in the literature already. Her project is more advanced. It is
to substitute for what she calls the linear model implicit in the
literature she has been criticizingthat model according to which the
early production of testosterone in a Y-chromosome-bearing embryo
makes a male, including male behaviorby introducing one [a model]
of greater putative complexity that includes physiological,
environmental, historical and psychological elements.
As example and support for such an interactionist model, she
adopts the neural selection theory of Gerald Edelman,65 according to
which the central nervous system is structured by a series of continuous
interactions between groups of growing, synapse-forming, and synapse-
breaking neurons and signals from outside the regions of active
morphogenesis (the establishment of form during embryonic
development). This is a selectionist theory, to do it minimum justice
for present purposes, about the way local and environmental signals
may affect brain structure and, inevitably, thought. While there are
some doubters among neurophysiologists and artificial intelligence
experts, Edelmans arguments are brilliantly presented, well-
documented, and widely respected.66 Unfortunately, they have nothing
to do with Longinos argument about the linearity of hormones and
behavior, nor is Edelmans theory in any significant sense nonlinear.
It would be perfectly consistent with Edelmans view for cascades of
morphogenetic events, initiated by programmed molecular signals such
as hormones, to be interwoven with and modulated by experience-
driven cascades. We daresay that most of the investigators Longino has
derogated are perfectly aware of that, and of the massive complexity of
emergent behavior in any morphogenetic model.
What Longino is really after is a way of doing science that will
negate any possibility of biological determination:
Our preference for a neurobiological model that allows for agency,
for the efficacy of intentionality, is partly a validation of our (and
everyones) subjective experience of thought, deliberation and
choice. One of the tenets of feminist research is the valorization of
subjective experience When feminists talk of breaking out and
do break out of socially prescribed sex-roles, when feminists
criticize the institutions of domination, we are thereby insisting on
the capacity of humansmale and femaleto act on
preconceptions of self and society and to act to bring about
changes in self and society on the basis of those perceptions.67

Once again, the hard biology of embryogenesis is snowed-under

by valorization. Science as-it-is becomes, for such critics, an
intolerable constraint, a terrible danger. To radical feminists as to
dreamers of teleportation and transluminal space-travel, it represents
abhorrent limits. Linear or not, it is liable at any moment to produce
results that demolish one or another cherished preconception of
ideology. Longino is at least honest about that. Her conclusion then
follows: since standard science is likely to be affected by contextual
values we dont like, let us, as feminists, drive our science by the
contextual values we approve of. An answer is thus given to the
original question: a feminist science is possible. Indeed, it exists! It is
political. Its answers can well be different from answers obtained by
investigators of the opposite persuasion. So be it.
Longinos essay ends on a sober note. Feminist science, when
there is more of it, and since it will be much less concerned with quick
results, less interested in manipulating nature than in understanding it
in all its rich complexity, will have a hard time getting funded in this
society, in which science is harnessed to the making of money and the
waging of war. Its practitioners, failing to satisfy the entrenched
patriarchy as to the utility of its results, may have a hard time getting
tenure. So, she asks, can there be a feminist science? Her
conclusion: If this means: is it in principle possible to do science as a
feminist? the answer must be: yes. If this means: can we in practice do
science as feminists? the answer must be: not until we change present
conditions.68
Hlas! What begins as an epistemological inquiry into science
ends as familiar anti-science tricked out in the ambient clichs of the
businessscience harnessed to the making of money and the waging
of warthe old moral one-upswomanship, and the call to political
action. It ends with the universal complaint of religious zealots,
utopians, and totalizers generally. Science as-it-is untrustworthy. We
cant bend it to our political will because, as a powerful institution of
the present, compromised world, it is protected. It will not be bent until
the enemy is weakened and the world is redeemed. (But then, once the
world has been remade in the image of our idealsthen, we shall see.)
We have heard this from ideologues, politicians, and thought police in
various uniforms since Galileos time. How sad it is that it should now
emanate from the scholarly halls of universities and reverberate there
among intellectuals who inherit the Enlightenment.
 CHAPTER SIX

The Gates of Eden

If we are to construct an environmental movement powerful

enough to enact needed reforms we must first relinquish our
romantic fantasies. A meaningful environmentalism cannot be
based on nostalgia, wishful thinking, and faith that the inherent
goodness of humanity will manifest itself once civilization is
dismantled.
MARTIN LEWIS, GREEN DELUSIONS

A few years ago, the novelist Ursula Le Guin, who is as much at home
in ordinary fiction as in fantasy and science fiction, scored a
considerable success with an unusual story, Always Coming Home, set
in the far future. The scene is a North America peopled by tribes
separated from each other politically and culturally, with hardly a
memory of the days of a continent-spanning nationstate. The tale
concentrates on one such group, the Kesh, whose ways and customs,
although they are Le Guins invention, strongly echo the folkways of
pre-Columbian Native Americans.
The Kesh culture is elaborately described in the novel: it is the
books true hero. An appendix provides information about the
language, poetry, music, and artwork of the Kesh, with specimens of
each. At its publication, the book was accompanied by a series of
ancillary productsrecordings of Kesh songs and chants, replicas of
Kesh paintingsall created by Le Guin in collaboration with artists
and musicians fascinated by her vision of this possible future. It proved
a popular line of goods at science-fiction bookstores and New Age
specialty shops, and the full setbook and recordingsremains a
popular item on university library reserve for students.
The strangest aspect of the Kesh culture is the degree to which it
has rejected not only technology as such (the Kesh live close to nature,
with minimal use of steam power and electricity, and every artifact
they produce is handmade and imbued with the qualities of art), but
also the entire set of attitudes, ambitions, and obsessions of what we
tend to think of as civilization. They have no interest in abstract
science. Their philosophy is embedded in their mythology. Nor do they
concern themselves with history or social theory, or brood upon the
destiny of man. The notion of knowledge for its own sake is alien to
them. Their values are at once entirely in the present and timeless. But
note: their ignorance does not come about because what we, in the
present, call knowledge has disappeared from the face of the earth. In
fact the human culture of the Kesh and the other tribes is paralleled by
a culture of sentient computers, with which the Kesh are in
occasional contact. The machines are willing to divulge to any curious
Kesh such details of scientific theory or historical fact as might be
sought. The point is that the Kesh simply arent interested. Their world
of myth, ritual, and song, and the slow turning of the seasons, satisfies
them. Science and knowledge expand; but that expansion is the
province of computers, which send probes to distant stars and seek the
facts of history in the ruins of previous human civilizations. It is as if
the Faustian impulse of humanity had been drawn off and perfused into
the circuitry of machines, leaving humans in an Eden of contentment
and forget-fulness, through whose gates they have at last returned.
Some readers are repelled by the somnolence of the Kesh and by
their renunciation of ambition; but many are charmed and inspired
(although Le Guin herself seems, at times, to be wryly ambivalent).
The psychology and the ideas of those who admire the Kesh and extol
the edenic virtues of such a society are what interest us here. Our
interest derives not from any concern with minor literary fads
although the talented Le Guin has our best wishesbut from the fact
that the admirers of the Kesh are so emblematicso coextensive, in
factwith radical environmentalism, whose ideology has made itself
widely felt in our time, but which is centered, in large measure, in the
same congregation that includes the academic left.
Among them, support for environmental causes transcends
doctrinal differences. The received version of environmental wisdom
has an unmistakably radicaland apocalypticflavor. The finality of
the conflict, the unflinching identification of one side with good and
the other with evil, are diagnostic. David Day, whose view of
Armageddon is entirely characteristic, introduces a practical workbook
on ecological issues this way, modestly: In the final analysis, the
outcome of the ecology wars will prove more critical than any ever
fought by the human race. What is at stake is not the dominance of one
nation over another, but the survival of life on the planet. 1 Tom
Athanasiou, writing in Socialist Review and in a rational, analytic mood
(for this is criticism of, among other things, ecological romanticism) is
nevertheless certain that the devastation is imminent:
The coming devastation will breed a vast hatred . It may even be
that the ideas of the green hard core are poised for a breakout
into larger domains. Fortunately, this is not the only possibility,
 and radical outrage is not likely to remain eternally constrained
within the anti-communist frameworks of Cold War analysis
capitalismlike the atmospheremay soon cease to seem a part
of the natural, eternal world. (Emphasis added.)2

The academic left entertains millenarian hopes. Its vision of The

Only Possible Future almost always includes an accommodation
between humankind and nature, a harmonious resolution of the
predicated incompatibility between contemporary society and the
sanctity of the natural world. Since it is the sprawling left we are
speaking of, explanatory differences arise. To a feminist, the roots of
environmental degradation lie in the hegemony of patriarchal values.
Marxists of a traditional stamp see the postulated ecological crisis as
product of the more general dialectical crisis of capitalism.
Postmodernists might blame something like a discursive practice that
objectifies the natural and robs it of agency; while anarchists, who are
still to be found in odd corners, urban and bucolic, are likely to finger
of coursethe hierarchies of the state. As usual, however,
ideological syncretism is the prevalent note. All doctrinal variants are
simultaneously endorsed to some degree; differences are submerged in
a broad tide of indignation over environmental outrages, the list of
which is continuously lengthened by selection of appropriate results
from scientific journals (and by ignoring inconvenient ones). The
typical dire warnings and portents conform perfectly to a model
constructed more than twenty years ago by George Steiner: We are
told, in tones of punitive hysteria, either that our culture is doomed ...
or that it can be resuscitated only through a violent transfusion of those
energies, of those styles of feeling, most representative of third-world
peoples.3
 These days, it goes without saying, environmental concerns are
widespread in the general population. Everyone who bundles old
newspapers and separates recyclables is affected by them.
Environmental piety, albeit in a diffuse and nonspecific form, has
become an American civil religion. It is endorsed by multinational
corporations and churches, as well as by politicians of all allegiances
and at the highest levels. The Wall Street Journal reports with
enthusiasm, on its Market pages, a meteoric rise in sales of cosmetics
labeled natural (and the label of one risen brandNaturistics
announces Not Tested on Animals) 4; the National College Magazine,
distributed with thousands of college newspapers to a claimed million
readers, offers an Environmental Issue devoted to Earth Crisis, every
third full page of which is a self-congratulatory advertisement from the
Anheuser-Busch companies, whose people are to be presumed enlisted
in the war against pollution.
The preferred form of environmental piety on the academic left,
however, is laced with prophetic disclosures of doom. Under this view,
adequate resolution of ecological problems is possible only through a
revolutionary reconstruction of society, or, in the more favored
language of theory, dismantling the definitions of privilege and the
diagrams of power that undergird industrial capitalist patriarchy.
Moreover, it is almost always assumed that in the redeemed world
industry and technology will have at most a minor role; that
bureaucracy will have given way to a localized face-to-face democracy,
in which trade and commerce are supplanted by a frugal self-
sufficiency. Thus that Marxian will-o-the-wisp, the withering away of
the state, has in our time taken on a hard, ecotopian specificity. It is
now asserted as well, on the academic left, that Baconian science, an
activity branded as toady and tool of imperialist expansion, is giving
way to an holistic, nonexploitative way of knowing, a new form of
science that expresses the spiritual pantheism of the new order. Of
course it is supposed and proposed that reversion to decentralized
tribalism will lead to the abolition of racism, of male supremacy, and
to a stop to the rape of nature. It is easy to find this vision articulated in
the theorizing of the most militant wing of the environmental
movement. Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! chants it: We must
break out of societys freeze on our passions, we must become animals
again. We must feel the tug of the full moon, hear goose music
overhead. We must love Earth and rage against her destroyers. We
must open ourselves to relationships with one another, with the land;
we must dare to love, to feel for somethingsomeoneelse.5
Clearly, Le Guins Kesh, with their insistence that person may
refer to a bear, a deer, a tree, or even a rock, are fictional models of the
sort of human beings Foreman would have us become. Nor are he and
his followers the only devotees of such a vision; dozens of academic
radicals proclaim it in their work and it is increasingly reflected in the
casual language (e.g., environmentally friendly, ecologically sane)
and attitudes of students. Morris Berman, a onetime orthodox historian
of science of leftist bent, is a typical convert. His vision of the future
echoes Le Guins fiction:
Human culture will come to be seen more as a category of natural
history, a semi-permeable membrane between man and nature.
Such a society will be pre-occupied with fitting into nature rather
than attempting to master it We will no longer depend on the
technological fix, whether in medicine, agriculture or anything
else The economy, finally, will be steady-state, a mixture of
small-scale socialism, capitalism, and direct barter. This will be a
conserver society with nothing wasted and with a great
 emphasis, to the extent that it is possible, on regional self-
sufficiency.6

Bermans ideological purpose is to supplant, with an approach

conditioned by spirituality and ecstasy, the scientific vision that
has reigned in Western intellectual life for three centuries. 7 He is a
latter-day disciple of William Blake (and Carlos Castaeda!), eager to
reject single vision and Newtons sleep. Like many contemporary
radical intellectuals who yearn for a recrudescence of irrationalism,
Berman, in the tradition of Blake, focuses much of his scorn on Newton
and, especially, on his philosophical precursor Francis Bacon: The
overall framework of scientific experimentation, the technological
notion of the questioning of nature under duress, is the major Baconian
legacy.8
Carolyn Merchant, a doyenne of the ecofeminist movement, is
always eager to settle Bacons hash. But from the perspective of
nature, women, and the lower orders of society emerges a less
favorable image of Bacon and a critique of his program as ultimately
benefiting the middle-class male entrepreneur. 9 Her larger proposition
is that the emergence of the scientific worldview has somehow not only
desacralized nature, leaving it prey to the rapacity of technologized
capitalism, but has as well, in identifying natural with female,
undermined the dignity and autonomy of women and left them prey to a
more absolute oppression than that which the prescientific world
inflicted on them. Moreover this (in her view) has brought us to the
brink of ecological catastrophe, which can now be averted only by a
reversion to edenic simplicity (although in this new Eden, Eve will
yield not an inch to Adam; and that old serpent, science, will have no
power of persuasion).
The pollution of her [the earths] purest steams has been
supported since the Scientific Revolution, by an ideology of
power over nature, an ontology of interchangeable atomic and
human parts, and a methodology of penetration into her
innermost secrets. The sick earth, yea dead, yea putrefied can
probably in the long run be restored to health only by a reversal of
mainstream values and a revolution in economic priorities. In this
sense, the world must once again be turned upside down.10

Such sentiments are echoed ceaselessly in radical

environmentalist literature, with or without feminist or New Age
trappings (although both are present more often than not). The image of
the earth as poisoned, as a deeply wounded victim, is central to the
iconography. Human suffering, as such, while not neglected (especially
when the victims are female or nonwhite) is notably secondary.
Herewith is Earths passion according to Jeremy Rifkin:
The modern era has been characterized by a relentless assault on
the earths ecosystems. Dams, canals, railroad beds, and more
recently highways have cut deeply into the surface of the earth,
severing vital ecological arteries and rerouting natures flora and
fauna. Petrochemicals have poisoned the interior of nature,
seeping into animals and plants, soaking the organs and tissues
with the tar of the carboniferous era. The spent energy of the
industrial revolution has choked the skies with layers of gases
carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfuric acid,
chlorofluorocarbons, nitrous oxide, methane, and the like
polluting the air, blocking the heat from escaping the planet, and
 exposing the biota of the earth to increased doses of deadly
ultraviolet radiation.11

Hysterical12 as is Rifkins prose to anyone having detailed

knowledge of these assaults, it is common currency in the
environmental movement, and taken as unexceptionable wisdom by
those whose environmentalism is linked to hopes for radical social
transformation, whether along feminist, anti-capitalist, or racial lines.
The particulars of the indictment seem to reflect the latest thinking of
the environmental sciences, although the accuracy of that reflection, as
we shall see, is very low. Similarly, the idea of a return to a more
primal way of life, stripped of the arrogance and insolence of
technology, may seem, especially to the young and historically naive, a
newborn vision.
In fact the primitivist vision is a recurrent one, and is strictly in
the Western tradition. The assumption that such thinking is a natural
and unique concomitant of leftist (or progressive) sentiments is
utterly false. The idea that industrial society, with its dirt and noise, its
depersonalization and anomie, is an affront to the natural order, and
that the proper course for humanity is a return to a life bound up with
the cycles of nature and tied to blood and soil, has arisen in the West
with great regularity. Political philosophies with which it has been
associated have run the gamut. Blame for mans alienation from natural
virtue has been assigned to every possible malefactor. As Anna
Bramwell points out in her remarkable history of ecologism:
There are several different guilty parties in common usage. These
are Christianity, the Enlightenment (with atheism, scepticism,
rationalism, and scientism following on), the scientific revolution
 (incorporating capitalism and utilitarianism), Judaism (via either
the Jewish element in Christianity or via capitalism), Men, the
Nazis, the West, and various wrong spirits, such as greed,
materialism, acquisitiveness, and not knowing where to stop. The
wrong spirit is a twentieth-century explanation, usually confined
to the West and derived from the puritan element in Protestant and
dissenting Christianity; therefore it is found mainly in Northern
Europe and North America. According to this ethic, bad spirits
are located in Western man, who is seen as the unsaved,
expansive, nonecological dominator of nature. Only by rejecting
the materialist heritage of the West will man be saved.13

Clearly, edenic ecologism, under one label or another, is an idea

with a long pedigree in Western history. It has been conscripted for
ideological use by radicals, conservatives, and reactionaries, by
Communists and by Nazis, and by schismatic sects hard to place on that
spectrum. At present, however, there is a particularly good fit between
this view of the world and the overall perspective of the academic left.
It strikes at most of their devils: industrial capitalism, white
supremacy, imperialism, male supremacy, the various expressions of
Western triumphalism. Simultaneously, it valorizes women (under the
bizarre doctrine that women as a class are in a sympathetic resonance
that men cannot achievewith nature) and nonwhite peoples, victims
of European rapacity, who are assumed confidently to have been in an
edenic state before their conquest.
Part of the package, in most formulations, is something like the
Blakean view of Western science. It is assumed that science is crippled
by its rejection of the subjective and the spiritual, by its reductive
analytic methodology, by the artificiality of the conditions it creates for
observation and experiment, by its insistence on a rigid distinction
between thought and feeling, subject and object, and, finally, by its
Baconian subservience to power and to the interests of the dominant
social class.14
To display this set of attitudes in its most elevated form (in
contrast to what will follow below), we quote a few lines from the
conclusion to an article by Edward Goldsmith, published in the
Ecologist. The point of this piece is to show that the scientific view of
the facts and mechanisms of evolution is false because the reigning
idea of science is fundamentally and comprehensively wrong; and,
moreover, that we wont stop destroying the living world until we
change our view of what science is and ought to be. Needless to say,
this article provides no evidence whatsoever for said flaws in science,
except by the application of standard (holist) epithets:
compartmentalization, empiricism, induction; causality, and the like.
Still, it is the attitude we are after here, and so:
In order to understand evolution one must reject the Neo-
Darwinist thesis and indeed the Paradigm of Science itself that
this thesis so faithfully reflects.
We must also see evolution and life processes in general as
displaying precisely the opposite features to those that they are
held to display by Neo-Darwinists and mainstream scientists in
general.
Rather than being atomistic they are highly organized and
hierarchical; rather than being mechanistic and hence passive and
non-creative, they are living, dynamic, and creative; rather than
being random they are ordered and highly purposive.15
Such charges, and indeed such moralizing language, have cropped up
among Lamarckians from the beginning of evolutionary theory, from
time to time with striking results (as in the Lysenko era in the late
Soviet Union); but nobody has so far been able to turn them to
recognizable use either as explanation or for prediction.
Of course we, and we hope most thoughtful persons encountering
edenic ecologism in explicit rather than poetic form, reject this
tendentious and ignorant view of science. So deeply, however, are its
tenets embedded in contemporary intellectual output, and so large is
that output that, again, an entire volume would be needed to refute it.
Here we can do little more than recall, following Bramwell, how much
it has in common with other antirationalist posturings, including those
of twentieth-century totalitarian movements and of religious zealots
throughout history.
In any case we believe that here there is a more urgent problem
than philosophical error and ideology masquerading as analysis. The
threat of ecotopian enthusiasms is that they will, in fact and in the long
run, weaken or eliminate the possibility of ecologically sound social
policy, under whatever ideological banner that may materialize. We
believe that such an effect must follow from the fervent antiscientism
now embraced by radical environmentalists, an antiscientism that, if
broadly influential, cannot fail to reduce the chances of success in
answering questions and solving problems that are quintessentially
scientific. As Michael Fumento puts it in his splendidly documented
expos of environmental alarmism:
Alarmists and people subjugating science to political ends dont
want you to consider relative risk Indeed, many of them
havent the slightest idea of what relative risk is Understanding
 of how odds work is the last thing they want you to have. They
want to be able to present you with a simple model that says that
since this or that has been alleged to be harmful, it must be banned
or at least heavily regulated.16

Environmental Realism

Let us be perfectly clear: we have no quarrel with environment-

consciousness. As successor to conservationism, it is based upon a
sound conviction. The good lifenow, and more so in the futurefor
our species as for all others, requires the clearest possible
understanding of our interactions with nature. It requires avoidance of
interactions that do or seem highly likely, on the basis of competent
risk assessment, to deplete or damage nature. There is no reason to be
concerned about an environmentalism so based: quite the contrary. To a
large extent we share its basic fears. Most of the problems
environmentalists point to have a real component. Our concern is,
rather, with a revived, apocalyptic naturism that has, in several
versions, caught the fancy of young people generally and engages a
rapidly increasing number of well-meaning adults.
Exponential growth of the human population, for instance, has
consequences, some of which are harmful and irreversible. Those
consequences are inherent in the simple relationships among
population size, ecosystem structure, and environmental carrying
capacity. The last of these has limits; that is an established scientific
principle. Technology cannot forever transcend carrying capacity. Once
the limits are reached, the human consequencesnot to mention those
for other speciesare certain to be horrible. Arguments to the contrary,
whether from religious dogma or the Micawberish doctrine that
something will turn up are bootless. The problem is that we do not as
yet have a genuinely reliable or meaningful estimate of Earths
carrying capacity, in the sense of a constant for the equations of
population growth. The prophets of doom, some scientists among them
(who have a losing record of predictions to date), insist that it is a small
number; religious fundamentalists and ecomillenarians know that
Gods (or Goddesss) world would work just fine, and forever, if we
gave up civilization.
The current concern with the possibility of an enhanced and
deleterious greenhouse effect is not just superstitious alarmism. It is
only the public language and political style emerging with the concern
that are dangerous. There is an atmospheric greenhouse. It has been
there throughout the history of life on this planet, much as that may
come as a surprise to some. Its temperature set-point is determined by
physical and chemical variables, exactly as the temperature held by a
thermostated heating plant is determined by the output of the furnace,
the external temperature, and the rate of cooling of the building.
Without a greenhouse atmosphere, the planet would be, like its
neighbors in the solar system, sterile. Earths atmospheric greenhouse
is the regulated heating plant that has turned its thin, wet skin into an
incubator for life.17
It is distinctly possible that human activities, intensified as
population grows and fuel-hungry technology becomes ubiquitous,
could change the set point. Natural geological and astronomical
phenomena, operative now as in the past, have, certainly, done that
during successive ice ages, for example, and perhaps as a consequence
of the cyclic repositioning of Earth relative to our star and the suns to
the center of the galaxy. Of course they will continue to do so in the
future. There will be global warming and cooling, whether we are here
or not. Volcanoes alone will see to it. 18 The questionand we
emphasize that it remains a questionof the effect upon this set point
of increasing emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other
greenhouse gases, byproducts of technology and agriculture, is of the
highest importance. It deserves the most comprehensive and scrupulous
investigation.
So does, however, the question of the climatic consequences, a
quite different and even more difficult question, about which there
remain deep disagreements among atmospheric scientists. The depth
and seriousness of these disagreements is visible to every reader of
such general professional journals as Nature and Science.19 The
proposals of some (but certainly not all) atmospheric physicists that
action to reduce greenhouse emissions should not be deferred pending
the outcome of this investigation have to be weighed seriously. There is
only one Earth, and nobody in his right mind wants to use it as a crash-
test dummy. But recommendations have to be weighed. Such proposals
do not justify panic; nor do they call for anything like an immediate
restructuring of society, along lines sketched by somebodys derivative,
post-Marxist, poststructuralist utopianism.
Much the same point might be made with regard to the ozone
hole. The hypothesis that the seasonal decline of ionospheric ozone
over Antarctica is caused in large part by active forms of chlorine (such
as chlorine monoxide radical, CIO) formed in the breakup of
chlorofluorocarbons in the upper atmosphere is an attractive one.20 It is
gratifying to the scientific ego, since the observed ozone hole seems to
confirm certain theoretical predictions made as long ago as the early
1970s. Nonetheless, in all these considerations, the meaning of the
word hypothesis must be kept seriously in mind. It is not only possible
that the hypotheses are wrong; it is also quite possible that even if they
are right, measures taken in haste to prevent the hypothetical
consequences may do more harm than good. There are countless
examples of this.21
This is not an argument, please note, for the continued production
of chlorofluorocarbons. They are clearly significant reactants in the
chain of processes causing the seasonal hole in polar stratospheric
ozone.22 We trust that alternative refrigerants that will do no harm of
their own will be used in air conditioners. We are not partial to
styrofoam cups, or to the spray-can art that disfigures our cities.
Exactness of scientific thought, however, and an honest
comprehensiveness in the cost/benefit analysis that should be done
before any solution to any global problem is undertaken, are of
incalculable importance. Apocalyptic movements dont do honest and
comprehensive cost/benefit analyses. They dont want to and they dont
know how (again, see Fumento, Science under Siege). To the extent that
sciencethe only reliable source of numbers for environmental
cost/benefit analysisis battered in the course of a primarily
ideological crusade, so much greater will be the chance of making
disastrous errors of policy.
Problems of human overpopulation and problems of drastic
climatic change both bear on another threat that has to be taken
seriously: the possibility of a further, even a catastrophic decline in
biotic diversity. The earths multitudes of species preserve in their
DNA sequences not merely potential riches for commerce and
medicine, butperhapsan as-yet only partially understood
contribution to the large-scale stability of ecosystems; species house a
history of life that we might translate one day, andperhapsmay
hold some unexpected clues to its meaning. The mass destruction of
species solely for transient convenience, for profits, or simply from
carelessness is stupid. The case for treating biodiversity as a problem
of the first importance has been made with great skill and appropriate
conviction by E. O. Wilson: we endorse it unreservedly.23
Given that we believe all thisand hope that every thoughtful
person will come to do so as wellwhy are we so dismayed by radical
environmentalism? Our concern is with the dogmas that inform the
academic lefts position on ecological matters, dogmas advocated and
defended by means of a rhetoric that derives from theoretical positions
having nothing to do with science and the facts of the case. It seems to
us that this particular environmentalism of the intelligentsia leads, in
the long run, to futility and disillusion. If intellectual and academic
history are any guide, many of its votaries are likely to become
apostates, not only from radical environmentalism, but from all
engagement with environmental concerns. Some of its most
passionately held positions seem ripe, after all, for refutation; its most
emphatic predictions will, in some and perhaps many cases, crash
headlong into reality, as did, for example, the memorable
announcement of an ozone hole over Kennebunkport.24 Other kinds of
cataclysm than environmental will be predicted and will grow large in
the oppositionist imagination. The need for a sober, scientific,
environmentalism will, however, grow rather than decline with time. It
must not become hostage to fashion.
Recall, in this regard, the injunction that adorned so many car
bumpers ten or fifteen years ago: Split Wood, Not Atoms. Those who
know better regard such self-advertisements with deserved contempt;
but those who stuck them on, innocent of any cost/benefit analysis of
wood splitting (i.e., wood burning) versus atom splitting, have since
mounted other, trendier stickers. The market for wood-burning stoves
has collapsed with the last of the communes. Predictablyfortunately
the vast majority of bumper-sticker people never gave up on central
heating; and even among the heavy users of bumper stickers, there are
now many who have learned about fossil-fuel burning and its effects on
health and the atmosphere. Out of simple, selfish concern for
respiratory health, we would much rather live next door to a nuclear
power plant (except possibly in the former Soviet Union), if that were
the only alternative, than in a community of any substantial size that
heats with woodor coal. In fact: given the catastrophic effect on
forests of large-scale, historic dependence on firewood, and the CO2
produced by fossil fuels of any variety, there is something to be said for
the proposition that in terms of environmental soundness, the self-
congratulatory slogan got things exactly backwards. Without other
choices, good sense would have called, and would still call, for splitting
atoms, not wood.25

Attitudes

As we see it, radical environmental wrongheadedness is rooted in three

interlinked attitudes. First of all, it is intensely moralistic. Among
ecoradicals, there is a tendency for surmises to take on the character of
articles of faith. Thus in any discussion of the greenhouse effect,
alternatives to CO2-emitting energy technologies such as nuclear power
or hydroelectric projects are immediately ruled out of court because
these have previously been assigned a place by the environmental left
in its fixed demonology. Unchanging casts of devils completely
exclude the careful, unemotional weighing of costs and benefits, of
relative risks and relative certainties that is a necessary part of making
pragmatic judgments. This is wryly illustrated by the fact that radical
advocacy of solar power never puts hydroelectric into that category,
in spite of the unarguable fact that hydroelectric power is civilizations
oldest and most practicable application of captured solar energy. To a
true believer, however, it is far easier to abandon a saint than a demon,
and hydroelectric power is rife with demons, for example, men,
machines, power lines, utility stocks and bonds, electromagnetic fields,
and artificial lakes full of power boats.
A related radical instinct is to reject any form of amelioration. The
radical mentality is, almost by definition, emotionally committed to
change that is sweeping and wholesale, change that rewrites the terms
under which we live. It is committed to punishing the wicked and
rewarding the pure. It follows, then, that ecoradicals are never satisfied
with gradual adjustment. The idea that our culture should go on much
as usual while incremental changes are made to insulate the
environment from damage is an unpalatable one for them, even if it
could be proven that in the end the cumulative effect of such changes
would be to create a permanent barrier to ecological degradation. The
ecoradical has a tendency to insist that the psychic conversion he or she
has undergone must be experienced by all others as well. The
ecoradical insists upon redemption; and the language with which one
calls for redemptiongiven the indifference and preoccupation of
ordinary people with their daily livesmust be strong enough to scare
them into attention.
Finally, we note the reflex dismissal of any but bad news by
radical environmentalists (and, to a large extent, the media).26 To the
ecoradical, No news is good news!provided we construe that old
saw to mean, It is impossible, under the current regime, for matters to
improve, or even for it to turn out that worrisome threats have been
overstated. As we shall see, the chances of overstatement are in fact
pretty good. There is a supposition, unacknowledged but patently held,
that worse means better. The worse things get, the closer the moment of
rupture and overthrow, when the worlds population will realize the
folly of industrialism, of the comforts of The Way Things Are, and the
sooner a return to the wisdom of its paleolithic (or neolithic, or hunter-
gatherer, or smallholder) ancestors.
These psychological symptoms of radical environmentalism
moralism, disdain for the meliorative, a thirst for the decisive
cataclysmare of course characteristic of radical movements in
general and, as Bramwells book makes clear, they have found a home
within ideologies of all sorts at different historical moments. There
seem always to have been penitents among us, marching in their grim
processions, lashing themselves for our sins against God or nature,
crying out for the rest of us to join in the fun. At present the radicalism
of the academic left is the most convenient symbiote for such fervor.

An Intellectual Embargo

In her latest work, Radical Ecology, Carolyn Merchant produces a

taxonomy of the radical wing of the environmental movement. She
examines the theories and dogmas of Deep Ecology, ecofeminism,
social ecology, Marxist ecology, and a number of other variants, taking
account of the similarities and inconsistencies that link and distinguish
them. Predictably, her tone is that of cheerleader and evangelist. In
Merchants view, radical environmentalism is preferable not only to
indifference to environmental questions but, as well, to any version of
environmentalism that leaves intact the authority of scientists and
technocrats on any question of substance. She endorses without
reservation the cultural constructivist doctrine. Under the heading
Contributions of Radical Theorists she asserts that science is not a
process of discovering the ultimate truths of nature, but a social
construction that changes over time. The assumptions accepted by its
practitioners are value-laden and reflect their places in both history and
society, as well as the research priorities and funding sources of those
in power.27
The motivation for Merchants equation of science entirely with
its social process (as opposed to its results), for her embrace of the
strong constructivist view, is obvious. She is simply unprepared to
accept the judgments of professional science as valid if they contradict
her hopes or deflate the prognostications of doom that radical
environmentalism needs in order to win converts. The relativism of
cultural constructivist doctrine is the perfect tool for discounting
science as biased or corrupt if and when it inconveniences ones
political program.
Nonetheless, like all other environmentalists, radical or otherwise,
Merchant stands in an unwilling and dependent relation to science as it
is. The hot issues in environmentalismthe possibility of major
global warming, the ozone hole, species impoverishment,
overpopulation and its consequencesare issues that would be
unknown and unknowable but for the accomplishments of professional
science. They exist only because of, and specifically as products of,
science. Comparing CO2 levels in fossil atmospheres with those of
the present time is not the sort of activity the back-to-nature layman
goes in for, nor is the construction of general circulation models of
weather for running on supercomputers. Questions about species
impoverishment arise from the dedicated work of biologists, not
because a mass of worried citizens have daily experiences of species
decline. In short, environmentalism in its modern form, including the
radical wing of it, is a reaction, occasionally appropriate, to specific
discoveries of orthodox science. The problem w i t h radical
environmentalism is, therefore, that its relations with science, upon
which it must be based, have become so ridiculously acidulous and so
dishonest.
There is a heavy traffic in ideas from science to the environmental
movementbut, as far as ecoradicals are concerned, there is also a
severe embargo. Radicals are willing, even eager, to accept work with
alarmist or apocalyptic implications. They are unwilling or at least
bitterly reluctant to accept scientific work that confutes or modifies
alarmist theories. Examples of this sort of thing are legion. For years, it
was an article of faith that dioxin is the most toxic substance known to
man, and that the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam has caused grave
and exotic diseases in many or all war veterans and birth defects among
their children. The initial estimates turned out to be overstated or
simply wrong. Dioxin is nothing to fool around with, but it clearly is
not that toxic. Actuarial and epidemiological evidence does not support
Agent Orange effects of the magnitude claimed by activist and
advocacy groups. Still, the issue remains mired in politics for the
reasonamong othersthat vast sums (as compensation, for example)
are at stake. It will surely not be settled by the recent, massive report
from the Institute of Medicine, which associates exposure to Agent
Orange with some health risks.
A more recent example: the Alar scare was just that, a scare. It did
heavy damage, to no good purpose, to apple growers across the country.
This is not to say that the initial guesses were necessarily dishonest or
incompetent, only that there is an important difference, in science,
between a hypothesis and a justifiable conclusion; and there is a further
difference between a justifiable conclusion and a public policy. In
science, moreover, all conclusions, especially about complex systems,
are temporary. Therein lies the urgent importance of the fullest
honesty, the most scrupulous avoidance of hyperbole, in discourses of
policy.
The Federal Register for July 17, 1992, carries the extraordinary
announcement that large numbers of substances, classified heretofore
by the National Toxicology Program as carcinogens, are to be removed
from that list. This announcement codifies understandings that have
been growing slowlyand against bitter political oppositionin the
scientific community, to the effect that the rodent-to-human
extrapolations used in animal screening programs are invalid.28 A
distinguished editor of Science magazine had summarized neatly two
years earlier the main arguments against standard methods of
carcinogen testing with rodents (arguments ventilated in successive
earlier issues of the journal):
Diets rich in fruits and vegetables tend to reduce human cancer.
The rodent MTD test that labels plant chemicals as cancer-causing
in humans is misleading. The test is likewise of limited value for
synthetic chemicals. The standard carcinogen tests that use
rodents are an obsolescent relic of the ignorance of past decades .
At that time, extreme caution made sense. But now tremendous
improvements of analytical and other procedures make possible a
new toxicology and far more realistic evaluation of the dose levels
at which pathological effects occur. (Emphasis added.)29
 In science, this happens all the time. Hypotheses generated by a
small amount of preliminary evidence frequently collapse when the
studies become larger, more systematic, and better controlled. In such
cases, however, the initial finding is usually welcomed by ecoradicals
for its doom-laden implications, while the later and better finding is
systematically ignored. To such people, dioxin will always be a
particularly horrific demon; Vietnam vets who are afflicted by disease
will always be victims of Agent Orange; apples will remain suspect
unless grown by naturists having no truck with chemicals: anything but
organic produce will be suspect at best. Science can indict, but it is
never allowed to dismiss the charges.
Naively, one would think that environmentalists should welcome
news that the planet is, in some respects, not in quite as much danger as
we might have thought. This neglects, however, to allow for the
psychodynamics of an apocalyptic vision. Radical environmentalists
scan the news pages and the popular science journals eagerly for every
scrap of evidence that the ecological End of Days is upon us. As with
biblical millenarians, objections of logic and fact have little effect.
They are already convinced that the world is in calamitous decline.
They believe, and seem to enjoy believing, that nature is being violated
blasphemouslyby their neighbors, and that ultimate retribution is
on the way. Evidence to the contrary is viewed as a terrible letdown,
not as a reprieve.
Similarly, inasmuch as ecoradicalism is a movement with a
worshipful view of the primal, it takes little heed of sober findings that,
in many cases, uncorrupted, nonwhite, primitive peoples have been just
as contemptuous of what we call environmental values as are greedy
Euro-American industrialists. As the geographer Martin Lewis notes in
Green Delusions, a large proportion of eco-radicals fervently believes
that human social and ecological problems could be solved if only we
would return to a primal way of life. Ultimately, this proves to be an
article of faith that receives little support from the historical and
anthropological record.30
The Indians of the Americas, for instance, are regularly depicted
as paragons of ecological wisdom, at one with nature and the land. This
not only collapses a vast and diverse array of cultures into a single
Native American way of life, but, as well, neglects the fact that long
before the hated Europeans made their way across the Atlantic, the
earlier settlers, whose forebears came across the Arctic land bridge,
wrought enormousin some cases horrifyingchanges to the
biological landscape of the primeval Americas. For example, it is likely
that most large North American mammals died out at the end of the last
ice age because they were hunted to extinction by human newcomers:
and there was as yet no population explosion! The Anasazi people of
the Southwest turned their homeland into a treeless, eroded waste by
their heedless use of timber. Mayan civilization may have collapsed
because warfare, urbanization, and overpopulation depleted the fertility
of its agricultural system. Slash-and-burn agriculture turned much of
the Midwest from forest to grassland, effecting what was one of the
most widespread impoverishments of an ecosystem in biological
history.
Examples could be multiplied. It is as erroneous to view
primitive peoples as walking hand-in-hand, philosophically, with a
benign nature as it is to think of them as unoffending pacifists
without knowledge of scalping, slave-taking, and human sacrificeor
to identify the latter three as inventions of Francis Bacon. The irony is
that such misconceptions have long been embedded in the imaginative
mythology of Western culture, certainly from Montaigne, Diderot, and
Rousseau onward.
Ecoradicalism is as opaque to such insights as it is to scientific
findings that might plausibly temper some aspects of environmental
alarm. Science, indeed rationality itself, appears, to the radical mindset,
as a Janus-headed beast, to be used when it warns, but dismissed with
contempt when it attempts to reassure. Ecological science, in
particular, is a socially constructed science whose basic assumptions
and conclusions change in accordance with social priorities and
socially accepted metaphors.31 In practical terms, this leaves the
radical theorist free to accept what flatters his worldview and to reject
what does not. As Martin Lewis points out, this leads to the ironic
contradiction that radical environmentalism becomes objectively
antien-vironmental in some of its actual effects. The natural fibers
and fabrics of which environmental radicals are so fond cost far more,
in environmental terms, than synthetic substitutes. The high-density
urban life from which back to the land environmentalists flee offers
the best hope for decreasing human pressure upon wild areas and
endangered biota; it is the homesteaders who add disproportionately to
the strain. Unfortunately, common sense is slow to make headway
among those fired up by a vision; rationality, scientific and otherwise,
is, as we have seen, in bad odor among such people.

Crying a Fraction of a Wolf

It would be all too easy to place all the blame for the excesses of
ecological radicalism on the philosophical fancies and whirligigs of the
academic leftbut that would also be facile and incorrect. Some of the
responsibility must be borne by competent, in some cases
distinguished, scientists who have taken up environmental causes.
Much of the apocalyptic rhetoric of ecoradicals derives, albeit by a
process of systematic vulgarization and overstatement, from the public
pronouncements, books, and articles of such scientists. It represents the
last stage of a process of simplification and elision, whereby
speculation, hypothesis, and conclusions of the most provisional sort
are transmuted into certainties. We do not claim that the process is a
matter of wrongheadedness or error on the part of the scientists
involved. Nor are we blaming them, nor suggesting that there is an easy
remedy to be recommended. We are simply suggesting that the
political tactics of some environmentally concerned scientists have a
spectrum of effects; that some of these effects are of dubious value;
and that among the latter are (1) the reinforcement of apocalyptic
hyperbole among radical environmentalists and (2) the suppression of
arguments and evidence that suggest caution as to derived social
policy.
The underlying question is this: What is a responsible, socially
aware scientist to do when his researches and legitimate speculations
lead him to suspect that some aspect of modern technological society
might, in the long run, have horrendous environmental consequences?
We emphasize the hypothetical nature of such predictions simply
because, in their early stages, novel scientific ideas are usually first
approximationseven when they are not (as sometimes happens) false
alarms. Moreover, it is often the case that the direst possibility appears
not as a simple prediction, but as one possibility along a spectrum of
possibilities, one end of which is neutral or even good. This is clearly
the case as regards the effects on global climate of a (nearly certain)
doubling, in the next century, of atmospheric CO2.32

In the course of routine sciencewhere conjectures, hypotheses,

and arrays of different alternatives are unrelated to any doomsday
scenariothe matter of sorting out possibilities, segregating sound
speculations from unsound, choosing the most parsimonious and, in
terms of explanatory power, the strongest theory is carried through by
the ordinary process of scientific publication and debate. It is the
central business of empirical science, and rarely does it make
headlines. But science with potentially deep environmental
implications is not, cannot be, routine. Even the remote possibility of
catastrophe sets off alarm bells so long as it is seen to have some
scientific plausibility. This is as it should be. There is only one planet
and one humanity.
We have already touched upon such hypothesesthe projected
enhancement of the greenhouse effect, the seasonal attrition of the
ozone layer, the predictions of catastrophic decline in biotic diversity.
To dismiss these problems or treat them lightly is, in our present state
of knowledge, irresponsibleas irresponsible as it would be to ignore
evidence of an asteroid calculated to be on a collision course with Earth
(which will happen eventually). On the other hand, in the social and
political realm they illustrate the vicissitudes of debating and
formulating policy in the presence of enduring uncertainty.
Many scientists argue that, in the face of social and political
reality, the caution and tentativeness that, in the corridors of
professional science, accompany the initial discussion of new ideas are
ineffectual. They are inappropriate when one is trying to sound a
warning about a grim environmental prospect, however yet uncertain.
They reason that this is a society saturated by exaggeration and gross
oversimplification. Consequently, ideas presented cautiously and
hedged with warnings of provisionality have no chance of making a
dent in public consciousness, or of influencing nonscientist politicians.
A scientist who announces that preliminary estimates reveal a 2 percent
chance that the sky will fall is unlikely to win much attention. But even
a one in fifty possibility of having the sky collapse is appalling. Why
not, then, stress the worst-case analysis? Why not proclaim in banner
headlines, THE SKY IS FALLING ? That way, at least, the potential falling
sky problem will get public attention and the needed additional
research will be paid for.
In some degree, this is the tactic adopted in relation to the
possibilities cited above. Some scientists concerned with the
anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric greenhouse gases have
framed their public discourse so as to stress, as much as possible, the
plausibility or even the imminence of disastrous global warming, and
have dwelt at length on the worst possible ecological and agricultural
consequences of that warming. The same applies to the ozone-depletion
hypothesis, to the nuclear winter scenario, to the story of synthetic
pesticides, and to a number of other questions.
In fairness, this does not amount to their throwing scientific
caution to the winds. Rather it is a matter of emphasis and tone, of
rhetoric and persuasive technique, of creating a public voice for oneself
that differs quite consciously from ones scientific voice, of doing
ones honest hedging very much sotto voce. A good example is the
remarkably candid statement of the influential atmospheric scientist
Stephen Schneider, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research:
To do that [reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic
change] we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the
publics imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of
media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make
simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any
 doubts we might have. This double ethical bind that we
frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each
of us has to decide what the right balance is between being
effective and being honest.33

It is worth pointing out, for contrast with the radical

environmentalist depiction of science as tool of repression and
multinational polluters, that this same Stephen Schneider was honored
with a major prize in 1991. This was the AAAS (American Association
for the Advancement of Science) Award for the Public Understanding
of Science. AAAS is the largest organization of professional scientists
in the United States. While Schneiders approach embodies perfectly
the elitism of hierarchs and syndics so hated by leftists, we are not
eager to condemn it out of hand. It would be unfair to characterize it as
hypocritical: even scientists must act politically when their
convictions, whether or not based in science, call for political action.
There is no reason to reproach the scientists who practice it openly, so
long as their legitimate concern does not harden into dogmatism and
they remain open (as most undoubtedly do) to the deflation of their
original guesses by subsequent research. The idea that in addressing
remote but terrible possibilities we should give more weight to the
terror than to the remoteness is humanly understandable and legitimate,
so long as it is understood that remoteness must count for something.
Nevertheless, there is a serious downside to the strategy of talking
apparent science while actually doing politics. The most obvious
danger, and, potentially, the most harmful, is that a long sequence of
unrealized predictions of disasternot so unlikely a prospect, perhaps
will desensitize the public and the policymakers to similar
predictions coming later, somewhere down the line, no matter how
firmly supported by evidence the latter turn out to be. Environmental
alarmism is, to some extent, a fad, a cultural whimsy. Should it turn out
that the alarms are false (as some of them have beenfor example, the
rather recent predictions of global coolingand will be), the likely
effect is that environmental concerns will diminish and that, even
worse, the scientific community will have acquired a reputation as wolf
cryers. That community has had many kinds of unfavorable reputation
in the past,34 but this one will be new and immensely more dangerous.
We are going to have real environmental problems for a very long time,
probably for as long as we are here on Earth in any numbers. The worst
thing that could happen would be for environmentalism to go the way
of the hula hoop. It will do no particular good for scientist-politicians
to respond that they have cried only 2 percent of a wolf. Scientists,
having deliberately blurred such niceties in raising the alarm, will be
hard pressed to call them to their defense if a particular alarm turns out
false.

Received Opinion

Important as this question is, however, it diverts us from our current

concern, the effect of the rhetorical style of environmentally concerned
scientists on the received opinions and clichs that circulate within the
community of nonscientific intellectuals. Clearly, the millenarian
longings of ecoradicals, and of academic radicals in general, have
fastened, with a kind of perverse glee, on the gloomiest
prognostications of atmospheric physicists and tropical biologists. If,
shall we say, incontrovertible evidence were to appear tomorrow that
current and projected levels of atmospheric CO2 pose no danger of
disastrous climate change,35 thousands of ecoradicals would ignore it
or, if unable to do so, be devastated. They would undoubtedly find a
hundred specious reasons for rejecting the good news. They have
stripped the last layers of caution and qualification from the warnings
of scientists and converted them into articles of faith, upon which mere
empiricism has never had any purchase.
To that extent, their capacity for understanding, let alone helpfully
influencing, the public debate on environmental questions has been
damaged. Furthermore, they have become so much more inclined to
champion the wisdom of gurus and shamansDeep Ecologists, Earth
Firsters, James Lovelock, Rupert Sheldrake, and the likewhose views
are open to serious question. Partthough only partof the
responsibility lies with the rhetorical style of the public science we
have been discussing. There has been an unhealthy resonance between
the propensity of some scientists to emphasize the worst, for what they
genuinely believe to be good reasons, and the eagerness of radicals to
believe the worst, and to build it into their theories of the world.
Having said this, we take leave of this issue in some perplexity. It
is not clear to us that the emphatic style of some scientists on
environmental issuesPaul Ehrlich on population growth, Carl Sagan
on nuclear winter, Stephen Schneider on the greenhouse effectis not
for the best, all things considered. Nor can we recommend with
confidence, in this volume, an alternative approach. The question of
how scientists should address such issues in public forums is difficult.
What we can say is that science, mostly of recent vintage, has
established the existence of mechanisms by which the geophysical state
of Earth might rather easily be upset by an ever-expanding human
population. It has established as well mechanisms that have done and
will again do the same thing independently of human activity.
Environmentalists dont much relate to the Milankovitch theory, for
example. In it the great, periodic climate changes on Earth that lead to
ice ages and their reversal are driven by changes in the solar energy
flux; and those are caused by the periodic changes of Earths orbit. The
Milankovitch theory has recently had a boost from a rigorous
reexamination of some of the critical evidence.36
This is as devastating a set of discoveries for the human self-
image, and for its constitutive myths of eternity, as was Copernicuss
heliocentric solar system. To play with them upon the consciousness of
a sometimes somnolent, often credulous public, to whose members
even the well-educatedthe fundamental meaning of probability is
impenetrable, is a terrible crap game. Every scientist-activist should be
asking himself, What if Im wrong? What are the likely long-term
effects of the social upheavals I am trying to put in train, and what if
they are unnecessary? Every scientist-participant should hold before
himself the negative example of Jeremy Rifkin.

The Gospel according to Rifkin

The career and influence of the activist Jeremy Rifkin provide an

instructive case study of the propensity of the academic left for
persuasion by the worst kind of pseudoscientific alarmism. The case
tells us how trustworthy are their judgments of scientific questions.
Rifkin has long been a militant crusader against the supposed dangers
of science and technology. In addition to producing his well-marketed
books and articles, he continually organizes protests and, in many
cases, lawsuits against what he professes to regard as urgent
environmental threats, particularly those supposed to arise from
biotechnology and genetic engineering. His latest crusade, for instance,
is to organize the chefs of Americas premier restaurants to boycott
new varieties of vegetables produced by genetic modification in the
laboratory.37
There is no doubt that Rifkin has achieved a kind of guruhood
among most ecoradicals and vast numbers of their sympathizers on the
nonscientific academic left. Here, for instance, is Steven Bests
encomium:
One of the best recent examples of this postmodern consciousness
is Jeremy Rifkins Entropy. Rifkins book is a powerful and
systematic analysis of the problems inherent in the modern
worldview and the current social and ecological crisis facing our
planet. Rifkin identifies the modern worldview as the source of
our current crisis and provides an illuminating account and
critique of the modern will to knowledge and power. He
demonstrates clearly how a repressive logic of development
informs all aspects of society, from agriculture to transportation;
he argues in favor of a radically different worldview and system of
social organization that he explicitly terms postmodern.38

Stanley Aronowitz seems also to be a fan of Rifkins postmodern

consciousness. Recently, he denounced sarcastically a conference of
biologists who question the wisdom and safety of recombinant DNA
research (which makes them a rapidly diminishing minority within the
scientific community) for refusing to invite Rifkin, and for rejecting
the precept of his book, Algeny, that biotechnology must be utterly
abolished.39 We note simply at this point that Rifkins Entropy is a
book that defies its own title by being resolutely ignorant of fine (and
not so fine) points of thermodynamics. Algeny is correspondingly
vulgar when it comes to genetics and evolutionary theory, upon which
it is necessarily based. Here, commenting upon it, is Stephen J. Gould:
Rifkin ignores the most elementary procedures of fair scholarship.
His book [Algeny], touted as a major conceptual statement about
the nature of science and the history of biology, displays painful
ignorance of its subject. His quotations are primarily from old and
discredited secondary sources (including some creationist
propaganda tracts). I see no evidence that he has ever read Darwin
in the original. He obviously knows nothing about (or chooses not
to mention) all the major works of Darwinian scholarship written
by modern historians. His endless misquotes and half quotes are,
for the most part, taken directly from excerpts in hostile secondary
sources.40

Needless to say, Rifkins ideological enthusiasms, which Best,

Aronowitz, and a host of other would-be critics of modern science
heartily second, are cut from the same anti-Enlightenment cloth as
those of Merchant, Berman, Keller, and the like. He professes a hearty
detestation of Baconian science as an expression of the Western urge
to dominate, tyrannize, and torture; and he decries the dualism that
severs us from nature. He hews closely to cultural constructivist
dogma, deriving all the proposed sins and errors of science from the
inhumane values of capitalism. (These folk seem all to have forgotten,
or perhaps never to have noticed, the vast quantity of science,
indistinguishable from other science, done over the past seventy-five
years in aggressively anticapitalist societies such as that of the former
Soviet Union.) In short, he has absorbed into his positions most of the
clichs of the postmodern left.
 The esteem for Rifkin of staunch postmodernists such as Best and
Aronowitz highlights a noteworthyand amusinginconsistency of
their thought. His use of postmodern slang notwithstanding, Rifkin, is,
at bottom, an ardent believer in a timeless, changeless nature, whose
realities are moral as well as physical. For him, nature is sacrosanct; it
embodies absolute virtue. Thus, to him, genetic engineering
manipulating the genomes that have arisen during lifes historyis
blasphemous, not just dangerous. One would think that ardent
postmodernists, who reject absolutes, especially moral absolutes, and
claim that the notion of a natural reality antecedent to social
convention is a bourgeois illusion, would steer clear!
Rifkin, clearly, is no fair-minded scholar, and his grasp of the
technical aspects of science is spotty. His misunderstandings,
moreover, are of the sort that stimulate rather than inhibit a desire to
preach heady ecological sermons. His recent book Beyond Beef
addresses what begins as a reasonably serious question: Does the use of
beef as a staple food in Western society cost more in energy, land use,
and externalities than is justifiable in ecological and economic terms?
But the address is written in characteristic fashion, treating the issue
with a blend of hyperbole, misinformation, and a flagrant selection of
favorable sources. It provides us with an opportunity to examine why
Rifkin is so popular a figure in academic radical circles. At the same
time it demonstrates how appalling a fact that is. The following
fragment is quite characteristic: A number of environmental factors
contributed to the agricultural crisis of the 1980s. They include
eroding soils, shrinking forests, deteriorating rangelands, expanding
deserts, acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, the buildup of
greenhouse gases, air pollution, and the loss of biological diversity.41
It is a useful exercise to dissect these two sentences, phrase by
phrase. First of all, was there, in the 1980s, an agricultural crisis, that is
to say, a general agricultural crisis of global proportions? Certainly
there were local agricultural crises, as there have been ever since the
neolithic invention of this alternative to hunting and gathering. The
local disturbances, however, have little to do with Rifkins general
thesis. The well-publicized American farm crisis of the mid eighties,
for instance, was the result of banking and credit policy, high interest
rates, a decline of world prices for a number of foodstuffs, and so forth.
Accelerating agricultural problems in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union during the period were largely the consequence of an inept and
demoralized central control in these command economies. The grim
agricultural failures in the swath of Africa that lies south of the Sahara
Desert produced massive famine, and had an important environmental
componentdrought, and more generally, desertification; but, in many
instances, they had an equally important political component as well
the long, gruesome civil war in Ethiopia, the Arab Kulturkampf against
the non-Islamic black population of southern Sudan, the collapse into
anarchy of Somalia. In general there was no world-wide agricultural
crisis as such; per capita food production increased, although the
situation is hardly one to be complacent about.
What about Rifkins list of causes? Might they, at least, have had
important local effects? Rifkin has quoted these intact from writing of
Lester R. Brown, who produced the passage under the auspices of the
Worldwatch Institutepublisher of the annual Worldwatch chronicle
of impending environmental catastrophe and, one should note, the
only book foretelling the end of the world that routinely advertises next
years edition.42 Agricultural soil erosion is of course as old as tillage
itself. It is sometimes a problem in industrialized countries that
practice large-scale, mechanized farming. In terms of human suffering,
however, it is a far worse problem in the developing world, where
farming methods commonly remain primitive and where there are few
capitalists.
The shrinking of forests is, as we concede, a serious problem.
However, it is, in major part at least, the result of increased agricultural
activity, not a cause of diminished agricultural activity! Deforestation
may be deplorable, but in the short runin the 1980sit did not cause
any agricultural crisis. In any case, it is far from clear that the eighties
witnessed a net loss of forest on a global basis. And, as regards net
decline of particular species in mature forests, when it is in fact
demonstrable, there is uncertainty about causation. In his text on
environmental ecology, Bill Freedman admits that such decline also
appears to take place in areas where pollution is unimportant, and in
these cases it has been hypothesized that dieback may be a natural
process that could variously involve climatic change, the synchronous
senescence of a cohort of overmature trees, or the effect of
pathogens.43
Deteriorating rangelands were, indeed, a problemmost
tragically, as we have mentioned, in the Sahel, where the decline is
associated with desertification. There is, however, no reason to ascribe
this to any man-made cause; it has been going on for centuries as part
of the general shift of climate since the end of the last ice age.
Acid rain, again, is indeed a problembut not, for the most part,
an agricultural problem. The threat (and it is recognized that its
magnitude was much exaggerated in the 1980s)44 is to certain forest
communities and to the biota of some lakes and streams. Cultivars are
not particularly affected. This is not to say that we advocate a return to
high-sulfur coal, although one serious hypothesis offered in explanation
of the failure of increased atmospheric CO 2 to warm up the Northern
Hemisphere as predicted by the models is that the acidifying
particulates emitted in fossil-fuel combustion protect, because they
nucleate cloud-formation!45
A significant or disastrous anthropogenic contribution to
stratospheric ozone depletion, to state it once more, is still a
conjectural matter. There may be an effect due to the sudden increase,
after World War II, of chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants and propellants,
and it may become serious. To date, however, and in any case, there has
been no solidly demonstrated biological effect (although there are
plenty of speculations) due to ozone depletion. That is no surprise,
since it occurs over the South Pole, where there is not much biology to
be affected. In temperate and equatorial latitudes, there is no solid
evidence as yet of a thinning ozone layer, let alone of increased
amounts of ultraviolet light reaching the surface of the earth. In fact the
evidence is that increased cloud cover has reduced the penetration of
ultraviolet radiation to the surface.46 There has thus been no discernible
effect, adverse or otherwise, of ozone depletion on agriculturewhich
is the point at issue. It may yet happen, but that is another story: it is
not the one being told, presumably to thousands of eager readers, by
Rifkin.
Greenhouse gases are indeed increasing. The effect is still
uncertain, although ultimately they will have an effect. Indeed they
may be having an effect now: a benign effect in counteracting a slow,
general cooling of the planet, brought about by geochemical or
astronomical processes, or by the enhancement of agricultural
production.47 However, even the keenest augurs of global warming
(among scientists, that is) admit that no such trend has been
unambiguously observed, that we do not yet have the predicted
signal: in short, that the warming that should have been observed by
now, according to the (general circulation) models and the
unquestionable increase of greenhouse gases since the industrial
revolution, hasnt happened yet.48 All this may change: significant,
early, greenhouse-induced global warming may become a reality. But
however desperate things get, they will never become bad enough to
produce retroactively a global agricultural crisis in the period 198090.
To round things off, we observe that air pollution is still chiefly an
urban problem, not one that affects (or is caused by) food production.
As for loss of biodiversity, this is a result of increased agricultural
activity, but it is not yet the cause of any agricultural crisis!
We crave the readers indulgence for worrying the logic, at such
length, of so small a scrap of text. We do it (1) out of a sense of rueful
admiration, (2) because it is entirely characteristic of its two authors,
and (3) because we cannot do it for the entire literature. It takes a
certain virtuosity to cram such a range of disinformation into two
sentences. The nearest parallel we can think of, on the other end of the
political spectrum, would be a televangelist contriving to blame the
American family crisis on day care centers, gay pride, gun control,
rocknroll, the abandonment of the gold standard, the theory of
evolution, and the graduated income tax.
Why, then, should professional intellectuals, who have been
trained in analytical thinking of some sort and presumably practice it
for a living, be so eager to promote Rifkin as a major thinker on
ecological issues? The sad truth seems to be that professorial tenure
does not immunize people against spin doctors, political or scientific.
Rifkin, as the quoted passage should demonstrate, hits all the hot
buttons, deploys all the buzzwords at once. This tactic, together with a
willingness to stoke all the postmodern leftists prejudices against
Western methodology, ontology, and epistemolgy, is enough to put to
flight any lingering impulse to make careful distinctions, especially
those that require scientific knowledge.

In Dubious Battle

There is something decidedly curious about this commitment of the

postmodern academic left to environmental issues. It seizes eagerly on
the pronouncements of scientists, judicious or otherwise, that hold out
the promise of crisis or catastrophe. It does this despite a firm rejection
of the notion that there is any special truth-value in science. The result
is a farrago of scientific fragmentssome of them sound in
themselves, but taken out of contextmyths, fancies, resentments and
dreams both vindictive and utopian.
So whats new? Hasnt intellectual argument always been like that
to some degree, the conceit of intellectuals notwithstanding? The
answer is yes and no. Shoddy logic, emotion-laden exposition of what
are offered as the hard facts of the human condition, special pleading,
wishful thinking, posturingall have long been with us as part of the
public life of the mind and of political action. They appear even in the
purest of natural sciences, although much more rarely (we believe) than
in other disciplines. Among Western academic intellectuals, however,
particularly since the Enlightenment, such argumentation has usually
received, sooner or later, a sharp, public correction. That has been the
game, particularly in empirical science.
The postmodern left, however, has introduced a new rhetorical
wrinkle that shields it from such rebukes. They are ready, at need, to
scorn the canons of logic, evidence, objectivity, and coherence on
which most of them used to depend for a living. For them, the life of
the mind is a dance on thin air. When dealing with academic arcana,
this is merely obnoxious. One could well ignore the whole game and
survive happily, except perhaps in certain departments. But it is a
terribly dangerous attitude to take toward environmental questions,
toward any questions, for that matter, of significant public import.
Environmental issues are important precisely because they involve
urgent questions of fact, whose investigation must be carried out, like it
or not, by the methods and epistemic strategies of orthodox science.
Epistemological hubris is a sin into which most scientists probably fall,
from time to time. But it is an unremitting flaw of radical
environmentalism, despite its pose of abandoning human arrogance and
humbly seeking the counsel of nature. This pose is carried along on an
undercurrent of unwavering self-righteousness. Ecoradicalism (like so
much of contemporary academic radicalism generally) is really a
movement of personal salvation. Consequently, in ecoradical lingo
facts frequently devolve into mere tropes, and flat assertion is elevated
to the status of evidence. Subjectivity is not only not suspect: it is
demanded. Objectivity, on the other hand, is dismissed, curtly, as the
delusion of a Western consciousness obsessed by domination,
exploitation, and profit. Objectivity is Satans wile.
What is involved here is a reconceptualization of the human side
of the human/nature dualism to free it from the legacy of rationalism,
proclaims the feminist philosopher Val Plumwood, in an ecofeminist
version of the credo.49 With minor variations, the theme recurs,
insistently, throughout the entire range of ecoradical literature. It is a
staple in Jeremy Rifkins books. And: it is a recipe for disaster in
ecological mattersand in human affairs generally! It is the
substitution of moonbeams and fairy-dust for thought, a frequent
human practice, but one that has taught grim lessons in the course of
history. Janet Biehl, in her devastating analysis of ecofeminism, has a
few well-chosen words for it:
notions focused overwhelmingly on womens allegedly quasi-
biological traits and a mystical relationship that they presumably
have with naturea nature conceived as an all-nurturing and
domestic Great Mother. This highly disparate body of hazy, poorly
formulated notions, metaphors, and irrational analogies invites
women to take a step backward to an era whose consciousness was
dominated by myths and by mystifications of reality. It does not
bode well for womenespecially those who regard themselves as
more than creatures of their sexualityto follow this regressive
path.50

Of course, the trick in avoiding hazy notions is to learn history; and

that is difficult if one believes that, having been written before the
discoveries of postmodernists, history is a delusion, not merely
Henry Fords bunk.
An example of the ecoradicals gift for prognostication may be
seen in Morris Bermans account of the social and historical
mechanism by which the villainies of industrial society will wither
away so that we may ascend to eco-paradise. On the political level,
decay will probably take the form of the breakup of the nation-state in
favor of small regional units. This trend, sometimes called political
separatism, devolution, or balkanization is by now quite widespread in
all industrial societies.51 Indeed, this trend is widespread, though
hardly in all industrial societies (consider, per contra, the nascent
Western European superstate). And it is called balkanization; and we
may currently see what that entails, in the bloody, fratricidal stupidity
that torments the Balkans! If Bermans prognosis is correct, the future
is nothing to look forward to, and nothing the theorists can be proud of
having recommended.
William Blake once wrote with pride that he was mad, yet retained
his health: mad as a refuge from unbelieffrom Bacon, Newton, and
Locke.52 That kind of madness is forgivable, admirable, perhaps, in a
poet of genius. Prophetic visions are indispensable to a culture. But we
must remember how double-edged they can be, and how pregnant with
unintended irony. As a guiding principle for a mass environmental
movement, Blakes madness portends disaster. According to Martin
Lewis, Radical environmentalism enjoys substantial, and growing,
intellectual clout. If its concerns merge with those of the broader
academic left, a trend visible in the rise of both eco-marxism and of a
self-proclaimed subversive postmodernism, we may well see
intellectual hardening of uncompromisingly radical doctrines of social
and ecological salvation.53
Notwithstanding Lewiss concernwhich is nevertheless a point
well takenwe must guess that the dangers he points to relate mostly
to the contamination of discourse in intellectual circles. The variants of
edenic environmentalism that Carolyn Merchant surveys in Radical
Ecology are, as social movements, self-limiting sects. Taken all
together, they hardly constitute a significant political fringe, except on
the many campuses where the academic left already enjoys a high level
of influence. In her more realistic moments, Merchant admits as much,
though she rather wistfully hopes that ecoradical insights will percolate
into the consciousness of the larger political community. Frankly, we
think it is just as well that ecoradicalism remains stunted, even in
relation to the mainstream environmental movement. It is far from
clear to us that a true mass movement of fervent ecoradicals, hearts
brimming with the precepts of Jeremy Rifkin or Dave Foreman, would
not, in the end, turn out to be as pestilential as that of the followers of
the Ayatollah Khomeini.
To us, it is self-evident that a 1 percent improvement in the
efficiency of photo-voltaic cells, say, is, in environmental terms, worth
substantially more than all the utopian eco-babble ever published. In
this sense, we are unabashed technocrats, unashamed of the
instrumentalism behind such assertions. An accomplishment of this
kind will almost certainly not come from the ranks of the ecoradicals,
most of whom would, no doubt, denounce it with scorn as a techno-
fix. Yet technology and the scientific thinking that stands behind it
are, for all their vexed history, indispensable tools for providing
humankind with a stable environment in which it can live on honorable
terms with itself and with nature. The attempt to replace them with
phantom visions of global consciousness change or cultural paradigm
shifts are wrong-headed and, even worse, wronghearted.
Our experience with ecoradicals, as with the antiscientism of
academic leftists generally, brings us round once more to poor old
Francis Bacon, whose once restful shade has been recalled, in the last
ten or fifteen years, to be harrowed endlessly by radical critics of
Western science and culture. It is a bum rap. Let us raise a glass to
Bacon! He wasnt much of a scientist or mathematician, but he made
some shrewd guesses as to how our species might crawl out of the rut
of ignorance. And heres to Baconian scienceif that misattribution is
to persist in our universitiesBaconian in the sense of a rigorous
adherence to the empirical, and a faith that what we learn that way can
improve the prospects for human life. The more Baconian science we
get, the easier it will be to believe that we have a fighting chance, if no
more than that, on this lovely planet that spins its way through an
unimaginably violentand indifferentspace.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

The Schools of Indictment

Meanwhile concentration on how the meaning is generated

keeps theorists busy; especially proponents of Marxism, Feminism,
Minority Discourse, Cultural Studies, Deconstruction, New
Historicism, and other schools of indictment.
DENIS DONOGHUE, BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BEWILDERED

Thus I think a good case can also be made that the AIDS pandemic
is the fault of the heterosexual white majority.
LARRY KRAMER, REPORTS FROM THE HOLOCAUST

Evil is the oldest and most intractable of all enigmas. Alone among the
species, we know that misfortune is inevitable. And yet, if this
knowledge is universal, so is the propensity to see a malign agent
behind our misfortunes. But in each eventin the living act, the
undoubted deedthere, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts
forth the moulding of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.1
So says Ahab, and so say we all in our most anguished moments. Most
likely, this is a cognitive adaptation of our species, allowing us to
function and continue sane in the face of actual or expected calamity.
Out of it, however, there have emerged most of historys bloody and
wasteful conflicts.
 In this chapter we consider certain social and political responses to
evils, real or perceived. In contrast to the arid disputes of the academy,
these are matters that actively and continually roil our civil existence,
and devastate the lives of thousands. Chiefly, we shall be concerned
with the abiding problem of racial justice, and with the AIDS epidemic
that has reawakened slumbering fears of plague and fatal contagion.
Science, obviously, has a great deal to do with the latter problem. In
fact it is our only defense, and our only source of hope. As regards
racial injustice, however, it is not at all clear that science, even in its
most forthright technological guise, has much to do with the situation.
Yet its iconic status as the emblem of intellectual authority and
material power in this era makes it one of the foci of the fantasies and
dreams of the dispossessed.
These problems are not primarily located in the academy, and,
indeed, where they intersectin the blighted neighborhoods where
AIDS is becoming omnipresent but a white face is rarely to be seen
the academy is but a rumor. Yet there is a peculiar and ultimately
unhealthy traffic between the world of rarefied postmodern theory and
the communities in which activism, though stemming from real and
terrible problems, overflows into paranoia and fantasy. Many of the
blind alleys down which activists charge have first been mapped out by
academics bedazzled by contemporary theories of discourse. Thus,
when questions of knowledge and authority arise in connection with
scientific and medical matters, or in a general context, the strange
combination of skepticism and credulity that characterizes the
postmodern stance is strongly echoed. By a process of tacit reciprocity,
the concerns of activiststheir tactics and rhetoric as wellfind
defenders and advocates among the left-wing scholars and cultural
critics to whom resistanceto the social norms of late capitalism
no matter how incoherent in its suppositions and doubtful in its
practices, is always a welcome development.
We also consider here a social stirringthe so-called animal
rights movementthat is, relatively speaking, small and eccentric, and
that arises from concerns that we see as far less compelling than those
that grip AIDS activists and crusaders for racial justice. This, too, is an
arena where the language and attitudes of the academic left are
deployed and, again, the cause is one that a growing number of
academics have come to rationalize, albeit the response is on a far
smaller scale than is the case with race and gender oppression.

AIDS

The story of AIDS, more so perhaps than any other in contemporary

science, refutes, simply as it is recounted, the notion that science is not
so much a matter of expanding knowledge as it is of competing,
culturally constructed paradigms. To be sure, paradigms compete; and
they contribute at any moment to the formulation of questions and the
choice of puzzles (Thomas Kuhns word); but the succession of
paradigms does not involve starting each time from scratch. Theory
choice is not just a matter of politics and style, as Kuhn himself
insisted in defending his work against its critics.2
The ongoing story of AIDS is already the subject of a huge
literature, a public literature as well as a new technical and professional
one. We could not begin to do it justice here, even in summary; but
some of its highlights illuminate the issues of our argument. If the
outbreak of AIDS had occurred a decade earlier than it did, most of
those ten years, it is safe to say, would have passed without any real
understanding of its etiology, and hence with far less hope for its
management. This is so because the disease results from an attack on
the bodys defenses against non-selfits immune systemby a
particular and peculiar virus. The keys to understanding that attack and
to identifying the pathogenic agent are bodies of very new knowledge
in cellular immunology, molecular biology, and virology, knowledge
that was spotty or did not exist until the late 1970s.3
The first papers describing a peculiar immunodeficiency
syndrome appearing in homosexual mensoon to be known as
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDSwere published in
1981. By 198283, it was clear that a catastrophic epidemic had erupted
in the gay communities of New York and San Francisco. The name
given the disease stands for its underlying symptoms: a breakdown of
normal immunity and the consequent, devastating appearance of
opportunistic infections and unusual cancers that the body is unable to
resist. The superficial symptoms were (as always) not informative,
taken by themselves: diarrhea, fever, rapid weight loss, muscle wasting,
weakness. Because, however, there were newly available and effective
means of assaying immune function, the deadly origin of those
secondary symptoms was soon understandable. Because indices of
immune function were availableincluding those dependent on
monoclonal antibodiesthe primary target of the disease process was
pinpointed: it is the particular subpopulation of T-cells known as CD 4+.
We note that among the early reports was an important one from a
group headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who will reappear below.4
There was no doubt, when the epidemic pattern became known,
that this was a communicable, an infectious disease. It was to be
understood by discovering what it is that attacks, and what then
happens to, the susceptible cells of the immune system. The search for
the pathogen was intense and worldwide (or, at least, Western
worldwide). In 1984 an RNA virus (retrovirus) of the lentivirus (slow
virus) subfamily was identified as the causative agent by Luc
Montagnier and his group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and
independently by Robert Gallo in the United States.5 This was the
outcome of a worldwide effort unprecedented in the history of
medicine: unprecedented in scale, scope, urgency, andmost
importantlyin the extent to which applicable resources of basic
science were brought to bear to create a new science ad hoc. The time
interval between recognition of the epidemic and identification of this
new and unusual infectious agent, which came to be known as HIV,
human immunodeficiency virus, is also unprecedented in its brevity.
Had there been no biotechnology and molecular immunology
based upon genetic engineering methodsmethods so abhorrent to the
radical critics of science, methods that biotechnology opponent Jeremy
Rifkin and his postmodern science admirers consider to be not only
superfluous but a kind of blasphemy against naturethere would have
been no such developments. Nor would the screening methods by which
the national blood supply was eventually protected have been created.
Even as it was, the time needed for such work was long enough to allow
a third major category of victims, after homosexual men and drug
abusers who share hypodermic needles, to be infectedhemophiliacs
and others receiving transfusions of blood and blood products.6
The epidemic has followed its predictable course within the at-risk
populations. The rate of infection seems to be beginning only now, as
we write, to level off, in the industrialized countries.7 At least in part
that local leveling off results from recognition among the original
(American and European) victim population, practicing homosexual
men, of the risks of casual sex with multiple partners. That recognition
is a great credit to activists (including Larry Kramer, of whom more
below) and more generally to the large numbers of well-educated,
middle-class homosexual men who threw themselves into the effort of
education about risky sex and behavior modification. It appears,
however, that, in the main, potential victims educated one another.
Neither their efforts nor the much larger government and media efforts
of education and propaganda seem to have had much effect on the
underclass subpopulation of victims, norsadlyon younger, less
well-educated homosexual men.8 The epidemic goes on, and despite the
explosion of knowledge about the molecular biology of infection and
response, neither cure nor vaccine is as yet to hand. In the meantime, as
hard science moves ever closer to a description of the cellular and
molecular basis of the disease,9 the awful complexity of its
pathogenesis becomes more evident. Hope for an early cure recedes
rapidly, and the problems of designing therapeutic and vaccination
strategies tax the powers of some of the worlds most advanced
laboratories and biomedical minds.10 Mitigation of AIDS there is, then,
in a growing medicine chest of new drugs and in evolving clinical
strategies of their use; but as yet there is no cure and no prevention,
except by avoidance of those acts that transfer body fluids from the
infected to the uninfected.

Spreading the Fear

Almost from the start, activists have suffered a terrible ambivalence

about the form to be taken by their educationand propaganda
efforts. There was and is a strong reason, on the one hand, to argue that
everybody is under the gun. In the first place, this might have been true
under certain conditions, for example, if transmission by ordinary
heterosexual contact were as easy as it is by less common sexual
practices. As we have found out, however, this clearly seems not to be
true, at least in America and Europe. 11 Nevertheless, especially in the
early phase of the epidemic, sober researchers and public health
officials were understandably determined to err, if at all, on the side of
caution, and to assume a worst case scenario, in which the general
population was assumed to be gravely threatened. Secondly, the
particular interestsand fearsof the at-risk groups came into play. If
the whole population were believed to be at equal risk, the focus might
be expected to shift away from unusual sexual behaviors, intravenous
drug use, and the outlaw status of the groups practicing them. It was
feltcorrectlythat the perception of a universal threat would
accelerate the appropriation of government money for treatment and
research.12
On the other hand, the fact remains that the overwhelming
majority of victims are members of classes originally tagged as high
risk: homosexuals and the inner-city poor, among whom drug abuse
and deviant sexual behavior are commonplace. This invites a
different and contradictory style of activist rhetoric. Here, AIDS is seen
simply as the amplification and continuation of oppressive practices,
long endemic in the society, that victimize gay men and the nonwhite
underclass. The special moral claims of the victim groups, antecedent
to AIDS as they undoubtedly were, can be invoked, at least to
sympathetic audiences, as another argument for addressing AIDS with
particular urgency.
In the conflict between these two strategies of education-
propaganda, the firstAIDS is for everyonehas won hands down: it
is now the generally accepted position among the public. Its iconic
figure is Magic Johnson. The weird notion is that Magic Johnson is like
everyone else, but perhaps nicer (the latter part of which may well be
true). The second point of viewAIDS as a form of racist and
capitalist oppressionhas retreated to the ends of the spectrum:
highbrow (academic left) and lowbrow (the conspiracy theories of
militant Afrocentrists,13 for example).
The AIDS-is-for-everyone thesis is now regnant in the media. 14 It
is strongly reinforced by the image of thousands of celebrities of every
description prominently displaying red ribbons during public
appearancesperhaps a praiseworthy act in itself, but nonetheless
firmly linked to the doctrine that AIDS is as much a threat to drug-
avoiding and monogamous heterosexuals as to drug-using gay
prostitutes. A wry comment on this situation appears in a recent New
Republic editorial:
Without exception, the press has presented teen AIDS as a
growing problem, which means you have to ignore the fact that the
tiny number of such cases actually fell from 1990 to 1991 The
media invariably make teen AIDS a problem of white straights of
both sexes, when most cases are minority male, and gay Most
teenagers with AIDS didnt get the disease from sex, but from
hemophilia clotting factor, with gay male teens as the second
biggest category.15

T h e New Republic prudently relied on the judgment of one of its

correspondents, Michael Fumento, whose book, The Myth of
Heterosexual AIDS, gives a detailed but accessible account of the
epidemiological facts for those disposed to pay attention. (The hostile
treatment of Fumentos book by AIDS activists, public health officials,
and various groups having a stake in the perpetuation of the myth
Fumento criticizes is one of the most depressing episodes to date in the
history of the public perception of AIDS.)
Honesty must view this situation with an uneasy ambivalence. On
the one hand, the imagery of stellar athletes (e.g., the late, justly
famous Arthur Ashe), Hollywood figures, and well-scrubbed white
teenagers succumbing to AIDS has probably enlisted support for AIDS
care and research that pictures of suffering Africans and afflicted
denizens of the gay ghettos of New York and San Francisco would
never have elicited. On the other, there is the matter of fidelity to
scientific factto the truth; and that is never a lighthearted issue.
Myths have consequences.
 LAffaire Duesberg

From the first, there have been legitimate questions within science
about the simple communicable-disease hypothesis, and these have
been followed by illegitimate arguments (mostly from the extreme
right, where homophobia is a reality) to the effect that there is
nothing much for ordinary people to worry about, and that there would
be nothing to worry about at all if certain people would stop doing
unnatural acts.
Best known among scientific critics of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis
has been Peter H. Duesberg, a distinguished Berkeley molecular
biologist. Reduced to its essence, Duesbergs argument is that the full,
classical proofs of causation that link a biological agent to a disease
process remain, in this instance, somewhat lacking; and that if we are
to be left with mere correlation, rather than proof, then the correlation
between AIDS and certain predisposing lifestyles (including heavy
drug use and the accompanying malnutrition) is just as strong as, or
stronger than, the one between AIDS and HIV se-ropositivity.16
Nor is Duesberg alone. Although his arguments have been negated,
successively, over time, as new science has appeared, the undeniable
specificity of the at-risk population persists, and certain lifestyle
characteristics of that populationof coursepersist as well. Serious
epidemiological work and examined clinical experience inevitably
produce correlations: to a large extent, that is what they are about. Thus
it appears that people who actually come down with AIDS are usually
subject to immunosuppressive factors. Among them are: semen-
induced autoimmunity following from anal intercourse; blood
transfusions; multiple infections; chronic use of recreational and
addictive drugs; and so on. This list is from arguments assembled by
Robert Root-Bernstein, a physiologist at Michigan State University. It
is a part of his argument to the effect that, whatever the role of HIV, it
is the predisposing factors, which are themselves products of particular
behaviors (some of them not choices but necessities, as in the case of
hemophiliacs, who need the clotting factors in order to live), that
determine whether AIDS develops. Put bluntly, as does one newspaper
in which this argument has been featured, healthy, drug-free people do
not get AIDS.17
That line of argument would hardly deserve mention in a book
concerned with the thinking of the academic left, since the lifestyle
argument, in its most magniloquent form, is mainly a preoccupation of
the right.18 But it is in fact also used by the left,19 when convenient, to
demonstrate the uncertainties, the indeterminacy, of standard science,
and in some extreme cases, to show that AIDS is a social malady first
and foremost, whereas the scientists are merely playing their
professional and careerist games of elegant research, heedless of the
apocalypse. We shall see samples of this below.
Granting, however, that predisposition to a full-blown syndrome
of any kind increases the likelihood of its appearancewhich is, after
all, a tautologynothing adduced by way of evidence so far has shaken
the infectious hypothesis of AIDS: quite the reverse. 20 In short, AIDS
is a communicablebut not an especially contagiousdisease. Its
communication is limited to particular kinds of risky behavior and
much more rarely to unprotected heterosexual21 contact with infected
persons or with their body fluids. The likelihood of infection in the first
instance, or of progression afterward, may be affected by other factors
of health status; but such modifications of the infection-disease
sequence are very weakly determinative. The disease is caused by a
virus; and despite brilliant, ceaselessly energetic work aimed at finding
effective therapies, there is as yet no treatment that stops the disease in
its tracks, let alone cures it. The most recent epidemiological data on
AZT, the most powerful anti-AIDS drug, show that it has little or no
effect on progression of the disease in seropositive, but still symptom-
free, people.22This is, sadly, no surprise: we havent done much better
with other viral diseases. Unfortunately, this virus, HIV, is a very
smart, successful, and brutal one: it hangs around long enough, silently
enough, in its victim to assure transmission to others, and only
thereafterlong afterdoes it kill.

AIDS and the Academic Left

The relation between the scientific study of AIDS and public

perceptions is thus vexed and equivocal. Of course, AIDS paranoia of
the rankest sort endures and is in fact likely to increase. It continues to
insist, in the face of all evidence, that AIDS is highly contagious and
that the mere presence of an infected person, the lightest touch of the
hand, carries a threat. Such superstitionthere is no other word for it
is often concurrent with outright hostility to the at-risk groupsgay
men23 and intravenous drug users. As we have seen, however, a number
of other factorsincluding a lack of forth-rightness concerning risks to
heterosexuals and unlikely but very well publicized alternative theories
of AIDS causationhave bred misinformation and confusion among
well-intentioned people. Among those segments of the population most
deeply concernedand this obviously includes at-risk groups and their
supportersuncertainty and ignorance have led to other kinds of
paranoia. The nastiest version is endemic in poor (and sometimes not-
so-poor)24 black communities, where it is widely held that AIDS was
deliberately developed and introduced by a white racist government in
order to perpetrate genocide against the darker-skinned. This is a
horrible, deeply saddening development in itself; but it falls outside our
purview (although, inevitably, a few academics give this demented tale
some sort of credence). Even among the highly educated and
intellectually sophisticated, however, bizarre theories have taken hold.
Often these are contemptuous of scientific opinion about AIDS and of
science in general.
It is easy to find, in any bookstore and on most college campuses,
versions of AIDS activism in which the hatred of scientific thought is
indelibly manifest. It is characterized by antagonism toward controlled
experiments of rational design, toward the effort to isolate variables in
complex situations, toward the painstaking quantitative analysis that is
essential to getting at the truth. Larry Kramer perhaps provides the
best-known example, arguing as he does that the heterosexual white
majority is to blame for the catastrophic AIDS epidemic. His book,
Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, is a
collection of polemical pieces written in the decade that began in 1978.
It concludes with a long and incoherent personal essay bearing the
books title. Personal or not, its tone is a scream of rage and fear. Of
course, one cannot help sympathizing with that fear, with the sense of
urgency, of someone who is a potential AIDS victim. Kramer is himself
HIV positive, and has been living for years under a perceived death
sentence. Like many other gay men, he has seen hundreds of friends
and acquaintances cut down by the disease in what should have been
the prime of life. If it were possible to view his writings as acts of
personal catharsis, they might be received with unreserved sympathy.
However, Kramer fully intends them to have an effect on public
discourse and on public policy; and to an extent his expectations have
been fulfilled. This puts his opinions in a much more ambiguous light.
A founder of such visibleand from some points of view,
effectivegroups as the Gay Mens Health Crisis and ACT-UP,
Kramer has been, for the fifteen years of the AIDS era, a conscience of
AIDS activism and one of its shrillest accusers. We do not mean to
suggest that he argues, as do some black militants, for a literal
conspiracy of infection, namely, that white heterosexuals have
conspired in biological warfare against homosexuals. Kramers
indictment is different and more subtle: it has elements of paranoia, but
it contains an argument. He doesnt deny that sexual promiscuity,
promiscuous anal intercourse, to be specific, played a key role in the
early and devastating spread of AIDS in America. That promiscuity,
however, he contrives to blame on the heterosexual majority, who, by
depriving gays of their ordinary, human identity, are supposed to have
forced homosexuals to adopt an alternative onean identity whose
affirmation entailed a way of life in which sexual promiscuity is a
necessary part, an affirmation of self.
This aspect of Kramers thinking inadvertently reveals a theme
that is present, but unacknowledged, in the pronouncements of most
other gay AIDS activists. Many of the individuals who are most
energetic and vocal in trying to cope with the epidemic were, some
fifteen years ago, fervent advocates of an ethic of unrestrained sexual
self-expression for gay men, a philosophy that played out, in practice,
as a lifestyle that involved dozens, even hundreds, of anonymous sexual
contacts per year. At the time, such frenetic sexuality was widely held
to constitute a political act, one that held the key to the personal
liberation of homosexual men and to the group solidarity necessary for
effective political action against reigning heterosexual norms of
society. The enthusiastic adoption of this point of view by thousands of
politicized gays was, tragically, one of the chief factors in the
explosive spread of AIDS through the homosexual community. This is
not a matter of scapegoatingit is simply a fact. Yet it leaves a bitter
residue of guilt among gay militants. It is a guilt that is hard to
acknowledge directly, for fear of confirming the hostility toward
homosexuality that strongly persists in the general community. Such
guilt thus finds its outlet, not in explicit remorse, but rather in
petulance and a redoubled militancy, in which the accusatory spirit is
hugely amplified. Larry Kramers polemics provide a prominent
example.
Kramer drives his argument to further extremities, in which
violent antipathy toward the majority culture in general and science in
particular is plainly evident. He holds that once the epidemic was in
full career, the heterosexual majority (and that includes the scientist
members of it) were quite content with the situation; that, with utter
equanimity, they allowed AIDS to devastate a part of the population: I
personally think that genocide is going on. The administrations
determinationwhich has persisted for a very long seven yearsnot to
do anything sufficient to fight the AIDS epidemic can only be
construed as an attempt to see that minority populations they do not
favor will die.25
Almost nobody escapes Kramers denunciation, not even some gay
men who happen to have succeeded him in positions of leadership of
various activist groups. The then-mayor of New York, his entire
administration, Ronald Reagan (of course) and his administration, the
entire National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its Dr. Anthony Fauci,
Dr. Frank Young (former director) and the entire FDA, the government-
pharmaceutical industry complexeveryone, in fact, who is not a PWA
(person with AIDS), and even some of them, come under furious attack,
if not for active collaboration with the disease, then for failing to take
appropriate action against it. All are denounced as irremediably stupid,
or cowardly, or homophobic.
In this country, our enemies include our President, our Department
of Health and Human Services, the Hitlerian Centers for Disease
Control, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Public Health
Service, the self-satisfied, iron-fisted, controlling, scientific
frankenstein monsters who are in charge of research at the
National Institutes of Health and who, with their stranglehold grip
of death, prevent any research or thinking that does not coincide
with the games their narrow minds are playing.26

It is painful to call attention to the absurdities of people whose

suffering is undeniable. Yet these citations point to a widespread
mythology well entrenched in our era, one whose grip is by no means
confined to the unlettered. A deep ambiguity inflames Kramers
thought and echoes through the pronouncements of hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of other activists. On the one hand, there is an almost
superstitious awe of science and scientific medicine, a presumption that
if only they really cared, researchers and clinicians could come up with
a solution to the AIDS epidemic in short order. Kramers polemic, for
instance, not only denounces the failure of the medical establishment to
take measures that he is certain should have been obvious early on, but
also accuses it of withholding its knowledge and expertise, of
perversely refusing to produce the miracles that, Kramer is sure, must
have been there all along. There is something deeply atavistic about
this. Scientists are seen as shamans possessed of limitless powers, and
if these powers are withheld, the only possible explanation is the
wonder-workers malice.
On the other hand there is a countervailing sense that medicine
and science are in fact impotent and even fraudulent, that they exist
chiefly for the benefit of careerist researchers, that they are no better
roads to the truth about health and disease than a thousand other
cultural practices. In ordinary times, these suspicions would be
fleeting. But, even by its own singular standards, the gay community
can hardly regard the last dozen years as ordinary times. Physicians
and biological scientists have failed at what they were thought, by a
naive public, to be able to do flawlessly and on demandcure
infectious disease. There is a sense that an implicit pact has been
broken, and the bitterness is enormous. Such feelings are endlessly
recurrent in the rhetoric of AIDS activists, especially when that
activism is conjoined to a mood of general cultural radicalism. As one
gay rights activist puts it, gay white men who previously considered
themselves relatively privileged began to question the medical and
scientific establishment, realizing as Blacks and women have long
known that science is not always friendly.27
It would be disingenuous to dismiss feelings like this as an
entirely baseless phobia. There is a long history of nasty behavior
toward homosexuals by some spokesmen of the scientific community.
Homosexuality has until recently been stigmatized in the judgments of
scientific medicine and psychiatry as dysfunctionality. The conversion
of mainstream medicine to a more tolerant view is a new development,
and in some respects not entirely secure. Even more grave is the
genuine conflict between AIDS victims, who look with desperate hope
to any possibility of cure, no matter how farfetched, and AIDS
researchers, whose professional standardsand moral conscience
impel them to conduct their studies so as to maximize the reliability of
conclusions. The question of how to justify placebo studies in a
population with an invariably fatal illness is one whose ethical
dilemmas are always intractable. We have known for years oncologists
whose spend sleepless nights over the implications of the
chemotherapeutic trials in which their cancer patients participate.
Muddying research protocols in order to allow everyone a fair shot at a
minimally promising treatment may seem the only ethical course if
you, or someone close to you, is ill with AIDS. Yet, from a wider
perspective, it seems clear that the price of a few months of equivocal
hope for a few hundred people may be genuine delay in the
development of effective measures, delay that, somewhere down the
road, will cost the lives of thousands of Africans. Nevertheless, those
under the most immediate threat can hardly be blamed if they reject a
long-term view that offers them little hope or comfort, and insist upon
interpreting it as an excuse for the vanity of academic scientists for
whom a statistically clean study seems to outweigh the value of a
human life.
In the end, however, such emphatic dislike of science, no matter
how comprehensible its emotional roots, worsens a wretched situation
and darkens a prospect that has never been bright. Sooner or later, a
price will be paid for such unearned antagonism, fed daily with
hyperbolic activist statements, a price that will be reckoned in pain and
death that could have been avoided. Even now, we begin to trace the
cost in the numbers of AIDS sufferers who have forsworn orthodox
methods in search of alternative therapies of one sort or another. For
the moment, it is still possible to argue that such choices incur small
costorthodox medicine is confessedly pretty helpless against AIDS
and may at least have the beneficial effect of keeping hope alive for a
few precious months. Sooner or later, however, the balance will shift.
Means to delay the consequences of HIV infection, if not to escape
them utterly, will be found. When that time comes, those who are
mired in the illusions and outright quackeries of alternative medicine
will be the major losers, just as were the thousands of cancer patients
who flocked to clinics dispensing Laetrile, or healing rays from black
boxes, and died even sooner than necessary.
To the extent that the thought and culture of the academic left
abets and amplifies the antagonisms between activists and researchers,
between patients and physicians, they may be justly accused of working
actual harm. We submit that this phenomenon is real and that concern
about it is amply justified. Furthermore, it takes a form that ironically
illustrates the seductiveness, as well as the silliness, of what passes for
theory among campus radicals. Here is the view of Daniel Harris, in a
widely read Lingua Franca article:
From the rhetoric of critics like Cindy Patton, who says that ACT-
UP provides an interesting example of emerging postmodern
political praxis using deconstructionist analysis and tactics, to the
methodology described by ACT-UP spokesman Douglas Crimp,
who maintains that the organizations graphic art addresses
questions of identity, authorship, and audienceand the ways in
which all three are constructed through representation, the fight
against AIDS is tainted with the faddish argot of
postmodernism.28

Harris has leveled his guns at a very curious phenomenon indeed.

The spell of postmodern theory has lured its acolytes into a bizarre
philosophical cul-de-sac, where reality is effaced as a meaningful
term and where representation, rhetoric, and discourse are the only
allowable phenomenological categories. Confronted by an epidemic
that is all too grimly real, these postulants are driven full circle into a
giddy doctrine asserting that control over representation and rhetoric,
over language and imagery, will, of itself, dispel the menace of AIDS.
This, beneath its ostensibly up-to-date skeptical veneer, is purely
magical thinking. It recurs to the ancient confusion between names and
things, between mention and use. In a nearly literal sense, it encodes a
faith in charms and magic words. It is, moreover, an approach that
offers immediate satisfactions beyond the imponderable hope that
AIDS will eventually yield to it. As Harris reminds us:
One of the most seductive and overlooked attractions of the AIDS
epidemic for postmodern theorists is that it uniquely engages an
academic anxiety that has undermined the self-esteem of liberal
arts faculties for decadesnamely, their belittling awareness of
the greater prestige of their scientific colleagues. The utter
inability of the latter to find a cure, a vaccine, or even an effective
treatment for the disease has created a kind of power vacuum in
the university, a temporary eclipse of authority that affords a
perfect opportunity for non-scientists to rush forward into an arena
from which they have been previously excluded.29

Examples of what Harris has in mind abound in the discourse of

the postmodernist clan. Hardly an issue of a trendy journal, nary a
specimen of a theory-laden compendium exists without its disquisition
on AIDS. Invariably, the disease is seen as a semiological construct, a
phantom animated by the illusions of a reactionary culture, a creature
of disordered discourse, a mere symptom of the tissue of social
prejudices that surrounds us. We understand that this is, for those
unacquainted with the genre, hard to credit; here is a specimen from
Cindy Patton, one of Harriss exemplars of postmodernist thinkers on
the subject of AIDS:
This [orthodox] view of science not only obscures the power
relations between science and public policy; it is fatal to people in
danger of HIV infection and catastrophic for the communities and
nations in the developing world which are currently and
inextricably the objects of scientific research on AIDS. It masks
the way in which medical research reconstructs colonial
relationships under the dual guise of scientific objectivity and
efforts for the good of mankind. It obscures the ways in which
pressure to adopt the organizational scheme of science as
representative of lived experience reinscribes hierarchies of social
difference. And finally, it reads as progress the destruction of
vernaculars and the adoption of scientific language.30

Pattons jeremiad not only echoes all the standard postmodernist

clichs but takes as given the critique of science being cranked out in
radical-feminist redoubts, by left-wing social theorists, and by the
remaining deconstructionists.
Here is another example from no less a source than Derrida
himself:
Given both time and space, the structure of delays and relays, no
human being is sheltered from AIDS. This possibility is thus
installed at the heart of the social bond as intersubjectivity, the
mortal and indestructible trace of a third. Not the third as the
condition of the symbolic and of the law, but as the destructuring
 structuration of the social bond.31

Here we have the Master in a characteristic mode: banality with an

honor guard of double-talk. Closer to home, from a cultural critic and
would-be AIDS activist:
Yet, in the context of the new global order, our society (US AIDS)
is still able to construct a political epidemiology in which its own
internal Third World of blacks and Hispanics are objectively
identified as the principal threat to Americas immune system
Moreover, this same map is deployed to trace the African
origins of HIV with the intention of sexualizing the transmission
of diseases, which historically has followed the trade routes of
commerce and war
Thus, I prefer to speak not of persons with AIDS
(PWAs) but rather of a society with AIDS (SWA). The issue
here is how such a society is to respond to itself, having
discovered that the autoimmunity it believed it enjoyed as an
advanced medicalized society is a fiction.32

And another:
My first thesis is that a psychoanalytic perspective on AIDS must
begin by acknowledging that each of us is living with AIDS: we
are all PWAs (Persons With AIDS) insofar as AIDS is structured,
radically and precisely, as the unconscious real of the social field
of contemporary America.
The analogy of social psychosis enables us to understand
AIDS as a condition of the body politic, an index of the socialized
 body of the American subject caught in a network of signifiers that
renders it vulnerable to AIDS precisely because, by refusing a
signifier for AIDS, it faces the prospect that what is foreclosed in
the symbolic will return in the real. By persistently representing
itself as having a general population that remains largely
immune to the incidence of AIDS, America pushes AIDS ... to the
outside of its psychic and social economies 33

These examplesand we have selected some of the least

bewildering rhetoric from each of themare quite typical. Certain
themes are recurrent: The basic problem is the language and the social
typology with which America thinks about AIDS. Get this under the
control of the right-minded, and a remedy will appear. Most especially,
it is imperative to get Americans to stop thinking about high-risk
groups; this is the error from which all others flow. Failure to heed
this insight will unleash a terrible retribution on the smug majority.
Pedestrian virology, immunology, and epidemiology are, needless
to say, banished from such analyses. The moralizing impulse is in full
career, albeit with Jacques Lacans rhetoric rather than Jerry Falwells.
Such hallucinatory language, which would not for an instant be
accepted in connection with lupus, myasthenia gravis, or hepatitis B, is
somehow justified because of the deep sense of victimhood (preceding
AIDS and likely to outlast it), the gnawing feeling that AIDS represents
but the latest and worst of a series of persecutions that beset the
afflicted communities, the gay community in particular. Scientific or
merely rational argument is irrelevant. Scientific standards are what is
being castigated. Articles of faith (e.g., that the unrepentant white
heterosexual majority will ultimately be visited with the full force of
the plague) are being declared. The language is religious, that of
Exodus. Moses and Aaron are warning Pharaoh.
The postmodern version of philosophy of science is often cited
in jeremiads of this sort. Cultural constructivist dogma is invoked with
depressing frequency to describe, or rather to deride, scientific work
done in connection with the AIDS crisis. As Daniel Harris points out,
In fact, academic AIDS theorists malign the presumed Objectivity of
science every step of the way as Donna Haraway does in her essay The
Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies, in which she jeers at our societys
veneration for science, for the univocal language of empiricism that,
in fact, conceals a barely contained and inharmonious
heterogeneity.34
The need to formulate ones thinking in language that endorses the
postmodern critique of standard scientific epistemology distorts even
thoughtful and sensible evaluations of the AIDS epidemic. Steven
Epstein, a sociologist writing in Socialist Review on the
democratization of AIDS research by activist groups comprised
largely of lay persons, is impelled to use terms like contested
construction of knowledge and to brood at length over Foucauldian
apothegms concerning knowledge as power. 35 Though he wisely rejects
the most radical epistemological proposalsthat AIDS is merely an
artifact of the way in which outcast groups are represented, that
supposed knowledge about AIDS is merely an artifact of linguistic
convention and the contest for social powerhis preoccupation with
these questions derails any serious investigation of methodological and
statistical matters, topics that would have been indispensable were he
to prove his case for the value and importance of the research
undertaken by the activists he so admires. One is left wondering what
evidence there is to substantiate Epsteins claim that the AIDS
movement has turned science into politics, but also turned politics into
science; and the combined effect is to carve out a large space of
scientific inquiry within which grassroots participation comes to be
seen as useful, desirable, and even necessary. 36 Ruminations on
postmodern discursive communities do nothing to authenticate such
claims, and put them in fact on the slippery slope to pure bombast.
Likewise, David Kirp, an eminent academic expert on social
policy aspects of AIDS, writes in The Nation37 to tell us that scientific
and medical practice is being remade by the gay activists who defy the
wisdom of medical orthodoxy to conduct their own field trials of new
and innovative therapies. At least that is what the tone of his piece
initially suggests. Closer examination reveals a far more modest claim,
as well as considerable misgiving concerning this putative paradigm
shift. After an initial flourish, maestoso, Kirp merely points out that
some credential-bearing researchers have been sloppy and unethical,
while some individuals without official credentials have learned
enough in the way of standard methodology and experimental design to
perform useful studies. This is interesting, but it hardly constitutes
evidence that science has been remade, or that its fundamental
assumptions are crumbling. In the end, and to his credit, Kirp reserves
most of his energy for an attack on those outsiders who scorn scientific
protocols, ignore controls and statistical measures of validity, and who,
in many cases, end up migrating to the camp of one or another
alternative healer. It is deeply disquieting to note the way in which
even sober writing on the subject of AIDS displays the need to
genuflect to the idols of the postmodern pantheon. Kirps piece, is, in
fact, a plea on behalf of orthodox science; yet it is garbed misleadingly
in the language of those who decry that orthodoxy.
What finally comes of this, we suspect, is a slow but inexorable
degradation of understanding among activists, members of high-risk
groups, and the public in general. It is not misinformation about AIDS,
per se, that is the threat, so much as it is misinformation about what
standards of judgment have to be brought to bear in order to decide
whether theories, studies, compilations of data are to be trusted.
Grumbling about the arrogance and authoritarianism of standard
science has its place. These are real enough at times and in places. They
can harm as well as annoy. But far more substantial harm is done when
all that is proposed in place of scientific objectivity is the overpriced
vaporware of postmodern skepticism, conjoined with the
understandable, but insidious, delusion that victimhood puts one in
direct contact with the wellsprings of truth.
The activism of cutting-edge theorists has a definite and concrete
downside. Political pressure from such activists has led on occasion to
loosening and changing some of the rules for conducting clinical trials,
particularly in the direction of eliminating placebos, depending more
on the statements of participants (who lie, more often than used to be
expected, in order to get treatment), and broadening participation to
include all elements of the affected and potentially affected population.
Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, no instance has yet been reported of a
significant grassroots contribution to the cellular immunology, to the
molecular biology, to the virology, to the effective clinical
management of AIDS, or to relevant epidemiological theory. Since it is
knowledge we are concerned with, we must judge that even the
authentic claims of commentators like Kirp and Epstein are more
important for morale among AIDS sufferers than for any implications
for biomedical knowledge.
In the meantime, the modification of clinical trial designs in
response to political pressure has upon occasion introduced not only
design absurdities but the potential for horrifically increased expense
of the simplest of testing assignments. Benjamin and Janet Wittes have
contributed a short but exact analysis of some of these new rules.38 As
Wittes and Wittes point out, the really dangerous implication of such
politicized experimental design is not the inclusiveness itself, but the
requirement, if the most elementary statistical honesty is to be
maintained, that all subgroups must be included in sufficient numbers
to demonstrate possible treatment differences between them and Other
subjects, presumably white men. 39 Their critique is not gaseous
theorizing: it reflects the experience of nearly a hundred years of
epidemiology and analysis. In the face of the realities of funding and of
chronic personnel shortages, emotional arguments for inclusiveness
and compassion in medical research come close to irrelevance
(notwithstanding political statements to the contrary from scientist-
administrators, who must answer to the Congress and the media, and
who must avoid unpleasant confrontations with activist groups). This is
not to deny that medical research and clinical testing designs are
sometimes very cold-hearted. But that is not the question; the question
is: What will contribute to the growth of vital knowledge about AIDS?
Issues of compassion and supposed fairness in the immediate instance,
of giving everyone a shot at every treatment that shows the least early
promise, of giving ear to every voice from the most afflicted
communities, may tug at the heart; but true compassion is not
necessarily a short-term matter, and attempts to view it as such run the
risk of turning it into mere sentimentality.
We are not here arguing for science as the only way of getting
answers to questions about how the bodyor the universeworks. We
dont think we need, for present purposes, to defend scientific
objectivism as the single admissible philosophical standpoint. We
simply observe that science is, as all the worlds experience clearly
tells us, overwhelmingly the best trick we so far know for getting the
upper hand against disease. And we know that the politicized,
overtheorized criticism that is our subject offers nothing at all in that
direction. Its main effect has been to reassure aspiring cultural critics
that they can play a significant role in combating AIDS without having
to do anything so tiresome as, for instance, abandoning the joys of lit-
crit for careers in medicine or molecular biology. In the case of the
AIDS tragedy, such criticism may have the merit of allowing some
desperate people to let off steamand God knows they need that. But it
has not in any degree hastened the arrival of those desperately needed
insights into chemotherapy, biochemistry, molecular biology, and
immunology without which we cannot much help those millions
throughout the world who have the AIDS virus, or those additional tens
of millions who are in danger of being infected by it.

Animal Rights: Doctor Doolittle Meets Professor

Foucault

Either Dr. Moossa stops the course or I will shoot him in the head.
That was the anonymous telephone message from an animal rights
activist to the teacher of a postgraduate surgery course in which,
necessarily, animals were to be used. 40 Dr. Moossa, who has a wife and
children, and an employerthe University of California at San Diego
not even lukewarm about backing him up, stopped the course. And so
his students went without instruction or practice. Had Moossa not
stopped, he might have suffered the same fate as did the obstetrician
recently killed by a crazed activist of the antiabortion movement. We
make this comparison advisedly. Dr. Moossas travails are but one item
on a long list of harassments, threats, and sabotage directed in recent
years against individuals and institutions that do biomedical research
employing animal subjects. Actions include verbal abuse and invective,
picket lines, raids on laboratories to wreck equipment and liberate
laboratory animals, destruction of research notes and records, and, in a
few instances, reasonably well-demonstrated plots to inflict actual
violence on research workers.
These actions represent a surprising resurgence of the
antivivisectionist sentiment that prevailed in the United States and
much of the rest of the Western world in the nineteenth century. As it
happens, much of the renewed fervor can be traced to the foundational
work of one individual, the Australian philosopher Peter Singer.
Singers arguments first appeared in an article in the New York Review
of Books, later expanded into an immensely popular book.41 Singers
theories on the rights of animals, at least those whose neurological
organization is complex enough so that we may deem them sentient
entities capable of emotional states, derive, in the main, from his own
extension of nineteenth-century Utilitarianism. These arguments are
neither mystical nor antirational; Singer is an authentic descendant of
the Enlightenment. Although his politics are, roughly speaking, left of
center, we could not with honesty affiliate him with the academic left,
in the sense in which we have been using that term.
Others, however, have picked up and amplified Singers ideas. The
philosopher Tom Regan, in particular, has probably been the leading
American advocate of this school of thought.42 The influence of such
ideas has grown exponentially. Many campuses, including our own, 43
now have organizations dedicated to the vindication of animal rights, a
point of view that calls not only for universal vegetarianism and the
rejection of animal products like fur and leather but also for the
abandonment of animal research by scientists and physicians.
The relation of the animal rights movement to the academic left is
a question of some complexity. Clearly there are connections. There is
evidence in the popular stereotypes, jokes, and catchphrases that
encapsulate the common understanding of what the academic left, the
political correctness crowd, is all about. The standard caricature of
the full-blown PC personage limns an individual who is not only deeply
mindful of the sensibilities of nonwhite peoples and non-Western
cultures, committed to the necessity of introducing nonsexist
neologisms into every nook and cranny of English diction, militantly
devoted to the abolition of every last vestige of gender stereotype, and
deeply sympathetic toward homosexuality as a form of Otherness. She
is, as well, exquisitely alert to the status of nonhuman animals as an
oppressed and exploited class. In the prevalent folklore, she is careful
to call pets animal companions; intent on converting all her friends
to meatless (or at least eggs-only) diets; and inclined to heap
vituperation on fur-bearing humans wherever she encounters them.
In this instance, the antennae of popular humorists have, as they
often do, detected something significant about our times and foibles.
Stereotypes aside, one ought to be quite careful in any serious
discussion of the issue. Animal rights, in the direct sense, and as
opposed to concern for animal welfare, is a position that commands the
support of only a small fraction of the academic left. It is quite
different from a question like multicultural education, which is
without question a defining issue for all postmodern radicals. There are
thousands of campus types who have systematically replaced black
by African-American in their lexicon, who ascribe all the worlds ills
to the white, capitalist patriarchy, who would drive three hundred miles
out of their way to avoid heterosexist Colorado; but who nonetheless
eat steak with relish and wear, for appropriate occasions, leather
bomber jackets or deerskin moccasins. Even among committed
ecoradicals, animal rights is at best a lukewarm issue: it is a tricky
thing to champion hunter-gatherer cultures as paragons of ecological
wisdom without allowing that hunting may be a justifiable activity.
Likewise, feminists are, for the most part, nervous about endorsing an
ideology whose rhetoric and emotional appeal so closely parallel those
of the pro-life movement. AIDS activists are equally edgy about
aligning themselves with efforts that, if successful, will bring
contemporary medical research to a grinding halt.
On the other hand, there are positions within the spectrum of the
academic left that passionately embrace animal rights doctrine in its
most unmitigated form. One chapter of Morris Bermans recent book is
an asseverative paean to animal rights sentiment.
It should be clear, then, that how any culture relates to animals
says much about how people in that culture feel about their bodies.
This in turn reveals the essential structure of the Self/Other
relationship and does much to explain the particular history of that
culture, the body politic And it is in technological societies that
we find the greatest terror of the organic, in fact the deepest hatred
and fear of life, that this planet has ever known.44

Similarly, there is a strong current of support for animal rights

dogma within the ecofeminist community, particularly that wing which
embraces holist or organicist points of view. A recent issue of
Hypatia, the leading journal of feminist-inspired philosophy, was
devoted to ecofeminist issues.45 Most of the articles endorsed (albeit
with occasional quibbles) the central beliefs of the animal rights
movement. Here is an example, from Carol J. Adams, a militant
advocate of both feminist and animal rights causes:
To eat animals is to make of them instruments; this proclaims
dominance and power-over. The subordination of animals is not a
given but a decision resulting from an ideology that participates in
the very dualisms that ecofeminism seeks to eliminate. We
achieve autonomy by acting independently of such an ideology.46

And, in a triumphalist vein, Deborah Slicer:

And while the [animal rights] movement continues to take its
undeserved share of ridicule, it has, for the most part, advanced
beyond that first stage [ridicule] and into the second, discussion.
There is even some encouraging evidence that its
recommendations are being adopted by a significant number of
people who are becoming vegetarians; buying cruelty-free
toiletries, household products and cosmetics; refusing to dissect
pithed animals in biology classes or to practice surgery on dogs in
medical school dog labs; and rethinking the status of fur.47

Most of these instances of outright support for animal rights on

the academic left are to be found in the region where nominally left-
wing politics begins to merge with the intellectual junk food of the
New Age movement. Left theorists of more abstract and cerebral
bent tend, with some exceptions, to avoid such questions. Nonetheless,
there are crosscurrents that convey attitudes from one realm to the
other. The spirit of postmodern critical theory nourishes contemporary
animal rights doctrine; it coexists, logical inconsistencies
notwithstanding, with old-fashioned pantheism and unvarnished
sentimentality. The key point is the perspectivism and relativism
central to the postmodern stance. On the one hand, it endows a mythical
community, the supposedly sentient animals, with a status parallel to
other communities of oppressed, exploited, voiceless beings. The
eagerness of academic leftists to run headlong from their ostensibly
privileged positions as members of the hegemonic white European
technoculture overflows, in the case of animal rights sympathizers, into
the impulse to denounce species-ism, and the assumption that human
needs and interests must always come first with us humans.
Humanismalready a word in bad odor among postmodernists
now takes on a doubly evil connotation. The indulgent relativism that
declares all cultures, all narratives to be equally valid, is stretched to
accommodate entities capable of neither culture nor narrative.
At the same time, the hyperskeptical aspect of postmodern thought
comes into play. With science reduced, on this view, to a truth-game
played by a narrow interpretive community under self-referential rules,
it becomes easy to dismiss, without close argument or factual
investigation, the claims of science to produce results essential to
human well-being. Theoretically, of course, an animal rights purist
would be quite willing to ban animal subject research even in the face
of evidence of its enormous usefulness in extending human life and
relieving human suffering. Some people take that precise position.48
But others, out of all-too-human motives, hedge the issue by declaring,
on their own authority of course, that animal research leads to useless
science and wrongheaded medical practice. No doubt this forestalls an
inevitable crisis of conscience.49 Also, it makes it possible for the
activist to represent his position to the unconverted as something other
than a doctrine enjoining extreme and painful sacrifice on individuals
and communities.
 If animal research is misleading anyway, if it exists only to make
profits or to gratify the ambitions of scientists trapped in a perverted
system of rewards and incentives, why not ban it and spare the poor
animals all that suffering? Postmodernism, with its insistence that
science is just another discourse, provides this impulse with a highly
efficient lubricant. That is the nub of the problem. The postmodern
position, incorporated into the sloganeering of animal rights militancy,
is not only academic nonsenseit is concretely dangerous nonsense.
Animal subject research is, without any question, enormously
important to efficient medical practice, and its abandonment would
entail incalculable human costs.
Let us consider the question of necessity. In 1985 the National
Research Council issued, following a long series of studies, meetings,
and workshops, a summary volume on Models for Biomedical
Research. The volume includes a long table that lists all the Nobel
Prize winners in physiology or medicine from 1901 through 1984, a
few words about the particular contribution of each, and the
experimental system used for the research leading to the prize
committees recognition. One hundred and thirty-nine Nobelists are
listed. The coded descriptions of their work are a birds-eye view of the
progress made by scienceand against human (and animal) disease
in the first eighty-four years of this century.
In just the first four decades, for example, prizes were awarded to
discoverers of the significant mechanisms of: digestion, signal
transmission in the nervous system, immunity, hormone function and
hormone action, vision, hearing, heredity, respiration, blood clotting,
trace factors (such as vitamins) in nutrition, the electrocardiogram and
the cardiac cycle, and a dozen others. The diseases (again of animals as
well as of humans) about which significant, direct understanding and
vastly improved treatments resulted from such knowledge in those four
decades alone included, inter alia, malaria, tuberculosis, parasitic
infestation, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, typhus, anemia,
neurological disease, dwarfism, pathologies of sight and hearing, and
diseases of immunity, such as anaphylaxis.
The experimental systems employed by the 139 Nobel laureates
included all levels of biological organization, from isolated cells in
culture, through bacteria, yeasts, and molds, to higher plants and
invertebrate animals, to humans and other mammals. Many of these
scientists were physicians, and it is therefore no surprise that twenty-
five of them18 percentdid research on humans in all or a part of
their work. Most of those, however, studied other systems as well.
Fourteen percent of the investigators used microorganisms or plants;
but 86 percent of the investigators employed animals as experimental
systems, usually as models.
We dwell on these simple numbers in order to focus on the key
arguments, other than those in moral philosophy, that surround animal
research today and establish the general atmosphere that encourages
activism. Was the research tabulated in the models volume
necessary? That, obviously, depends on ones definition of necessity.
But, given an honest and informed choice, would rational and humane
people have voted at any point to stop it? We think not, not under our
definition of what it means to be humane. In fact, had the research not
been done, there would have been far fewer rational people around to
vote, and the world would clearly have had a burden of suffering, and
of early death, far more diverse, far more terrifying, than todays
burden, however great that is.
Let us ask a somewhat different and more technical question:
could all, or most, of that life-saving and life-enhancing science have
been done without the use of animals? The answer is certainly no. To
understand why, one must understand the purpose of animal models in
experimental biology and medicine. Even the simplest organism is an
almost unimaginably complex system, whose fundamental chemical
and physical processes reflect a heritage of several billion years of
trial, error, and modification. Yet a disease can, although certainly does
not always, arise from a single, simple molecular difference buried
deep within the continuous, labyrinthine reaction system that is the
chemistry of life. The accidental substitution of a single nucleotide
letter out of tens of millions in an individual genome, within the gene
for just one of the several kinds of hemoglobin used over the course of
a life to make red blood cells, can produce a life-destroying anemia.
Equally simple mistakes account for a large array of other diseases.
How are the errors to be found, so that they can be dealt with?
In the whole patient, they are not even the proverbial needle in a
haystack: they are, far worse, an errant sand grain on a thousand miles
of Atlantic beach. The process to be examined must be isolated and
disassembled in order to determine its elementary components: it must
at some point be studied in the simplest possible system, whose
variables are under control. And once that has been done, once there is
a mental construct of its components and operation, it must be isolated
and observed again intact, under conditions of minimum intrusion by
unexpected, uncontrolled environmental variables. That is the first step
of modeling. But it is only the first step if what is ultimately at stake is
a disease.
There are unities, astonishing unities, of biochemistry and
physiology among all the living things of Earth; but there are also
divergences. It is the latter that give us biological diversity. Thus, while
the basic, ionic mechanism by which a message is sent from one cell to
another seems to be the same in sponges and in mollusks and in people,
the brain of a child is not the same thing as the sensory cells of a
sponge, or even as the giant axon of a squid. While research on that
marvelously large and hardy squid cell does tell us how information is
processed, at the most fundamental level, in all nervous systems, we
cannot use squid axonsmuch less computer simulations of squid
axonsto determine in detail what has gone wrong in a human
neurological disease, or how to treat it. For that, the modeling has to
proceed upward, step by step, to more complex systems, closer to the
ultimate problem, but not yet as complex or as subject to the operation
of confounding variables.
The advance of technology, in cell culture, computing,
enzymology, drug design, does not remove the necessity for
appropriate modeling and experimentation. In fact, the exhilarating
growth of such technologies produces hypotheses about process, and
candidate drug structures, at a rate unimagined even a decade ago.
Every one of those hypotheses or synthetic drugs has to be studied
under controlled conditions, in a biological system of appropriate
complexity, if it is to be of any use at all as knowledge or as therapy.
And the choice is clear: the final models, at the highest level of
complexity, must be either human beings or other mammals,
specifically those whose relevant systems mimic the particular human
ones as closely as possible. Cell cultures alone, computer graphics
alone, do not and cannot decide, in the absence of biochemical and
physiological information derived from studies on animals, how a drug
works, or whether it is likely to work as is predicted from theory. In
fact, the better we get at cell culture and invertebrate-animal molecular
biology and computer graphics, the more good candidate drugs are
proposed, the more need for higher-animal modeling there is, that is,
for experiments in which animals are the subjects.
We have, therefore, a range of possible choices. First, give the
whole thing up, bravely, as a sacrifice, on moral grounds. Accept life
on Earth as it was before science. Decide that humans should be no
more privileged than the bacteria, the yeasts, the treesor the
viruses. Second, test and model, if we must, but do it on people, not on
defenseless animals. If our species wants to fiddle with nature (i.e.,
with disease), then the fiddling should be done with human subjects,
not with innocent mice, rats, dogs, cats, monkeys. Third, model, and
use animals as necessary, but with every care to minimize their
discomfort or suffering.
Most sensible persons, confronted with these choices, and
recognizing that there really are no significant additional alternatives,
opt for (3). As it happens, (3) is, and has been for a very long time, the
general position of biomedical science and scientists. Of course there
are lapses from time to time, as there are in all organized (i.e.,
hierarchical) activities, although they are far, far rarer than one is led to
believe by animal rights enthusiasts. The facts and arguments of the
case are available for any fair-minded inquirer to assess.50

Science and Afrocentrism

As we write, we are confronted with the spectacle of a revived ethnic

tribalism in Europe, where Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Moslems rape
and murder one another in the charnel house of the former Yugoslavia;
we may soon see something similar between Balts and Russians,
Russians and Romanians, Romanians and Magyars, or Magyars and
Slovaks. The murderous hatreds that rend Northern Ireland no longer
seem anomalous. Elsewhere, the racial and religious chauvinism that
pits Sikh against Hindu against Moslem, Sinhalese against Tamil, Arab
Sudanese against black Sudanese goes on unabated. We might expect
the humanitarian conscience to be especially aware, in such a time, of
the horrors lurking in tribalism.
Yet in the decidedly less lethal venue of academic life, we find
that tribalism, in one form or another, is the most-favored project of
leftist ideologues, who appear to have abandoned, for the moment, the
universalism that once shone through even the dreariest left-wing cant.
The politics of identity is now sanctified on the campus.51
Increasingly, many groups are held to deserve their own separate and
inviolable space. Nor has the crusade been in vain. Womens studies
programs are ubiquitous; many of them now have departmental status.
Latinos and Native Americans are similarly favored at a growing
number of schools. Gay/lesbian students and faculty are organizing
nationwide to demand the same kind of accommodation for their
communities, as are the physically disabled (differently abled). Of
course, in point of chronological priority and intensity of separatist
feeling, the black community easily holds pride of place. Black studies
departments, in one form or another, have been around longest,
maintain the greatest distance from the rest of the scholarly
community, and command the fiercest loyalty from their ostensible
constituency.
The pros and cons of the currently fashionable separatism may be
debated endlessly. It is not our intention to judge it, although we admit
readily to serious reservations concerning at least some aspects of this
balkanization of the academy. We are, however, chiefly concerned
with how the politics of identity has affected the teaching and learning
of science and, more generally, the perception of science among the
various communities that are becoming privileged with special
academic status. We have already considered the first-line, new
critiques of science, whose constituencies consist of the major
communities of academic feminists (which we insist upon
distinguishing as a subset of women students and faculty), together
with a relatively small number of male adherents, of cultural
constructivists, and of radical environmentalists. Here, however, we
address the relationship between Afrocentrism and the sciences, a
phenomenon that has a rather different profile and that resonates
emphatically beyond the walls of academe.
A great many scholars who are associated with black (or African-
American) studies programs are decidedly on the left of the political
spectrum, at least in the sense that they are profoundly unreconciled to
current political arrangements and tend to identify with movements, in
this country and abroad, that embrace some form of socialism. In the
alignments of campus politics, its uproars and showdowns, they are
usually affiliated with the academic left, as we have defined it. The
legitimacy of ethnic studies is a favored leftist shibboleth; and there is
reciprocity in the form of black support, albeit sometimes grudging, for
the programs and slogans of the left.
Notwithstanding this alliance, the intellectual and scholarly style
of black studies is decidedly different from that of the trendy left. The
language and posture of postmodernism is almost wholly absent from
black studies. The philosophers and social theorists who enthrall white
leftists are not much in favor among militant blacks. The respective
student constituencies are largely disjoint. The white left is, of course,
eager to offer its own analyses as justification for the protected status
of black studies within the university. Indeed, one reason that the left
finds postmodern doctrines that denounce universalism and celebrate
difference so attractive is that these notions are perfectly suited to
the idea that different communities, especially those arguably
oppressed, are entitled to institutionally separate facilities (such as
buildings and studies departments) insulated from the scrutiny of
conventional scholarship. To share facilities with other departments,
faculty, and students is considered demeaning.
The situation is not completely symmetric, however. Black studies
specialists are largely indifferent to the fine-grained ideological
concerns of contemporary left-wing theory. Their style, for better or
worse, is very much their own. (In offering these generalizations, we
are keenly aware that they disregard important distinctions. The black
studies departments at Harvard and Princeton are markedly different, in
style and substance, from those at, say, the University of Massachusetts
or the City College of New York; frankly, it is the latter, better
represented type that we have in mind.)
The argument most often put forth for teaching a black
perspective on various subjects is that in the present climate young
black people cannot be expected to make an ungrudging adjustment to
the styles and assumptions of the traditional white university. They are
said to need an approach that respects their singular cultural experience
and that validates their sense of self-worth. Moreover, they need
examples and role models that counter the presumed discouragement
and disparagement that the white-dominated culture has inflicted on
them. In short, they need a milieu in which white values are not
privileged.
Whatever the value of such an approach in general, it would seem
to be highly questionable when applied to the teaching of natural
science, especially at the college level. These reservations, however,
are of little force in the face of the current mania for Afrocentric
approaches to teaching everything in sight. A small, but growing,
literature is emerging that intends to provide at least the beginnings of
an Afrocentric science pedagogy, and, as it grows, the demand that the
university accommodate such a curriculum is increasingly heard. So far
as we are aware, no reputable college catalog now offers Afrocentric
calculus or microbiology. We can certainly not discount the possibility,
however, that such a catalog is now in the press: developments in
elementary and secondary education point immediately and ominously
in that direction.
At first glance, some of the key elements of the Afrocentric
approach seem benign. What is wrong with the idea that talented black
kids, who have met with little opportunity or encouragement in the
sciences, should be familiarized with the lives and achievements of
black scientists and the accomplishments of African cultures in the
areas of technology and speculative science? At worst it seems a bit
mechanistic and unnecessarythousands of bright young people from
other marginalized communities have made strong scientific careers
without the benefit of emplaced role modelsbut there would seem
to be little actual harm in it. Unfortunately, in the grim comedy of
American education, lower and higher, things are not so simple.
If one examines the nascent literature of Afrocentric science, one
is immediately struck by two things: the enormous amount of
Afrocentrism, and the remarkable paucity of science. Even worse,
however, is the flagrant falsification of science (and of history and
ethnography as well) in the service of Afrocentric chauvinism. The
notion that intelligent but naive students will first encounter science
in this form is chilling indeed. There is absolutely nothing in it to
encourage the legitimate hope that in the not-too-distant future blacks
will occupy positions in science proportional to their numbers in the
general population.
A good example of the substance and range of the Afrocentric
science literature is to be found in the volume Blacks in Science,
Ancient and Modern, edited by Ivan Van Sertima, a professor of
Africana studies at Rutgers University. A few of the pieces are
inoffensive and possibly, in some limited way, useful. They consist of
brief biographies of black scientists, engineers, and inventors. One
must take it on faith that they are sufficiently inspirational to do some
good. Presumably, they are intended for children of ten or eleven, since
they are written at that level of comprehension. The volumes idea of
providing inspiration from purely African culture is illustrated by a
piece by Claudia Zaslavsky that briefly describes the arithmetic
terminology of the Yoruba and Benin peoples. This amounts,
intellectually, to little more than a minor curiosity, although the
cheerleading spirit in which it is presented may, for all we know, give it
the desired morale-building effect. Some genuinely impressive facts
are to be found here and there in the book, such as the two-thousand-
year-old tradition of steel-making in Tanzania, and the eyewitness
account of a caesarean section in nineteenth-century Uganda.52 On the
other hand, even the biographical pieces are usually guilty of
exaggeration, as in John Henrik Clarkes sketch of Thomas Edisons
assistant Lewis Latimer, or the description of quotidian inventions as
great scientific breakthroughs. Even worse is Van Sertimas own sketch
of the chemist Lloyd Quarterman. This is so abominably written, so
vague, and so afflicted with Van Sertimas scientific ignorance as to do
a great disservice to a man who has had an honorable, possibly a
distinguished, career in science.
 These sins, however, are venial. Far worse is the bombast and the
wretched logic that pervade most of the book. One finds here in
abundance the antic confusion that is the unfortunate hallmark of so
much Afrocentric literature. There is the refusal, repeated in article
after article, to recognize that Africa, a geographic term, is not
synonymous with race or culture. Those terms are, in turn, conflated
with language, religion, and political system. The great cultural variety
of the African continent over the course of history is flattened into a
simpleminded Africanness. The contrary sin is also present; cultural
unities are artificially sundered when they straddle Europe and
Africa. Thus we have, for instance, a short section on Euclid, the
great compiler of Greek mathematical knowledge, circa 300 B.C. Why
Euclid? Because Euclid worked in Alexandria, which makes him an
Egyptian, hence an African! Presumably, this makes him black as well
(although this is not explicitly stated), since the reigning assumption of
the book is that the Egyptians were of the same racial stock as sub-
Saharan West Africans. 53 In short, we have one more depressing
instance of the inane but by now ineradicable historical fallacy that
anything south of the Mediterranean is black.
Naturally, the claims on behalf of Egyptian science and
mathematics are correspondingly exaggerated. We are told in no
uncertain terms that the Egyptian contribution to geometry has been
grossly undervalued by white scholars.54 After all, the Egyptians
approximated by 3.16 and computed the volume of a truncated
pyramid! Therefore, their achievement is comparable to that of the
Greeks, if it does not, in fact, outshine it! Such statements conveniently
overlook the fact that every mathematician with an interest in the
history of the subject (and that means most of them) knows perfectly
well that the Egyptians approximated by 3.1655 (not terribly good
compared to the Greek approximation 22/7 = 3.1428 even worse
when one considers that the Greek mathematicians, unlike the
Egyptians, had a well-developed and general methodology of
successive approximations) and developed various formulae for
geometric mensuration, so that what is asserted to have been
suppressed is in fact widely known. What is truly irresponsible in this
piece, especially from the pedagogical point of view, is the failure to
come to grips with the enormous conceptual gap between the
systematic synthetic geometry of the Greeks and the clever but ad hoc
mensural geometry of Egypt (and other civilizations). To set the one up
as the equal of the other, for the sake of racial pride (overlooking, once
more, the non sequitur of Egyptian and therefore black), is to deprive
students of an indispensable mathematical insight, and, moreover, to
prime them to react with hostility to any attempt to convey it to them.
Silly as this is, it pales by comparison to some of the other
articles. Khalil Messiha tells us, for instance, that a small wooden
figure of a bird, presumably made in Egypt during the Hellenistic
period, is an example of African experimental aeronautics. The
evidence? If you build a copy of balsa wood (rather than the original
sycamore), and then add a vertical stabilizer (not present in the
original) to the tail, you get a so-so version of a toy glider!
Of course, the tale of the Dogon discovery of the dwarf
companion of Siriusthe great celestial beacon of Canis Major
resurfaces in two articles by Hunter H. Adams (of whom more below).
The evidence, aside from unreferenced diagrams by the author, is of
wretched quality. We are offered a picture of a carved gourd from
Guinea and a Babylonian zodiacal diagram, which resemble each other
in only the vaguest way. A Dogon doodle, said to represent Sirius, is
compared to an astronomical photograph of the star. Indeed, they do
resemble each other! The Dogon Sirius is a disk with four points
coming out of it: the photograph shows Sirius as a disk with six points
projecting. The author neglects to inform us that the points in the
photograph are an artifact of the design of astronomical reflecting
telescopes. (In this respect, it does no good to argue, as Adams does on
the basis of the flimsiest evidence, that ancient Africa invented
refracting telescopes; only reflectors produce this effect.) To make
matters worse, Van Sertimas preface solemnly endorses and amplifies
the Adams claims.
If, by some act of a mad jokester, a book of similar content, rigor,
style, and tone, say, Norwegians in Science, Ancient and Modern
were assembled, no reputable publisher would touch it. If it were
published, there would be protest marches in the capitals of the Great
Lakes states, at least, and a break in diplomatic relations with Norway
would undoubtedly ensue. Yet in the current climate, academic presses
are eager, with (presumably) the most honorable intentions, to publish
such Afrocentric material.
Somehow, the condescending belief has taken hold that black
children can be persuaded to take an interest in science only if they are
fed an educational diet of fairy tales. The white academic leftto
which some of the contributors to Van Sertimas book belongis
resolutely and astonishingly unembarrassed by such stuff. To apply
rigorous scrutiny to it is, after all, to insist on the horrid Western
paradigm of objectivity, and to deny blacks the right to form their own
interpretive community and to create their own metaphors; thus to
the postmodern left it is indelibly racist. The most awful aspect of the
situation, however, is the way it testifies to the desperation and
confusion of black people themselves. To resort to such tall tales is to
reveal a deep and tragic insecurity and a willingness among black
intellectualsincluding scientiststo hold their tongues about
nonsense damaging to their children.
Blacks in Science is but one venue for the egregious Hunter
Adams. His notoriety has been much enlarged by the so called
Portland Baseline Essays,56 a series of texts designed to put
multicultural content (for which read, typically, Afrocentrism) into
the public school curriculum. Adams is the author of the Baseline
Essay in Science, which bears the innocuous title, African and
African-American Contributions to Science and Technology. A
measure of the reliability of this work is Adamss use of the model bird
already mentioned. He goes far beyond the claims previously cited,
dubious as they may have been, and now asserts that the figurine proves
that the Egyptians possessed full-sized, working gliders that were in
common use. Even this pales, however, beside Adamss most bizarre
pronouncements. Early African writings, he claims, indicate a
possible understanding of quantum physics and gravitational theory. 57
Further, he credits the Egyptians with the full panoply of psychic
powersthey were famous as masters of psi.58 Thus the Egyptian
science, which is supposed to inspire young people, turns out to be
the worst kind of New Age boobery.
Here is the biographical note on Adams that appears in Blacks in
Science:
Formerly on staff (196970) at the University of Chicago in the
Chemistry Department, where he was in charge of operations of
the mass spectrometer and also assisted graduate students in their
research.
Since 1970 he has been at the Argonne National Laboratory at
the ZGS Atomic Accelerator. There he has been advancing the
 state of the art of proton beam detection and diagnostic equipment,
such as proportional wire counters.
He is currently researching the impact magnetic fields may
have had on the rise of civilizations. He has written science-
related articles for Ebony Jr.

Similar claims are made in the Baseline Essays. Behind this fustian lies
the fact that Adams has completed no work toward a degree beyond a
high school diploma and has no record of scientific publication. He was
employed at the Argonne National Laboratory as an industrial hygiene
technician; and he did no research there.59 He is, however, associated
with the secretive but increasingly controversial group known as the
melanin scholars, whose doctrine of an innate racial superiority of
peoples with dark skin forms a bizarre echo to the Aryanism of J. A.
Gobineau, H. S. Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler. One can imagine what
is permitted to scholars under this strange new ideological confection
by noting that Adams now feels free to assert that the Dogon peoples
knowledge of the Sirius system need not have involved telescopes
after all.60 Apparently, he agrees with other melanists 61 that the
melanin of deep-hued Central Africans enhanced their psychic powers
to the point that such astronomical knowledge could be acquired by
direct and unmediated insight! We leave it to the reader to draw the
obvious inferences about the pedagogical competence of projectsand
of entire school systemsthat rely on such materials to instruct and
inspire young people potentially interested in science.
There have been far worthier attempts to claim science as part of
the black heritageinspirational biographies of Benjamin Banneker, E.
E. Just,62 and so forth. There are plenty of honest stories of struggle
and scientific achievement to be told. But the full-fledged Afrocentrists
find this altogether too unfulfilling. The confabulations of Adams, Van
Sertima, and their ilk are much more to their taste. Leaving aside
objectivity, simple sanity cries out on the dangers of this stuff to the
prospects of students who are prompted to take it seriously. We can
report from personal experience that there are many such students. At
the very least, they are wasting their time with nonsense during a stage
of their lives at which they should be learning basic science as rapidly
and efficiently as possible. Furthermore, they are likely to face
confusion and disillusionment as they acquire even a fragment of
intellectual sophistication. Far from inculcating self-esteem, teaching
science from the Portland Baseline Essays or from their proliferating
equivalents elsewhere must do the gravest harm to the minds of
minority students.
How is such foolery to be dealt with? Ideally, competent black
scientists and mathematicians, whose numbers are not as large as we
would like but certainly large enough for the purpose, would refute it in
no uncertain terms, while at the same time stepping in to provide
healthier role models than the invented ones of the Afrocentrists. In
reality, however, competent black scientists and mathematicians are
beleaguered with symbolic as well as practical responsibilities; andin
any casewhy should they be obliged to take on a burden that
initially, at leastmust make them the focus of opprobrious charges of
racial disloyalty, if not worse? Still: in the current political climate of
universities and especially of public education, it is hard to see how a
predominantly white scientific establishment could hope to have much
of an effect, even if it had the courage to speak up.
One might hope, at a minimum, that responsible universities and
scholarly presses would find their own courage to put distance between
themselves and the worst kind of Afrocentric fantasy mongering. 63
Competent referees are, after all, easy to find, and among them a few
might be willing to be quoted. Unfortunately, the academic left, in its
misguided loyalty to multiculturalism and the politics of identity, is
not likely to play any useful role. Its ideology has, in fact, opened the
doors of universities and schools of education to the nonsense we have
described.

The Academic Left and Afrocentrism

It is not hard to see how poorly placed the hard-core academic left is to
protest against the cited mischief. Postmodern relativism undercuts any
possible protest grounded on the notion of objectivity. It entails a
perspectivism that finds no basis for epistemological distinctions
between science and fables. Feminists, indignant as they have been at
the strictures of scientific orthodoxy, bogged down in their own school
of indictment, are in no position to call Afrocentrists to account for sins
more ostentatious, but, at root, hardly more reprehensible, than their
own. The introduction to Hunter H. Adamss Baseline Essay in Science
glancingly reflects the influence of postmodern academic attitudes and
their usefulness as a first line of defense against the demands of
scientific thought. Adamss quotation from the great physicist Louis de
Broglie, for instance, is subtly amended to a misquotation, almost
certainly on the basis of a readingbut hardly a misreadingof
feminist science-criticism.64
Beyond reluctance to criticize Afrocentric pseudoscience, which
seems to be general, we find among some prominent academic leftists a
positive eagerness to endorse it. This is evident in a recent article by
Bell Hooks (or, to render the name in her chosen orthography, bell
hooks). Hooks, a black woman scholar at Oberlin College, is well
known as a militantly feminist, postmodernist scholar of literature and
culture. Her piece Columbus: Gone but Not Forgotten is, for the most
part, yet another recitation of the stylish counter-myth: Columbus as
founding father of all the iniquity and violence that followed upon the
European intrusion into the Americas, and thus of the continuing
injustice visited by the ruling elite in the United States upon Native
Americans, blacks, women, homosexuals, and so forth. To the extent
that white European settlement begat a swarm of evilsand, beyond
denial, it did sosome indignation (tempered by a minimal
understanding of history) is warranted. On the other hand, Hookss
implicit portrayal of the pre-Columbian America as a pacifist Elysium
is a type-specimen of the fatuous clich that has been repeated
endlessly in left-wing diatribes prepared for the Columbus
quincentennial. Thus it is not especially remarkable. What is
remarkable is the thesis that serves Hooks as the springboard for her
ruminations: again, we are confronted with the work of Ivan Van
Sertima, this time in the form of his book, They Came before
Columbus. Says Hooks:
Thinking about the Columbus legacy and the foundations of white
supremacy, I am drawn to Ivan van Sertimas groundbreaking
book They Came before Columbus. Documenting the presence of
Africans in this land before Columbus, his work calls upon us to
recognize the existence in American history of a social reality
where individuals met one another within the location of ethnic,
national, cultural difference, who did not make of that difference a
site of imperialist/cultural domination.65
 Leaving aside the grave difficulty of making a site out of a
difference, which must be akin to the problem of silk purses and sows
ears, we can see that Hooks accepts unquestioningly Van Sertimas
thesis of ancient contact between seafaring West Africans and Meso-
American cultures, together with the further assertion that this
encounter was wholly peaceful and mutually enriching. We shall not
examine Van Sertimas book in any detail, noting only that the
assumption of transatlantic travel by ancient Africans is, in itself,
unsupported by any evidence.66 (We have already had a glimpse of Van
Sertimas evidentiary standards.) Conjoined with the further proposal
that black explorers and Native Americans met without violence or
exploitation, and that the ideas of Afro-Egyptian civilization provided
the seed from which the South and Central American high cultures
sprang, Van Sertimas hypothesis clearly belongs in the category of
wishful thinking. Thus it is hard to characterize Hookss embrace of
Van Sertimas ideas as anything other than superstitious credulity.
Yet unlike Van Sertima, whose reputation does not extend much
beyond fanatically Afrocentric circles, Hooks is a mainstay of the
academic left and a ubiquitous presence at conferences and symposia
devoted to questions of racial and gender justice. As even the brief
excerpt quoted above reveals, she has mastered the postmodernist
lexicon and the style that is de rigueur for fashionable campus radicals.
She is, in short, a far more prestige-laden and influential figure than
Van Sertima, ranking with highly respected black scholars such as
Henry Louis Gates of Harvard and her sometime collaborator Cornel
West of Princeton. Her susceptibility to Afrocentric fantasy and the
pseudoscience that supports it is thus particularly ominous.
An even more startling example confronts us in recent work of
Sandra Harding. As noted earlier, this feminist philosopher of science
has openly called for a revolution against science, for replacing it with
a multicultural, multiracial, ethnically diverse discipline, claiming that
it will be more strongly objective than the existing version. One can
garner some notion of what her enthusiasm really endorses by taking
note of her recent book, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking
from Womens Lives . Several pages of that work are devoted to
repeating slavishly the claims of Blacks in Science, without so much as
a hint of skepticism or reservation.67 In the gospel according to
Harding, skepticism is to be reserved exclusively for scientific work
done by white males and backed by the methodologies of scientific
orthodoxy. Strong objectivity turns out to be another name for
pathetic gullibility. Clearly, to the extent that Harding and her feminist
admirers have any influence on the situation, they can only intensify
the pedagogical damage being wrought by Van Sertima, Adams, and
most of their collaborators.
To take another example, the sociologist Stanley Aronowitz has
also championed the cause of multicultural science and asserts that it
will revolutionize the content and the conceptual foundations of all the
scientific disciplines, as well as the demographic picture of those who
practice them. He is hardly well placed to object, even were he so
inclined, when his summons to remake science along multicultural
lines is answered by the purveyors of Afrocentric science. Likewise,
we have seen that Andrew Ross, Aronowitzs friend and ally among the
cultural critics, waxes indignant at any attempt of the scientifically
literate to inculcate a widespread public understanding of what
distinguishes authentic science from pseudoscience, New Ageism, and
superstition in general. In Rosss view, such people are mere bullies,
intent on preserving the unjust privileges of a scientific elite that works
hand in glove with other purveyors of bourgeois mystification. He is
not a very reliable ally in any attempt to undo the gross miseducation
of young black people.
All this strongly suggests that even if the universities of this
country eventually succeed in developing effective antidotes to the
myths of fervent Afrocentrists (and failure to do so will leave many
black students in an intellectual ghetto), they will do so without much
help from most of the campus left; more than likely, they will have to
proceed in the face of its indignant opposition. This may seem an
unkind characterization, but the direct evidence, sadly and shamefully,
supports it. The experience of Bernard Ortiz de Montellano provides an
example. Ortiz de Montellano is an anthropologist and ethno-historian
originally trained in organic chemistry, 68 who has been active in trying
to develop honest and legitimate multicultural approaches for
encouraging minority youngsters to scientific careers. Yet his
encounter with the Afrocentrists has sidetracked him into a new line of
work, one that has produced a series of painstaking and impeccably
documented refutations of Van Sertima, Adams, and their friends
among the melanin scholars.69 His attempts to convey these findings
have met, however, with severe frustrations from an unexpected
quarter.
When Ortiz de Montellano and some of his colleaguesall of
them nonwhite (he is himself Mexican-American) or female
attempted to present a critique of Afrocentric pseudoethnography at a
recent meeting of the American Anthropological Association, their
proposal was rejected. The tone and manner of this rejection suggest
strongly the heavy hand of a new orthodoxy among cultural
anthropologists, one that pretends to atone for the putative sins of
ethnography during the era of Western imperialism and colonialism by
abandoning the Western prerogative to judge the narratives of non-
Western peoples in the light of objective knowledge and scientific
methodology. All of this further confirms the rueful judgments of
Robin Fox, cited in an earlier chapter, concerning the decadence of a
subject that was, at its height, not only scientifically important but
intellectually bold and morally brave.
In the face of all this, one is left with a melancholy question. Can
the university, as the ultimate locus of scientific education, find the
courage to stand up to Afrocentric (and related politicized) nonsense
to the degree necessary to sustain and enhance the possibility of
scientific careers for young black Americans? We dont know the
answer: it is certainly not clear that it will be yes. Far more likely, in
fact, is increased agitation for black-separatist science to be
institutionalized alongside the standard variety, in a ghastly parody of
affirmative action. This has already and notoriously occurred in a few
places. And: on the basis of its record to date, we foresee that the wider
academic left, with its relativist and perspectivist intellectual
armament, its snide postmodern insistence that all narratives are
equally valid and equally invalid, is likely to cheer the latter process
on. Let us hope that all this is bad prophecy for the ultimate response of
higher education (at least as regards science), to AIDS extremism,
animal rights agitation, and Afrocentric fantasies. It must be a dim
hope, however, tempered by fear for the consequences of
nonfulfillment.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

Why Do the People Imagine a Vain

Thing?

Why do the Nations so furiously rage together? And why do the

People imagine a Vain Thing?
PSALM 2 AND MESSIAH NO. 36

El sueo de la razn produce monstruos.

CAPTION TO PLATE 43 OF GOYAS CAPRICHOS

Our sense of historical motion is no longer linear, but as of a

spiral. We can now conceive of a technocratic, hygienic utopia
functioning in a void of human possibilities.
GEORGE STEINER, IN BLUEBEARDS CASTLE

How shall we read the Psalmist? Let us attempt it dialectically. The

rage of nationsand of races, social classes, genders, creeds, and
pariahs of all sortsis the hammering pulse of history. That rage and
the horrors that boil forth from it evoke all manner of imaginings.
Some few of those may honor us as a species: they are the recurrent
dreams of peace, justice, universal dignity, the power of human reason
allied with kindness. The others are indeed vain: they are the flux of
racism, of rabid nationalism, of misogyny, of religious fanaticism, and
of superstition. These vanities feed in turn the rage that generates them,
and inflame it further with malignity.
What of the sleepor is it the dream?of reason? Goyas
epigram has always had a double meaning. When reason sleeps, the
monsters of human pride, foolishness, malice, and cruelty emerge to do
their worst. Thus it may be read: a maxim of the Enlightenment. Yet it
is true that utopian fancies that flow from an unjustified esteem for the
power of reason can also breed monsters of violence, vengefulness, and
tyranny, monsters the equals of those overthrown in reasons name. The
judicious historian will always have both interpretations at his elbow,
for history has abundant examples of each. Yet this book is
unashamedly an affirmation, in one particular context, of the first.
Thankfully, we note that this is the one that seems to have Goyas
explicit endorsement: Imagination deserted by reason creates
impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the
mother of all art and the source of all its beauty. The same, we insist,
holds true of science, or at least of that complex human activity
deserving of the name. United with reason, imagination is indeed the
mother of scientific insight.
We have been censorious, though not, we hope, unfairly so, toward
critiques of modern science that have gained currency and popularity in
contemporary scholarship, particularly among those thinkers and
theorists who advocate sweeping, egalitarian changes in the economic,
social, racial, sexual, and ecological mores of our culture. We
emphasize again that the underlying grievances that ignite their anger
are by no means wholly imaginary or capricious. Racial bigotry and the
deification of greed have clogged cities with ruined men and women,
and have come near to turning crime into a rational career choice for
tens of thousands of young people. Casual and unremarked brutality
against women is a continuing fact of our culture as, of course, of
others. Easy as it is to mock the self-righteousness of scholarly
bluestockings in their academic sinecures, we must keep in mind the
real fear of violence that attends the life of any woman, no matter how
privileged. The crime of rape remains a brutal expression of power, not
only over women, but over othervanquishedmen.1 Matters of
sexual taste and private choice that a true civilization would cede
ungrudgingly to individuals remain subject to an intolerance that is
sometimes expressed as violence and is never less than humiliating.
And when we contemplate the mess and the real, if invisible, dangers
that are at times created by the frenzied processes of industry and
technology, we are once again face to face with the mordant power of
greed, with the shortsightedness that can offend the landscape in aid of
a few more years of cheerful annual reports to stockholders.
Yet, as far as this book is concerned, we find ourselves in the
position of scorning groups seemingly alert to such outrages and
committed to doing something about them. This may seem a moral
paradox. We justify it by insisting that the rage of nations, even that
nation of persons pledged to constructing a just and ethical society, can
and does beget its own vain imaginings. We have seen how easily a
redemptive vision can slip free of reason (at least as regards science,
one narrow but crucially important realm of thought) to produce
monsters in the form of theories and conjectures as sillyand possibly
as dangerous, tooas they are self-important.
These are so far, we admit, monsters of a lesser kind. They have
tortured to date no more than the logic of discourse, and they skulk
mainly in a secluded academic setting. We shall argue subsequently
that matters of greater importance are ultimately at stake; but even if
that were not so, we believe that the health of a culture is measured in
part by the vigor with which its immune system responds to nonsense.
Such an immune response, although sometimes slow in the mounting,
has been the richest heritage of the Enlightenment. We are vain enough
to hope that our effort might form a small part of such a response.
We see it as an act of fairness (although, no doubt, our subjects
will take it as evidence of deepest hostility) to inquire into the
underlying sources of the antipathy toward science and its standards of
validity that we have traced and attempted to refute. We are trying, in a
sense, to turn the tables on the cultural constructivist theorizers whose
ideas we find so unconvincing. What, we ask, are the social and
ideological roots of their antiscientific theorizing? If their ideas were
sustained by decent arguments and adequate evidence, this would be an
unfair attack ad hominem. But we have been at pains to answer those
ideas on their own ground; and we think we have shown that they are
ill-founded and obtuse. What follows is meant then, candidly, not as
additional refutation, but as a sincere effort to comprehend why such
shaky doctrines have been embraced so enthusiastically by individuals
who are by no means stupid and who have often, as it happens, made
penetrating analyses in other areas of social and political thought.
Our society has had an astonishingly general mood swing: the
tonality of the new state goes far toward explaining the antagonism and
suspicion toward science that we have undertaken to examine. The last
of this chapters epigraphs, that of George Steiner, comes close to
epitomizing it. Steiners darkly brooding essay In Bluebeards Castle
examines the fate of optimistic humanism in an age that has proved
merciless toward hopeful illusions. Steiner notes the great paradox
bedeviling our civilization and tormenting its most sensitive spirits.
Humanismpost-Enlightenment Western humanismhas created, in
the face of all the narrow particularism and dogmatic absolutism that
has eternally plagued our species, an ethic of universal justice and
universal tolerance. Moreover, history attests to the value of the
humanistic view in tokens that go far beyond sentiment. The Western
culture that grows from, extends, and intensifies the Enlightenment
proves itself and displays its uniqueness most impressively by its
ability to fathom nature and natures regularities, to a depth
unimaginable in prior civilizations. Western culture converts that
knowledge into the instruments, conveniences, and perceived
necessities of daily life with a swiftness that far outspeeds the
traditional pace of historical process. Even for the gloomy Steiner, the
impulse to celebrate the unique range, depth, and virtuosity of Western
civilization and its antecedents runs so strongly that it leads to
language that must enrage a dedicated multiculturalist: But it remains
a truismor ought tothat the world of Plato is not that of the
shamans, that Galilean and Newtonian physics have made a major
portion of human reality articulate to the mind, that the inventions of
Mozart reach beyond drum-taps and Javanese bellsmoving, heavy
with remembrance of other dreams as these are.2
The counterargument to this sentiment is, alas, all too obvious.
Whatever may be said in praise of Western civilization and its most
exalted visions of itself, it cannot be seriously maintained that the level
of bloody-mindedness, selfishness, and cruelty found therein has fallen,
overall, very much below that characteristic of the species in other
times and places or embedded in other modes of social existence. One
need only to open the daily papers for confirmation. In the meantime
the instrumentalities available to our worst impulses have grown
unimaginably lethal, and clearly we have no more power than any other
culture to nullify those impulses. The stench of history is ever present
in our nostrils; it rises from the killing fields on which Napoleon fought
his fellow tyrants, from Gettysburg, from Sedan, Verdun, Stalingrad,
Dien Bien Phu. Most especially it rises from Lidice and Dachau and
Treblinka, from the Gulag, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The same
science that Steiner celebrates for its articulation of human reality is
the accomplice, sometimes the eager accomplice, of these atrocities.
Yet the mind framed by the ethic of the Enlightenment has no
natural path of retreat. The very clarity of vision, the insistence on
calling things by their true names, that defines us as heirs to the
Enlightenment makes it impossible for us (that is to say, the honest
among us) to disguise the rancid corners of our history under gaudy
banners of nationalism, religion, progress, or justice. The very scope of
the knowledge we have insisted upon rules out a comforting ignorance.
We are bound to Enlightenment valuesthe universality of moral
principles, the sanctity of individual volition, a detestation of wanton
crueltyand yet we have no choice but to indict the very civilization
that begat those values as it goes careening through time leaving pain,
death, bewilderment, the wreckage of aboriginal tribes and of rain
forests in its wake.
But again, the terms of that indictment can be spelled out only in
the language of those values. This, and not the mincing word games of
the deconstructionists, is the true aporia. The criminal is also accuser
and judge. Again, Steiner:
And it is true also that the very posture of self-indictment, of
remorse in which much of educated Western sensibility now finds
itself is again a culturally specific phenomenon. What other races
have turned in penitence to those whom they once enslaved, what
other civilizations have morally indicted the brilliance of their
 own past? The reflex of self-scrutiny in the name of ethical
absolutes is, once more, a characteristically Western, post-
Voltairian act.3

(Hardly post-Voltairian at that. Consider Montaigne. 4) Today, of

course, the cultural mood described by Steiner has crystallized in a
politically strident form, under the name of multiculturalism or some
such. It is the driving impulse of much of the intellectual self-
abnegation that parades as theory in many university departments of
literature. A deconstructionist is not a parasite but a parricide. He is a
bad son demolishing beyond hope of repair the machine of Western
metaphysics.5 It is clear that the father-victim of this ritual murder
wears the vestments of the Enlightenment and that he has been tried by
the light of his own stern, universalizing code.
When we examine how this mode of self-abnegation, sustained by
the very code of values it deplores, deals with Western science we shall
not be surprised that the leading sentiment is revulsion and retreat. This
is not a new theme; the notion that science is poisoned knowledge, the
fruit of a Faustian bargain, has been with us for a long time, and its cry
has more often come from reactionaries than from progressives. The
idea that we should back away from science, set its temptations and
gratifications aside, is at least as old as Frankenstein or Rappacinis
Daughter. For good or ill, however, science and scientists have been
largely deaf to these remonstrances. In ethical argument, they can give
as good as they get. For every bomb, there is a vaccine; for every
ICBM, a CAT-scanner. Yet those driven to throw off the guilt of
Western man by the pricklings of Western conscience find the answer
unsatisfactory. New evils pile on oldChernobyl, Bhopal, the threat if
not the assurance of an excessive greenhouse effect in the atmosphere
or of a growing ozone hole, possibly bored by our air-conditioners and
hair sprays. New epidemics add to the toll of old, familiar ones.
Science seems potent to destroy, but appears ineffectual as a savior.
Science, as the term is now understood is, moreover, uniquely
associated with Western culture. It arose only once, an invention that is
unlikely to be repeated in detail no matter how many other cultures and
peoples eventually come to produce fine scientists. In a hundred years,
the greatest theoretical physicist in the world may well be Maori or
Xhosa by descent; heor she, as may well be the casewill
nonetheless be a Westerner in the most important aspect of his or her
intellectual temperament. The argument may be made, pace Steiner,
that even Mozart is outdone by the polyrhythmic splendors of the
Javanese gamelan or by the sonorities of Indian classical music. No
s u c h possibility exists for the multiculturalist challenging the
intellectual hegemony of Western science, aside from pure falsification
as is practiced, say, by the most deluded Afrocentrists or New Age
mystics. No other civilization bears a like gem in its crown. Thus
science becomes an irresistible target for those Western intellectuals
whose sense of their own heritage has become an intolerable moral
burden.
But science will not allow itself to be abandoned. It is too
powerful and, when all is said and done, too interesting. Therefore it
must be exorcised, castrated, at least at the symbolic level, if no
material recourse is available. The natural viewthat science gives
power to those who understand and underwrite it precisely because it
sees accurately into the workings of natureis, of course correct; but it
sorts ill with the temperament of the would-be exorcist. Thus the drive,
fragmented and incoherent but energetic, to impeach science not
merely as amoral handmaiden of the wickedly powerful but as flawed
at its conceptual roots. The moralistic imagination always demands
such an iconographic degradation of that from which it wishes to turn
away. Science cannot be seen merely as dangerous; it must also be
revealed as false in some essential way.
It is actually this moralism, rather than any solid philosophical
commonality, that unites the various critiques we have examined.
Moralism has the bad intellectual habit of excusing itself, on its own
grounds, for weak and shoddy arguments. Moralism of this kind is, for
instance, untroubled by the fact that its denunciations of Western
scientific epistemology are composed on word processors whose very
existence derives from a subtle understanding of the universe encoded
in quantum mechanics, perhaps by a writer whose indispensable
spectacles depend upon the lightvia the science of opticsof
Enlightenment. It lives very comfortably with all such contradictions.
At the level of broad cultural inclination and underlying
symbology this analysis accounts, we think, for much of what we have
been examining. Yet it would not be amiss to give a more specific and
local view of the phenomenon, one centered in the particulars of
American intellectual and political culture and paying some attention,
without condescension, to the psychological generalities involved. We
pass, in other words, to a less lofty and more concrete level of
investigation than that which preoccupies George Steiner.
As we examine the process by which the current hostility to
science within the academic left was incubated and nurtured, we find
ourselves naturally turning to the 1960s. Commentators such as Roger
Kimball have placed heavy emphasis on the sixties as the breeding time
for all sorts of malfeasance. He sees the confrontational style of
campus multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and postmodernist
advocates of nontraditional scholarship as having descended from the
attitudes and tactics of the sixties student left, namely, Students for a
Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
and other activist groups that engaged in militant civil rights and anti
Vietnam War politics. There is some justice to this charge. The rude
tactics of sixties campus militancypicketing, sit-ins, a generalized
rhetoric of suspicion and scorn toward the nominal academic hierarchy
are recycled in our day when questions of making the curriculum
more diverse or initiating womens studies programs become hot
issues. Many veterans of the sixties are still on hand as leaders or
advisors to radical undergraduates, and indeed, to those who know
these folk well, the trace of nostalgia is strong and unmistakable.
On the other hand, at a higher level the styles of intellectual
radicalism have diverged from what was current in 1968. Racial
separatism, which in that era was reluctantly accepted by the white left
as a temporary tactical necessity, has long since hardened into a major
component of the so-called politics of identity. In this respect, the term
integration, which was, after all, the inspirational watchword of the
sixties civil rights movement, is now scorned in all politically
fashionable quarters. Feminism has become institutionalized, and,
while neither its emotional tonality nor its concrete agenda has changed
appreciably over two decades, it has evolved a large body of densely
esoteric doctrine informed, to a large degree, by developments in
literary theory and to a lesser extent by psychoanalysis. Marxism, as
understood by the American left, has mutated from a revolutionary
program driven by a strong sense of economic forces, to a
philosophical impulse that mixes with other strainsfeminist,
deconstructionist, Foucauldian, Lacanian, ecological, and so forthto
create the eclectic brew of postmodern radicalism. In the parlance of
the academic left, radical scholarship formerly meant historical
research into the catastrophes of capitalism or the careful tracing of the
interlocking relations among economic, political, and institutional
elites. Nowadays it has devolved, typically, into a murky theoretical
project, a sort of abstract, unempirical sociology preoccupied by
semiotics and burdened by portentous overinterpretation.
Environmentalism itself, first mooted in the sixties as an essential
political concern, has become entangled in a body of mystical or quasi-
religious impulses carrying it progressively further from scientific
discourse and leaving it vulnerable to such dubious dogmas as goddess
worship, a living planet, and animal rights. Many radicals schooled
in the politics of jobs and wages, voter registration, opposition to the
military draft, reproductive rights, and health care are put off by this
turning away from practical, real-life concerns on the part of academic
leftists, and ascribe it, with considerable scorn, to the leisure of the
theory class.
Despite such ideological shifts and revisions, there remains a
strong resonance between the style of the contemporary academic left
and the wider cultural mood of the sixties, the so-called
counterculture. This goes beyond sharply defined points of political
doctrine. It has to be remembered that in the sixties the culture of
rebellion and alienation was far more diffuse and generalized than can
be captured in the manifestos and position papers of self-identified
radical sects. The mood of the period was one of widespread disdain for
all kinds of middle-class norms and expectations. Sex, drugs, and rock
n roll was as important a rallying cry as any antiwar slogan. This
enthusiasm persists in our day, of course, but now it is chiefly found
(among whites) in a completely apolitical and somewhat racist youth
culture, quite segregated from the intelligentsia. Even so, as an index of
the academic mores of the late sixties, it demonstrates why it has
become possible for professors of English or art history to abandon
ostentatiouslyall concern with the treasures of the high culture and to
celebrate popular culture and its vulgarities quite without apology.
The sixties were also notable for a fascination with non-Western
modes of thought. The drug culture of the period was tied to an eclectic
mysticism into which all sorts of esotericaauthentic or bogusfrom
a variety of cultures were enthusiastically imported. Astrology
flourished alongside Tantric Buddhism, and the fictitious shamans of
Carlos Casteeda echoed the vaporous posturings of Timothy Leary. Of
course, on the literal level much of this was sternly rejected by the
solemn ideologues of the serious left; but, inevitably, there was
leakage from one subculture into the otherthe legendary Woodstock
Festival, for instance, incorporated both. Thousands of radical students,
some of whom went on to become todays radical professors, toyed
with these more colorful heterodoxies. What prevailed was a kind of
generous latitudinarianism, a willingness to accept all sorts of oddball
ideas at least provisionally, and if necessary, whimsically. Implicitly,
what had taken shape was an informal conspiracy of the heretical, a
community of defiance toward the conventional, a range of wacky
doctrines linked mainly by the glee they all took in spitting in the face
of received opinion. The progeny take the appropriate form, in our
time, of slogans such as in your face, and of the continuing fad for
legible clothing whose legends are flamboyantly meaningless.
This inclination to regard heterodoxy, per se, as intrinsically
valuable persists in the oppositional subculture of our own day, in its
attitudes and in its choice of philosophical godfathers. One can
attribute the popularity of relativism, for instance, as much to the traces
of omnivorous credulity that linger from the sixties as to the dialectical
skills of influential thinkers. Likewise, the skepticism of
deconstruction or Foucauldian determinism is but the obverse of the
generalized will-to-believe, the impudent credo quia absurdum, of the
hip radical (or radicalized hippie) counterculture.
We might also point out that, seen apart from its characteristic
idiosyncracies, the supposedly novel mood of the sixties was, in its
scatterbrained way, part of a long tradition of rebellious, Romantic
individualism that goes back at least as far as Rousseau. Some of the
monumental figures in the history of this sensibilityBlake,
Wordsworth, Goethe, to name a few of the giantswere notable for
their rejection of the worldview suggested by the orthodox science of
their day. To them, science seemed to be both the servant and the
sponsor of a blinkered and incomplete vision of human possibility and
spiritual destiny. It suggested closure and limitation, where open-
endedness of vision was desired. It emphasized abstraction and
schematism while rigorously censuring the subjective. It hardly needs
saying that this perception, justified or not, was sufficient to create a
lasting breach between the Romantic impulse in our culture and the
scientific temperament. Thus the tatterdemalion romanticism of the
sixties, deficient as it may have been in enduring poetry, was heir to a
long-standing tradition in which science and the modes of thought
sustaining science are seen to epitomize a small spirit and a stunted
imagination. They had their personification in the figure of the nerd,
now known as the techie. By contrast, pretensions to cosmic insight
and mystic wisdom tend to be given every benefit of the doubt. Were
Madame Blavatsky still with us, she would be a winner on the student-
sponsored lecture circuit of our colleges.
Obviously, this generalized susceptibility to unorthodoxywhich
may, of course, manifest itself as radical skepticismdoes not
coexist happily with a conventional respect for the competence and
authority of the sciences. Indeed, even the most playful mock-belief in
astrology, the Tarot deck, or the I-Ching usually betokens a certain
restiveness under the doctrine that science, as typically practiced, is the
most reliable way of learning about the universe. While it would not do
to overstate this point, we can detect in modern-day challenges to
science, whether from humanists or sociologists, a strong echo of the
whimsies of the sixties. The current phenomenon is, in our view, rather
more obnoxious because it has entirely lost its playfulness and now
parades as serious scholarship and solemn theory.
This thesis is strengthened by the fact that many of the academics
who are most actively hostile toward standard science are affiliated,
formally or informally, with areas of study that first arose during the
sixtieswomens studies, ethnic studies, environmental studies, and so
forth. In their very origins, these subjects were linked as much to the
oppositional culture of the sixties as to the formal traditions of research
and scholarship. It is not surprising that a whiff of the sixties mentality,
of LSD mysticism, shamanistic revelation, and ecstatic nonsense, still
clings to them in some places. All this ties into a wider observation
about the psychological underpinnings of the rebellious or oppositional
intellectual stance. We put it forward as a general rule that the
indulgence of one kind of heterodoxy betokens a further susceptibility
to eccentric or highly speculative ideas. In the eighteenth century, for
instance, the nascent political radicalism of groups such as the
Freemasons was often associated with esoteric magical doctrine;
historical figures like Cagliostro and the Rosicrucians attest to this.
Earlier in this century, radical intellectuals, their patrons and
sympathizers, mingled with theosophists, spiritualists, Jungians, and
the like. A predilection for the unconventional almost always reigns
among rebellious spirits. Science, nowadays the most stable and
unassailable convention of them all, presents an irresistible challenge
to such contrary and defiant natures. It stands as a metaphor for the
smug self-assurance of the ruling culture and the stability of its
institutions; therefore it must be brought low.
This analysis, please note, is not intended as an indiscriminate
sneer to be employed against all social radicalism. We are merely
taking note of what seems to be a general fact of social psychology, a
fact that ought to enter into our understanding of the strengths and
weaknesses of radical thinking.
We must consider the sadly ironic role that valid criticism of
science and technology has played in fostering a far more dubious
philosophical antiscientism. Much that has been said and written
against the dangerous and foolhardy abuse of technology and the
distortion of scientific knowledge is true and wise. (The reader who has
remained with us can easily create his or her own catalog of such vices,
needing no help from us on this point.) Nor is an emphasis on the social
roots of the perversion of science pointless or particularly misleading.
One neednt be a mystic or a radical antiempiricist to associate
technologically generated disaster with the acquisitive propensities of
industrialism. The industrial worlds catalysis of population growth and
its consequent need for resources attacks the forest and pollutes the
ocean; its drive for profits adds toxins to the air long after it has
become clear that this is in the end a stupid thing to do. It is
disheartening to note, however, that such well-founded criticism often
leads further to bizarre and shoddy theorizing about the epistemic
status of science, as if allegiance to such doctrines could somehow
magically generate the power to halt the technological misuse of
scientific knowledge. Even more discouraging is the fact that among
the thinkers who most clearly and accurately emphasize the dangers
into which technocratic society falls, there are quite a few who lose
perspective and begin to expound dubious positions concerning modern
science, excoriating it for nonexistent philosophical flaws. Of course,
the ultimate result is likely to be that they will cruelly subvert their
own hopes.
In the current situation, however, the strategy of thumbing ones
nose at science has few immediate costs. This, after all, is a society that
remains saturated with superstitions of the grossest kind, and debased
by a ubiquitous credulity. Any trip to a supermarket checkout-counter
tabloid display will confirm this. Neither an occupant of the White
House nor a celebrated literary scholar runs much risk of damage to
professional standing simply because of a belief in astrology. 6 It would
be inadmissibly cynical to suggest that the antiscientism of the
academic left is just a ploy, playing to the ignorant in the fashion of
New Age hucksters. On the other hand, the pervasive superstition of the
culture does not stop short at the gates of the university. Many college
newspapers, after all, run astrology columns without the slightest irony.
It is quite possible that the criticisms of science we find unwarranted
and, indeed, perverse are instigated by the mere propinquity of so much
silliness in the general cultural atmosphere.
Furthermore this high-handed attitude toward science and toward
rationality itself has its instrumental uses within the narrow world of
left-wing campus politics. It is far easier to put up with Afrocentric
nonsense, for instance, if ones immediate tactical reasons for doing so
are seconded by a philosophical relativism that scorns the supposed
canons of objective knowledge and shrugs indifferently at the
abandonment of logic and evidence. If one believes that science is
nothing but metaphor, then one need have no qualms about substituting
for it other metaphors. These last points, however, are relatively minor.
There are more telling factors deriving from the psychology of intense
political commitment. We have in mind the propensity of ideological
systems, however noble their ultimate aims, to induce a totalizing
mentality in their adherents.
Totalism, as we would define it, is the impulse to bring the entire
range of human phenomena within the rubric of a favored doctrinal
system. It erects ideological categories which are viewed as primary,
privileged, and comprehensive. Totalism of this kind has been the
historic tendency of organized religion as we have known it since the
end of classical paganism. Religion, however, has no monopoly in this
respect. Marxism, to take one inevitable example, is just such a
totalizing system, especially as amplified and interpreted by a
monomaniacal thinker such as Lenin. Hard-core Marxists assume that
all history and culture, all social phenomena in fact, are to be explained
by the so-called laws of historical development set forth by Marx and
elaborated by certain privileged successors. Marxists assert that the
economic order of society, as reflected in class relations, underlies
everything and that all other aspects of social lifemorals, law, art,
political principles, and all the restare derivative, mere
epiphenomena.
The exact sciences too are subject to this scheme. Indeed, they are
regarded as lesser branches of a master science unknown to all but
Marxists, the science of dialectical materialism. Dialectical
materialism, on this view, has the power to oversee and indeed to
rectify all the other sciences. Supposedly, it is uniquely situated to
escape the illusions in which ordinary science, because of its historical
and social situation, may become entrapped. Marx himself took these
ideas quite seriously and was eager to sit in judgment on scientific
questions despite his modest and sometimes absent competence to do
so.7 This sorry tradition was carried on by Lenin in a number of
notorious pamphlets;8 under Stalins regime in the Soviet Union it was
at least a factor in the wretched Lysenko affair, which crippled Soviet
biology for decades.
This is not to accuse all modern scholars who describe themselves
as Marxists of such simplistic and reductive attitudes. Nowadays,
Marxism is a rather flexible conviction, and many versions avoid the
occasional crudities and intellectual barbarities of Marx himself.
Nonetheless, old habits die hard, and the notion that science is a fallible
part of the cultural superstructure of bourgeois society is reborn as
social constructivism among Marxist, quasi-Marxist, and purportedly
non-Marxist intellectuals. Here too, however, behind this piece of
doctrinal refurbishment, there stands the habit of totalizing thought.
Sociologists qua sociologists are hardly immune to it. Who would not
want to see his own particular discipline regarded as the master
science?
Leaving aside the vanity of sociologists, which, on the scale of
human folly, is hardly worse than that of physicists, the totalizing
instinct is found to be firmly embedded in some current modes of
radical thought which in other respects have put themselves at a
distance from traditional Marxism. Feminism, at its most aggressive
and confrontational, is obviously one such system of thought. As
totalizers, radical feminist theorists are easily a match for the most
rigid Marxist. The lurking idea behind this presumptuousness seems to
be that the situation of women in society cannot be viewed merely as a
problem, susceptible to pragmatic amelioration. Rather, it must be
seen as foundational, as having cosmic dimensions, and thus it can be
redeemed only by a wholesale reconstitution of the entire social fabric.
Radical feminism in this vein not only makes a claim on received
notions of equity and justice but appropriates the whole notion of
justice to itself. It demands to be recognized as morally
omnicompetent. It follows that no institution of the existing order may
be viewed as free of the original sin of sexism, for to exempt anything
from the surveillance of the feminist ethic is to deny the absolute
priority of feminist values.
Since science in particular is incontestably central to
contemporary society, it too must be made to run the gauntlet of
feminist censoriousness. The historical fact is that science, as a social
institution, has perpetrated systematic injustices against women, most
notably the unforgivable injustice of excluding them until recent
decades. This is a genuine grievance which even the most down-to-
earth feminist could not overlook. The radical feminist critique of
science, however, goes far beyond a demand for redress on this point. It
insists, as we hope we have demonstrated, on a reconstitution of
science at its most basic conceptual level, so that it may be
incorporated, as no more than a subsidiary element, in the moral and
ideological universe of militant feminism. We should not, in theory,
expect this attitude to produce a dispassionate and well-reasoned
evaluation of science and, as we have seen, the most widely known
attempts at feminist analysis of sciencethose of, say, Harding, Keller,
and Harawayare all undone intellectually by the moral ferocity that
motivates them in the first place.
The radical ecology movement is another site of the totalizing
instinct. Radical ecology, as embraced by the extreme wing of the
European Green parties and such American groups as Earth First!, is
hard to understand if we think of it as a mere political doctrine. It is
more an embryonic religion, combining syncretically a genuine fear of
environmental degradation with all sorts of sentimental, mystical, and
ecstatic attitudes toward an idealized nature. As time goes on, it is
increasingly impatient with utilitarian arguments giving priority to the
safety, health, and well-being of human beings. Rather, it deifies the
natural in a way that condemns implicitly most of what humanity has
been up to since the end of the Neolithic period. Humanity is seen as
worthy only to the extent that it takes its place in a static, unchanging
world as one species among millions, undistinguished by any special
moral worth. Characteristically, ecological radicals call for a drastic
reduction of the earths human population, not so much to make life
healthier and more fulfilling for the people remaining as to create new
space for all those species shoved aside by the heretofore exponential
growth of humanity.
Such a dogma, outwardly gentle but horribly fierce in its inward
essence, is impatient with the analytical and empirical style of science.
Deep Ecology, as this tendency is often called, insists on facing nature
with an intellectual passivity wholly inconsistent with the scientific
attitude. Such a creed is by its very content a totalizing one. After all,
its devotees cannot head off into an isolated wilderness all their own;
its goals can be met only through the universal acquiescence of
mankind. It is entirely inconsistent with pluralism. Therefore it comes
to see the tradition of scientific thought as an impiety, a stiff-necked
refusal to merge with nature on natures own terms. Couched in such
language, these doctrines are not open to rational refutation, for the
entire tradition of rationality is under the deepest suspicion. On the
other hand, rank superstition is entirely acceptableif it comes garbed
in the vestments of nature worship.
Deep Ecology as such may not have many adherents. Its doctrines,
however, have emotional appeal to a range of people who are disgusted
by the evils of contemporary industrial civilization, by the filth and
environmental destruction it creates. The formulations and
catchphrases of ecological radicalism have infiltrated with remarkable
efficiency the language of more moderate environmental groups and of
oppositional politics generally. Distrust of science is naturally borne
along with such terminology; as some of the slogans of Deep Ecology
become platitudes, its antiscientism and antirationalism are quietly
absorbed into the intellectual bloodstream of oppositional discourse.
This tendency is reinforced by the degree to which the language of
ecological radicalism tends to echo the New Age clichs of popular
culture, and by its insistence on the futility of mere human reason,
which chimes well with the radical skepticism of the trendy
postmodernists whose own totalizing pretensions we have already
explored.
To this point our argument has implicitly rested on a certain
benign and, perhaps, slightly condescending assumption. We have
tacitly assumed that there is in sober fact no real contradiction between
science as such and the social and political goals (in their nonfanatic
forms) of the various oppositional movements we have studied. It
would therefore seem that in adopting a view of science as an enemy or
as a corrupt institution in need of deep ideological reform, these
movements have created a bogeyman visible only to themselves and
have wasted time and intellectual energy. Moreover, in the rather
parochial environment of the university at least, they have irritated and
annoyed people who initially bore them no ill will; they have made
skeptics of potential allies. There will be no large-scale conversion of
scientists to the point of view of these critics. What is more probable is
that the scientific community will increasingly come to feel that since
the criticism is asinine, the moral claims of those who advance it must
be negligible. The recent antipathy toward science of various social
radicals is not only pointless but self-defeatingor so it would seem.
We must, however, qualify this view, even at risk of seeming
professorial. It is true that on most of the larger ideological issues,
science as such has little to say. Whether or not capitalism must always
retain an exploitative aspect, whether or not it is possible to construct a
viable and humane socialist society, are not, for example, questions on
which scientific knowledge has much bearing. On the other hand,
science has been in some crucial respects a positive source of support
to oppositional movements. It has dispelled much of the nonsense that
sustained sexual and racial discrimination, in spite of early attempts to
ally it with the forces of repression. It has given powerful evidence of
the ineluctable importance of environmental consciousness in the
application of technology.
All the same, there remains a small residue of political issues on
which the conclusions of science have some bearing without
necessarily flattering the hopes of passionate reformers. These issues
are another source of friction and they motivate, beyond the factors we
have already considered, the hostility that exists. The examples are not
numerous but they are important.
If we examine feminist doctrine, for instance, we find it split, for
the most part, into two camps. On the one hand, there is what is usually
called essentialist feminism, which hews to the idea that there are
indeed innate differences between the sexes in emotive and cognitive
style and in ethical predisposition. Of course, it is assumed that the
feminine side of humanity, its good side, has been cruelly neglected
and suppressed, and that the purpose of feminism is to restore it to its
merited preeminence. On the other hand, antiessentialist feminism
insists that there are no innate psychological differences of any
importance, and that to posit their existence is not only chimerical but
invites the continued repression and exclusion of women. The grounds
for this fear are obvious; myths of essential difference have provided a
host of societies with their justifications for mistreating women and
cruelly circumscribing their lives.
Not unexpectedly, there have been attempts to synthesize these
apparently conflicting views, most commonly by invoking a species of
social constructivist doctrine in order to argue that while there is no
congenital difference between men and women on the psychological
and behavioral level, the strictures of a sexist society induce children to
grow up thinking and behaving as though there were, whence women
end up being more admirable in their ethical and philosophical outlook
even as they are intolerably degraded. This putative reconciliation, an
attempt to have it both ways, is precarious, unstable, and vulnerable to
its inherent and quite obvious contradictions. (Feminist philosopher
Sandra Hardings work provides a cautionary example of the pitfalls.)
Most feminists sooner or later fall to one side or the other.
Unfortunately, both factions eventually run up against hard facts that
are less than encouraging to them. Science, to the extent that it is the
bearer of these bad tidings, becomes the focus of the resulting hostility.
To consider the essentialists first, we observe that they form the
subculture from which goddess worshipers and believers in a supposed
golden age of matriarchy are usually drawn. Of course, insofar as
science is generally hostile to superstition, it grants little
encouragement to devotees of the goddess and offers a worldview by
and large antagonistic to its mystical whims. Matriarchalism, by
contrast, need not be overtly superstitious or antirational. However, to
the extent that it relies on historical precedent, it is doomed to be
disappointed by orthodox historiography, anthropology, and
archaeology. There is not much that the matriarchalists can say in
answer short of a retreat, acknowledged or otherwise, into the misty
uncertainties of wishful thinking.9
The case with antiessentialist feminism is more nuanced and
ultimately more important. Antiessentialism is the common creed of
most feminists involved in serious intellectual life in or out of the
academy. The reasons for this should be fairly obvious. The doctrine of
innate mental differences between the sexes holds obvious perils for
women embarked on scholarly careers in a society that until recently
barred them from such roles. It would be natural therefore to assume
that the relevant branches of sciencebehavioral and cognitive
psychology, neurophysiology, and so forthare the allies and
benefactors of the antiessentialists precisely because they have done so
much to dispel the myths of female intellectual limitations. Because of
their insights, one cannot, these days, deny the capacity of women for
any kind of intellectual or creative activity without revealing oneself as
an ignoramus.
Paradoxically, however, this kind of science figures high on the
antiessentialist-feminist enemies list. The problem is the absolutism
the totalizing inclination we spoke of abovethat afflicts even the
highest intellectual circles of feminism. The fact is that the behavioral
sciences have given an inordinate amount of time to the question of sex
differences and their origins. By and large, the notion of hard-and-fast,
rigid, categorical differences has been shown up as an absurdity, which
ought to give feminists all the ammunition they need for political
arguments in favor of equality of opportunity. On the other hand, there
is evidence, strong to begin with and growing stronger over time, that a
number of perceived behavioral differences between males and
females, especially at an early age, are in fact innate and congenital.
This inference is not easily impeached as the warped product of sexist
science, since many of the researchers who came up with it were, in
fact, women who would have been happy to reach the opposite
conclusion. It is, moreover, a fact whose political implications are
generally negligible. In no way does it imply the inadvisability of
complete legal and social equality between the sexes. Nonetheless
feminists who fear the lurking dangers of essentialism are outraged and
frightened by this innocuous work.
Apparently, no evidence, however strong, is to be allowed to dent
their conviction that all but the obvious anatomical differences between
men and women are socially constructed. This proposition amounts
to a credo, a virtual article of faith, a test, in certain circles, of ones
loyalty to feminist principles. As a result, an extensive and dogmatic
feminist literature has grown up around the genes and gender
question and the trick of finding farfetched arguments for evading these
harmless but (to the absolutist mentality) displeasing truths has grown
into a minor art form. The relations between the scientific community
and militant feminism have been, to say the least, soured by this
curious episode.
In the environmental movement we find another example where
scientific standards are distrusted because of their capacity to bring
ideologically unwelcome news. We are not speaking here of ecological
extremismDeep Ecology, spiritualized ecofeminism, animal rights
absolutism, and the likebut rather of certain tendencies to be found
even within mainstream environmentalism. Historically, of course,
environmentalism arose precisely because of fervent and conscientious
advocacy on the part of ecologists, climatologists, geophysicists, and
other scientists who were the first to perceive the dangers into which
unthinking abuse of the environment and spendthrift attitudes toward
our finite resources were leading us. Distinguished scientists with
unimpeachable credentials are still among the most prominent figures
in the movement, and, moreover, the issues that most intensely excite
environmentalist fervorthe greenhouse effect, for instancewould
be invisible in the absence of acute scientific work. Still, a rift exists, if
only embryonically, between science as a mode of thought and
environmentalism as a political force.
The problem is that environmentalism, like any political
movement, needs a credo, a stock of beliefs to form the core of its
motivations. Those upon which environmentalism draws are reasonably
obvious and certainly valid as a general rule. A dismissive attitude
toward environmental threats is, after all, symptomatic of a psychotic
break with reality. All the same, when we get down to cases we find
that many rank-and-file environmentaliststhe sort of people who
flock to Earth Day celebrationsunderstand environmental issues in a
way inconsistent with the scientific temperament.
To a scientist functioning in his professional capacity the
questions that arise in connection with ecological issues are subject to
the same methodological constraints as any others. Most of these
questions cannot be answered with anything like perfect confidence. As
scientists, we cannot say, for instance, that a runaway atmospheric
greenhouse is the certain result, within a fixed number of years, of
continued combustion of fossil fuels, and that it will inevitably bring
about ecological catastrophe. We simply know too little, and what we
know is imperfect and provisional. Complexity and its attendant
uncertainty is part of the scientists everyday intellectual environment
and he is well aware of his predictive limitations. It may well turn out
that the greenhouse scare was a false alarm (which does not excuse us
from taking it very seriously and considering public policies that, for
the sake of prudence, assume the worst).
Environmental fervor, on the other hand, requires a large degree of
subjective certainty. It will impose a strict binary logic on the
probabilistic estimates of cautious scientists and convert a theorists
tentative hypotheses to dire inevitabilities. Most environmental
activists know that the greenhouse world is upon us; scientists know no
such thing, although they may fear it. Perhaps the activists are right
when they convert suspicions to certain conclusions, in the sense that to
do otherwise would leave them dispirited and unmotivated. On the
other hand, there inevitably will be false alarms every now and then;
every once in a while apologists for industry or government or the
military will turn out to have been right, from a scientific point of
view. The most likely result, unfortunately, is not an intellectually
flexible environmental movement that finds ways to live with
uncertainty and is capable of revising its agenda as new scientific
information emerges. Rather, given the emotional intensity of political
commitment, it is probable that organized environmentalism will, by
stages, come to reject the exasperating caution of scientific thinking
and move closer and closer to the shallow gratifications of dogmatism,
a position as silly as that of the know-nothings who are confident that
no man-made activity can change the world or Gods plan for it. In a
sense, the prediction of an environmentalist rejection of science has
already been borne out by the recent success of the most radical and
doctrinaire form of ecological thought and the celebrity of its
demagogic proponents. To those of us for whom environmental science
is of desperate importance, this is a deeply melancholy conclusion.
We have a final thought to offer, unfortunately a pessimistic one.
In a world of recalcitrant evils, the would-be reformer is most likely to
share the fate of Sisyphus and to live with frustrated hopes and pitifully
transient achievements. One of the saddest facts of life is that
frustration rarely begets wisdom; but it frequently ignites irresponsible
fantasy. In the final analysis, the curious and mostly regrettable
phenomenon we have been talking aboutthe anti-scientism of
intellectualsmay be yet another instance of this general principle.
 CHAPTER NINE

Does It Matter?

There is today a broad, generational, postmodernist current of

irrationalism with its roots deep in the seductively brilliant
thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which is at its core elitist and
antidemocratic, even though that thought is often absorbed only in
the flattened, simplified version popular among todays students
and intellectuals. This is the cloven hoof of earth mother
communitarianism, the need for the organic, the authentic feeling
and for passion as against the cool patriarchal logic of the
broad Left. This trend includes the rejection of science as well as
scientistic fetishism. And, of course, it is permeated by utter
contempt for the warp and woof of genuine democracy, for
discussion, give and take, compromise, and elected representative
bodies.
BOGDAN DENITCH, AFTER THE FLOOD

Discounting the Critics

Science is, above all else, a reality-driven enterprise. Every active

investigator is inescapably aware of this. It creates the pain as well as
much of the delight of research. Reality is the overseer at ones
shoulder, ready to rap ones knuckles or to spring the trap into which
one has been led by overconfidence, or by a too-complacent reliance on
mere surmise. Science succeeds precisely because it has accepted a
bargain in which even the boldest imagination stands hostage to reality.
Reality is the unrelenting angel with whom scientists have agreed to
wrestle.
Yet those who insist that science is driven by culture and by
politics, by economics, by aesthetics, even by a species of understated
mysticism, are not for that reason alone to be dismissed as
wrongheaded. On the contrary, these assertions, if driven is replaced
by influenced, come near to being truisms. Great difficulties arise,
however, when such insights are wielded as ideological blunt
instruments in the name of demystification, or to nourish the
political vanity of factions and the academic vanity of scholarship more
notable for its novelty than for its profundity. A serious investigation of
the interplay of cultural and social factors with the workings of
scientific research in a given field is an enterprise that requires
patience, subtlety, erudition, and a knowledge of human nature. Above
all, however, it requires an intimate appreciation of the science in
question, of its inner logic and of the store of data on which it relies, of
its intellectual and experimental tools. In saying this, we are plainly
aware that we are setting very high standards for the successful pursuit
of such work. We are saying, in effect, that a scholar devoted to a
project of this kind must be, inter alia, a scientist of professional
competence, or nearly so.
This is not a dictum that sits at all happily in the minds of those
thinkers whom this book has criticized. They read it as an ideological
demand, emanating from the arrogance of a priesthood that denies the
intellectual fitness of anyone who is not an initiate. Such resentment is
quite understandable on an emotional level. But as logic, it is of little
avail. The critiques of science and the political misuses of it that we
have evaluated vary greatly in perspective and argumentative strategy.
Yet common to almost all of them is a failure to grapple seriously with
the detailed content of the scientific ideas they propose to contest, and
with the scientific practices they wish to impeach.
This alone, aside from other defects of reasoning and evidence,
aside from the routine intrusion of special pleading, almost invariably
guarantees that the results, however aggressively proclaimed, will lack
accuracy and specificity. Such work founders because it treats science
as a token of the illegitimacy of the current social order, rather than as
a coherent body of ideas requiring the most exacting attentiveness.
Scientistsaside from a small cadre of ideologically motivated
sympathizersgenerally ignore these critiques, not out of blind
defensiveness of their own turf, not out of snobbery, but because the
critics simply sail so wide of the mark, and have so little to say about
the actual ideas with which scientists contend every day of their
working lives.
Science, from the most cloistered and abstruse to the most directly
applicable, has taken little notice of recent critiques of its underlying
conceptual basis. Instead, it has tended to be vaguely receptive to the
political right-thinking to which the critics lay claim, but without
examining the details. There has been no rethinking of fundamental
ideas, or of how these are to be articulated to experimental and
observational reality, in response to recent criticism by feminists,
sociologists, and postmodern philosophers. Occasionally, the opinions
of such thinkers are voiced in scientific journals of the more general,
informal sort (as opposed to specialized research publications).1 This
illustrates an admirable intellectual hospitality, orsometimesa lazy
and weak-minded one. But it should not be misread as general
acceptance or influence on actual scientific practice. Science as such
molecular biology, solid-state physics, polymer chemistry, nonlinear
differential equations, and the thousands of other specialtieswould
have taken the same course over the last couple of decades had no
feminist philosopher or postmodern social critic ever addressed a line
to scientific matters. To put it bluntly, the probability that science will
sooner or later take these critiques sufficiently to heart to change its
fundamental way of knowing is vanishingly small.
This is not to say that criticism of the social implications of
scientific practice has been without effect. In a few areas of applied
science, medicine, and technology, practices have been rethought and
modified on the basis of specific critiques (for example, of workplace
safety monitoring), a good many of them having a left-wing
provenance. Some of the modifications have been useful; some, as we
have seen, are less than justifiable on logical grounds. In any event this
must be distinguished very clearly from revisions at the level of
concepts and fundamental methodology. There, despite the hyperbole
and the earnest attempts of ideologically charged enthusiasts, the effect
is imperceptible.
Thus we come round once more to the question of why the
critiques of science generated by the academic left should be taken
seriously enough to require an honest rejoinder from science. If, as we
believe, science will not, in any serious way, be influenced, deflected,
restricted, or even inconvenienced by these critics and those they
influence, why should their work draw more than passing comment
from anyone outside that mutual admiration society? Why, in fact, have
we troubled to worry about it? From the broadest point of view, we
worry, and believe that scientists as well as lay persons well disposed
toward intellectual progress should worry, because unanswered
criticism must in due course have effects. We worry for the reason
articulated by Arthur Potynen, for example, among many others who
have begun to ask this question:
Those attempting to ignore Post-modernism are many: for
example, the natural sciences and business departments often hope
that the affected, yet essentially harmless, humanities will remain
isolated and irrelevant. But if power is the essence of all human
endeavors, then can science escape being labeled willful and
coercive? Can business be anything other than rapacious? Can
either science or business continue to function in a political
culture that assumes them to be oppressive? (Emphasis added.)2

Those who choose to do so may dismiss this remark as the carping

of one to whom business as usual may be the most sacred of values.
The epigraph of this chapter, a cri de coeur from Bogdan Denitch, a
life-long socialist of unswerving faith, fully demonstrates that such
misgivings do not necessarily go hand-in-hand with a benign attitude
toward business. A similar complaint is heard from the left-wing
social theorist Alan Chalmers:
I am by no means alone in viewing social trends in the
contemporary world with dismay and alarm. The gulf between rich
and poor and between developed and undeveloped countries
widens, the environment is destroyed, and the threat of
annihilation looms. The social and political problems facing us are
urgent and vital. I do not think this cause is helped by construals
of science as a capitalist male conspiracy or as indistinguishable
from black magic or voodoo.3
Plainly, one neednt be in any sense a conservative to view the
antiscientism of the academic left with deepest apprehension. One
needs only to have paid some attention to it, to have understood its
meanings, deep as well as superficial, to be concerned.

Academic Recognition and Fairness

The issue of academic recognition derives, we admit, from what some

will descry as academic priggishness. Much of the work we have cited
has been received with enthusiasm in certain academic quarters, where
trendiness in the humanities and social sciences combines with
identity politics and with the residue of Marxist intellectual totalism
that persists among leftist thinkers. Paradoxically enough, in the United
Statesthis bastion of free-market capitalism and reflexive hostility to
socialist ideassuch enthusiasm is usually enough to guarantee
success and even celebrity in the narrow world of the academy. The
critics whose work so disturbs us will, in one sense, have the last laugh.
For the most part, they have made it to the upper rungs of the academic
ladder, from which no rejoinder, however well founded, will dislodge
them in any likely future. Nor will the richest charitable foundations
cease to support and honor them.
Most of the science-critics with whom we have dealt in this book,
for instance, have high positions in such notable universities as
Princeton, Berkeley, Brown, MIT, Rutgers, and the CUNY Graduate
Centerand, if we allow some British examples, Oxford and the
University of Edinburgh. They do not struggle in outer darkness: many
of them are influential, politically as well as intellectually. We shall
not illustrate this point with a list of the chairs, fellowships, and
academic titles to which they lay claim at those institutions, but the
facts are a matter of public record, and readers so inclined can easily
satisfy themselves that most of our subjects, far from struggling as
assistant professors, hanging on by their fingernails, are near the
summit as regards academic prestige and seniority. Moreover, they
enjoy that status principally by virtue of the work we find so
unsatisfactory. Since we are hardly alone in such judgments, as we have
tried to show, this fact raises serious questions about the presumed
intellectual meritocracy of the academy.
It seems clear to us, in fact, that on the whole the academic lefts
critiques of science have enjoyed an astonishing free ride. Most
evaluation of this work has come, so far, from scholars whose own
ideological commitments are strong and whose scientific backgrounds
tend to be deficient. It has been shielded, we suppose, from more
skeptical treatment for a number of reasons. First of all, its egalitarian
posture has won it the benefit of the doubt from prospective hostile
critics whose own political sentiments run along the same lines. A
critical response to particular feminist assertions, for instance, poses a
problem for well-intentioned academics, many scientists among them,
on whom the general moral claims of feminism exert a strong, positive
influence. There is a reluctance to dissect them with the same rigor that
might be applied to work that is not put forward as part of a wider
struggle for justice. We have repeatedly run into this attitude on the
part of left-wing humanists, in particular, who are willing to overlook
the inconsistencies and evidentiary inadequacies of anti-science
critiques in part because, as nonscientists, they are imperfectly aware
of those flaws, but more importantly because such work strikes them as
courageous and pathbreaking in its political ambitions. To these
sympathizers, the very act of putting on the table questions about the
competence and objectivity of science, about its complicity with the
injustices of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, is praiseworthy in and
of itself; nagging doubts about the competence and fairness with which
this is done are easily deferred.
This attitude is seconded by a frame of mind that derives from
envies, rivalries, and resentments that have long beset academic life.
Humanists and sociologists alike take a certain pleasure in the notion
that the mighty principality of the exact sciences, with its arsenal of
laboratories and observatories, its inexhaustible sources of funding, its
imagined stentorian voice in public policy, its intimidating intellectual
mystique, is now itself put on the bench for demystification. They are
eager to find virtue in any analysis that claims to have accomplished
this trick. Its novelty alone insulates it from severe questioning.4
Moreover, as many of those questions would themselves require a
reasonably deep knowledge of scientific particulars, it is far from clear
that humanists and sociologists are even able to frame them. On the
other hand, they are not immune to the flattery implicit in claims that
the perspectives of postmodern literary theory or radical social theory
have brought to light certain aspects of, shall we say, theoretical
physics or evolutionary biology to which the scientists themselves were
heretofore blind! They are correspondingly uneager to subject such
claims to skeptical scrutiny, especially in light of the painful fact that
to exercise it, they would have to acquire expertise in a field they have
studiously avoided.
More than once we have been told by Y, the eminent professor of
English and cultural critic, that Xs critique of science shows her to be
intimately familiar with some specific technical subject. On looking
into Xs work, however, we seem to find a great deal of psycho-talk, a
good deal of literary language, and a glaring absence of knowledge of
the supposed subject. In this case Ys wish has clearly been father to
the thought. Likewise, we have been told over and over again that the
keen methodologies of contemporary literary analysis leave up-to-date
literary critics uniquely placed to analyze the rhetorical strategies and
semiological underpinnings of scientific treatises. This claimit
amounts to an unquestioned truth in some circleshas, however,
remained entirely unsupported. We have never seen it illustrated with
reference, for example, to a paper on the instability of induced
magnetic fields in high-temperature superconductors. We doubt we
ever shall. Nonetheless, it remains an effective sop to the vanity of
contemporary literati.
At the same time, we find that scholars who are eager to praise
cultural and political critiques of science are reluctant to take into
account the (admittedly rare) actual responses of scientists to this work.
Having, as they see it, reduced the scientific community to an object of
study, they are quite unwilling (despite their repertory-theater feeling
for the organism) to allow the specimen to wriggle free of its new
restraints. Their logic is that any objections on the part of scientists are
tainted, prima facie, by self-interest and special pleading. It is never
taken into account that the same defects might afflict the critiques
themselves. In any event, this kind of exclusion serves the further
purpose of acquitting the humanist and social-scientist enthusiasts of
recent science criticism of the tiresome chore of learning the specifics
of the biology, chemistry, physics, or mathematics being criticized.
In sum, we are accusing a powerful faction in modern academic
life of intellectual dereliction. This accusation has nothing to do with
political correctness or subversion; it has to do, rather, with the craft
of scholarshipa craft that has always had consequences,
independently of the behaviors of individual scholars. We allege that
eagerness to praise a certain spectrum of work has disarmed skepticism
and careful critical attention. Political sympathy has combined with
professional vanity to give undue weight, prestige, and influence to a
decidedly slender body of work.
As we have observed, substantial careers have been made and
salvaged on the basis of it, to the relative detriment of scholars whose
own work is more competent but less ideologically intoxicating. As
scientists, we observe this fact with some dismay. We know how hard it
is to achieve even a modestly successful career in science or
mathematics. In addition to native talent and appallingly hard work
over many years, it requires unremitting self-scrutiny and attention to
the possibility of error. There is the constant risk, unknown outside of
the sciences, that the rewards of ones patient effort will vanish beyond
recovery because a colleague announces the same result a few weeks
before ones own work is ready for publication. Moreover, there is
rarely any lasting payoff for mere self-promotion, or for the ability to
talk a good gamealthough, as in life generally, such talents dont
hurt.
To top it all, for the typical faculty scientist, teaching
responsibilities, charged as they are with the necessity to cram huge
amounts of hard technical information into a few dozen lectures every
semester, afford little opportunity to play to the grandstand. The
displays of classroom charisma to which many humanists are frankly
given, and that make campus celebrities of the cleverest,5 are simply
out of place in most science courses. Science has its staginess and its
celebrities, to be sure, but the style is different. Papers, for example,
are never literally read. Delivery is almost ostentatiously casual,
even at the great international meetings. It is a gaffe not to credit ones
graduate students and collaborators, in great detail. Emphasis is
supposed to be upon the idea, the data, the structure, the equations:
forceful or rhapsodic presentation is taken to be amateurish. To be sure,
this is as much a style as is the page-turning and premeditated diction
of the humanists; but in science it is the findings that are supposed to
enchant, not the person offering them. The classroom offshoot of this is
that even a young and inexperienced science teacher, following the
example of his mentors, does not rhapsodize on the grandeur of, say,
the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, in which simple, single graph the
life, death, and evolution of all the stars is displayed or implied: that
grandeur is supposed to be grasped by the student who is prepared, by
prior study, to grasp the implications of such a plot. Some, but not
many, are.
In view of this, we can hardly be indifferent to the spectacle of
major academic honors and emoluments accruing to work whose lack
of substance and whose reliance on special pleading and appeals to
political solidarity seem perfectly obvious. The situation is the more
provoking in that, when all is said and done, the central appeal of such
work is the pretext it provides to disparage the natural sciencesto
dismiss their astounding achievements as so much legerdemain on the
part of a ruling elite. Would that we couldbut we cannot
recommend practicable remedies for this situation that are also simple
and fair. The best we can do, for the moment, is to bring our point of
view as honestly as possible, but also as forcefully, to the attention of
the academic and scientific community.

A Schism in the Academy?

Emeritus professor of sociology Lewis S. Feuer has recently written:
If multiculturalists succeed in acquiring control of the curriculum
and if they then institute a kind of force-conditioning of students
with the literatures and ideological apologia for backward
peoples, the consequence for the universities will be quite other
than they foresee. Science students, with their essential
preparatory studies growing all the time, will finally rebel against
the humanities requirements, and for all practical purposes, the
colleges of science will secede from their traditional association
with the liberal arts college The free marketplace of students
and professors will, unless politically intimidated, decide for those
institutions loyal to scientific values.6

Even if one judges Feuers vision to be unduly pessimistic, it must be

admitted that he has his finger on something. The mood he detects is
real, if unfocused. The National Association of Scholars, antiradical if
not in any simple way conservative, may intend to exploit it.7 One of
its principles seems to be that in campus disputes over political
correctness and the like, among the things to be done is get the
scientists on your side.8
The immediate subjects of Feuers iremulticulturalistshave
not, under that description, received much attention from us, aside from
our remarks concerning Afrocentric science. But it would be
disingenuous to pretend that our subjects and his dont have a large
overlap. Left-wing critics of science such as Stanley Aronowitz, Sandra
Harding, and Helen Longino salt their analyses heavily with appeals to
the presumed superiority of multicultural epistemologies. If their
views become part of the general intellectual baggage of the academic
left, a process we believe is well advanced, then Feuers scenario, or
something resembling it, becomes very much more likely. Departments
of chemistry or electrical engineering, other things being equal, have
little to say, and will continue to have little to say, about the kind of
multiculturalism that infuses the reading lists of courses on the
modern novel with works by Third World women. If, however, the
same academic factions are seen to be agitating for a similarly
politicized view of science, one that draws heavily on the critiques we
have analyzed above, academic life, already fractious, is likely to
become considerably more belligerent. The chemists and engineers are
quite likely to insist on a say about such agitation, once it is their own
courses, rather than the vague metaphors of a discipline, that are being
proposed for purification or diversification.
On the whole, it is regrettable that serious students of the exact
sciences rarely encounter, in their training, courses in the history of
their disciplines that pay close attention to social, cultural, and political
factors. Such knowledge is usually acquired ad hoc by those scientists
who take a particular interest in it. But, as Feuer points out, the burden
of essential preparatory studies is enormous, and is continually
growing. Time is precious to a young scientist, and the optimal career
path leads to the frontier of the subject as quickly as possible, leaving
little opportunity for historical rumination. Nevertheless, much as one
might lament the rarity of historically oriented science courses (and we
join in that lament), in our judgment their absence is, on the whole,
preferable to a hypothetical curriculum that requires such courses but
hands responsibility for them over to historians and sociologists whose
views derive from the science critiques of the academic left. We should
be very surprised if our opinion is not shared by the vast majority of
our colleagues, including some whose political outlook is
unequivocally egalitarian and feminist.
The humanities, as traditionally understood, are indispensable to
our civilization and to the prospects of living a fulfilling life within it.
The indispensability of professional academic humanists, on the other
hand, is a less certain proposition. Academic scientists have acceded to
it, and properly so, out of respect for their colleagues as well as a deep
concern that the great traditions of Western humanism should not be
buried under the shabby detritus of popular culture and philistinism.
The current stir over the postmodern style of humanist scholarship
invokes the possibility that this body of sentiment may erode.
Scientists are not the only skeptics, or even the most important ones;
nor is such skepticism, we insist, necessarily a badge of right-wing
leanings. Many of our wholeheartedly left-liberal, humanist colleagues
are increasingly embarrassed by the spectacle of flamboyant celebrities
in their respective fields playing such fantastic tricks before high
heaven as make the angels weep. How far things would have to go
before the disenchantment becomes severe enough to provoke a
genuine crisis in university life is anyones guess. It is, however,
obvious that to the extent that the various misconceptions about science
we have examined become part of the general stew of postmodern
assertions, the irritation of scientists will grow increasingly acute.
This tendency will be amplified because of the activism inspired,
to a great degree, by left-wing antiscientism. In this regard, we might
mention the raids on laboratories by animal-rights extremists, the
successful attempts to inhibit funding of innocuous studies on the
relation between heredity and sociopathic behavior and to close down
scientific meetings on the subject, the assaults on evolutionary
biologists for their advocacy of a not particularly doctrinaire
sociobiological perspective, and the endless string of nuisance lawsuits
brought by Jeremy Rifkin and his allies. All these actions have had the
support, or at least the sympathy, of a substantial faction of the
academic left. To most if not all scientists, however, they smack of the
deepest anti-intellectualism. It would not be going too far to label them
as superstitious outright. Yet they dovetail rather neatly with the
emerging dogmas of the left concerning the innate fallibility of
Western science.
Our speculations on the growing antipathy toward academic
radicalism on the part of scientists are influenced by a certain sense of
how the humanities and the arts enter into the actual lives of our
scientific colleagues. On the whole, scientists are deeply cultured
people, in the best and most honorable sense. The image of the
scientific monomaniac, of science departments devoted to a naive
scientism,9 is, to say the least, highly misleading. The range of
knowledge of music, art, history, philosophy, and literature to be found
in a random sample of scientists is, we know from long experience,
extensive, and in some fortunate venues enormous. Most of this
learning has been acquired, of necessity, at odd moments here and there
not through formal or systematic study. As humanists, therefore,
scientists are autodidacts. One obvious consequence of this fact is to
undercut the argument that traditional humanities departments, in their
role as educators, are indispensable bearers of the great treasures of our
cultural heritage. There are other, albeit less efficient, routes to
erudition.
Let us be blunt: having come so far, we have little left to lose. If,
taking a fanciful hypothesis, the humanities department of MIT (a
bastion, by the way, of left-wing rectitude) were to walk out in a huff,
the scientific faculty could, at need and with enough released time,
patch together a humanities curriculum, to be taught by the scientists
themselves. It would have obvious gaps and rough spots, to be sure, and
it might with some regularity prove inane; but on the whole it would
be, we imagine, no worse than operative. What the opposite situation
a walkout by the scientistswould produce, as the humanities
department tried to cope with the demand for science education, we
leave to the readers imagination. This little exercise in one-upmanship
is, of course, utter fantasy. But it does point to something real. The
notion that scientists and engineers will always accept as axiomatic the
competence and indispensability for higher education of humanists and
social scientists is altogether too smug. Other sentiments are clearly
astir. How these matters play out in American intellectual life will
depend, to some degree, on the ability of the non-scientists to rein in
the most grotesque tendencies in their respective fields.
We are not loath to propose that some, at least, of the critiques of
science we have addressed must be counted among such grotesqueries.
If they retain their current ascendancy among humanist radicals, it
seems likely that the gap between C. P. Snows two cultures will
become a rigid barrier, maintained by mutual disesteem between
scientists and their would-be critics. The sense of unity, of sharing in a
common, though diverse, enterprise, will certainly diminish. The
comity, the sense of mutual respect, that has been one of the graces of
university life, compensating for its difficulties and penuries, will
atrophy. At the same time, the tendency of the university to devolve
into a cluster of rival satrapies, each eager to serve exclusively its own
clientele, will be amplified. The thinning of the curriculum into a list of
narrow, mutually incomprehensible specialties will be accelerated.
Feuers suggestion of a formal secession of the sciences from the
radicalized world of no-longer-liberal arts may seem overblown. It
would be premature, however, to rule it out.
 The Debasement of Science Education

It is self-evident that active and interested citizenship in this country,

the frame of mind that follows public affairs and stands ready to
participate to some degree in ongoing debates, requires a usable
knowledge of science and technologyat the very least, a seat-of-the-
pants ability to track disputes concerning science and public policy. In
a republic that counts Franklin and Jefferson among its founders, and
whose culture heroes prominently include the participants in the
Manhattan Project and the entrepreneurs who have endowed every
desktop with its own computer, one might hope that such intellectual
endowments would be commonplace, if not ubiquitous. All too
obviously, this is not the case. Outside the community of professional
scientists and engineers, understanding of even the most elementary
science is thin and vague. Indeed, most of the population, including its
iconic voicesthe television entertainers who comment on and not
infrequently distort the newsseems to take a perverse pride in the
self-abnegation Im no rocket scientist.10 The mass media have
acquired a habit, deriving equally from fear and laziness, of presenting
scientific matters in the most stripped-down terms; and they bail out in
terror when any kind of nuance or subtlety threatens to intrude on the
story. If scientists have acquired a quasi-sacerdotal status in the
popular imagination, it is not because they have pressed strongly for
such recognition, but because so much of the population finds it more
comfortable to declare itself awestruck than to acquire the knowledge
that might dissipate the awe.
Like it or not, the responsibility for a remedy to this palpable and
increasingly dangerous defect in the foundations of republican
existence lies principally with the university. For all its failings, and
despite its supposed economic decline relative to the other Western
industrial powers, the United States remains unique in its ability to
provide a large proportion of its young people with some kind of higher
education. In the face of all just criticism of the race and gender biases
of this society, the fact remains that a bright and energetic young
person who is determined to get a college education can probably get
one, no matter how marginalized or disempowered his or her social
background. The campus culture not only shapes the maturation of
most middle and upper class youth; it functions in a similar way for a
large proportion of the underclassat least those of its young people
who manage to get through adolescence without major damage and
with some hope left intact.
There is, however, an inevitable corollary to the praiseworthy
demographics of American undergraduate education. The majority of
students entering college are inadequately prepared for it across the
board. In science and mathematics they are as a rule wretchedly
prepared, so that undergraduate teaching responsibilities in the sciences
involve a great deal of remedial work. Even worse, many students in
lower-level science courses are not only ignorant of science but are
ignorant as well of the fundamental frame of mind, the attitudes, the
intellectual rhythms needed if one is to acquire useful knowledge.
Thus, for better or worse, university scientists, as a body, have, in
addition to their research goals and their duty to train new generations
of scientific professionals, the responsibility of inculcating basic
scientific literacy in an enormous number of students who are
unprepared, recalcitrant, and skeptical about the whole business.
Superb teaching may overcome these obstacles; but excellence of that
kind, like excellence of any kind, is rare and appears only fitfully in the
population of college teachers.
In the face thereof we now confront the emergence of a new body
of criticism of science, one that holds, when we get down to cases, that
Western science is in fundamental ways blind or blinkered, that it is
corrupted by its subtle bigotry and by its servile accommodation of
power, that it is the artifact of a worldview liable, any day now, to be
overthrown. The critics, by their stance, their language, and the terms
on which they engage the scientific views they criticize, offer another
dispensation as well. They declare, in effect, that parallel, even superior
ways of knowingthose of feminism or postmodernism or deep racial
wisdomare available for the evaluation of scientific questions, and
that from the heights of such alternative epistemologies the newly
enlightened can discern the fundamental errors and weaknesses of
traditional sciencewithout troubling to become well informed about
the substance and the inner logic of the scientific enterprise. Thus, with
the aid of an unrelenting moralism that cloaks itself in political and
social virtue, a moralism seconded with reigning platitudes of activists
and cowed, beleaguered college presidents alike, the critics enthrone a
doctrine and a methodology for thinking about science that is at once
scornful and ignorant.
We have been at pains to say why we think most of this is sheer
puffery, and why the residue of genuine insights is negligibly small.
Nevertheless, the odor of rectitude, as it is now defined in many areas
of university life, can insulate a swarm of silly errors from criticism
indeed, it can silence the critics. Remarking on Robin Foxs critique of
the extreme relativism prevalent among ethnographers and cultural
anthropologists, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano has this to say:
I think that Fox is understating the amount of political correctness
 in certain fields. For example, the American Anthropological
Associations last meeting had multiculturalism as a theme and
ran a number of inane PC sessions on the topic. However, it
rejected a session I proposed on Multiculturalism and
Pseudoanthropology. This session included the dean of Olmec
and Maya studies and the only African-American Meso-American
archaeologist, critiquing Ivan Van Sertimas idea that
Nubians/Egyptians were here at the time of the Olmecs, which is
received wisdom among African American circles The
foremost authority on Nubia was going to talk on The Afrocentric
Misuse of Nubia; Eugenie Scott was going to give a case
study of how multiculturalism is being used in the Berkeley
schools; and I was going to give my talk on melanin. This problem
is not just in anthropology. I have found extreme reluctance and
avoidance of the topic of the Portland Baseline Essay and
Afrocentric pseudoscience generally at the AAAS Education
directorate, National Science Foundation Science Education,
and even at the National Academy of Sciences Committee on
National Science Standards.11

As we have noted, the criticism of science that we find so thin and

unconvincing has been the making of a number of academic careers. To
some degree at least, the attitudes it reflects and encourages have
radiated into the general atmosphere of academic life. We encounter
increasing numbers of students, graduate as well as undergraduate,
whose primary contact with science has been through the work of
feminist or cultural constructivist critics, and who are convinced,
moreover, that they have imbibed doctrines that are wise (as well as
stylish). Even more sadly, we have run into bright and ambitious black
students who have become emotionally committed to some of the most
risible Afrocentric mythsthose of the black Egyptian superscientists,
for instance, or of white, government scientists having created HIV
secretly, in the laboratory, as a tool for genocide. We know of
mathematics departments where the most straightforward pedagogic
housekeeping taskthat of giving placement exams to insure that
students are assigned courses commensurate with their background and
abilityis complicated by the insufferable intervention of ideologues,
who insist that such tests are inherently culturally biased or gender
biased, an intervention whose probable consequence is to make life
miserable for the poor undergraduates who are shoehorned, courtesy of
their would-be benefactors, into courses they arent ready to handle.
At the level of primary or secondary education, where even in
more halcyon times science education was often a stepchild, matters
stand even worse. The inanities of Afrocentric science now have free
rein in a number of urban, predominantly black school districts. Of
course, simple charity urges us to see this as a desperate, if horridly ill-
considered, response to a desperate educational and social situation; but
that situation is not to be ameliorated by the teaching of nonsense. As
Ortiz de Montellano points out, however, many professionals in science
education, who should, presumably, see the danger of this situation and
take action to defuse it, sit on their hands and even devise relativistic
excuses for letting it continue and worsen. It is never easy to estimate
how much of this nonresponse is due to ignorance of what is really
going on and how much to simple cowardice.
Even more startling, however, is the attitude of school authorities
in some upscale, politically progressive districts. Eugenie Scott,
executive director of the National Center for Science Education, reports
(despite the apparent disapproval of the American Anthropological
Association) that multicultural antiscientism fulminates in the
progressive mecca of Berkeley, California. 12 According to Scott, some
Berkeley textbook committees are now trying to bar history and social
science books that assert (innocuously, one would think) that Native
American populations arrived in this hemisphere from Asia toward the
end of the last ice age. Native American myths, they point out, contain
no such assertions; why, therefore, should the confabulations of
scientists be privileged over the narratives that the indigenes tell
about themselves? It is ironic that Scott, an anthropologist who has
devoted her recent career to fighting the influence of presumably right-
wing scientific creationists, should now find herself trying to ward
off similarly appalling nonsense that is backed by a large faction of
what now passes for the left. In some ways, it is even more frightening
nonsense. For, whereas the well-educated folk of the Berkeley
community were eager to take up arms against the intrusion of
creation science into the schools, and insisted that the facts of
evolution be taught without apology, a certain hesitancy gripped many
of them when scientific nonsense intruded under the banner of
multiculturalism, convoyed by the new relativism of the postmodernist
thinkers.13
 The Inanition of Public Discourse

If, as seems obvious, scientific and technical issues will become

increasingly and urgently relevant to public policy in the decades
ahead, how well will such matters be debated in this country?
Obviously, we cannot hold high hopes. The historic record of American
education in making the general public conversant with basic science
has always been poor, except for a brief flurry of serious effort in the
post-Sputnik era. Superstition, whether about astrology, ancient
astronauts, or alien abductions, has always had easy and profitable
going. Fringe medicine and outright quackery, long endemic in
American culture, have taken on new and ominous vigor, thanks in part
to the dizzily rising costs and increasing impersonality of ordinary
health care. The contrast between the incomparable virtuosity of
professional American science and the general, public disregard of
scientific substance, whether from complacency or hostility, grows
ever more pronounced. It is one of the great social paradoxes of history.
Those on the left of the political spectrum are concerned, and
rightly so, about the abridgment of democratic procedure and debate
inherent in a system that delegates all responsibility for important
policy matters to a technocratic elite. These misgivings are
manifestations of a significant dilemma. How are such decisions to be
made in a manner that takes serious and accurate account of technical
and scientific matters without abrogating popular rule or reducing it to
a mere symbol? Dozens of pressing issues, from AIDS to alternative
energy sources, are complicated by this question. How do we permit a
wide public to have a serious voice in such deliberations without
inviting in gullibility, ignorance, and mere faddishnesswithout
inviting in the PR operators? The easy answer, of course, is to educate
the great mass of citizens in such a way that thinking accurately about
science is possible, if not quite second nature. The countervailing
obstacle, however, is that widespread ignorance of science in and of
itself prevents the development of an educational system that could
dispel it.
It is clear that many of the left-wing thinkers whose ideas we find
so unsatisfactory are, at bottom, obsessed by the same essential concern
as the one we are now trying to address. How do we democratize
scientific and technological decision making? How do we give the
heretofore powerless some measure of control over the decisions,
technological and otherwise, that so profoundly shape their lives? The
unfortunate trajectory of academic radicalism has carried it to a
position where this question is not so much answered as dispelled by a
fog of philosophical conceits. Andrew Ross, Sandra Harding, Simon
Schaffer, Stanley Aronowitz, Carolyn Merchanteven Jeremy Rifkin
are all, in their various ways, insisting that the mountain come to
Mohammed. In this they are seconded by a squad of educational
bureaucrats. Since science seems so difficult, so inaccessible and
intimidating, when viewed on its own terms, the radical critics take the
daring step of insisting that science cant be what it claims to be, no
matter how well it backs up its claims with experiment and applied
technology. Outwardly or covertly, they insist on supplanting standard
science with other ways of knowing that, by their very nature, will be
inclusive and welcoming. This is the true agendum of Hardings
strong objectivity, of Rosss insistence that New Agers and others on
the far fringes of science will rally us against the omnivorous monster
of technoculture.
The generosity of the democratic impulse when conjoined to this
mode of thinking is instantly perverted to a kind of inverse intellectual
snobbery, a form of coarse populism that is willing to exile the most
stringent kinds of analytical thought and jettison the reliable devices of
empiricism in the name of opening the doors of knowledge and driving
the haughty priests of science from the temple. The theorizing done on
behalf of this project is thus a species of incantation, a ritual rather than
an argument. It does not conceive the need to examine science closely
on the terms set by the logic of science because, in itself, that kind of
examination would concede too much to the temperament and mind-set
of the scientist. It would require precisely the kind of education, or
self-education, that the critics, in the name of some kind of popular
participation and empowerment, want desperately to prove superfluous.
A recent address by Carolyn Merchant gives voice to this
sentiment in a fashion that reveals clearly the characteristic
combination of earnest concern, wistfulness, and outright
superciliousness that marks recent leftist criticism of science.14
Drawing upon the misleading characterizations of chaos theory that
have controlled public consciousness of this topic, she further distorts
those second-hand characterizations in order to view it as a license to
abandon the predictive strategies of science, to ignore computers, in
favor of a warm, cozy, inclusive discussion in which all voices
especially those of the formerly disempoweredwill now have weight.
Chaos theory, she reasons, tells us that the predictive claims of science
have been ill founded; so why not abandon, or at least demote them, in
the name of communitarian solidarity and radical egalitarianism? Of
course, Merchants daydream ignores the simple reality that, popular
images to the contrary, chaos theory as an actual science does not
diminish the claims of science to provide accurate predictions, but
rather enhances and extends them substantially. One would have
guessed that a Berkeley professor, motivated to take an interest in such
matters and having had scientific training, could easily have discovered
the facts of the casethey are certainly readily available. But this
would not have sorted well with the egalitarian and ultimately pastoral
vision Merchant wants to vindicate. She seems to prefer a science that
is unsure and a little bit helplessit would be far more amenable to her
ideology.
Back-door utopianism, so characteristic of academic-leftist critics
of science, is a sad and, ultimately, a woefully impatient business.
Behind it stands a Romantic discontent that echoes perilously certain
sentiments that were once recognized as reactionary. How much it will
add, in the end, to the burden of outright superstition and ignorance that
has always plagued the American democratic experiment is difficult to
say. It is plain, however, that the underlying disaffection is hostile to
enlightenment as such, and not just to the Enlightenment. What is
chiefly discouraging about its new ascendancy in academic life is the
evidence it provides of a tradition of egalitarianism falling under the
sway of obscurantism and muddle. We do not need to convict the
paladins of the postmodern left of any particular superstitious
foolishness, in the ordinary sense, to notice that they have an appalling
tendency to condone such foolishness with a relativist nod and a
deconstructionist wink.
Above all, the net effect of all this is to debase still further the
already corrupt coinage of public debate. The damage wrought by
denatured language is all too apparent. Public health officials struggle
to gain the credibility that should rightfully be theirs, and have to fight
continually to be heard over a hubbub of voices stridently denouncing
the arrogance of Western scientific and materialist paradigms, and
offering to replace them with alternative modes of healing that
promise to make us better faster and cheaper than stodgy old M.D.s.
At the root of it all is an ancient amalgam of quackery and self-
delusion, but now, the fashionable shibboleths of postmodern academic
discourse have become available to array the old foolishness in up-to-
date scholarly language. Discussion of environmental questions is now,
at least to some degree, hostage to a rhetorical style and a technique of
public relations in which unrelenting ecobabble plays an increasingly
peremptory role. The locutions environment friendly and
environmentally sane cover a broad range of styles and practices that,
as we have seen, can be neither of those. This, too, is a language
fostered in large measure by the peculiar intellectual gamesmanship of
the academic left, and it is as often as not employed for purely political
purposes.
As we have seen, practical measures for making discussion of
scientific issues effectively more democratic by what should be the
straightforward process of extending scientific literacy are continually
subverted by the intrusion of identity politics into the pedagogy of
science. In the case of Afrocentric science education, the
phenomenon is nothing less than garish, although it remains strangely
immune to criticism. It is clear that black youngsters who aspire to
scientific careers will be in deep trouble if their early education is
dominated by the Afrocentrism espoused by Ivan Van Sertima, Hunter
Havelin Adams, and their co-workers.
The feminist critique of science is subtler and, superficially, less
provocative in style; but it may, ultimately, have even more widely
exclusionary results. Young womenor men, for that matterwho try
to embark on scientific vocations with the explicit aim of reconstituting
science along the lines advocated by Harding, or Haraway, or Keller, or
Longino, are on a course leading, we submit, to frustration and
disillusion. We are not imagining such young people: we encounter
them regularly in our classes!
Science does not work the way the critics say it works, and the
program of reforms mooted by the critics will turn it into something
other, and less than, science. Enthusiastic recruits to the cause of
feminist science will have to face this contradiction sooner or later
most likely sooner. They may then come to take the view, shared by
most women scientists of our acquaintance, that feminism, whatever its
strengths as a moral stance and a social program, is not a methodology
for doing science: it does not offer any privileged insights into
scientific questions. That will be their victory. But if they attempt to
hold fast to the most emphatic tenets of feminist dogmafor instance,
Sandra Hardings assertion that women cant be scientists under
the present order, because society constructs these as mutually
exclusive categories, and therefore that scientific practice must be
reconstituted along radical-feminist lines before women can
participate15they will quickly find themselves effectively excluded
from serious scientific work.
On the other hand, many women with scientific talent may not get
even that far. They will be discouraged from the outset by the litany of
the most prominent critics to the effect that science, as it is practiced,
i s innately antagonistic to women, that it reflects and embodies a
system of patriarchal domination and violent subordination of
nature. Thus, to the degree that this sort of thing actually happens,
feminism will find itself in the position of frustrating an original,
legitimate, and honorable feminist goal: that of augmenting the
proportion, as well as the absolute number, of women in science.
We must also note that the left itselfnot only the peculiar
ideological tribe we have dubbed the academic left, but the far
broader and deeper tradition of egalitarian social criticism that properly
deserves such a designationis, potentially, one of the ironic victims
of the doctrinaire science-criticism that has emerged, just as it has long
been the victim of the worst kinds of Marxist, Leninist, and Stalinist
cant. It is quite legitimate, for instance, to assert that socialist views, as
such, have a place in the important debates about environmental
questions. Without here endorsingor rejectinga socialist point of
view, we appreciate that it exists, that it is distinguishable from
alternative political visions, and that it has a certain force. The
underlying argument is that free-market capitalism, with its
enthronement of profit and its tendency to insulate crucial economic
decisions from democratic oversight, is, per se, an obstacle to changes
we should make in our uses of technology if we are to develop sound
environmental practices. In itself, this is a view that can be argued
intelligently and that cannot simply be dismissed without specific, and
historically informed, criticism. If, however, eco-socialists are forced
to carry the ideological baggage of the academic leftthe relativism of
the social constructivists, the sophomoric skepticism of the
postmodernists, the incipient Lysenkoism of feminist critics, the
millenialism of the radical environmentalists, the racial chauvinism of
the Afrocentriststhen they will, in effect, greatly accommodate their
opponents, and facilitate the rapid dismissal of their own soundest
points, since those will be embedded in a tissue of unscientific and
antiscientific nonsense. Scientists, and the scientifically well informed,
will simply not accept any form of socialism whose agenda include
the subversion of legitimate science.

The Role of Scientists

If a jeremiad is to be more than a prolonged lament, it should, by
custom, conclude with a call to arms, with a list of actions to be taken
by people of goodwill. Thus are the diagnosed evils to be remedied and
the disasters foreseen somehow avoided. Our list comes up, however,
disconcertingly sparse; and the actions we can recommend are, on the
whole, unheroic. We address ourselves chiefly to scientists, engineers,
physicians, and other scientifically well-informed people who are
members, by actual affiliation or by inclination, of the academic
community. What ought they to do, as formal or informal educators,
about the bizarre war against scientific thought and practice being
waged by the various ideological strands of the academic left?
Obviouslyat least we hope that by now its obviouswe are not
calling for a purge of the institutions of higher learning in this country.
We dont advocate supplanting one regime of political correctness by
another, even more odiously high-handed one. Having made that
disclaimer, however, we can in good conscience urge that certain forms
of vigilance are appropriate, troublesome as they may be to
preoccupied teachers and scholars. First and most important is the
necessity of seeing to it that whatever is labeled as science education
in our colleges and universities deserves that designation. Science
courses must teach science. Its as simple as that. They should have
substantive scientific content, validated by perfectly well-known and
legitimate modes of scientific inference. As educators, scarred in battle
and wearing a few tarnished medals, we have experience of the
attempts to label shaky theorizing and tendentious quibbling as
science for the sake of introducing it into the curriculum.
Creation science is an example that most of us are familiar with,
although institutions of higher education (outside of sectarian colleges
of dubious legitimacy) were rarely the targets of that campaign. We
have also the example of various New Age confections peddled at some
community colleges and in extension programs, under the pretext that
they represent science of some kind. But the influence of the
academic left is of a different kind, since it is seconded by the support,
often enthusiastic, of many established senior members of the
academic community. To date, it has merely nibbled at the fringes of
the hard sciences, although, as we have seen, such heretofore
honorable fields as anthropology and psychology have been gravely
contaminated. We cannot help feeling, however, that there will be
many more calls for feminist courses in biology and Afrocentric
courses in mathematics. How much force such campaigns will have is
hard to predict. In any event scientists and science educators must, on
their professional honor, be prepared to resist the insertion into the
science curriculum of courses whose content is tailored to the demands
o f any ideological faction. It will be alleged, of course, that
conventional science, like all knowledge, is inevitably ideological,
and that the proposed reforms are therefore just as legitimate and
considerably more self-aware than the traditional kinds of scientific
education. This contention is, however, simply wrong, as we hope we
have at least suggested: in fact, we think it comes very near to being
nonsense. Scientists ought to reject it out of hand. This is not really a
matter that demands intellectual acuitythe theories of the left-
academic critics are not, on the intellectual plane, particularly
intimidating. Rather, it is a question of not letting ones social ideals,
which may well find much to admire in feminism and in the quest for
racial justice, overrule ones professional judgment and simple
common sense. Unthinking sentimentality, be it remembered, is the
great enemy of genuine compassion.
 Beyond this, there is the matter of courses, seminars, symposia
and the like, that claim to address scientific matters while falling
outside the official boundaries of science departments. We urge
scientific professionals to scrutinize these offerings, whether or not
invited to do so, to participate in them if possible, and with appropriate
skepticism. We urge them not to fear making judgments, not to
hesitate, for the sake of someone elses imagined good social
intentions, to make their misgivings public. The academic left, after all,
is fiercely judgmental and highly vociferous, though all the while it is
eager to denounce judgmental behavior in its opponents. Moreover,
some of the instinctively deferential habits of academics will simply
have to be put aside. One cant assume, in these matters, that
possession of an advanced degree or a professorship equates to
intellectual legitimacy. Most of this book has been devoted to a critique
of work done by academics whose nominal credentials are quite
impressive. That has not prevented them from propounding
wrongheaded, even fatuous, theories about matters in which their
knowledge ranges from shallow to nonexistent. This is a disconcerting
fact of contemporary academic life. It should stimulate energetic action
and argument, not resignation or quietism. It should be as strong a goad
to attending faculty meetings, and paying attention to curricular
proposals, as the threat of state-mandated program cuts or of new
parking regulations.
In our experience, scientists who try to engage the radical critics
of science in direct debate are in for a frustrating time of it. This is not
because their foes are expert rhetoricians. In fact the critics of science
are decidedly reluctant to contend with actual scientists in the flesh.
They prefer a hermetic, self-referential atmosphere for the
promulgation of their ideas; often they appear to regard the presence of
well-informed scientists, unless invited for specific technical
contributions, as intrusive. This is a characteristic of the sectarian
mentality: it usually implies a skittishness on the part of the critics, one
that may derive from inward knowledge that their theories rest as much
on wishful thinking as on learning. In any case scientists oughtnt to be
reluctant to stick their two cents in. They should insistalways within
the bounds of courtesy, of courseon being included in debates and
presentations that center on science and the relations between science
and culture. If they are nevertheless excluded, as will sometimes
happen, they should be prepared to make a bit of noise about it. They
will be on very firm ground in todays academy, where few proceedings
are allowed to proceed without proper representation of the affected
class, and where noise is no longer taken, as it used to be, as evidence
of an unfortunate class origin.
We realize, of course, that the greatest disincentive to
participation in such controversies is the time and effort it takes, costs
that will add greatly to the burden of sustaining a serious research
program and meeting ones instructional and professional
responsibilities. Intellectually, these quarrels tend to be tiresome.
Nature is the scientists worthy adversary (we use the figure in defiance
of the fact that science critics will sniff it out as evidence that we are
slaves to the Western-patriarchal paradigm of dominance and control).
Academic leftists, on the other hand, tend to be unfocused bores, and a
certain deliberate, cheerful simple-mindedness is needed to hear them
out sufficiently to catch the drift of the arguments and to formulate an
apposite response. It is an unlikable chore, but one that a good many of
us ought to be doing, out of loyalty to our own disciplines and to
forgive the pretentiousness of the wordcivilization.
Finally, there is the unpleasant, but serious, question of careerism,
which, conjoined to ideological enthusiasm, has been responsible for
much of the misbegotten scholarship we have considered. It has been
traditional, in the academy, for the humanists to let the scientists do
their own hiring, firing, and promotion, and for the scientists to
reciprocate. If representatives from one camp are obliged by local
custom to rule on the others actions in such matters (as in the case of
tenure committees), they usually assent pro forma, without making any
inquiries beyond the superficial ones, for example, to ascertain that the
letters of recommendation and so forth are adequately fulsome or lack,
at least, the hint of bones rattling in closets. The proliferation of would-
be science critics and epistemologists among left-wing humanists
raises serious questions about this cozy arrangement. If an aspiring
scholar is to be judged on work affecting to make deep pronouncements
on questions of science, scientific methodology, history of science, or
the very legitimacy of science, it strikes us that scientists should have
some say in evaluating it. This holds even if the candidate resides
academically in the English department or the art department or the
sociology department. It will be objected that scientists, as a hermetic,
self-protective guild, ought not to sit in judgment of those who are
s t u d y i n g them. But academic leftists, postmodernists,
deconstructionists, and the like have their self-protective guilds, and
experience shows that they are not at all reluctant to rally round their
own. Elementary fairness requires that a broader spectrum of opinion
should be brought into the process. If an assistant professor of English
is to stake his bid for tenure on work that, for example, purports to
analyze quantum mechanics as an ideological construct, then he has no
right to complain if a professor of physics is brought into the
evaluation to say whether he evidences any real understanding of
quantum mechanics. More broadly, if scientists perceive that a spate of
nonsense concerning science has been coming out of the mouths of
their young humanist colleagues, then they have the right to raise
questions about the mechanisms that give a fair wind to such shaky
scholarship.
It will be argued immediately that this is an asymmetric, and
therefore inequitable, proposition. If physicists are to judge scholars of
English, why shouldnt English professors judge physicists? The
fallacy here is that the asymmetry originates from the pretensions,
legitimate or otherwise, of members of the English (or sociology or
cultural studies or womens studies or African-American studies)
department to qualification on scientific questions. If, say, a member of
the mathematics department were to engage in the (most unlikely)
scholarly project of analyzing the rhetorical and stylistic elements of
certain mathematics papers, it would be entirely legitimate for literary
scholars to pronounce judgment on the work, and for the promotion
process to take that judgment fully into account. To put it bluntly, it is
humanists of the academic left who have transgressed the boundaries
as they are eager in most circumstances to proclaim. Thats their
privilege; but they are not (or should not be) exempt from customs
duties!
Finally, there is the question of reconquering lost territory for the
scientific approach. As we have noted, some fields, long recognized as
scientific in principle, have fallen victim to antiscientific relativism.
Anthropology is one example; other, partial examples could be found
within psychology and sociology. Plainly, there is no direct way to
enjoin our counterparts in these fields to abandon the pleasures of
subjective narrativity for the fuddy-duddy rigors of empirical and
statistical research. Still, hard scientists should find some way of
supporting those of their colleagues in these areas who are willing to
honor the principle that the right to make knowledge claims, in a
university, has to be earned by the methodologically sound sweat of
ones brow. Its fine to argue about competing methodologies; it is not
fine to congratulate oneself on having abandoned method.
We must conclude on a note of melancholy. At this point in
history, for anyone who has read it honestly, the status of science as a
reliable, profound, and productive source of knowledge ought to be
beyond serious question. That vague but grandiloquent challenges
nevertheless recur incessantly remains, after all our attempts to
understand, a source of sad perplexity. That many of these challenges
now issue from a community that consists, regardless of ideology, of
people who have presumably enjoyed a first-class education and who
have, all their adult lives, played a central role in the larger intellectual
world deepens our misgivings. We would have been much happier if
this book had been unnecessary. We may be misguided; we may have
made mistakes; our erudition may be more deficient than we already
know: but we are not dishonest. Honestly, then, we care deeply about
our students, and honestly we treasure that collegial life of the mind
which no external insultnot of age nor loss nor straitened
circumstanceshas in our time been able to diminish. For us to believe
that a book of this kind is needed means at very least that, in making
our inquiries and absorbing a large and distressing literature, we have
had to abandon the complacent feeling that the republic of intellectual
inquiry is secure from internal decay.
Finally, and with an ironic nod to Andrew Ross, we would like to
acknowledge with deepest gratitude the gifts of all the science teachers
we have had throughout our lives. That includes colleagues, senior and
junior, and, most important, some of our students. This book could not
have been conceived, let alone written, without them.
 Notes

1. The Academic Left and Science

1. This is not to suggest for a moment that our subjects would

spurn the opportunity to manipulate mass consciousness, if they were
to get it. All too many of the claims of the academic left flow from the
wish to dominate public discussion.
2. One fine distinction we do not want to make is that between
postmodernism and poststructuralism. The former is the more inclusive
term, implying as it does a range of stylistic attitudes and judgments
that reject modernism (including much of the Enlightenment), as
well as the specifically philosophical positions associated with
structuralism and its presumably triumphant successor,
poststructuralism. No writer we identify here as a postmodernist is
done an injustice thereby. We were tempted, but only tempted, to rely
upon Patrick Scrivenors definitions, which begin: POSTMODERN:
adjective. So new its out of date already (in Egg on Your Interface: A
Dictionary of Modern Nonsense).
3. This is not to suggest that other sorts of institutions are more
lovable. Indeed, if institutions were to be ranked on a scale of
delinquency, the most at the top, universities would fall far below
governments and multinational corporations.
4. It would be a mistake to believe that conservative thinkers are
no longer generating nonsensical opinions about science. A recent Op-
Ed piece in the New York Times by historian John Lukacs (Atom
Smasher is Super Nonsense, June 16, 1993) is as ignorant and
presumptuous as any of the writings by nominal leftists that we
examine in this book.
5. There are honorable thinkers on the leftand elsewherewho
advocate strongly a multicultural approach (e.g., to education) that
looks toward the development of fruitful interchange between the
various ethnic and historical strands woven into our culture. (See for
instance, Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint.) They are as appalled
as are we by the chauvinism and blindness to fact of the Afrocentric
movement. In the academic trenches, however, the call for
multiculturalism is largely answered by a proliferation of increasingly
intransigent and insular Afrocentric curricula.

2. Some History and Politics

1. See, e.g., Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity.

2. For an incisive essay on Maistre and his foreshadowing of
modern thought, see Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity.
3. See Leo Loubere, Utopian Socialism.
4. Timothy Ferris, The Case against Science, 17. (The title of
Ferriss piece refers not to its own content, but to that of a book under
review, Brian Appleyards frankly reactionary Understanding the
Present). See also Ian Hacking, His Father the Engineer, for an
equally skeptical view of the same work. Appleyard at least has the
virtue of wearing his nostalgic social and religious views on his sleeve.
The curious thing about so much of the left-wing critique of science
is its unconscious and unwitting echo of this kind of right-wing
grousing.
5. See Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the
United States, vols. 3 and 4.
6. Robert K. Murray, Red Scare.
7. For an exhaustive history of the American Communist party
during the Depression, see Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American
Communism. For a more personal view of the lives and motivations of
American Communists, see Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American
Communism.
8. For an account of the Communist party and its intellectual
critics, from the Hitler-Stalin pact to the 1950s, see William L. ONeill,
A Better World.
9. Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names.
10. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters.
11. See Harold Fromm, Scholarship, Politics, and the MLA, for
a shrewd assessment of the current state of affairs.
12. Traditionalists, of course, see the spectrum of opinion
offered by the media through a different lens. From their perspective,
the right end of it has been eliminated. The bias they see is opposite to
the one we describe. For example, in an angry letter to the New
Republic, in which an unnecessarily snide account has been given of a
recent cultural conference organized by Patrick Buchanan, John Zmirak
writes: Technology is on our side, shattering the hegemony of the
Three Networks, the One Newspaper and the public schools. All three
institutions are hopelessly discredited outside of a few square miles in
Washington, New York and Los Angeles (pp. 45).
13. A woman scientist friend, who is also a feminist interested in
our argument, took umbrage at academic left, describing herself as
one of those, yet sharing our negative view of the science critiques we
examine here. She undertook to help us out of the terminological trap;
after much thought, she proposed the signifier New Rage Academics.
We demurred.
14. Vincent P. Pecora, What Was Deconstruction?
15. Lingua Franca, SeptemberOctober 1992, 21.

3. The Cultural Construction of Cultural

Constructivism

1. Stephen J. Gould, The Confusion over Evolution.

2. We have already mentioned Bryan Appleyards Understanding
the Present (note 4 for Chapter 2). Ian Hackings review, His Father,
the Engineer, observes that traditionalist views like this flourish in
the same soil as postmodern or cultural constructivist arguments. Both
genres address a constituency poorly educated in science and, for that
reason, already inclined to view it with hostility.
3. Harvie Ferguson, The Science of Pleasure, 238.
4. Or, to put it otherwise and as is demonstrated by example in
Chapter 5, where we take up feminist anti-science: constructivist
critical thought has neither identified major flaws in existing, specific
science nor provided better alternatives to existing scientific
interpretations.
 5. See Alan Chalmerss excellent book Science and Its Fabrication
for an extensive rejoinder to the constructivist viewpoint, temperate in
tone and sympathetic to the political motives of constructivist theorists
but adamant in insisting on the shallow and unconvincing nature of
cultural constructivism in general and in its most vaunted examples.
6. Paul Feyerabend, Atoms and Consciousness.
7. For the record, one of us is also a member of that organization.
8. Here are some names that go unmentioned in this history:
Poincar, Planck (?!), Weyl, Schrdinger (??!!), deBroglie, von
Neumann, Pauli. Diracs name flashes past briefly in another chapter
(p. 119), but the context for it is a paraphrase of the views of a Marxist
philosopher (who is himself paraphrasing). This is not the kind of
history of quantum mechanics where the intriguing role of
noncommuting self-adjoint operators on complex Hilbert space gets
much of an airing.
9. The assertion that deterministic causality is still viable within
the phenomenal world of quantum mechanics may come as a surprise
to people far better informed than Aronowitz, but recent work in the
mathematical foundations of the subject seems to support it strongly. A
beautiful result of Drr, Goldstein, and Zanghi shows that a large part
of classical quantum theory emerges naturally from a dynamical model
which is deterministic through and through, and in which the only
hidden variables are thoroughly classical variables like position and
velocity. See their Quantum Equilibrium and the Origin of Absolute
Uncertainty and Quantum Mechanics, Randomness, and
Deterministic Reality (a short exposition of these results without
mathematical details). The model is so simple that we cannot resist the
temptation to summarize it for readers with a little knowledge of
mathematics and physics:
Consider a universe consisting of N particles the set of whose
possible respective coordinates form a configuration space (modeled on
3N-dimensional Euclidean space). Let qk denote the position of the kth
particle (as a triple of local coordinates) and mk its mass. Thus q = (q1,
, qN) is the configuration vector. We assume as well a complex-
valued wave function, , defined on the configuration space. The
dynamics are then given by the familiar Schrdinger equation
i/t = (2/2) + V

(where V denotes a potential energy function) together with the

ordinary differential equation
dq/dt = Im (grad/)

(Here the Laplacian and the gradient are given in terms of a

Riemannian metric scaled by the masses of the particles.) The
mathematically literate reader will readily see that, given an initial 0
at one particular time, evolves purely deterministically (as usual),
and thus, with initial values for q as well, the whole system evolves
deterministically. As it turns out, however, with modest and
unproblematic assumptions on the initial values of 0 and q(o),
small subsystems consisting of small numbers of particles will
behave so that, statistically speaking, the standard quantum mechanical
formalism applies.
This work amplifies and makes rigorous rather old ideas of the
philosopher/physicist David Bohm, vindicating him and bluntly
contradicting the Copenhagen interpretation of Bohr and Heisenberg.
Aronowitz mentions Bohm briefly and skeptically (p. 17) but seems
unaware that Bohms program is not just philosophical but involves a
specific strategy, now seen to be quite fruitful, for doing mathematical
physics.
We emphasize, of course, that this particular work only rederives
the classical (i.e., nonrelativistic) quantum mechanics of a collection of
point-masses in a potential field. The philosophical point is strongly
clear, however, since the standard debates use this case as a touchstone.
The moral, if one must be whimsical, is that Occams Razor may now
cut through the leash that heretofore bound us to Schrdingers Cat,
that half-and-half beast weirder by far than Centaur, Sphinx, and
Hippogriff. In other words: (a) Einstein was right: God does not play
dice with the cosmos. (b) On the other hand, since individually and
collectively we are not God, nor Laplaces Demon, nor any other
demiurge of comparable intellectual power, we must inevitably regard
the universe as something of a crap game. As far as (b) is concerned,
note well that even if the universe were purely Newtonian in the best
eighteenth-century tradition, and the perplexities of quantum
mechanics entirely avoided, the crap game would still be inevitable.
This follows from the work of Poincar on classical mechanics and
from that of his latter-day disciples, which goes under the fashionable
name chaos theory.
10. Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power, 346.
11. Aronowitz, Science under Capitalism.
12. Foremost in Einsteins mind when he was developing the ideas
that matured as the theory of special relativity were certain anomalies
in the mathematics of the Maxwell equations for electromagnetic
radiation. The Maxwell equations, unlike Newtons principles of
mechanics, are not invariant under Newtonian change of coordinates,
but rather under what is called Lorentz transformation, a situation that
bewildered late-nineteenth-century physicists. If the fundamental
correctness of the Newtonian picture was assumed, then the very
experimental success of Maxwells equations could be accounted for
only under the assumption that they were invariant under Newtonian
transformation! Einsteins staggeringly brave and brilliant solution to
the mystery was to insist on recasting mechanics so that its laws
become Lorentz invariant. The entirely counterintuitive result is that
quantities like length, mass, and duration lose their absolute character.
See Ronald Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, and Gerald Holton,
The Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought, for complete discussions
of Einsteins relation to the Michaelson-Morley experiment.
13. Michael Sprinker, The Royal Road, 138.
14. See Hans Eysenck, Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire ,
for an accurate and unrelenting critique of the claims of Freudianism
and its variants to scientific status as either theory or clinical practice.
15. Among the Gould collections that exhibit this analytic sanity
through most of their length we recommend: The Mismeasure of Man,
The Pandas Thumb, and Bully for Brontosaurus.
16. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
17. For further examples of such distortion, see Paul R. Gross, On
the Gendering of Science.
18. Bruno Latour, Science in Action, 99 and 258.
19. Ibid., 186ff.
20. We assertnot that there is any great intellectual
accomplishment involvedthat our argument was invented
independently, since we devised it before becoming acquainted with
Latours views on the matter. We are puzzled, however, about why
Latour thinks it necessary or instructive to resort to flow-chart-like
diagrams (ibid., 19394) in making such a simple point. May we
suggest that this is an example of showmanship, rather than of
profundity?
21. Ibid., 209, 259.
22. Latour, Science in Action, 237ff.
23. Ibid., 90. The reference here is to the mathematician Georg
Cantors discovery that the (infinite) cardinality of a one-dimensional
line segment is equal to that of a two-dimensional square. Latour cites
Cantors commentI see it but I dont believe it!on the note about
this theorem that he sent to Dedekind, the mathematician who initiated
the rigorous study of the real continuum. This remark has to be
understood as we understand the same exclamation coming from a
sportscaster; but in this case, it is an instance of sly self-praise. Cantor
is celebrating his own cleverness in coming to such a counterintuitive
conclusion. Latour regards this result as scarcely conceivable. On the
contrary, it is, once one has caught the spirit of the game, a pretty easy
result to grasp, and may easily be taught to undergraduatesor even
bright high school studentsjust beginning the study of rigorous
mathematics. One of us, in fact, has just done that very thing. See Karel
Hrbacek and Thomas Jech, Introduction to Set Theory, 121 (Theorem
2.3).
A more deeply counterintuitive result was produced a few years
afterward by Peano, who showed that there is a continuous path that
passes through every point of the square at least oncethe so-called
Peano Space-Filling Curve. This is a somewhat more tricky example
and requires a bit more background to understand.
24. Ibid., 85.
25. Ibid., 23739. The Reynolds number works only as long as
there are hundreds of hydraulic engineers working on turbulences.
Latour seems to be saying here that the abstract and general
formulation of fluid dynamics in which Reynolds numbers appear, and
in which their general applicability is made logically clear, is just so
much window dressing that disguises a widespread social convention
and the politicking that leads to its acceptance. On the other hand
pinpoint clarity is not one of Latours virtueshe may be saying that in
a society that paid little attention to fluid mechanics, Reynolds
numbers would not be considered important. The latter does not seem
to be a particularly choice insight. Could he really mean that if all
hydraulic engineers went on strike, baseballs, boats, and bullets would
start to behave differently?
26. Ibid., 242. The reader of Science in Action might find it
instructive to measure Latours snide aphorisms against some of the
better-known examples of prediction arising from intensive
engagement with deep abstract models and their logical consequences.
Halleys prediction of the reappearance of the now-eponymous comet
is perhaps universally familiar; but we also have, for example, the
staggeringly counterintuitive predictions of special and general
relativity, the unbelievable precision of the quantum electrodynamics
predictions that arose from the work of Feynman and Schwinger, the
uncanny correctness of the correlation at a distance prediction that
followed from John Bells analysis of the so-called Einstein-Podolsky-
Rosen paradox. Effrontery is far too mild a word for Latours
wisecracks on this point.
27. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air
Pump, 283.
28. Ibid., 301.
29. Ibid., 344.
30. Ibid., 139.
31. Shapin and Schaffer identify Spinoza along with Hobbes as an
opponent of Boyles particular views of the nature of air, as well as a
builder of a priori rationalistic systems, and thus an opponent of
experimental philosophy. Spinoza clearly was an a prioristand
much better than Hobbes as a pure dialectician in this vein. On the
other hand, as a leading expert on the science of opticsand a
professional lensgrinderSpinoza must also count as an
experimentalist. Still, given Spinozas outcast status, as well as his
subversive views on religion, he should have been cast further into the
outer darkness even than poor old Hobbes! Yet he was closely
associated with Henry Oldenburg, the Royal Societys inaugural
secretary.
32. See Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing.
33. These problemsconstructing a square equal in area to a
given circle or a cube of volume twice that of a given cube using only
the ideal compass and straightedge of synthetic Euclidean geometry
go back to classical antiquity. By means of deep algebraic arguments,
they were shown, in the nineteenth century, to be insoluble.
34. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 135. Also
cited (100) is Hobbess question, For who is so stupid, as both to
mistake in geometry, and also to persist in it, when another detects his
error to him? but not the ironic answer, Thomas Hobbes!
35. In taking this position, we contradict not only Shapin and
Schaffer, but some later work on the same subject from a similar
social-determinist perspective. Why was Hobbes excluded from
membership in the Royal Society? asks James R. Jacob in The
Political Economy of Science in Seventeenth-Century England, 532n.
Quite simply, he answers, we can now see that the social and
political views of leaders of the Society like Boyle and Wilkins
diverged sharply from those of Hobbes in certain fundamental
respects. Again, out of eagerness to derive everything from politics,
a scholar has overlooked the contrast between Hobbess high opinion of
his own mathematical abilities and his manifest mathematical
incompetence. Hobbess contemporaries, however, were not deceived
on this point.
36. See, for example, Marc Blochs justly celebrated essay The
Advent and Triumph of the Water Mill, reprinted in Land and Work in
Medieval Europe.
37. Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy.

4. The Realm of Idle Phrases

1. John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left,
35657.
2. Ibid., 363.
3. Heather MacDonald, The Ascendancy of Theor-ese, 360.
4. Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left, 356.
 5. See David Lehmans fine book, Signs of the Times, for a
devastating account of de Mans character.
6. See Thomas Sheehan, A Normal Nazi, 3035, in the New York
Review of Books, for a discussion of Heideggers zeal as a Nazi,
including a brief but telling discussion of Derridas machinations in his
attempt to occlude the obvious. See also the subsequent exchange in the
same journal (Feb. 11, 1993, and Mar. 25, 1993), of which Derridas
own letters form the unintentionally comic centerpiece. A continuation
of the exchange (Apr. 22, 1993) by a posse of Derridas American
camp-followers, including such stalwarts of the academic left as Judith
Butler, Jonathan Culler, Stanley Fish, Gerald Graff, Fredric Jameson, J.
Hillis Miller, Joan Scott, and Hayden White, adds immeasurably, if
inadvertently, to the high drollery.
7. See Lehman, Signs of the Times, for an account of the attempts
remarkable for their moral and intellectual opacityof Derrida and
deconstructionist faithful to defend de Man. See also Heather
MacDonald, The Holocaust as Text, for a merciless but well-earned
scourging of de Mans student, Shoshanna Felman, for her bizarre
attempt to get her mentor off the hook.
8. Foucaults most influential work is probably to be found in his
historical studies: Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic,
Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. It goes without
saying that despite Foucaults celebrity, many professional historians
are highly critical of his selective and impressionistic methodology.
Many of his admirers now concede that his histories are probably best
regarded as novels of a singular type, works which, for better or
worse, say more about their author than about the truths of history.
9. George Steiner, In Bluebeards Castle, 131.
 10. Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences, 267. (This citation appears in Ernest Gallos
short article, Nature Faking in the Humanities, to which we are much
indebted.) Note that Derrida follows this up with a peroration on
algebra that is as opaque as it is silly.
11. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, 208. We cannot resist the
impulse to point out that in Derridas usage the word topology seems to
be virtually synonymous with topographyat least the index regards
them as identical. This recollects an experience of one of us (N.L.) at
the age of eighteen. When being interviewed by an insurance executive
for a summer actuarial job he was asked: What kind of mathematics
are you interested in? Topology, he replied. Well, we dont have
too much interest in topography, said the insurance man. Obviously a
deconstructionist avant la lettre.
Defenders of deconstruction and other poststructuralist critical
modalities will no doubt wish to point out that topos (pl.: topoi) is a
recognized term within literary theory for a rhetorical or narrative
theme, figure, gesture, or archetype, and that therefore it is permissible,
without asking leave of the mathematical community, to deploy
topology to designate the analysis of textual topoi. Ones suspicions are
reignited, however, when the term differential topology suddenly
appears. (In mathematics, differential topology is used to denote the
study of the topological aspects of objects called differential (or
smooth) manifolds, which are, roughly speaking, higher-dimensional
analogues of surfaces in three-dimensional space.
When we first encountered this usage in literary theory, we
guessed that sooner or later some ambitious but naive young scholar
would conflate the mathematical sense of the term topology with its
meaning within postmodern theory. Second thoughts, however, inclined
us to believe that no literary scholar, no matter how impressionable or
callow, could fall into such error. We were right the first time. See note
12.
12. Tim Dean, The Psychoanalysis of AIDS, 10786. Dean is a
graduate student in English. His guru is the psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan. Lacan is cited as declaring that topology is a conception
without which all the phenomena produced in our domain would be
indistinguishable and meaningless. Since the citation is from a piece
of Lacans called Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,
it is pretty clear that someone has been getting literary topoi mixed up
with the subject matter of mathematical topology. Whether the
confusion is Lacans or Deans, we cant say. If Deans, it is probably
free of arrant fakery; but on the other hand, it then crosses the line from
mere confusion into the realm of actual stupidity.
Deans propensity for inadvertently comical confusion of
categories is underlined by the associated footnote, which asks: What
are we to make of the fact that the development of topological science
is historically coincident with the emergence both of the homosexual
as a discrete ontological identity and of psychoanalysis? (It is also, we
note, coincident with the era in which people played football without a
helmet. Would it be too cruel of us to wonder whether Dean is overly
fond of some similar activity?) For the record, non-Euclidean geometry
involves changing what are usually called the metric properties of
space. The topological properties, and thus topological mappings,
remain unaffected. Also for the record, Deans piece appears in
October, which is published at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. We doubt that it is vetted by the mathematicians of that
magnificent institution.
 13. Jean Baudrillard, Le xerox et linfiniti.
14. J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 45.
15. Alexander J. Argyros, A Blessed Rage for Order, 234. Argyros
himself is concerned with the philosophical implications of
contemporary mathematics and science, in relation to the postmodern
ideological positions promulgated by Derrida and others. He is critical
of many of these positions, although he finds some useful. He is also
slightly guilty of bluffing his way through mathematical points. In his
discussion of Lyotard, for example, he states: Lyotard has correctly
diagnosed the failing prestige of linear, or continuously differentiable,
functions. Of course, a mathematical functionlinear, continuously
differentiable, or otherwiseis not the kind of entity that carries
prestige, although a mathematician may be. In any event, the
mathematics of continuously differentiable functions, along with those
mathematicians who work on it, is in no particular danger of suffering a
decline in prestige. More important, Argyros seems to think that
continuously differentiable functions are, in general, linear, which is
grossly untrue.
What is really involved in this remark is Argyross naive
acceptance of Lyotards naive enthusiasm for what is called applied
catastrophe theory. This is a point of view, advocated by such
mathematicians as Ren Thom and Christopher Zeeman, for making
mathematical models of phenomena in physics, chemistry, biology, and
even economics, which exhibit sharp jumps or discontinuities.
Although it is based on beautiful mathematics concerning the topology
of function spaces (spaces of continuously differentiable functions, as
it happens), applied catastrophe theory has not, over the years, provided
empirical scientists much help in the way of insight or technique. There
have been stringent criticisms of the approach from other
mathematicians. (See R. S. Zahler and H. J. Sussmann, Applied
Catastrophe Theory.)
16. J. Crary and S. Kwinter, ZONE 6: Incorporations.
17. Here is a brief bill of particulars concerning the mathematical
sins of the cited authors of pieces in ZONE 6: Incorporations:
Deleuze (Mediators, 283): Gives an utterly incoherent,
essentially meaningless account of the notion of Riemannian
manifold (Riemannian space in the text) in an attempt to make it
relevant to film criticism.
Simondon (The Genesis of the Individual, 30lff): Tries to use
the notion of metastable point of equilibrium without much in the
way of an honest definition, the point being to find some philosophical
resolution to the problem of wave-particle duality in quantum
mechanics. This reads like so much metaphysical hand-waving and
doesnt make any particular sense in terms of mathematics or physics.
Eisenman (Unfolding Events, 425): Gives an utterly incoherent
account of the seven catastrophe theorem of Ren Thom.
Presumably, the idea is to exploit rhetorically the fact that unfolding
is a technical term in the mathematics of catastrophe theory.
Stone (Virtual Systems, 614): Misrepresents both the
chronology and the content of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in
order to create a strained metaphor.
Turner (Biology and Beauty, 412): Gives a misleading
paraphrase of the Gdel incompleteness theorem (a common sin of
amateur logiciansand cultural theorists).
De Landa (Non-Organic Life, 137): Correctly points out that a
minimum of a potential function is a dynamical attractor (of the
simplest sort) but then (p. 163, note 27) claims, essentially, that such a
situation does not represent an attractor. In the latter discussion, there
is some muddle about linear versus nonlinear mathematics.
Nevertheless, de Landas paper, which is essentially a piece of
scientific journalism pointing out the insights into empirical science
provided or promised by recent developments in mathematics, is pretty
clear and straightforward, by no means a typical spate of postmodern
hyperbole. For a nonexpert, de Landa has done a good and honest job,
although one might wish for a more careful delineation of how much of
this is really speculative.
18. Robin Fox, Anthropology and the Teddy Bear Picnic, 51
52.
19. Ibid., 53.
20. Ibid., 49.
21. Alan Ryan, Princeton Diary. See also Ryans illuminating,
judicious, and fair-minded article Foucaults Life and Hard Times.
22. Frank Lentricchia, Reading FoucaultII, 57.
23. Ibid., 51.
24. Bogdan Denitch, address to Socialist Scholars Conference.
25. Argyros, A Blessed Rage for Order, 9.
26. Elizabeth Wilson, The Postmodern Chameleon, 187.
27. Kate Soper, Postmodernism, Subjectivity, and the Question of
Value, 128.
28. Kate Ellis, Stories without Endings.
 29. Ibid., 47.
30. Vincent Pecora, What Was Deconstruction? 65.
31. Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery, 12930.
32. An example of the hostility of some social scientists to the
authority of the exact sciences is to be found in the quixotic embrace
of the notorious crank Immanuel Velikovsky by a few notable social
theorists. Velikovsky ( Worlds in Collision) held that various mythical
catastrophes, e.g., the Noachian flood, really represented folk memories
of a time when the planet Venus was born from the gas-giant Jupiter
and initially careened around the solar system before settling into its
present (near-circular!) orbit. His defenders among the sociologists
(see De Grazia, 1978) were motivated by a desire to reveal hard
scientists as closed-minded and intolerant, and to display a case where
historical and ethnographic studies ostensibly revealed an astronomical
truth denied to mere astronomers. This, we submit, was an important
harbinger of postmodern relativism and antiscientism.
33. See J. W. Grove, The Intellectual Revolt against Science, for
an interesting account of this phenomenon.
34. See, for example, the right-wing libertarian journal Critical
Review, vol. 5, no. 2, 1992, a special issue devoted to postmodernism.
35. See the profile of the cultural studies phenomenon at the
NILS, and of Andrew Ross in particular, in Anne Matthews,
Deciphering Victorian Underwear.
36. Andrew Ross, New Age Technicultures, 535.
37. Andrew Ross, Strange Weather, 29.
38. Ibid., 60.
 39. David Ruelle, Chance and Chaos. See also Ivar Ekland,
Mathematics and the Unexpected, for an equally intelligible treatment
(by a first-rate mathematician) of much the same material. On the
whole, Ruelle is probably preferable to Ekland because of its tone
(Ruelle is urbane where Ekland is somewhat histrionic in a way we
judge to be slightly misleading), completeness (Ekland scarcely
mentions quantum mechanics, which is quite important in any
historical and philosophical discussion of the physical significance of
chaos theory; Ruelle treats the matter thoroughly), and because of
Ruelles record of having been present at the creation of chaos
theory. This last gives added weight to Ruelles sensible advice to keep
matters in proportion when tempted to proclaim the chaos revolution.
Ruelles brief description of the typical mathematics seminar is also a
gem of sociological observation. On the other hand, Ekland concludes
his book, oddly enough, with a beautiful chapter of literary criticism
on Homer, to be precisewhich, in the context, is neither inappropriate
nor presumptuous.
40. Harmke Kamminga, What Is This Thing Called Chaos?
41. For a typical, relatively innocuous example of this sort of thing
see the concluding pages of Alan Beyerchens article What We Now
Know about Nazism and Science. Other examples abound.
42. Steven Best, Chaos and Entropy, 188.
43. Ibid., 204.
44. See Stephen J. Gould, Integrity and Mr. Rifkin. This is a
scathing analysis of Rifkins pretentiousness and incompetence, by a
distinguished scientist and educator whose pro-environmental and
politically left-wing views are well known. We shall have more to say
on Rifkin in another chapter.
 45. Curiously enough, something similar happens in a recent paper
of the distinguished economic historian and theorist of Third World
development Immanuel Wallerstein (The TimeSpace of World-
Systems Analysis, section 4, pp. 1720). Wallerstein is under the
impression that somehow or other, quantum mechanics and nonlinear
topological dynamics have overthrown the claims of the physical
sciences to yield reliable knowledge about the world, and that
physicists are frantically throwing paradigms overboard. (Apparently
he hasnt heard the contrasting rumors, far more plausible although still
worthy of skepticism, that physics is closing in on a theory of
everything.) In short, most of the distortions of Bests paper are
reproduced, although without the political rodomontade, in Wallerstein.
The latters motives are clear. He is eager to believe that the social
sciences are now at the top of the knowledge hierarchy: But all of a
sudden, the physical scientists seem to be looking towards the
historical social sciences for models (Wallerstein, 20). We, on the
other hand, have noticed no such thing; but its understandable that a
social scientist would wish it to be so. As gauge of Wallersteins actual
knowledge of mathematical physics, we offer the following: Einstein
spent his life searching for the unified field theory, the single equation
that would encompass all reality. He only achieved E = mc 2, which
explained a large part of, but not all of, the physical world
(Wallerstein, 19). If ignorance is an excuse for bizarre condescension,
Wallerstein is excused.
46. Best, Chaos and Entropy, 203.
47. We might put things in a kinder light by taking Bests
assertion as a refutation of a favorite Creationist argument. The latter
asserts that since lifeof ever-increasing complexityrepresents
increasing orderliness, its existence violates the Law of Entropy,
and hence divine intervention must account for it. This is fallacious
reasoning, of course; and Bests point may be taken as a sketchy
indication of the error. Since, however, serious scientists have long
been aware of the fallacy, this can hardly count as a postmodern
development.
Also: we dont want to leave the impression that formation of
snowflakes and similar phenomena are perfectly understood. Nor do we
for a moment deny that there are exciting developments in the
statistical mechanics of self-organization in none-quilibrium systems.
(See, for an enthusiastic account, Gregoire Nicolas, Physics of Far-
from-Equilibrium Systems.) As with flowers that bloom in the spring,
however, dialectics and the postmodern zeitgeist have nothing to do
with the case.
48. Best, Chaos and Entropy, 225, note 5.
49. Thus one can readily compare Heisenbergs theory of
uncertainty and chaos theory with Derridas concept of undecidability,
or Bohrs emphasis on the discontinuous movement of subatomic
particles and Foucaults emphasis on the discontinuous breaks from
one episteme to another. Ibid., 212.
50. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound, 181.
51. The Feigenbaum number, approximately 4.66920, is a
universal constant (the term universal is off-putting to some
postmodern enthusiasts of chaos theory, including Hayles) that arises in
connection with any parameterized dynamical system where chaos
arises via a cascade of period doublings as the parameter is
increased. See Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, 6770, or Ekeland,
Mathematics and the Unexpected, 13738, for details.
 52. Argyros, Blessed Rage for Order, 238. Argyross own
comparisons between mathematics and literary philosophy, while still
stretching analogies to what we consider a questionable degree, are
more cautious and tentative than those of Hayles. His mathematical
exposition is also far more systematic and coherent, although it is far
from flawless.
53. N. Katherine Hayles, Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics.
The standards Hayles sets in Chaos Boundfor erroneous accounts of
physics, hallucinatory history of mathematics, and substitution of
arbitrary analogy for logicare fully honored here. In short, dont
expect to learn much about Reynolds numbers or divergence-free
vector fields.
54. Both these mainstays of postmodern skepticism toward science
seem to have lost heart for this particular battle. Rorty is now, it seems,
chiefly concerned with old-fashioned politics and in this regard
advocates a moderate, pragmatic, and unideological brand of social
democracy. (See Rorty, For a More Banal Politics.) A telling and
convincing quote from Rorty, Love and Money:
All the talk in the world about the need to abandon technological
rationality and to stop commodifying, about the need for new
values or for non-Western ways of thinking, is not going to
bring more money to the Indian villages . All the love in the
world, all the attempts to abandon Eurocentrism or liberal
individualism, all the politics of diversity, all the talk about
cuddling up to the natural environment, will not help. Maybe
technology and centralized planning will not work. But they are all
we have got. We should not try to pull the blanket over our heads
by saying that technology was a big mistake, and that planning,
 top-down initiatives, and Western ways of thinking must be
abandoned.
In the very same number we find the remark of Paul Feyerabend
already cited (Chapter 3) whose essential thrust is equally
cautionary: Movements that view quantum mechanics as a
turning-point in thoughtand that include fly-by-night mystics,
prophets of a New Age, and relativists of all sortsget aroused by
the cultural component and forget predictions and technology.

55. From the article on Rudolf Carnap in the Encyclopedia

Britannica (1965 edition): Carnap, Rudolf (1891-), one of the chief
representatives of logical positivism From 1926 to 1931 he taught
philosophy at the University of Vienna where he belonged to the
famous Vienna circle which first proclaimed the logical positivist
doctrine.
56. Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, 341.
57. Hayles, Chaos Bound, 267.
58. The degree to which this kind of association has penetrated the
academy, affecting undergraduates as well as scholars, is illustrated in
an op-ed piece by a student, Jeffrey Robinson, that appeared in the
Rutgers Targum (Lessons in Holistic Learning, Apr. 19, 1993). The
piece calls for an undergraduate curriculum that puts a double emphasis
on technological education and on multicultural and holistic
learning. Says Robinson:
Our undergraduate education is failing us by not providing
holistic learning. From kindergarten through the years of
undergraduate education we are taught with a monochronic
 process. Western society has been taught to think in a linear, one-
dimensional, somewhat mechanistic fashion which focuses on one
sub-problem and solves it before it moves on to the next. Eastern
societies tend to process polychronically, reviewing all of the sub-
problems as a whole and solving with a process different from our
own.
The advantage of such a polychronic process lies in the way
in which the solution is found. Multiple problems are worked on
simultaneously and ideally with multiple approaches. This results
in solutions that incorporate many systems of thought Diversity
of thoughts is essential to 21st Century problem solving. This
holistic approach many times [sic] is cross disciplinary and cross
cultural. (Emphasis added.)

It would be intriguing to learn the source of Mr. Robinsons ideas,

which draw upon slogans in support of multiculturalism, New Age
catchphrases, and the shibboleths of postmodern scholars. The
disparaging reference to linearity, in particular, echoes a widespread
attitude, one of whose consequences is the enthusiastic, if
mathematically illiterate, fascination with nonlinearity that abounds
in postmodernist theory. Here is a further example from a militant
feminist tract by Patti Lather, (Getting Smart, 1045): These
[scientific] practices were rooted in a binary logic of hermetic subjects
and objects and a linear, teleological rationality Linearity and
teleology are being supplanted by chaos models of nonlinearity and an
emphasis on historical contingency. Lathers authority for this
assertion is the unlikely duo of James Gleick and Michel Foucault. As
it happens, a similar confusion shows up in the paper by Wallerstein,
cited in note 45 above (Wallerstein, The TimeSpace of World-
Systems Analysis, 18).
59. See Thomas and Finney, Calculus and Analytic Geometry, 165,
for a charming picture of this fractal phenomenon. Of course, calculus
books (e.g., earlier editions of Thomas and Finney) have ignored this
sort of thing until now. The fad for matters chaotic has induced
publishers of elementary texts to decorate their offerings with such
doodles. Similarly, the new version of William E. Boyce and Richard
C. Di Prima (Elementary Differential Equations, 1992), a cut-and-dried
traditional text for science and engineering majors, now contains a
short discussion (section 2.12) of the evolution of the attractors of the
iterations of the logistic function f(x) = 4kx(1 x), as k increases from
o to 1. Argyros, Blessed Rage for Order, also contains a picture of this
phenomenon with a misleading caption but a reasonably adequate
explanation in the text. Strange doings for philosophers of literature!
60. Michael Rosenthal, in What Was Postmodernism, suggests,
with more relief than regret, that the high-water mark of
postmodernism has passed and that it is likely soon to be regarded as a
mere relic of the discontents of the eighties. It is ironic that this
appears in a journal recently enthusiastic for the dogmas of the
postmodern left. Rosenthal acknowledges that both the stance and the
terminology of postmodernism, as well as the term itself, will persist in
the books and articles of radical academics for years to come. In this
insight, he is supported by the fact that a considerable number of books
and journals advertised in this issue of Socialist Review prominently
announce themselves with the term postmodern. Then, too, one of us
(NL) recently dropped by the main scholarly book outlet near an Ivy
League university to find that, of the featured new releases in all
humanities fields, 20 percent contained the term postmodern in the title
or subtitle.
 5. Auspicating Gender

1. See Alison Galloway et al., exchange of letters in Science.

2. Sue V. Rosser, Teaching Science and Health from a Feminist
Perspective.
3. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds., Conflicts in
Feminism.
4. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, eds. Women, Knowledge, and
Reality.
5. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, 25. To
these adjectives we might have added several more, e.g., white, male,
European. The fashion for grouping them as mutually reinforcing
pejoratives seems not yet to have peaked.
6. This is not the place to enlarge upon the meaning of the
assertion that science works, and that in so doing it is
epistemologically unique. That is, obviously, the central issue for texts
in the philosophy of science; and it is of course obvious, as well, to
many nonphilosophers who are able to think honestly about the
question. We note, however, that a particularly eloquent, as well as
brief, statement on the matter is to be found in Jonathan Rauchs
Kindly Inquisitors (pp. 2930), otherwise a journalistic, but
philosophically serious, treatment of the contemporary attack on free
thought.
7. Mary Anne Campbell and Randall K. Campbell-Wright,
preprint of the article. This paper was read originally at a meeting of
the Mathematical Association of America, a professional association
concerned primarily with mathematics education at the post-secondary
level. (The other main organizations of professional mathematicians
are the American Mathematical Society, which is chiefly concerned
with current research in all mathematical fields, and the Society for
Industrial and Applied Mathematics, whose name is self-explanatory.)
It has been also submitted as a contribution to a proposed volume on
how to teach science so as to attract women into scientific careers.
8. Ibid., 6.
9. Here is a sample problem from Carrolls Symbolic Logic:
Derive logical conclusions from the following premises:
(1) Puppies, that will not lie still, are always grateful for the loan
of a skipping-rope.
(2) A lame puppy would not say thank you if you offered to lend
it a skipping-rope.
(3) None but lame puppies ever care to do worsted work.
Another example, more redolent, perhaps, of C. L. Dodgsons class and
time:
Derive logical conclusions from:
(1) No Gentiles have hooked noses.
(2) A man who is a good hand at a bargain always makes money.
(3) No Jew is ever a bad hand at a bargain.
Still, we can read Carroll with pleasure and ignore the stereotyping
foolishness of such problems as the second one.
10. This is from a problem in Stanley Grossman, College Algebra
cited by Campbell and Campbell-Wright, Toward a Feminist
Algebra.
11. One of us (NL) will cheerfully read any proposed solution to
this problem that our readers might come up with.
12. Campbell and Campbell-Wright, Toward a Feminist
Algebra, 11.
13. Ibid., 12.
14. Ibid., 10.
15. Mathematical insight can generate whimsical and instructive
metaphors, sometimes quite elaborate. See, for instance, the graphic
work of the artist/mathematician Anatolii T. Fomenko, ( Mathematical
Impressions, 1990). Fomenkos elaborate visual fancies are inspired by
such things as the action of the fundamental group on the higher
homotopy groups (32) and proper Morse functions on 3-dimensional
manifolds (42). However, this is a case of the mathematics generating
the visual metaphor, not of a social metaphor generating
mathematics.
16. Athena Beldecos, Sarah Bailey, Scott Gilbert, Karen Hicks,
Lori Kenschaft, Nancy Niemczyk, Rebecca Rosenberg, Stephanie
Schaertel, and Andrew Wedel.
17. The words privileged and oppressor, appearing in the same
sentence and within the same line of type, should be added to a list of
useful clinical tests.
18. Scott Gilbert et al., The Importance of Feminist Critique,
173.
19. For evidence, see the review (of a new book on the Human
Genome Project): Sydney Brenner, That Lonesome Grail. This piece
exemplifies, in addition, the approval and sympathy with which many
distinguished scientists (among whom Brenner is one) tend to respond
to social criticism, even when it bears upon science, in contrast to the
tough-minded, analytical treatment they accord arguments of scientific
substance.
20. Although eventually, when the full story of the functions of
signal, binding, and receptor proteins that play a role in fertilization is
known, McClungs metaphor might turn outironically and by
accidentto have been right.
21. The theory, became fact very quickly, of course. It was
critical for Morgans great work (for which he received a Nobel Prize)
that founded modern genetics. It has been triumphantly confirmed
countless times, most recently by identification of the location on the
Y chromosome of male mammals at which the testis-determining
factorthe molecule that initiates the chain of developmental switches
that produce the maleis encoded.
22. See Harding, The Science Question, 113.
23. Nor did, presumably, his two distinguished predecessors in this
sort of experimentationA. D. Mead and T. H. Morgan. See Frank R.
Lillie, The Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory . None of the
papers of these workers betray any obviously greater admiration for the
sperm than for the egg.
24. Scott F. Gilbert, Developmental Biology, 490ff. The key
experiments, reported by P. R. Gross and G. H. Consineau, established
the existence and function of maternal messenger RNA. The data are
represented on p. 493 by a graph taken from the 1964 paper.
25. Eric H. Davidson, Gene Activity in Early Development.
 26. We cant resist naming here this ancient and dangerous
rhetorical device, in which natural objects are portrayed
(inappropriately) as having human feelings.
27. It is worth pointing out that to control for bias is an ancient
house rule of empirical science, and a direct inheritance from the
Enlightenment. It is one of the hallmarks of the good science that the
postmodernist critics of science disparage.
28. Discover, June 1992. This issue was deemed a finalist for the
National Magazine Award (in the category of single-topic issues) by
the American Society of Magazine Editors.
29. Ibid., Meredith F. Small, Whats Love Got to Do with It?
30. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Is Nature Red in Tooth and Claw?
31. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender.
32. Sandra Harding, Feminist Justificatory Strategies.
33. The reader who doubts this should have a look at what
physicists say in books, rather than in space-limited research articles.
Among dozens of recent possibilities, here are four well-known ones:
Freeman Dyson, Infinite in All Directions, 1988; Stephen W. Hawking,
A Brief History of Time, 1988; Roger Penrose, The Emperors New
Mind, 1989; and David Layzer, Cosmogenesis, 1990.
34. Philip Lenard was a Nobel Prize-winning German
experimental physicist of emphatic anti-Semitic views, notorious for
his hatred of Einstein and relativity theory. The cited quote, from his
Deutsche Physik, is reproduced in Clark, Einstein, 52526.
35. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, 43.
36. Ibid., 47.
 37. Observe, please, Hardings magically malleable logic:
Assertion: Physics is tainted by sexism. Assertion: Physics is the
(illegitimate?) model for all science. Ergo: All science is sexist. But: if
we search the actual content of physics, we have trouble finding the
sexism. Not to worry! Since physics shouldnt be paradigmatic, it isnt.
The rest of science can therefore and nonetheless be declared sexist.
This, we suppose, is what is meant among the avant-garde by
nonlinear thinking.
38. Margarita Levin, Caring New World, 106.
39. Marcy Darnovsky, Overhauling the Meaning Machines, 66.
A similarly extravagant encomium is also to be found in Robert M.
Young, Science, Ideology and Donna Haraway.
40. Darnovsky, Overhauling the Meaning Machine, 82.
41. Harding, Feminist Justificatory Strategies, 193.
42. A similar ambiguity afflicts the chapter The Womens
Movement Benefits Science in Hardings most recent book (Whose
Science? Whose Knowledge?). The shadowy benefits dont seem to
have much to do with particular science that anyone actually works at.
43. Harding, Feminist Justificatory Strategies, 197.
44. Ever since the publication of Nien Chengs moving book on
the Cultural Revolution (Life and Death in Shanghai, 1988), texts
sprinkled with the word struggle smell of the auto-da-f. (The public
tribunals at which innocent people were denounced were known as
struggles.)
45. Garry and Pearsall, Women, Knowledge, and Reality, 198.
46. Kenneth Minogue, The Goddess That Failed.
 47. Sir Charles Sherrington, Goethe on Nature and on Science.
48. Quoted ibid., 38. This relatively early fragment appears in the
complete (thirty-volume) edition of Goethe by Cotta (Stuttgart, 1858).
49. Evelyn Fox Keller, The Gender/Science System.
50. Evelyn Fox Keller, broadcast interview by Bill Moyers, 1991.
51. Evelyn Fox Keller, Long Live the Difference between Men
and Women Scientists.
52. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
53. Ibid., 206.
54. See Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism.
55. Evelyn Fox Keller, Feminism and Science.
56. This, although she surely knows that the word dogma was used
in this connection tongue-in-cheek, an inside joke. Even if not,
however, she must know, as a scientist herself, that no scientist would
describe seriously his or her own idea as a dogma. Dogma, as every
freshman taking biology or chemistry or physics for the first time is
told, is exactly what science is not supposed to be.
57. Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism.
58. Garry and Pearsall, Women, Knowledge, and Reality, 186.
59. Gould has within the hearing of one of us (NL), and before an
audience quite sympathetic to the radical social critique of science,
unambiguously repeated the assertion that there is no such thing as
feminist science. (Gould, Capitalism and the Environment.)
60. Helen E. Longino, Can There Be a Feminist Science?
 61. Ibid., 206.
62. That is, there is a great deal of important work ahead for
feminist criticism of science.
63. Longino, Can There Be a Feminist Science? 208.
64. Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge, 13361.
65. Gerald Edelman and Vernon Mountcastle, The Mindful Brain.
See also Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire.
66. Edelmans theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS),
elaborated in a remarkable series of scientific books and papers, is
heavy going even for working scientists, if they are not simultaneously
expertas he isin molecular and developmental biology,
neurobiology, and cognitive science. He has reduced the difficulties,
however, even for lay readers, in a summary volume: Bright Air,
Brilliant Fire. Here he deals again, explicitly, with the problem of
consciousness. For our present purposes it is important to say that in
this book as elsewhere Edelman insists that the theory isas many of
its predecessors and competitors are notrigorously biological. It is
standard science, to the highest possible standard. To be sure, it can be
dubbed an interactionist description of the brainsand the minds
ontogeny and phylogeny; but the component interactions are among
genes, molecules, cells, and timeevolutionary time and its embedded
history. To recruit this body of fact and hypothesis as justification for
an ideology comes close to trivializing it.
67. Longino, Can There Be a Feminist Science? 211.
68. Ibid., 214.

6. The Gates of Eden

 1. David Day, The Eco Wars (foreword).
2. Tom Athanasiou, Greenhouse Blues, 107.
3. George Steiner, In Bluebeards Castle, 62.
4. We hope that these concoctions are tested on something. It
would do the environmentally sensitive no good at all to shampoo with
what turned out, upon its first tests in the marketplace, to be an herbally
fragranced depilatory.
5. Dave Foreman, Confessions of an EcoWarrior.
6. Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of Nature.
7. See also Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses. The publisher,
Bantam Books, quite properly labels this one of its New Age series,
but curiously includes among its companion volumes books by such
emphatically non-New Age types as Richard Feynman, Heinz Pagels,
Lewis Thomas, Michio Kaku, and Douglas Hofstadter. This is grossly
unfair to both camps!
8. Berman, The Reenchantment of Nature, 31.
9. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature.
10. Ibid., 295
11. Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef, 185.
12. We are aware that hysterical is a politically incorrect word;
but it is hard to find a substitute for it in this case.
13. Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century.
14. Another, typical, example of the urge to lay the sins of a
supposed patriarchal technocracy at the feet of Francis Bacon can be
found in Susanne Scholzs, The Mirror and the Womb, a critique of
Bacons presumed misogyny: From its very beginnings, the aim of
scientific knowledge in the western world has been the domination of
nature. This is as obvious in the thought of Francis Bacon as in the
philosophies he set out to criticize.
15. Edward Goldsmith, Evolution, Neo-Darwinism, and the
Paradigm of Science, 73.
16. Michael Fumento, Science under Siege, 272.
17. The difference between the greenhouse effect, which is a
constant property of Earths atmosphere, and a possible excessive
enhancement of that effect is not in the least trivial. As regards policy,
as well as physical chemistry, it is absolutely fundamental.
Commentators who have not quite mastered the science and,
unfortunately, a few who have, give the impression that the greenhouse
is something new, something imposed by human activity on a
previously invariant atmosphere. Such statements are false and
inherently alarmist. They imply, moreover, a much greater certainty
about future surface temperatures on this planet than is justified by
available knowledge. A good example of this careless usage is to be
found in (then Senator) Al Gores well-meaning and fervent book
(Earth in the Balance, 5). Despite its merits, this work manages to
create false impressions, e.g., that an overwhelming majority of
scientists believe that we are now passing or have already passed the
point of no return toward a catastrophic global warming due to a
greenhouse effect (3739).
18. A grumble, widespread among atmospheric physicists whose
predictions of global warming have so far failed, is that their expected
climatic shift has been preventedor frustratedby recent volcanic
eruptions (e.g., that of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines). Vulcanism puts
sulfate aerosols and CO2 into the atmosphere in huge quantities. The
aerosols, added to the gases, nucleate cloud formation; and the more
cloud cover, the more incoming solar radiation is reflected back into
space. In the end there is less energy available to be transformed, via
the greenhouse effect, into surface heat. It is perhaps not necessary to
remind readers that we have no control over volcanoes.
19. One, again, among hundreds of possible examples, is the
recent News and Views essay of Mark Chandler (of the NASA
Goddard Institute for Space Studies) in Nature, on current
understanding of the relationships between atmospheric CO2 and
oceanic heat transport in the regulation of planetary surface air
temperatures (Mark Chandler, Not Just a Lot of Hot Air). Chandlers
closing sentence is worth quoting in full: Global circulation models,
working from the fundamental physical equations, may one day do the
job, but not until atmospheric water and ocean features are simulated
more realistically. Recognizing that the devil is in the details would
ensure that the road to hell is not just paved with good conventions
(emphasis added).
20. See J. W. Waters et al., Stratospheric CIO and Ozone from
the Microwave Limb Sounder on the Upper Atmosphere Research
Satellite.
21. Observe, for example, the recent, much-advertised conversion
of fast-food packaging from plastic to paper. The outcomes will include
a sharp acceleration of tree-cutting for paper, an increase of energy
utilization (in pulping the logs and making the paper), and a decrease
in biodegradability of the discard (because the paper used is actually
a composite, lined with a plastic heat-retainer). In short, this remedy
is with high probability a net loser, from any seriously
environmentally conscious point of view, as, for example,
McDonalds management is the first to admit in the right company. An
interesting explanation for the failure of specific interventions to
influence the behavior of very complex systems is given by the
physicist F. David Peat, in an effort to come to grips with the startling
implications of Bells theorem (which demonstrates nonlocality in the
quantum universe). Applying the insight macroscopically, while it
encourages him in a certain amount of rhapsodizing on nonlinearity,
nevertheless suggests why hasty interventions so often cause trouble:
Such systems have a wide variety of behaviors that range from
stability and rigidity to change to sudden bifurcation points and
extreme sensitivity. The very complexity of these systems may
make them impossible to model in any satisfactory way. In
addition, any human intervention often leads to unpredictable
results Such solutions can have unexpected effects and
when it comes to highly complex and interrelated systems, the
cure may even be worse than the problem itself! (F. David Peat,
Einsteins Moon, 163.)

22. See, e.g., Gary Taubes, The Ozone Backlash.

23. E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life. We applaud the arguments
of this distinguished and humane scientist, and await with curiosity the
response to them of the academic left, some of whose members have
accused him repeatedly of sexism and racism, among other, lesser
crimes, for his role as a founder of sociobiology.
24. Taubes, The Ozone Backlash, 1581.
25. Although to do so will place us irretrievablyin the minds of
some of our colleaguesamong the Reaganites and dinosaurs, we
recommend on this point chapter 10 of Trashing the Planet, by the
straight-shooting Dixy Lee Ray and Lou Guzzo (pp. 123ff).
26. See Gregg Easterbrook, Green Cassandras, 23, reporting on
the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit: There, discussion of palpable threats
to nature mixed in equal proportion with improbable claims of instant
doom. Environmentalists, who would seem to have an interest in
separating the types of alarms, instead encouraged the confusion on
doctrinal grounds, namely that environmental news should be
negative.
27. Merchant, Radical Ecology, 236. Merchant derives her
postmodern view of science, i.e., that mechanistic and atomistic
science is being supplanted by holistic science, in part from opinions
of physicist David Bohm, in his last years a philosopher and something
of a mystic (pp. 9394). Bohms meditations on quantum mechanics
and its implications (see, for example, his nontechnical essay
Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World), as Merchant
understands them, lead to this position. It is thus an irony that a
rigorous working-out of Bohms ideas about physics (see chapter 3,
note 9 herein) lead to a strong reaffirmation of the mechanistic and
atomistic picture of reality. Merchant is also eager, of course, to
claim that chaos theory provides metaphysical leverage for her notions
of the superiority of organistic science over mechanistic (9697).
Therein she echoes Steven Best, giving as little evidence as does he of
significant understanding of the theories she cites. Mercifully, she is
less prolix.
28. Editorial by G. B. Gori.
29. Philip Abelson, Testing for Carcinogens with Rodents, and
the same editors more recent Toxic Terror; Phantom Risks.
30. Lewis, Green Delusions, 81.
31. Merchant, The Death of Nature, 236.
32. See, for an example of the scientific arguments against general
circulation models (GCMs) that predict disastrous global warming
during the next century, and of arguments for a protective role of rising
CO2 in the current atmospheric greenhouse, the views of the
climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, brought together in Sound and Fury.
33. Stephen Schneider, statement in Discover magazine, October
1989, quoted in Michaels, Sound and Fury, 161.
34. For instance, as insatiable supplicants for increased federal
funding, and as infighters, with one another, over a share of the pieor
pork.
35. As has been argued, not unconvincingly, by many serious
scientists in the businesssee Michaels, Sound and Fury.
36. J. Imbrie et al., Milankovitch Theory Viewed from Devils
Hole.
37. See Environmental Politics Is Making the Kitchen Hotter, a
story by Marian Burros on Jeremy Rifkins alliance with the celebrity-
chef Wolfgang Puck. We hope that the reader understands that except
for seafood, wild game, and a few genuinely wild berries and greens,
all the food we eat is the product of extensive genetic modification; and
that this has been true almost from the beginning of agriculture and
animal husbandry. There is no reason to believe that genetic
modification by recombinant DNA techniques is any different in effect
or more dangerous than the ancient practices of selective breeding for
favorable varieties. See also John Seabrook, Tremors in the
Hothouse, for an account of this quarrel and Rifkins role in it as it
centers on tomatoes modified by recombinant DNA techniques.
38. Steven Best, Chaos and Entropy, 2045.
39. Stanley Aronowitz, Science under Capitalism lecture.
40. Steven J. Gould, Integrity and Mr. Rifkin, 236.
41. Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef, 158.
42. Jonathan H. Adler, in the American Spectator, April 1993;
Rifkins quotation is from Lester R. Brown et al., in the Worldwatch
Institutes State of the World 1990.
43. Bill Freedman, Environmental Ecology. This, of course, does
not address the problem of species loss from the deforestation of the
tropical rainforest.
44. Ibid., 104. See also Michaels, Sound and Fury, 144.
45. Ibid., 120ff.
46. Ibid., 165.
47. For one, and only one, of hundreds of possible recent examples
of such research, see H. Wayne Polley, et al., Increase in C 3 Plant
Water Use Efficiency and Biomass over Glacial to Present CO 2
Concentrations.
48. Michaels, Sound and Fury.
49. Val Plumwood, Nature, Self, and Gender, 18.
50. Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics, 6.
51. Berman, The Reenchantment of Nature, 278.
 52. From Blakes personal papers, quoted by Charles Rosen, The
Mad Poets, 35.
53. Martin Lewis, Green Delusions, 247.

7. The Schools of Indictment

1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chap. 35, The Quarter-Deck.

2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
3. Here is but one example: the pathway of development of those
cells that function as the bodys guardians against non-selfincluding
pathogenic invaderscould not be worked out until the identity and
life history of such cells were known. Such a life history cannot be
obtained merely from looking at the cells: they all look alike. A means
of identifying the stages of developmentthese cells are lymphocytes
of thymic origin (hence T-cells)had to await the solution of a
separate, older, technical problem. In due course it came down to the
question of how to produce an antiserum, every antibody molecule of
which would be the same as every othera monoclonal antibody.
Without the aid of such antibodies, which can function as markers for
(otherwise invisible) surface molecules (antigens) of cells, there would
be no way of knowing exactly what is happening within the system of
cellular immunocompetence as it varies normally or in disease. The
technical problem of preparing monoclonal antibodies was solved,
eventually, by an ingenious and elegant application of thenrecent
knowledge about the behavior and genetics of cell mixtures in culture.
Only after that development, and others that evolved from an
increasingly sophisticated cell biology, was it possible to make a start
on the molecular-level analysis of T-cell development and maturation.
Only the results of such an analysis could provide insight into a
catastrophic breakdown of the bodys defenses against invaders and of
its tumor-surveillance systems. Progress was very rapid after 1975; but
even so, it took five or six years before a comprehensive picture of the
molecular-level events of T-cell-mediated immunity began to emerge.
Such a picture is, of course, absolutely essential for any understanding
of a disease that wipes out immunity, since disease happens in the first
instance, here as elsewhere, at the cellular and molecular levels.
4. Anthony Fauci et al., Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome,
92.
5. As is well known, there was considerable bad blood between
these two eminent researchers. It is not for us to judge their conflicting
priority claims. There are questions of history and ethics here; but no
doubt at all about the validity of the science that emerged.
6. To date, this category of AIDS sufferers, expanded by the
number of babies born to infected mothers, accounts for about 10
percent of the total. Readers with some life science background but
unfamiliar with modern immunology will find an excellent source in
Golub and Green, Immunology: A Synthesis. The concluding
chapters on immunodeficiency disease are highly accessible.
7. In the rest of the world, matters are grimmer. According to
Daniel Tarantola and Jonathan Mann, Coming to Terms with the AIDS
Pandemic, the spread of the disease is explosive now in Southeast
Asia, where, by the turn of the century, more than 40 percent of cases
will be found.
8. Everyone keeps score, everyone for his own purposes; and the
published scores are sometimes suspect, as we demonstrate here; but it
seems clear that while the rate of new HIV infections may have begun
to decline nationally, it continues to rise among young homosexual
men, i.e., between the ages of thirteen and twenty-nine. See, for an
example of the sermonizing this elicits, an editorial in the Richmond
Times-Dispatch for March 8, 1993.
9. Recently, the decade-old puzzle of the long latency of AIDS,
the remarkably long interval between infection and the appearance of
symptoms, has yielded to research. It is now clear that the virus is alive
and well, but hiding, for a long period after initial infection, in the
lymph nodes and in other lymphoid tissues. See Giuseppe Pantaleo et
al. and Janet Embretson et al., back-to-back articles in Nature on the
progressive activity of HIV in lymphoid tissue during the clinically
latent stage of the disease. One more littlebut deadly serious
puzzle of nature solved.
10. Science magazine for May 28, 1993, has for its title AIDS:
The Unanswered Questions. This was as fair and authoritative a
summary of the issues as was available at the time of writing this book.
The reader interested in a well-documented summary of the
pathogenesis of AIDS, as understood in the summer of 1993, is referred
to the paper by Robin A. Weiss (How Does HIV Cause AIDS?) in
that issue.
11. The wildfire spread of the disease in parts of Africa, by what is
almost certainly heterosexual contact, has yet to be fully explained, but
it may be a property of a variant HIV. It becomes increasingly likely,
however, that there are other factors, such as endemic diseases,
venereal and otherwise, that produce genital irritation, scars, and
lesions, in whose presence transmission of the virus is greatly
facilitated, whereas in their absence transmission via heterosexual,
vaginal intercourse is highly unlikely.
12. Oddly enough, even the most abusive oppositionist arguments
favor research; what is taken to be at stake here, inconsistently, is not
the power and effectiveness of scientific research, but who is to be in
charge of it.
13. As an exampleand a notorious one at thatwe have the
militant Chicago politician Steve Cokely, who insists that Jewish
doctors are deliberately infecting black babies with the AIDS virus,
under the pretext of vaccinating them against disease! This charge is
sickening, but by no means unusual.
14. We might call it the school-condom school, except that to do
so would encourage unnecessarily the extreme right, in whose members
the distribution of condoms in the public schools triggers fits of rage.
Such distribution will protect few heterosexual males for whom sexual
intercourse is the only risk factor. It might be of some value to sexually
active young women among whose partners may be bisexual or IV drug
users. It will protect no one from the consequences of needle sharing.
On the other hand, as a contraceptive for teenagers who areand who
will continue, come what may, to besexually active and sexually
promiscuous, it is possibly better than nothing. Conservative rage is
against the implication that sex sans sacrament is okay; the radical
delusion is that education, in the form of slogans and free penile
sheaths, is even a partial solution to the problem.
15. Notebook, New Republic, August 17 & 24, 1992, 8.
16. See, typically, Peter H. Duesberg, HIV Is Not the Cause of
AIDS, Science 241, July 1988, 51416, and for a rebuttal, W. Blattner,
R. C. Gallo, and H. M. Temin, HIV Causes AIDS, Science 241, July
1988, 51517.
 17. Robert Root-Bernstein, Re-thinking AIDS, Wall Street
Journal, editorial, March 17, 1993. Root-Bernsteins full argument is in
his book Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus.
18. See, for example, Tom Bethell, AIDS Reporters Snooze, in
an issue of Heterodoxy that gives sympathetic coverage to Duesberg
and his followers.
19. The argument also has an undeniable appeal to a small faction
of gay militants, to whom it holds out the hope that, despite the AIDS
epidemic, it might be possible to return to the omnivorous sexual habits
that pervaded the most liberated gay communities in the seventies.
The argument is that if HIV is not, per se, causative of AIDS, then the
danger of infection can be ignored, provided other damaging behaviors
and bad health habits are avoided.
20. Let us take, for the single example to which we can devote
space, the particular set of claims about drug abuse as fatally
predisposing or even as the main cause of AIDS. This one has been a
favorite, oddly, on the political left as well as on the right; and it is still
taken very seriously by some scientists. M. S. Ascher and colleagues
(see M. S. Ascher, H. W. Sheppard, W. Winkelstein, and E. Vittinghoff,
Does Drug Use Cause AIDS?) have investigated the question by
means of a direct epidemiological test. They analyzed the large data
source of a population-based cohort, the San Francisco Mens Health
Study. The cohort is 1,034 single men aged twenty-five to fifty-four at
the time of recruitment, from a neighborhood where the AIDS epidemic
had flourished in its early years, but otherwise without regard to sexual
preference, lifestyle, or, at the time of recruitment, to serology (i.e.,
presence or absence of HIV antibodies in the blood). In this statistically
rigorous investigation, the variables included sexual preference, drug
use, and serostatus: the endpoints were AIDS cases and deaths. An
added, unique feature of the work, however, was the availability, during
eight years of the study, of an additional endpoint: CD4+ T-lymphocyte
counts for its participants. Thus the studys variables could be related,
not only to appearance of the syndrome known as AIDS, but
specifically to an objective criterion: the diseases principal (and
unquestionably causative) pathologic feature: depletion of CD4+ cells.

The results of this study are as clear as epidemiology ever gets to

be. Environmental or behavioral factors proved, in this group, to be
statistically insignificant, while seropositivitythe presence of
antibody to the putative AIDS virusand its progression over time
were highly significant. The CD4+ data are impressive. People free of
the virus had normal cell counts throughout the interval, or even
slightly elevated counts if they were heavy drug users (a matter of
separate, potential interest); among those infected with HIV and
remaining alive (a good many of them died of AIDS, of course), there
was a steady and cataclysmic decline in cell number over the entire
period.
21. I.e., vaginal intercourse.
22. This is the outcome of the Concorde Trial in Europe,
reported in the April 3, 1993, issue of The Lancet.
23. By association of the most irrational sort, lesbian women are
also tagged, in some quarters, as AIDS bearers. Obviously, committed
lesbians are at less risk for AIDS than other categories of sexually
active persons.
24. E.g., middle-class college students.
25. Larry Kramer, Reports from the Holocaust, 178.
 26. Ibid., 103.
27. Kay Diaz, Are Gay Men Born That Way? 43.
28. Daniel Harris, AIDS and Theory, 16.
29. Ibid., 19.
30. Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS, 71.
31. Jacques Derrida, Rhtorique de la drogue. Quoted in
Alexander G. Dtt-mann, What Wilt Have Been Said about AIDS,
102.
32. John ONeill, Horror Autotoxicus, 26566. Note that
autoimmunity does not mean what the author seems to think it means.
In ordinary clinical use, this word refers to a disease state in which the
immune system fails to recognize self, and therefore attacks it.
Autoimmunity is never enjoyed.
33. Tim Dean, The Psychoanalysis of AIDS, 84ff. Deans verbal
mush, appearing as it does in the wake of Harriss debunking Lingua
Franca article, is self-consciously defensive. Dean accuses Harris of a
thoroughly reactionary, anti-intellectual stance. Dean should be
reminded that nothing is more anti-intellectual than shooting ones
mouth off when one is overwhelmingly ignorant (see note 12, chapter
4).
34. Harris, AIDS and Theory, 19.
35. Steven Epstein, Democratic Science? AIDS Activism and the
Contested Construction of Knowledge.
36. Ibid., 60.
37. David L. Kirp, Rx Populi.
 38. Benjamin Wittes and Janet Wittes, Group Therapy. The
regulation in question is Section 131 of the National Institutes of
Health Revitalization Amendments (pending). While it is true that
Section 131 is concerned principally with the inclusion of women and
minorities in clinical trials, it represents a political impetus of
precisely the kind Epstein and others are talking about, i.e., the
democratization of clinical research.
39. They calculate the practical consequences of such a
requirement in a hypothetical test of a stroke-reducing treatment for
hypertension patients. Those would include increasing the sample size
from, say five thousand persons, followed for five years, to forty
thousand or more. The cost implications are staggering: Wittes and
Wittes report that a recent hypertension trial involving five thousand
subjects cost $50 million. Costs for such activities as clinical trials rise
at least in proportion to sample size: in fact they usually rise faster,
since there are emergent complications. Would the additional
information emerging be useful? Possibly; but not significantly more
so than that emerging from a standard test on a designed and limited
cohort (i.e., limited to the primarily affected group).
40. See Dennis L. Breo, At Large, 19.
41. Peter Singer, Animal Rights.
42. See Tom Regan, All That Dwell Therein.
43. At Rutgers, for instance, there is an Animal Rights Legal
Center affiliated with the Rutgers (Newark) Law School. At the
University of Virginia, on the day of this writing, the concrete walks
have chalked all over them, in foot-high letters, such maxims as FUR
KILLS.

44. Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses, 82.

 45. HypatiaA Journal of Feminist Philosophy 6, no. 1 (Spring
1991). Special issue on ecological feminism.
46. Carol J. Adams, Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals,
140.
47. Deborah Slicer, Your Daughter or Your Dog? 10824. Note
rethinking the status of fur: pour encourager les autresthose
potential recruits or contributors who have not yet determined upon a
defensible means of disposing of the mink coat. To sell it, of course,
even if at a loss, would be shaming.
48. This does not include Peter Singer himself, whose utilitarian
propensity for moral bookkeeping intrudes and complicates the
question.
49. An article in the left-wing journal Z (Joan Dunayer,
Censorship: Faculty Who Oppose Vivesection) gives some evidence
of the affinity of the contemporary academic left for the animal rights
cause. For the most part, this is a standard anti-vivisectionist screed
that asserts categorically the uselessness of animal research for drug
development, creation of new treatment modalities, or devising
diagnostic technology. (The article purports to raise certain questions
about the academic freedom of anti-vivisectionists. There may be a
point here but the evidence presented is too skimpy and selective to
allow any judgment.) In fairness to Z, we note that the magazine
published subsequently a devastating rejoinder to Dunayers piece, in
the form of a lengthy letter to the editor from Matt Spitzer (Z, June
1993, 3).
50. The following are a very few samples of well-documented
articles on the depredations of animal rights activists and on the nature
and effects of their arguments: Herbert Pardes et al., Physicians and
the Animal-Rights Movement; Rudy M. Baum, Biomedical
Researchers Work to Counter Animal Rights Agenda; Jerod M. Loeb
et al., Human vs. Animal Rights. An editorial account of a
Consensus Conference of the National Institutes of Health, devoted
to exploration of non-animal models in the study of diabetes,
cardiovascular disease, and pulmonary diseases, is in Paul R. Gross,
Animals Still Crucial to Research.
The clearest and most fundamental statements of the opposing
point of view that are not simply activist propaganda tracts are the
popular philosophical books of Singer (Animai Rights) and Regan (All
That Dwell Therein and The Case for Animal Rights). It must be noted,
however, that distinguished moral philosophers can be deeply
concerned about animal rights and yet reject decisively the simple
and shakyutilitarianism of such arguments. See, for example, Cora
Diamonds often quoted Eating Meat and Eating People.
51. See Todd Gitlin, The Rise of Identity Politics.
52. Charles S. Finch, The African Background of Medical
Science, 151ff. Byway of comparison to Europe, see Renate
Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born, which demonstrates that in
medieval and Renaissance Europe, successful cesarean sections were
extremely rare.
53. See Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Melanin, Afrocentricity,
and Pseudoscience, which briefly lays out the evidence that the
ancient Egyptians, like the modern residents of that country, were of
mixed ancestry, with a small contribution from sub-Saharan Africa.
54. Beatrice Lumpkin, Africa in the Mainstream of
Mathematics.
 55. Actually, 256/81.
56. These are published by the Multnomah School District of the
Portland, Oregon, public schools (1990).
57. Hunter Havelin Adams, Baseline Essay in Science. (Outline,
page 7 of the general introduction.)
58. Ibid., 41.
59. See Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Multicultural
Pseudoscience.
60. The Dogon, with no apparent instrument at their disposal,
appear to have known these amazing facts [about the Sirius system] for
at least 500 years! (Adams, Baseline Essay in Science, S-60.)
61. See Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Magic Melanin and
Melanin, Afro-centricity, and Pseudoscience, for an account of the
bizarre doings of the Melanin scholars.
62. The latter (Kenneth R. Manning, Black Apollo of Science),
however, albeit very well written and handsomely published, offers a
rather superficial view of Justs research accomplishments, theoretical
positions, and eventual politics.
63. We note with great satisfaction that an art critic has devoted
substantial space to a properly devastating critique of Van Sertima, H.
H. Adams, and their cronies (Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint). As
scientists, we owe him enormous thanks; and we wonder why the
scientists left the job to someone else.
64. Adams, Baseline Essay in Science, vi. De Broglie is quoted as
follows: Many scientists of the present day, victims of an ingenuous
realism, almost without perceiving it, have adopted a certain
metaphysics of a (sexist), materialistic, and mechanistic character and
have regarded it as the very expression of scientific truth. De Broglie
was, of course, addressing the implications of quantum mechanics,
which had rendered problematical the billiard-ball determinism of
classical physics. Even if we allow that the use of parentheses, rather
than editorial square brackets, is a simple misprint, Adamss imputing
concern about sexism to de Broglie, who died before the term was
coined, is a solecism. That simply was not de Broglies concern in the
cited passage. It is possible to infer that Adams is lured into this
childish error by his reading of Ruth Bleier, Feminist Approaches to
Science.
65. Bell Hooks, Columbus, 25.
66. Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Chariots of the [Black] Gods?
(preliminary version).
67. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? 22327.
We note that Hardings approving reference to the work of Van Sertima
et al. comes in for similar praise, in its turn. The favorable review of
Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? by Sue V. Rosser (The Gender
Equation) singles out Hardings citation of African scientific
achievement as particularly admirable. The appearance of Rossers
featherweight piece in The Sciencesa normally serious journal of the
New York Academy of Sciencessays quite a bit about the sympathy
that feminism enjoys in the scientific communityand about the moral
leverage that feminist scholars are now able to apply in many areas.
68. A recent, well-received book reflecting Montellanos hard-
science background is Aztec Medicine, Nutrition, and Health.
69. In addition to the works already cited, Ortiz de Montellano has
pursued these questions in Afrocentric Creationism and A Critique
of the Portland Schools Baseline Essay.

8. Why Do the People Imagine a Vain Thing?

1. See, for example, Jeri Laber, Bosnia.

2. George Steiner, In Bluebeards Castle, 65.
3. Ibid., 65.
4. See, for example, Montaignes essay On Cannibals.
5. J. Hillis Miller. Quoted in David Lehman, Signs of the Times,
4041.
6. The story of the Reagan familys involvement with astrology is
universally known. By way of symmetry, here is Camille Paglia, the
celebrated literary critic, in the canceled prefacenow reborn in Sex,
Art, and American Culture, 107to her Sexual Personae: I am
partial to cyclic theories of reality, as in Hinduism or astrology and the
ever-turning Wheel of Fortune. On the other hand, her exquisitely
formulated view of the postmodern pantheonDerrida, Foucault,
Lacanredeems her in full: French rot! Gibberish. Readers who have
not yet encountered Paglias comments on this subject can meet her at
her best in the long essay Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,
reprinted in the same volume (170248).
7. See, for example, P. Gerdes, Marx Demystifies Calculus, which
reprints, with enthusiastic commentary, much of Marxs writing on
mathematics. The book is apparently intended as some kind of manual
for students who have been bewildered by the attempts of mathematics
professors to teach them the bourgeois foundations of calculus. No
description can do justice to its absurdityit must be sampled directly.
On the other hand, there seems to be an embryonic movement to put
this stuff into the universities as part of multicultural reforms. We
trust this wont get too far, although stranger (but not much) things
have happened.
8. See, for example, V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empiro-
Criticism.
9. For a devastating critique of matriarchalist feminism and the
superstitious and merely wishful strain in ecofeminism generally, see
Janet Biehl, Rethinking Ecofeminism. As to what there is to criticize,
consider the following: Rationalism is the key to the linked
oppressions of women and nature in the West (from Val Plumwood,
Nature, Self, and Gender).
 9. Does It Matter?

1. As one among many possible examples, see Anne Fausto-

Sterling, Is Nature Really Red in Tooth and Claw? This piece is
earnestly devoted to knocking down a straw man: an established
biology the author characterizes as fixated on competition, while it
suppresses the facts and significance of cooperation (i.e., mutualism
and symbiosis) in nature. Fausto-Sterlings political purpose of this is
clear: A strong case can be made for viewing nature as a socialist
cooperative only a change in social ambience will permit these
already existing ideas to be incorporated into the mainstream of
biological thought. Anybody who thinks of life in a complex
ecosystem in a major landscape, say, the continental shelf, a coral reef,
or a tropical rainforest, either as a system of competing capitalist
enterprises or as a socialist cooperative has been staying up late with
the wrong literature. We know of no serious contemporary natural
history, ecology, or evolutionary biology so afflicted in its structure.
2. Arthur Potynen, Oedipus Wrecks.
3. Alan Chalmers, Science and Its Fabrication, 125.
4. Indeed, such responses as are here printed, to already-famous
attacks on patriarchal science, have been criticized when made viva
voce as tasteless and unfair because womens studies is a struggling
young discipline, still finding its feet in a hostile academic world.
5. For a clear-eyed analysis of this phenomenon at its most
intense, see Martin Jay, The Academic Woman as Performance
Artist.
 6. Lewis S. Feuer, From Pluralism to Multiculturalism.
7. The media, including such trade organs as the Chronicle of
Higher Education, seem to have settled upon the description of this
body (the N.A.S.) as traditionalist. While that certainly fits many of
the members, it clearly annoys others, who have some claim to being
thinkers quite as advanced and progressive as their equivalents in the
MLA.
8. Jacob Weisberg, The NAS: Who Are These Guys, Anyway?,
3439.
9. These exact words were used by an energetic young
postmodernist, in the hearing of one of us, to impugn the warning given
by a distinguished cardiologist to a colleague who was being pressured
to seek help for a serious heart condition from the local holistic healing
emporium.
10. The full stories of several such media distortions, compounded
in equal parts of avarice (for sensation and its consequent ratings),
politics, and scientific ignorance, is beginning to be told. Michael
Fumentos new (1993) book, Science under Siege, is full of them,
meticulously documented. Any reader who still doubts that the huge
environmental public-interest groups are as interested in public
relations, and as casual about the scientific truth, as the most profit-
driven multinational corporation should study Fumentos account of
the disgraceful Alar scare, to which the main contributors were the
EPA, CBSs 60 Minutes, the Nader organizations, the National
Resources Defense Council, and a public relations firm hired by the
NRDC.
11. Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, personal communication.
 12. Eugenie Scott, MulticulturalismThe Good, the Bad, and the
Ugly (lecture).
13. Stanley Aronowitz, having deconstructed the scientific
enterprise in Science as Power, has gone on to co-author a tract on how
to reform education in accordance with postmodern philosophy and the
academic lefts canon of political virtue (Aronowitz and Giroux,
Postmodern Education). For a self-appointed expert on science,
Aronowitz has wondrous little to say about the reform of science
education. The book avoids this question, except to convey a
generalized distrust of scientists and to suggest that ecological
questions be introduced into science courses. We should be thankful for
this reticence.
14. Carolyn Merchant, address, University of Virginia, 1993.
15. Sandra Harding, seminar talk at Center for the Critical
Analysis of Contemporary Culture, 1992.

Supplementary Note

The literature with which we are concerned is large and scattered.

New items, and older ones of which we have become aware too late for
mention in the text, continue to demand our attention. We feel obliged
to take note of a few samples here. In the following paragraphs,
numbers in square brackets refer to relevant pages of this book. Sources
are identified in the supplementary list at the end of the references.
Andrew Ross [8992] (now at New York University) has added to
his bibliography on science with The Chicago Gangster Theory of
Life (1993), a tantrum in the form of an essay that denounces science
in general and genetics in particular. There is the predictable scourging
of E. O. Wilsons sociobiological thought as some kind of capitalist-
patriarchalist conspiracy. We note, with some puzzlement, however,
that Ross, through ignorance or unkindness, fails to credit Wilsons
well-known and effective efforts on behalf of biodiversity, a cause that
seems close to Rosss heart.
Meredith F. Small has just published Female Choices, a
celebration of the bonobo that enlarges to book length her claim that
this primate can and should serve our species as a nonsexist role model
[125]. A brief, caustic review, Oh, Those Bonobos! by the biologist
and feminist Helena Cronin, has appeared in the New York Times.
Freeman Dysons recent article, Science in Trouble, includes
acute remarks on the obstacles put in the way of a safe and beneficial
biotechnology by Jeremy Rifkins endless stream of environmentalist
lawsuits [170].
The postmodern sage Avital Ronell has joined the list of thinkers
who view AIDS as a product of the corrupt metaphysics of Western
post-Enlightenment discourse with A Note on the Failure of Mans
Custodianship. Sample sentences from this effusion: The co-factors
that have produced the destruction of internal self-defence capabilities
still need to be studied in a mood of Nietzschean defiance toward the
metaphysico-scientific establishment. For surely AIDS is in concert
with the homologous aggression that is widely carried out against the
weak within the ensemble of political, cultural, and medical
procedures. It is not far-fetched to observe that these procedures take
comparable measures to destroy any living, menacing reactivity, and
thus have to be considered precisely in terms of the disconcerting
reciprocity of their ensemble [60]. Ronell easily outshines, in sheer
loopiness, the examples [19193] to which our readers have already
been introduced.
As to medical procedures, we are saddened to discover that one
source of instruction for undergraduates in the history and practice of
obstetrics is Alexandra Dundas Todds Intimate Adversaries, the
burden of which is that male physicians have turned the natural, healthy
process of childbirth into a disease and that their destructive (to
women) contribution, rooted in (patriarchal) science, should never have
replaced midwifery. There is, of course, no serious discussion in this
airy volume of such matters as puerperal fever, infection, eclampsia,
and the like, nor of the role of twentieth-century male physicians in the
advocacy of natural childbirth. This book is a prototype of what
happens when social-scientific disciplines (here sociology and
anthropology) are recruited wholly to the service of an
uncompromising sexual politics.
Among a number of comprehensive refutations of the strong form
of cultural contructivism (as regards natural science) are several
impressive recent books. Steven Weinbergs new Dreams of a Final
Theory contains devastating remarks on the cultural constructivist
theory of scientific knowledge [4270] (Weinberg, 18490). We note
with amusement that he, too, found the post-World War II cargo cults
pertinent to his analysis [4041]. Sociologist Stephen Cole provides a
detailed refutation in Making Science; and Scrutinizing Science, a
recently reprinted compendium of papers edited by Arthur Donovan,
Larry Laudan, and Rachel Laudan on the philosophy and history of
science, is a rich resource for those interested in empirical efforts to
test the major post-positivist claims on guiding principles
(paradigms) and theory choice.
Supplementary Notes to the 1998 Edition

p. 9 The notion that right-leaning intellectuals, academic and

otherwise, keep their distance from Creationism turns out to have been
premature. Within the last few years, and with the support of such
academics as Phillip Johnson (University of California at Berkeley),
Michael Behe (Lehigh University), and Dean Kenyon (San Francisco
State University), religiously linked anti-evolutionism has become a
fixture of the campus scene. A pseudo-scholarly journal, Origins and
Design, has been established to promote this point of view.
Conservative journalist Tom Bethell (see also p. 282, n. 18) is a
supporter. (See National Center for Science Education Reports, Winter,
1996.)
p. 20 Laplaces famous quip, I did not find the hypothesis
necessary, seems, according to recent scholarship, to be apocryphal.
Laplace might have said it (but didnt); somebody did say it (but not
Laplace).
p. 34 To the panoply of communications instruments by which the
academic left propagates its ideas, we may now add World Wide Web
sites. Of course, its the rare upwardly mobile thinker, these days, who
doesnt have his own homepage, so the left has no monopoly.
p. 39 Perusal of recent numbers of Lingua Franca reveals that the
tone and scope of such announcements hasnt changed much in four
years.
p. 54 Recent Newton scholarship shows that Newtons jealous
editing of the historical record was even more extensive than has been
commonly thought. While his claim to have invented calculus during
the late 1660s seems to hold up, he apparently backdated much of his
work on celestial mechanics in order to suppress the role of Robert
Hooke. Hooke has priority for much of what we now think of as
Newtons Laws of Motion, and Newton focused clearly on the relation
between an inverse-square, central force formulation of gravitation, and
Keplerian orbital ellipses at the urging (sometimes as tart criticism) of
Hooke in the late 1670s. Newton nevertheless deserves full credit for
the key mathematical insights necessary to make this formulation
rigorous. See A. Rupert Hall, Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and Michael
Nauenberg, Hooke, Orbital Motion, and Newtons Principia,
American Journal of Physics 62, no. 4 (April 1994): 33350, and John
Aubreys brief life of Hooke.
p. 55 In the early 1700s, Newton did address himself to the urgent
and practical navigational problem of determining longitude; his
scheme involved lunar observations interpreted through the
astronomical theory of the Principia and was never of practical use.
(Dava Sobel has written a short but eloquent account of the great
longitude problem and the achievement of the clockmaker, John
Harrison: Longitude [New York: Penguin Books, 1995].) However,
since all this occurred decades after Newtons foundational work in
mechanics, it can in no sense have motivated that work.
p. 57 Bruno Latour is on record as denying that he is a leftist. He
also denies that he is a constructivist, or indeed an anything but the
inventor of his own system (dare we call it actor/network theory?) of
verbally pyrotechnical science-studies and one of the Darwins of
science (see Who Speaks for Science? in Sciences, March/April
1995, 7). But his fame, at least in the United States, is due to his having
been taken up by the academic left and the cultural constructivists.
Perhaps they have really misunderstood him as, presumably, his French
compatriots have not (since he claims to have been attacked there by
the left). Misunderstanding him would not be difficult. The internecine
wars of science studies (for examples of which, see Andrew Pickering,
ed., Science as Practice and Culture [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992], especially Part 2) suggest that practitioners of this
subdiscipline disagree, and misunderstand one another, about
everything except that science is a social construct, decisively shaped
by social forces and interests, rather than by nature or reality, and
that it needs to be taken down a peg or two. The misfired attempt to
secure Latours appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study (which
preceded the writing of this book, but was unknown to us at the time)
was led by two prominent members of that tribe, anthropologist
Clifford Geertz and historian Joan Wallach Scott. See David Berreby,
That Damned Elusive Bruno Latour, Lingua Franca, October 1994,
2232 and 78.
p. 58 The hostility toward Latour among philosophers of science
and others concerned with scientific practice (including some
sociologists) has not lessened over the years. See Gross, Levitt, and
Lewis, eds., The Flight from Science and Reason (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997); N. Koertge, ed., A House Built on
Sand (forthcoming from the Oxford University Press); and a volume
forthcoming from A. Sokal and J. Bricmont.
p. 61 Some criticism has emerged of our reference to the
Traveling Salesman Problemthe problem of finding an optimal route
through a networkas anachronistic. The confusion arises because
these days, many people in theoretical computer science think of the
Traveling Salesman Problem as a synonym for the so-called P = NP
Problem (with whose technical significance we will not burden the
reader). However, at an earlier period, the TSP had a more practical
connotation, that is, of actually finding efficient routes through
networks. The scheduling problem for the Aramis scheme is obviously
a generalization of that kind of problem.
p. 62 Latours difficulties with mathematics are made hilariously
clear in his now-notorious paper, A Relativistic Account of
Relativity, Social Studies of Science 18 (1988): 344. See John Huth,
Latours Relativity, in A House Built on Sand.
p. 63 Pentimento: to call the Hobbes-Boyle dispute resounding
is perhaps to concede too much to the Shapin-Schaffer thesis. The
dispute was loud and vituperative, but essentially a historical sideshow.
p. 66 The distinguished historian of science Margaret C. Jacob
advises us that she considers Halleys reputation as an atheist to have
been a canard. We think the question is still open; at any rate, Halleys
views fell far short, in point of piety, of Newtons enthusiasms.
pp. 6768 Our refusal to accept the Shapin-Schaffer thesis on the
socially determined nature of the vacuum dispute of 1661, and on its
significance for enthroning the experimental life, has provoked
considerable agitation among those of the science studies community
who accord classic status to Leviathan and the Air Pump. But few of
them have addressed the rhetorical sleight-of-hand through which
Shapin and Schaffer avoid the question of Hobbess eccentricindeed,
madpretensions to mathematical genius, and their bearing on his
extensive quarrels. A number of additional points can be made to
illustrate just how far astray this omission has led gullible readers of
their book. (For what follows, Alexander Byrd, Squaring the Circle:
Hobbes on Philosophy and Geometry, Journal of the History of Ideas
57, no. 2 [1996]: 21732, is a good general reference; S. Probst,
Infinity and Creation: The Origin of the Controversy between Thomas
Hobbes and the Savilian Professors Seth Ward and John Wallis,
British Journal of the History of Science 26 [1993]: 27179, is also
valuable.)
1. The invective between Wallis and Hobbes over mathematical
questions began as far back as the early 1650s. In particular, Hobbess
claim to have squared the circle was widely circulated and widely
scorned during this decade, as was his supposed duplication of the
cube. With respect to these claims, Walliss colleague Seth Ward had
this irony to offer in 1654: Geometry hath now so much place in the
Universities, that when Mr. Hobbs shall have published his
Philosophicall and Geometrical Pieces [i.e., his circle-squaring and
cube-duplication efforts], I assure my selfe, I am able to find a great
number in the University, who will understand as much or more of
them then he desires they should, indeed too much to keep up in them
that Admiration of him which only will content him. Hobbess
repeated, but obtuse, attempts to answer his critics merely deepened the
scorn, which is typified by Huyghenss remarks that, as mathematician,
Hobbes was ridiculous and childish. Equally damning was
Hobbess reluctance to recognize significant results obtained by others,
particularly Wallis. Hobbes uncomprehendingly rejected Walliss
characterization of the conic sections of classical geometry as second-
degree plane curves. This, as even a mathematical tyro knows, is an
achievement of surpassing elegance and beauty, and Hobbess refusal
to come to terms with it can only be called stupid.
2. Shapin and Schaffer took note of Hobbess much-quoted remark
For who is so stupid, as both to mistake in geometry, and also to
persist in it, when another detects his error to him? to emphasize his
commitment to the deductive method. We noted (264 n. 34) the irony
of this remark: Hobbes himself was exactly that stupid, on many
occasions. We were not the first to take noteWallis, with similar
ironic intent, cited the very same words on the title page of his Due
Correction for Mr. Hobbes (1656). Another remark of Wallis, anent
Hobbes: How little he understands the mathematics from which he
takes his courage. All of this bolsters our chief point: The reputation
of Hobbes as a mathematical scientist was, by 1661, so deservedly low
among important thinkers that his not having been taken seriously as a
participant in scientific debate hardly needs explaining. Whats
puzzling is Walliss eagerness to continue the endless exchange, even
though his friends warned him that it was futile to try to wring
concessions from a crank. This, however, was a matter of egotism and
irascibility, not a case of political and social forces shaping scientific
dispute.
3. We have been attacked (see R. Hart, The Flight from Reason
in Science Wars , ed. A. Ross [Durham: Duke University Press, 1996],
25992) for putting forth our observations on Hobbess mathematical
folly as new scholarly discoveries on our part. This is absurd. The
point, which we should have thought obvious, is that these very well
known tales were not only swept under the rug by Shapin and Schaffer
but also ignored by hordes of supposed scholars eager to heap praise on
their work. (Harts critique on this point is bizarre, to say the least, in
other respects as well; he characterizes the proposition that Hobbes was
wrong in these mathematical disputes, and Wallis correct, as mere
conventional wisdom. Would that conventional wisdom were always
so wise!) Whether this obvious criticism was neglected out of mere
ignorance or, equally likely, out of a desire to laud the superiority of a
certain brand of social analysis of science, inconvenient facts
notwithstanding, the science studies community failed in an elementary
duty to scrutinize sweeping claims. It should have been warned by a
peculiar elision in the text of Leviathan and the Air Pump. On the very
last page of the book, which is the conclusion of the Appendix
presenting Simon Schaffers translation of Hobbess Dialogus
Physicus, these words appear in brackets: Here follows a proof, which
we omit, of the duplication of the cube. In other words, in the very
middle of the slanging match over the air pump, Hobbes reverted once
again to his absurd mathematical pretensions, to the great amusement,
no doubt, of his more-than-knowledgeable contemporaries. Can there
be any question at all why Hobbess version of deductive methodology
based (so he said) on Euclids geometry, was dismissed? As early as
1652, Seth Ward had pointed out, with respect to Hobbess attempt to
claim mathematical validity for his physical theories, that he [i.e.,
Ward, writing in the third person] is sure he [i.e., Hobbes] hath much
injured the Mathematicks, and the very name of Demonstration, by
bestowing it upon some of his discourses, which are exceedingly short
of that evidence and truth which is required to make a discourse able to
bear that reputation. Although the Appendix to Leviathan and the Air
Pump is chock-full of footnotes on all sorts of matters pertaining to
Dialogus Physicus, there is not one word about this strange omission,
or about the significance of what is left out.
4. We note that the work of Shapin and Schafferindividual and
jointhas recently come under telling attack by a number of scholars,
of whom we mention Mordechai Feingold, When Facts Matter (Isis
87, no. 1 [1996]: 3139; Cassandra Pinnick, Whats Wrong with the
Strong Programmes Case Study of the Hobbes-Boyle Dispute, in A
House Buiit on Sand; and Alan E. Shapiro, The Gradual Reception of
Newtons Theory of Light and Color, 16721727, Perspectives on
Science 4, no. 1 [1996]: 59140.) We also find it remarkable that
Shapin was able to write a well-publicized book, The Scientific
Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), which has not
one reference to the invention of the calculus and its significance. All
these points raise questions as to why Leviathan and the Air Pump and
the constructivist philosophy that it incarnates were elevated to the
exemplary academic status they have enjoyed.
p. 69 In his essay The Pioneer Defended, New York Review of
Books, December 21, 1995, 5458, on G. Geisons The Private Science
of Louis Pasteur (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), M. F.
Perutz has called attention to the eagerness of social scientists and
historians with sketchy scientific backgrounds to sit in judgment of the
ethics of scientists and (more to the point) on the science itself, upon
the authority of constructivism and other relativist notions. Says
Perutz, The entire approach emphasizing relative truth seems to me
a piece of humbug masquerading as an academic discipline; it pretends
that its practitioners can set themselves up as judges over scientists
whose science they fail to understand. The conclusion of this
fascinating argument, illustrating the tortuous justifications offered for
the kind of derogatory science-history to which Perutz was responding,
and the bluntness of his response, can be found in an exchange of
letters in the New York Review of Books, February 6, 1997, 4142.
p. 79 A. Plotnitsky, a deconstructive literary theorist with some
mathematics and physics background, has attempted to show that the
bizarre Einsteinian constant comment of Jacques Derrida, which has
by now attracted much scornful attention from physicists, actually
makes sense in the context of relativity theory (But It Is above All
Not True: Derrida, Relativity, and the Science Wars, Postmodern
Culture, published electronically). His effort is admirable for its
ingenuity and even more so for its presumptuousness. Its accuracy is
another matter, and its honesty is decidedly another matter.
It has also been pointed out, quite correctly, that the term
differential topology does not appear in Derridas Acts of Literature;
what shows up is differantial topology, as a translation of topique
differantiale. Let us assume, then, that Derrida did not authorize the
translators locution (but remember, the Wolin affair demonstrated that
he can be very finicky about translation of his writing). The honor of
the coinage then goes to translator Derek Attridge, a well-known
American deconstructionist. We leave it to the judgment of the reader
to assess the probability that the near-identity of Attridges phrase with
the mathematical one is merely adventitious.
In any case, there has been an enormous amount of comment from
our critics on this one specific matter, which, remember, was a casual
illustration of an incidental point: literary theorists sometimes use
jargon borrowed from scientific terminology to create the impression
of rigor and congruity with cutting edge science. We think the point
still stands, even if Attridge, rather than Derrida, is responsible for the
example. Plenty of other instances can be found. For example this,
from postmodern social theorist John Law, an ally of Bruno Latour, in
an attempt to characterize actor network theory:
Another way of tackling the issue is to think topologically.
Topology concerns itself with spatiality, and in particular with the
attributes of the spatial which secure continuity for objects as they are
displaced through a space. The important point here is that spatiality is
not given. It is not fixed, a part of the order of things. Instead, it comes
in various forms. We are most familiar with Euclideanism [sic].
Objects with three dimensions are imagined to exist precisely within a
conformable three dimensional space without violence so long as they
dont seek to occupy the same position as some other object. And so
long as their coordinates are sustained, they also retain their spatial
integrity....
All of this is intuitively obvious.
But studies of exotic societies suggest that there are other spatial
possibilitiesand so does actor network theory.
(John Law, Topology and the Naming of Complexity [draft],
published by the Centre for Social Theory and Technology, Keele
University, at <http://www.keele.ac/depts/stt/staff/jl/pubs-JL3.htm>).
If the success of this analogy depends upon Prof. Laws grasp of
topology, the prospects are not bright.
In any case, we take comfort in the fact that our critics have such
difficulty finding substantive grounds upon which to impeach our
arguments that they are forced to hammer away at this trifle.
p. 80 Fairness obliges us to note that the well-known cultural critic
Frederick Turner is an honest admirer of natural science (e.g., Frederic
Tur ner, Natural Classicism [Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 1992]), an emphatic antagonist of postmodernism, and,
ultimately, an advocate of traditional aesthetic and cultural standards.
p. 81 For a fascinating account of the purposeful and systematic
rejection of science by large parts of anthropology, and a thoughtful
analysis of what will be needed to reverse the process, see Lawrence A.
Kuznar, Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology (London: AltaMira
Press, 1997).
p. 83 Since our book was written, Duke University literary critic
Frank Lentricchia has stunned the community of literary critics by an
eloquent public recantation, in which the fatuities of postmodernism
and theory are scornfully denounced. (See F. Lentricchia, Last Will
and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic, Lingua Franca,
September/October 1996, 5967.)
pp. 8990 Prof. Andrew Ross was understandably discomfited by
the analysis in this volume. His response was to organize and edit a
special number of the cultural studies journal Social Text (no. 46/47
[1996]) under the rubric Science Wars, whose contributors included a
number of people criticized in this book, along with their sympathizers.
Their intention, in large measure, was to reply to our critique. That
intention misfired to a degree when Ross and his coeditors fell into the
trap set by our friend, Alan Sokal, accepting his hilarious hoax article
Transgressing the Boundaries: The Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity (Social Text , 21552) at face value. This volume
was subsequently republished in book form as Science Wars , but
without the Sokal piece. It sports, however, a few new essays. See the
subsequent Social Text 49 (1997) for further commentary.
Roger Harts Science Wars piece, The Flight from Reason (see
note to pages 6768 above) alleges that in quoting the long passage
(from New Age Techniculture and Strange Weather) likening the
science-versus-pseudoscience distinction to the high-brow-versus-
lowbrow cultural face-off, we misrepresented the views of Andrew
Ross (R. Hart, in Science Wars , 290 n. 37). Hart points out that the
paragraph following (unquoted by us) begins with Ross conceding, I
do not want to insist on a literal interpretation of this analogy (Strange
Weather, 26); this, claims Hart, is exculpatory. Harts claim is either
silly or sophistical. The paragraph we quoted got Ross into hot water
with many scientists and philosophers, not because it pushed the
analogy between science and taste cultures too far, but because it
clearly insisted that the distinction between science and pseudoscience
is a boundary-policing power-play, by which establishment scientists
maintain their social and political hegemony. The next paragraph,
although it hedges slightly on the taste culture analogy, does nothing
to qualify, modify, or soften the assertion that the science-
pseudoscience distinction is essentially dirty work perpetrated by
scientists anxious about their status. To quote further from that
paragraph:
A more exhaustive treatment would take account of the local,
qualifying differences between the realm of cultural taste and that
of science, but it would run up, finally, against the stand-off
between the empiricistss claim that non-context-dependent
beliefs exist and that they can be true, and the culturalists claim
that beliefs are only socially accepted as true. Ultimately, the
power of science rests upon making and maintaining that
distinction, and we ought to recognize that sciences anxiety about
authenticating its belief in truths is, in the truly [sic] Foucauldian
sense, a question of power. Consequently, it is not such a great
leap from seeing that categories of taste are also categories of
power employed to exclude the unwanted to seeing that the power
of scientific ideology rests upon its unwillingness to question the
role of the powerful institutions of sponsors whose interests are
not only heavily mortgaged in the demarcation debate [between
science and pseudoscience], but who are also well served by the
hireling scientists who referee it.

Should the reader guess that this kind of immaterial quibble might
be entirely characteristic of Harts critical equipment, we would not
spurn the presumption.
 p. 96 The recent claims, both mathematical and philosophical, of
Ilya Prigogine have been subjected to withering scrutiny by the
physicist and specialist in statistical mechanics Jean Bricmont. (See his
essay Science of Chaos or Chaos in Science? in The Flight from
Science and Reason, 13175.)
p. 97 We should make clear that when we speak of the process of
snowflake formation, we mean to include the entire system: warm
water-vapor, cold air, etc. It is the entropy of the whole system that
increases, of course.
p. 98 N. Katherine Hayles responds to this critique with a rejoinder
(Consolidating the Canon, in Science Wars [book version], 22637).
We recommend this to our readers as a specimen of Hayless logical
rigor and scrupulous handling of evidence. Says Hayles, One of the
grotesque exaggerations in which Levitt and Gross indulge is the
fantasy that the cultural and social studies of science are responsible
for cuts in funding for basic scientific research (Science Wars , 234).
Readers of the present text are invited to scrutinize it, line by line or
even word by word, for any support of Hayless statement.
p. 100 For an extensive and devastating analysis of Hayless
Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics, see P. A. Sullivan, An
Engineer Dissects Two Case Studies: Hayles on Fluid Mechanics, and
MacKenzie on Statistics, in A House Buiit on Sand.
p. 101 The lingering doubts about the correctness of general
relativity on the cosmic scale still linger. Recently, for instance, there
has been renewed interest in the cosmological constant and similar
modifications.
p. 110 In stating that the only widespread, obvious discrimination
today is against white males, we may have created, inadvertently, the
impression that we think there is widespread, obvious discrimination
against white males in science. For that confusion, we apologize. Such
is not the case, by and large. Science departments have, on the whole,
avoided the kind of race-and-sex-conscious hiring and retention
policies that have been commonplace in other areas of academic life,
just as they have been more successful in avoiding exclusionary
practices of the traditional kind. (We cannot, and do not, deny that
there have been exceptions of both kinds.) We note also, however, that
there are precious few science departments that have not been told by a
dean or provost, in the decade now ending, We dont have a faculty
line for you, but, if you find a qualified woman or minority candidate
... What effect this has had in these days of chronic understaffing, we
do not pretend to know. Whether this practice constitutes
discrimination against white males is a question that we leave to the
judgment of our readers.
pp. 113 and 27273, n. 7 Toward a Feminist Algebra has now
appeared as an essay in S. V. Rosser, ed., Teaching the Majority (New
York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1995), 12744.
We hope, somewhat forlornly, that its influence will be limited.
pp. 11617, 205 and 253 A current experiment in teaching
mathematics multi-culturally, as well as with a feminist slant, is
worth noting. It is a course, offered at the State University of New York
at Plattsburgh, designed to fulfill the mathematics requirement for non-
science majors. Here is a list of its objectives as given in the
syllabus:
After taking this course the student will be able to:
1. Describe the political nature of mathematics and mathematics
education.
 2. Describe gender and race differences in mathematics and their
sociological consequences.
3. Examine the factors influencing gender and race differences in
mathematics.
4. Critically evaluate Eurocentrism and androcentrism in
mathematics.
5. Describe the role the culture plays in the development and
learning of mathematics.
6. Give examples of the historical role of women and people of
color in mathematics.
7. Critically evaluate research on the relationship of gender and
culture to mathematics and mathematics education.
In the context of this course, the descriptions asked for are already
inflexibly determined; they are built into the reading list and lectures.
The instructors clear task is to make sure the answers come out in a
way that will satisfy the right-thinking on all points. Just in case
someone might be tempted to slip into unorthodoxy, the course requires
that a journal be kept so that the instructor can keep weekly track of the
progress of the students opinions. Arts and crafts are not neglected; the
student is to make an Incan quipu, a quilt square (presumably
illustrating nonmale mathematics), or an African board game. A typical
lecture assigns readings on fighting Eurocentrism, the role of
mathematics in building a democratic and just society, becoming
critically numerate, and justice and equity, and mathematics
instruction.
pp. 11722 The argument that there is bias in developmental
biology for sperm and against eggs continues to be made, publicly and
with strong emphasis of its exemplary character, despite its perfect
emptiness. The usual system of circular quotation of a politically
favorable story that happens not to be true (but what matter?) is in full
career. E. Fox Keller, H. Longino, N. Tuana, E. Martin, B. Spanier, and
others cite one another and, of course, the Biology and Gender Study
Group, as authoritative sources on the matter. So far as we can see, the
only source in the recent scientific literature is the one cited by the
BGSG (Schatten and Schatten), and that is a gloss on earlier research of
Schatten and Mazia, the conclusions of which give no support to the
statement that an aggressive egg grabs the spermatozoon, with the
latter contributing nothing to the interaction. In fact the Schatten-Mazia
conclusions are to the opposite effect: the morphological change
signaling effective interaction starts with the acrosome reaction of the
sperm head. Martin refers to certain claims that the force exerted by the
spermatozoons flagellum is weak, and others in this game report
with glee and astonishment that many spermatozoa are malformed, or
swim in circles and dont seem to know where they are going. These
observations are textbook material in embryology and in the clinical
literature of fertility and sterility. They have nothing to do with the
spermatozoons incompetence or the eggs aggressiveness in
fertilization. An effort to compare this popular chapter in the book of
feminist science-critique with the facts, biological and historical, has
been made by one of us in Bashful Eggs, Macho Sperm, and
Tonypandy, in A House Built on Sand; but the effort may well be in
vain. You cant keep a good story down.
p. 141 For further analysis of Kellers misrepresentation of
McClintocks work and scientific style, see our essay in the AAUP
house-organ, Academe (N. Levitt and P. R. Gross, Academic Anti-
Science, Academe, November-December, 1996, 3842) We might
strengthen an observation somewhat: There are no developments in
the history and philosophy of science that prove, or even plausibly
suggest, a social construction of the final product of empirical science.
Finally, we note that the recent cloning of Dolly has been the signal for
a remarkable outpouring of commentary from self-appointed as well as
professional ethicists. Leaving the latter aside for now, it is clear from
the asseverations of the former that most of them have no idea of the
technique of nuclear transplantation, which dates back to the late 1950s
and early 1960s, or of what the Edinburgh group did to modify it so that
it works in mammals (rather than in amphibians, in which Briggs and
King, but especially John Gurdon, using donor nuclei from
differentiated cells, showed thirty years ago that it works pretty well).
The socio-political bombast has included quite a lot of commentary on
DNA that displays no understandingstillof the roles of genes,
chromosomes, nuclei, and the egg cytoplasm in the reproduction and
development of multicellular animals (like us).
pp. 146 and 230 An interesting new twist in the history of feminist
dogmatism concerning the social construction of gender roles has
just emerged. One of the most celebrated cases supposedly proving that
sexual identity is plastic at birth and that environmental cues push it in
either a male or female direction irrespective of physiology was that of
an unfortunate male infant whose penis was severed in a surgical
accident. The decision of physicians and psychologists at the time
(some thirty-five years ago), acting under a version of this theory
already firmly entrenched, was to castrate the child, surgically create
the external female genitalia, and raise the child as a girl, with hormone
treatments administered chronically to foster the development of
female secondary sex characteristics. The supposedly successful
adjustment to this gender reassignment has long been celebrated by
feminist theorists as confirming the constructed nature of
masculinity and femininity.
It has recently been revealed, however, that, unfortunately for the
theory, the child never accepted a female identity, engaging
repeatedly and defiantly in male behavior (e.g., trying to urinate in a
standing position). Finally, the unhappy parents confessed the truth,
and the child swiftly adopted an emphatically male identitywith the
aid of further reconstructive surgery. He is now married. We wonder
what Professor Longino makes of this particular case.
pp. 153, 178 Irony suffuses the role assigned to Francis Bacon by
recent feminist theorists. Supposedly, it was Bacon who bequeathed
modern science a covert set of values encoding the male (scientific)
desire for conquest, domination, and penetration of the female (nature).
But see Aubreys brief life of Bacon:
He was a . His Ganameds and Favourites tooke
Bribes; but his Lordship alwayes gave Judgement secundum
quum et bonum. His decrees in Chancery stand firme, i.e. there
are fewer of his Decrees reverst then of any other Chancellor.
His Dowager married her Gentleman-usher Sir Thomas (I
thinke) Underhill, whom she made deafe and blinde with too much
of Venus.
Does this mean that contemporary science ought to be regarded as
a branch of queer studies?

p. 157 The difficulty of estimating the Earths carrying capacity

for human population, to which we refer, gets a certain amount of
scoffing from the Chicken Littles of the left and the Micawbers on the
right. The former insist that we already know the carrying capacity and
have exceeded it; the latter that the whole question is a preoccupation
of eggheads and purveyors of class envy. For a scientifically sound
assessment of the question, establishing both its difficulty and its
gravity, see the recent volume by Joel E. Cohen, head of the Laboratory
of Populations at Rockefeller University, How Many People Can the
Earth Support? (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). Most recently,
demographers have concluded that the worlds population will not
double in the twenty-first century; but that it will grow from the current
5.8 billion to about 10 billion in 2050. Population growth is slowing
down in the West and in Eastern Europe, but it is very rapid in the
Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and North Africa, where a tripling of
population is expected by 2050. Worldwide, there will be a major
demographic shift toward middle- and old age (Reuters, London, June
19, 1997).
The idea that all our neighbors in the solar system are sterile has
lately come under challenge with the discovery of what might be
interpreted as traces of microbial life in meteorites of Martian origin,
and with the confirmation that the Jovian satellite Europa is covered by
a huge ocean of liquid water under a crust of ice, which suggests an
interior source of heat.
pp. 15874 Recently, the scientific consensus has moved in the
direction of greater certainty of a significant global warming due to
anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases. See S. Schneider,
Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We Cant Afford to Lose
(New York: Basic Books, 1997); T. R. Karl, N. Nicholls, and J.
Gregory, The Coming Climate, Scientific American, May 1997, 78
83; and John Houghton, Global Warming: The Complete Briefing
(Oxford: Lion Books, 1994). The fact remains, however, that we have
as yet no unequivocal signal, that is, a measurement or a series of
climate events that all or most atmospheric scientists agree is the
signal, of global warming of anything like the magnitude predicted by
the available climate models. The atmosphere has in fact cooled,
according to the most reliable measurements (by satellites), about o.iC
since 1979. It is almost certain that anthropogenic greenhouse gases
added to the atmosphere at the present rate will eventually warm the
planet; but at what rate, by how much, with what sort of geographic
variation, and with what specific climatic consequences remain
questions in need of much better answers than we have. Were not
politics involved (which would of course be impossible), there would
be much more research and much less posturing. Because it was a
project supported by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a collection
of essays entitled The True State of the Planet (ed. Ronald Bailey [New
York: Free Press, 1995]) is dismissed out of hand by ecoradicals and
ecopoliticians; but its authors include distinguished scientists and
economists and it is worth reading on environmental issues like this.
p. 161 The persistence of the habit, among some environmental
activists, of excluding hydroelectric power from the solar category
was recently illustrated by the comments of Ralph Nader during a
broadcast (PBS Frontline, April 22, 1997) on the ongoing debate about
nuclear power. Nader mentioned windmills and photovoltaic sources as
solar alternatives to nuclear, but not hydroelectricexcept to the extent
that he called for exploitation of tidal power as well, identifying this
one type of hydroelectric power as solar when, in fact, the ultimate
source of energy for tidal power is not the flux of solar energy, but
rather the kinetic energy of the earths rotation.
p. 163 See M. Fumento, Science under Siege (New York: Quill,
William Morrow, 1993) for a well-documented account of how much
and to whose benefit the dioxin danger has been overplayed.
pp. 165 and 247 Recently, the well-confirmed idea that Native
Americans are descendents of immigrants from Asia has encountered
increasingly vituperative rejection from Indian-rights activists. Most
prominent among them has been Prof. Vine Deloria, whose book Red
Earth, White Lies (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) explicitly
rejects Western science and its conclusions about the peopling of the
Western Hemisphere. Delorias writing shows substantial influence of
precisely those postmodernist and constructivist critiques of science
that this book scrutinizes. See also M. Gladwells curious account (New
Yorker, November 11, 1996, 3638) of a speech by Alan Sokal and the
audience reaction thereto.
p. 174 Of late, there is some empirical evidence associating the
ozone hole with temporary decreases in the populations of plankton and
some fish species in the Antarctic. It is not yet clear that this represents
a serious threat to the biota. Empirical evidence is of course the sine
qua non; but it must always be evaluated. Commonly lacking in the
public discussion of environmental worries, themselves reasonable, is
reasonable evaluation. The Boston Globe carried, for example, a full
lead story on a putative epidemic of malformed frogs (Scott Allen, July
28, 1997, B1B3). Among the proposed culprits are pesticides and
excess ultraviolet radiation due to the ozone hole. The article indicates
obliquely that such explanations are contradicted by available data:
the malformations are seen where pesticides are not and that there is no
evidence of increased UV radiation at those loci. But only the final
paragraph of this alarming story addresses the primary evidence:
But researchers first concern is simply determining the extent of
the abnormalities. The data still consists [sic] mainly of anecdotal
 reports in most states. Until last week, the main information on
deformities in Vermont had come from a one-day outing last
October in which state officials found that 13.1 percent of the
frogs they collected had abnormalities.

pp. 17982, 190 The recent development of a whole class of drugs

called protease inhibitors, in addition to AZT, has led to many cases in
which the progress of AIDS seems to have been arrested. (For example,
Magic Johnson, who is under treatment with such drugs, has announced
that all direct signs of the virus are absent from his system.) Whether
this treatment will live up to its promise and be developed to the point
where it is more widely available and applicable than now, or whether,
on the contrary, it will ultimately be defeated by the mutability of HIV
genes, remains to be seen. In any case, it has produced remarkable
results in the clinic and by the hard evidence of viral load reduction. It
is the first medical intervention that has allowed AIDS investigators
and clinicians to speak of management of the disease, if not of a
cure.
pp. 18287 Issues involving the origin of the AIDS epidemic and
the existence of high risk populations retain their power to stir up
strong feelings. The role of the unfettered sexual behavior of members
of the gay community in the late 70s and early 80s in spreading AIDS
is still a painful topic to many gay activists. Gabriel Rotellos new
book, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men (New York:
Dutton, 1997), emphasizes the link, and pleads for a new and more
restrained sexual ethic among gay men to prevent another flare-up of
the AIDS epidemic. In reviewing Rotellos book for the Nation
(Epidemic Arguments, May 5, 1997, 2728), Martin Duberman, an
activist as well as a distinguished social historian, accepts this
judgment on the origins of the epidemic, but clearly feels
uncomfortable having to do so. On the other hand, the same issue of the
Nation carries a review (Reality Bites, 3133) of Katie Roiphes new
Lost Night in Paradise (New York: Little, Brown, 1997) by Emily
Gordon, who is clearly incensed at Roiphes (correct) assumption that
AIDS is not a major threat to the heterosexual, non-drug-using,
general community in this country. Roiphes heresy, which is to say,
Michael Fumentos, is not to be allowed a disinterested examination,
even in 1997, by those committed to gay identity politics and the like.
On the other hand, see Chandler Kerr, The AIDS Exception: Privacy
vs. Public Health, (Atlantic Monthly, June 1997, 5767), for a
penetrating analysis that confronts these pieties. Its a safe guess that
four or five years ago Kerrs piece could not have been published in
any such mainstream forum.
pp. 18486 The Duesberg arguments still manage to command
inordinate attention, even though they are rejected, almost
unanimously, by serious AIDS investigators. Extensive debates on the
topic have appeared in Science and the New York Review of Books.
(See, for instance, a series of pieces on Duesberg by Jonathan Cohen,
The Duesberg Phenomenon, Science, December 9, 1994, 164249,
and the correspondence between Duesberg and his critics in several
succeeding issues. For its part, The New York Review of Books
published Richard Hortons Truth and Heresy about AIDS [May 23,
1996, 1420], followed by an exchange between Duesberg and Horton
[August 8, 1996, 5152].)
pp. 186, 18095 Steven Epstein has expanded his analysis of the
relation between AIDS scientists and the gay community into a book,
Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), in which he claims
that the active role of the gay community in monitoring and
redesigning clinical AIDS research amounted, in some sense, to
reinventing science. Although some of Epsteins claims are advanced
with Foucauldian and postmodernist flourishes, there is some truth to
them. Large numbers of activists representing a cohesive, well-
educated gay community did, in fact, a considerable amount of
homework to learn some of the science and methodology involved, and
did put pressure on the research community and the regulatory
agencies. Their efforts altered various traditional protocols so that
largely untried drugs could by obtained by HIV-infected persons and so
that drug trials could be done without placebo methodology.
Sociologically, this is an important phenomenon, but it is not true that
it effected revision of the canons of scientific validity. We might
summarize this complicated ethical and methodological situation as
follows:
1. Numbers of HIV-infected individuals did get access to
speculative treatments that more rigid observance of standard cautions
and research designs would have denied them. If nothing else, this
provided the psychological comfort of hope in the face of what is
generally considered a hopeless disease.
2. Clinical researchers learned a great deal about the diplomacy,
tact, and flexibility needed to deal with an aroused and militant
community in order to secure its cooperation in testing therapy.
Scientists reconciled themselves to the necessity of settling for less
efficient experimental designs in order to secure the cooperation of
subjects who would have rebelled against a more stringent system.
3. Compromising the canons of methodology did, in all
probability, retard the acquisition of reliable knowledge about AIDS
and modes of treatment, although how severe this delay will prove to
have been is of course unknown.
4. The emphasis on treatments suitable for an urban, relatively
affluent, knowledgeable community probably diverted some work that
might have been more germane to the situations in Africa and Asia,
where a vastly larger population is infected by the virus or stands at
risk. (It is noteworthy that Epstein pays no attention to the AIDS
situation outside North America.)
5. The origins and development of the protease inhibitor
therapeutic strategy owes little to science created by gay activists and
almost everything to relentless traditional research in molecular
biology and virology laboratories and in the theory of infectious
disease.
An interesting commentary on Epsteins book can be found in S. J.
Heginbothams review, The Power of HIV-Positive Thinking,
Sciences, May/June 1997, 3842.
p. 198 The influence of animal rights activist groups, at least in
the area of medical research, seems to be on the wane. Part of the
reason is the adamant opposition of AIDS victims, their families, and
articulate AIDS activists, to any interference with medical research in
this area. On a more frivolous note, fur coats and the like have enjoyed
a significant revival in popularity, while the antifur movement seems to
have lost steam and is no longer quite so fashionable as it once was.
However, not all signs are good. Recently, the young winner of a high
school science competition was denied his prize for a time on the
grounds that his research had been cruel to fruit flies! In
Massachusetts, a veterinarian (Dr. Richard Rodger) was attacked on a
Cape Cod golf course by a charging Canada goose. The good doctor
defended himself by swiping at the goose with his golf club, injuring
her. He is now in pretrial hearings, charged with cruelty to animals.
Judge and District Attorney have recommended that he plead guilty, go
on probation, and pay $3,500 in restitution to the Humane Society. At
the time of writing, the accused has rejected such plea agreements in
favor of a simple not guilty (Cape Cod Times, June 19, 1997, 1).
If that needs a topper, consider the efforts of the animal-rights
monitors on the set of the popular film Men in Black; their task was to
see to it that none of the many cockroach extras used in the film were
killed, harmed, or inconvenienced. Of course, once filming ended for
the day, exterminators arrived to see to it that no escaped bit-players
made themselves permanently at home (David Shenk, Star Treatment
for Men in Blocks Six-legged Extras, New Yorker , July 21, 1997, 25
26). On a less whimsical note, consider the continuing indulgence of
the putatively serious press towards animal rights rhetoric; for
example, Joy Williams, The Inhumanity of the Animal People,
Harpers Magazine , August 1997, 6067. (The Williams piece was
only ambiguously and partially countered in the same issue of Harpers
by Wedeline L. Wagner, They Shoot Monkeys, Dont They? 2730.)
And, a few months ago, the once austerely scientific Scientific
American ran an extensive debate on the ethics and efficacy of research
on animal subjects. (See Scientific American, February 1997, in
particular Neal D. Barnhard and Stephen R. Kaufman, Animal
Research Is Wasteful and Misleading, 8082, and Jack H. Botting and
Adrian R. Morrison, Why Animal Research is Vital to Medicine, 83
85.) Needless, perhaps, to say, no new evidence for the wastefulness
of research on animals, or of its having misled medical science, has
been forthcoming since more than a decade ago, when one of us (P. R.
G.) organized the report of a consensus conference of the National
Institutes of Health, at which all the animal rights groups had their
passionate say.
p. 210 One of us (N. L.) has had an opportunity to give a guest
lecture on science and culture to a class supposedly studying the
cultural strands that make up American society. A suggestion that the
tales told by Ivan Van Sertima in his various books should not be taken
too seriously brought forth loud cries of indignation from the numerous
black students in the class. It was a depressing experience.
p. 223 The recent success of the film Apollo 13 and the surging
popularity of the comic strip Dilbert offer the hope that admiration for
techno-nerds is not entirely dead in the hearts of their fellow
Americans.
p. 246 The attempt by the National Academy of Sciences National
Research Council to set up nationwide standards for science education
was heavily influenced initially by social-constructivist philosophers
of science appointed to the panel assigned to formulate them.
Fortunately, the objections of alarmed scientists were eventually
respected and the standards rewritten to eliminate these eccentricities.
Similarly, the Smithsonian Institutions costly exhibit Science in
American Life was initially created under the influence of a number of
constructivist historians and sociologists of science whom the curators
of the institution, responsive to academic fashion, procured for the task.
The protests of the American Chemical Society, which provided the
funding, were ineffectual until the exhibit opened. The indignation of a
few members and organizations of the scientific community (especially
the American Physical Society) eventually brought about some
changes. But Paul Forman, a Smithsonian historian of science and
knight of postmodern science studies, exults in the insignificance of
those changes. See Paul Forman, Assailing the Seasons, Science,
May 2, 1997, 75052.
Both these incidents are recounted and analyzed in G. Holton,
Science Education and the Sense of Self, in The Flight from Science
and Reason, 55160.
p. 251 In their book Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from
the Strange World of Womens Studies (New York: Basic Books, 1994),
N. Koertge and D. Patai speculate that large doses of feminist theory,
especially as regards the nature of science, demoralize and discourage
young women. Their thesis is borne out by the indignant rejection of
such feminism by mathematician Mary Beth Ruskai, Are Feminist
Perspectives in Mathematics and Science Feminist? in The Flight
from Science and Reason, 43742. Ruskai regards such perspectives
as condescending at best and discerns a specifically anti-feminist bias
in them.
p. 252 The suggestion, which we regarded as quite modest, that
appropriate scientists should be among those consulted in judging, for
promotion and tenure purposes, work of humanists or social scientists
that purports to deliver judgments on the content or methods of science
has provoked more howls of protest than anything we have said.
Langdon Winner, a member of the science studies program at
Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, has told the readers of his review of
this book (Sheriffs of Scientific Correctness, Technology Review,
February 1995, 74) that we propose that all faculty with left-wing views
should be excluded from university life. Similar charges were made by
Basil ONeill in the (London) Times Higher Education Supplement
(Here Be Dragons, July 1, 1994, 23) and by Berkeley philosopher
Elisabeth Lloyd (Science and Anti-Science: Objectivity and Its Real
Enemies, in L. H. Nelson and J. Nelson, eds., Feminism, Science, and
Philosophy of Science [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996]). We need not refute
this; we trust our text already does so, quite explicitly. It is interesting
to note that Winners review for Technology Review was solicited and
published only after another (largely favorable) review, commissioned
and paid for, was received and then spiked. We regard this incident,
along with some similar ones, as the highest tribute to our powers of
persuasion. As regards the remarkably lengthy indictment by E. A.
Lloyd, see P. R. Gross, Evidence-Free Forensics, in A House Built on
Sand.
p. 266, n. 12 E. Roudinescos newly translated biography Jacques
Lacan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) makes it clear
that the late psychoanalyst had an obsessive interest in topology
surfaces, knot theory, and the likeand tried to incorporate it into the
foundations of his theoretical work. Alas, his mathematical talent
seems to have been minimal. His efforts vitiated, rather than enhanced,
the rigor of his theories. They can only be called addlepated.
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Adams, Hunter Havelin III. African Observers of the Universe:

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Bloch, Marc. The Advent and Triumph of the Water Mill. In
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Delanda, Michael. Non-organic Life. In Crary and Kwinter, eds.,
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Deleuze, Gilles. Mediators. In Crary and Kwinter, eds., ZONE
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Derrida, Jacques. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human
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Dttmann, Alexander G. What Will Have Been Said about
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Gilbert, Scott, et al. The Importance of Feminist Critique for
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Harding, Sandra. Feminist Justificatory Strategies. In Garry and
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Keller, Evelyn Fox. Feminism and Science. In Garry and
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Longino, Helen E. Can There Be a Feminist Science? In Garry
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Lumpkin, Beatrice. Africa in the Mainstream of Mathematics.
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Messiha, Khalil, et al. African Experimental Aeronautics: A
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Nicolas, Gregoire. Physics of Far-from-equilibrium Systems. In
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Shore, Debra. Steel Making in Ancient Africa. In Van Sertima,
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Simondon, Gilbert. The Genesis of the Individual. In Crary and
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Stevens, William E. An Eden in Ancient America? Not Really.
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Stone, Alluqure Roseanne. Virtual Systems. In Crary and
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Turner, Frederick. Biology and Beauty. In Crary and Kwinter,
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Zaslavsky, Claudia. The Yoruba Number System. In Van
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Articles

Abelson, Philip H. Testing for Carcinogens with Rodents.

Science, September 21, 1990, 1357.
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Adams, Carol J. Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals.
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Archer, M. S., H. W. Sheppard, W. Winkelstein, and E.
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Athanasiou, Tom. Greenhouse Blues. Socialist Review 91, no. 2:
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Baum, Rudy M. Biomedical Researchers Work to Counter
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Best, Steven. Chaos and Entropy: Metaphors in Postmodern
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Bethell, Tom. AIDS Reporters Snooze. Heterodoxy 1, no. 9
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Beyerchen, Alan. What We Now Know about Nazism and
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Blattner, W., R. C. Gallo, and H. M. Temin. HIV Causes AIDS.
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Brenner, Sydney. That Lonesome Grail. Nature 358 (1992): 27
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Breo, Dennis L. At Large. Journal of the American Medical
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Burros, Marian. Environmental Politics Is Making the Kitchen
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Chandler, Mark. Not Just a Lot of Hot Air. Nature 363 (June 24,
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Darnovsky, Marcy. Overhauling the Meaning Machines: An
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Dean, Tim. The Psychoanalysis of AIDS. October 63 (1993):
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Diamond, Cora. Eating Meat and Eating People. Philosophy 53
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Diaz, Kay. Are Gay Men Born That Way? Z Magazine,
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Donoghue, Denis. Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered. New
York Review of Books, March 25, 1993, 4652.
Duesberg, Peter H. HIV Is Not the Cause of AIDS. Science 241
(July 1988): 51416.
Dunayer, Joan. Censored: Faculty Who Oppose Vivisection. Z
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Durr, Detleff, Sheldon Goldstein, and Nino Zanghi. Quantum
Equilibrium and the Origin of Absolute Uncertainty. Journal of
Statistical Physics 67 (1992): 843907.
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Deterministic Reality. Physics Letters A 172 (1992): 612.
Easterbrook, Gregg. Green Cassandras. New Republic, July 6,
1991, 2325.
Ellis, Kate. Stories without Endings: Deconstructive Theory and
Political Practice. Socialist Review 89, no. 2 (1989): 3752.
Embertson, Janet, et al. Massive Covert Infection of Helper T
Lymphocytes and Macrophages by HIV during the Incubation
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Epstein, Steven. Democratic Science? AIDS Activism and the
Contested Construction of Knowledge. Socialist Review, 91,
no. 2 (1991): 3564.
Fauci, A. S., et al. Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome:
Epidemiologic, Clinical, Immunologic, and Therapeutic
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Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Is Nature Really Red in Tooth and Claw?
Discover, April 24, 1993, 2427.
Ferris, Timothy. The Case against Science. Review of
Understanding the Present, by Bryan Appleyard. New York
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Feyerabend, Paul. Atoms and Consciousness. Common
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Fox, Robin. Anthropology and the Teddy-Bear Picnic. Society,
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Fromm, Harold. Scholarship, Politics, and the MLA. Hudson
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Gallo, Ernest. Nature Faking in the Humanities. Skeptical
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Gitlin, Todd. The Rise of Identity Politics. Dissent, Spring
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Goldsmith, Edward. Evolution, Neo-Darwinism, and the
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Gori, G. B. Editorial. Wall Street Journal, August 27, 1992.
Gould, Stephen J. The Confusion over Evolution. New York
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Gross, Paul R. Animals Still Crucial to Research. Medical
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________. On the Gendering of Science. Academic Questions
5, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 1023.
Grove, J. W. The Intellectual Revolt against Science. Skeptical
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Hacking, Ian. His Father the Engineer. Review of Understanding
the Present by Bryan Appleyard. London Review of Books, May
28, 1992, 56.
Harding, Sandra. After the Neutrality Ideal: Science, Politics, and
Strong Objectivity. Social Research 59, no. 3 (1992): 56787.
Harris, Daniel. AIDS and Theory. Lingua Franca, June 1991, 1
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Hayles, N. Katherine. Gender Encoding in Fluid Mechanics
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Hooks, Bell. Columbus: Gone but Not Forgotten. Z Magazine,
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Imbrie, J., A. C. Mix, and D. G. Martinson. Milankovitch Theory
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Jacobs, James R. The Political Economy of Science in
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Jay, Martin. The Academic Woman as Performance Artist.
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Kamminga, Harmke. What Is This Thing Called Chaos? New
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Kantrowicz, Barbara, et al. Teenagers and AIDS. Newsweek,
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Kaus, Mickey. TRB. New Republic, March 29, 1993, 4.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. Feminism and Science. Signs: Journal of
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Kirp, David L. Rx Populi. The Nation, April 5, 1993, 45861.

Laber, Jeri. Bosnia: Questions about Rape. New York Review of

Books, March 25, 1993, 36.
Lentricchia, Frank. Reading FoucaultII. Raritan Review,
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Levin, Margarita. Caring New World. American Scholar 57
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20.
Lukacs, John. Atom Smasher Is Super Nonsense. New York
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MacDonald, Heather. The Ascendancy of Theor-ese. Hudson
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___________. The Holocaust as Text. Salmagundi 92 (1991):
16073.
Matthews, Anne. Deciphering Victorian Underwear and Other
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42ff.
Minogue, Kenneth. The Goddess That Failed. National Review,
November 18, 1991.
Nash, Gary B. The Great Multicultural Debate. Contention 1, no.
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Ortiz de Montellano, Bernard. Afrocentric Creationism.
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_________. Chariots of the [Black] Gods? Forthcoming.
_________. A Critique of the Portland Schools Baseline Essay on
African-American Science by Hunter Havelin Adams III. Paper
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_________. Magic Melanin: Spreading Scientific Illiteracy
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16366.
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Illiteracy among Minorities: Part I. Skeptical Inquirer 16, no. 2
(1991): 4650.
Pantaleo, Giuseppe, et al. HIV Infection Is Active and
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Pardes, Herbert, et al. Physicians and the Animal-Rights
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Pecora, Vincent P. What Was Deconstruction? Contentions 1,
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Plumwood, Val. Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism,
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Polley, H. Wayne, et al. Increase in C 3 Plant Water Use
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Potynen, Arthur. Oedipus Wrecks: PC and Liberalism. Measure
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Robinson, Jeffrey. Lessons in Holistic Learning. Rutgers
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Rorty, Richard. For a More Banal Politics. Harpers, May, 1992,
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Rosen, Charles. The Mad Poets. New York Review of Books ,
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Rosenthal, Michael. What Was Postmodernism. Socialist
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Rosser, Susan V. The Gender Equation. The Sciences,
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1992, 21.
Scholz, Susanne. The Mirror and the Womb: Conceptions of the
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Seabrook, John. Tremors in the Hothouse. New Yorker, July 19,
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Sheehan, Thomas. A Normal Nazi. New York Review of Books ,
January 14, 1993, 3035.
Slicer, Deborah. Your Daughter or Your Dog? A Feminist
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Soper, Kate. Postmodernism, Subjectivity, and the Question of
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Sprinker, Michael. The Royal Road: Marxism and the Philosophy
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Tarantola, Daniel, and Jonathan Mann. Coming to Terms with the
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Wallerstein, Immanuel. The TimeSpace of World-Systems
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Waters, J. W., et al. Stratospheric C10 and Ozone from the
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Weisberg, Jacob. NAS: Who Are These Guys Anyway? Lingua
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Wittes, Benjamin, and Janet Wittes. Group Therapy (Research by
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Miscellaneous

African-American Baseline Essays. Portland: Multnomah School

District 1J, Portland Public Schools, 1990.
Aronowitz, Stanley. Science under Capitalism. Lecture. Plenary
Session, Socialist Scholars Conference, Borough of Manhattan
Community College, CUNY, New York, 1991.
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Lecture and panel discussion. Socialist Scholars Conference,
Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, New York,
1992 (tape available from J. Turney, 2214 Hey Road, Richmond,
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Campbell, Mary Anne, and Randall K. Campbell-Wright. Toward
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1992.
Spitzer, Matt. Letter to the Editor. Z, June 3, 1993.
Zmirak, John. Letter to the Editor. New Republic, July 12, 1993, 4
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Supplementary References

Cole, Stephen. Making Science: Between Nature and Society.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Cronin, Helena. Oh, Those Bonobos! New York Times Book
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 Index

AAAS. See American Association for the Advancement of Science

Abelson, Philip, 279
Academic left, 810, 26, 72, 74, 151, 152, 159, 161, 166, 180, 199, 203,
255
and AIDS, 190
and animal rights, 19798
careerism within, 23741
definition of, 24, 910, 3441, 260
hostility to science, 1011, 14, 27, 46, 236, 237
threat to science education, 24448
Acid rain, 172, 17374
ACT-UP, 187
Adams, Carol J., 19899
Adams, Hunter Havelin, III, 207, 2089, 210, 212, 251, 285
Adler, Jonathan H., 279
Affirmative action, 111
Africans, pre-Columbian contacts with America, 211
Afrocentrism, 11, 14, 38, 225, 252, 289
and science, 20314, 220, 241, 24647, 251, 25354, 28486
Agent Orange, 163, 164
Agricultural crisis, 17275
Ahab, Captain, 179
AIDS, 14, 79, 145, 179, 18096, 198, 214, 248, 28083
in Africa, 184, 190, 192
in Asia, 28081
black attitudes toward, 186, 189, 247
latency of, 281
placebo studies, 18990
postmodern discourse on, 19093, 194, 288
transmission of, 18385, 187
Alar, 163
Algebra, 264, 265, 273
teaching of, 113117
Alperovitz, Gar, 69, 265
American Anthropological Association, 213, 24647
American Association for the Advancement of Science, 168
American Mathematical Society, 273
Amnesty International, 138
Ampre, Andr Marie, 22
Anarchism, 151
Anasazi, 165
Ancient aeronautics, 207
Andreski, Stanislav, 42, 87, 268
Androgenized females, 14547
Animal research, 199203, 242, 28
Animal rights, 14, 129, 180, 231, 242, 28384
and science, 196203
Antisemitism, 110, 129, 154, 274
Appleyard, Brian, 260, 261
Aramis project. See Latour, Bruno
Argyros, Alexander J., 80, 83, 99, 26667, 268, 270, 27
Aristotle, 40, 11718
Aronowitz, Stanley, 59, 70, 89, 91, 129, 171, 172, 212, 241, 249, 287
Science as Power 5055, 262, 279
Ascher, M. S., 282
Ashe, Arthur, 184
Association for Science and Literature, 103
Astrology, 225, 286
Athanasiou, Tom, 15051, 276
Austen, Jane, 84
Ayer, Alfred Jules, 86, 101
AZT, 185; Concorde trial of effectiveness, 282
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 36
Bacon, Francis, 119, 123, 152, 153, 155, 171, 17778, 277
Bailey, Sarah, 273
Balkanization, 177, 203, 204
Banneker, Benjamin, 209
Baudrillard, Jean, 25, 79, 85, 95, 266
Baum, Rudy M., 284
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 27, 85
Beldecos, Athena, 273
Bell, John, 101, 264, 278
Benin, 206
Berlin, Isaiah, 260
Berman, Morris, 153, 171, 177, 198, 276, 280, 284
Bernoulli, Jacob, 69
Best, Steven, 14, 9598, 104, 170, 171, 172, 26970, 279
Bethell, Tom, 282
Beyerchen, Alan, 269
Biehl, Janet, 176, 280, 286
Big Bang, 145
Biodiversity, 159, 167, 172, 174, 278, 288
Biology and Gender Study Group, 11722, 124, 125, 131
Black studies, 203214
Blake, William, 2021, 105, 153, 155, 177, 223, 280
Blattner, W., 282
Bleier, Ruth, 143, 285
Bloch, Marc, 69, 265
Blood supply, protection of, 182
Bloor, David, 5253
Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate, 284
Bohm, David, 26162, 27879
Bohr, Niels, 262, 270
Bonobo, 12425, 288
Boyce, William E., 272
Boyle, William, 17, 6365, 6769, 264
Bramwell, Anna, 15455, 161, 277
Branch, Taylor, 260
Brenner, Sydney, 27374
Breo, Dennis L., 283
Brown, Lester R., 173, 279
Bryan, William Jennings, 28
Buchanan, Patrick, 260
Bunthorne, Reginald, 71, 106
Burke, Edmund, 20
Burros, Marian, 279
Butler, Judith, 265
Caesarian section, 206, 284
Cambodia, 32
Campbell, Maryanne, 11317, 27273
Campbell-Wright, Randall. See Campbell, Maryanne
Cantor, Georg, 100, 103, 263
Carcinogens, 16364
Cargo cults, 4041, 288
Carnap, Rudolf, 102, 271
Carroll, Lewis. See Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge
Castaeda, Carlos, 153, 222
Catastrophe theory, 267
CD4+ cells: defined, 181. See also T-cells

Cell biology, 11720, 125, 181, 280, 282

Chalmers, Alan, 237, 261, 287
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 209
Chandler, Mark, 277
Chaos theory, 6, 92105, 24950, 262, 26872
Charles II, 63
Cheng, Nien, 275
China, 20, 21, 31, 32, 128, 275
Church of England, 17, 66
Churchill, Winston, 29
Clark, Ronald, 262, 274
Clarke, John Henrik, 206
Clemens, Roger, 99
Climate change, 158
Clinton, President Bill, 53
Cokely, Steve, 281
Cole, Stephen, 288
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 20
Columbus, Christopher, 211
Combinatorics, 61
Common law, 87
Communist Party, U.S.A., 2830, 73
Computational complexity, theory of, 94
Comte, Auguste, 22, 102
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 170
Corneille, Pierre, 87
Correlation coefficients, 62
Counterculture, 22224
Cousineau, G. H., 274
Crary, J., 267
Creationism: afrocentric, 286
Institute for Creation Research, 9, 129, 269
Critical Review, 268
Cronin, Helena, 288
Cuba, 32
Culler, Jonathan, 265
Cultural anthropology, 8182, 213, 24647, 256
Cultural constructivism, 11, 13, 14, 5657, 59, 63, 6970, 13234, 162,
261, 264, 288
and AIDS, 193
Edinburgh school, 25, 52
and Marxism, 226
strong version, 44, 4550
weak version, 4345
Cultural studies, 72, 85, 8990
Dannemeyer, Rep. William, 125
Dante Alighieri, 85
Darnovsky, Marcy, 275
Darwin, Charles, 44, 132, 156, 171, 217
social Darwinism, 23
Davidson, Eric, 121, 274
Day, David, 150, 276
Dean, Tim, 79, 192, 266, 283
De Beauvoir, Simone, 40
De Broglie, Louis, 52, 261, 285
Debs, Eugene V., 2829
Deconstruction, 6, 7578, 82, 85, 99, 120, 219, 255, 26566. See also
Derrida, Jacques
Deep ecology. See Environmentalism
De Grazia, Alfred, 268
De Landa, Manuel, 80, 26667
Deleuze, Gilles, 80, 267
De Man, Paul, 7677, 83, 99, 265
Democratic Socialists of America, 50, 83, 261
Denitch, Bogdan, 83, 234, 23637, 268
Derrida, Jacques, 25, 39, 40, 7578, 79, 83, 8485, 88, 89, 95, 96, 99,
192, 26566, 270, 283, 286
Descartes, Ren, 65, 68
Diaz, Kay, 283
Diderot, Denis, 18, 24, 165
Differential geometry, 94
Diggins, John Patrick, 72, 74, 265
Di Prima, Richard C., 272
Dirac, Paul M., 261
Discover Magazine, 12226, 274, 279
Dittersdorf, Carl Ditters von, 128
DNA, 6, 118, 159, 171, 275, 279
as master molecule, 14041
Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (Lewis Carroll), 114, 273
Doell, Ruth, 145
Dogon, astronomical knowledge of the, 2079, 285
Donne, John, 36
Donoghue, Denis, 179
Donovan, Arthur, 288
Doolittle, Doctor, 196
Duesberg, Peter H., 18486
Dunayer, Joan, 284
Duplication of the cube, 67, 264
Durr, Detlef, 26162
Duttmann, Alexander Garca, 283
Dynamical systems, 92, 93, 99, 100
Dyson, Freeman, 274, 288
Earth First! 152, 169, 227
Easterbrook, Gregg, 278
Ecofeminism, 134, 162, 176, 231
Ecoradicalism, 150, 161, 163, 166, 169, 176
Edelman, Gerald, 147, 276
Edinburgh school. See Cultural constructivism
Edison, Thomas Alva, 206
Egypt, 2068
Afrocentrism and, 24647
mathematics in, 20
psychic science in, 208
Ehrlich, Paul, 169
Einstein, Albert, 24, 55, 85, 129
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, 264
relativity theory, 46, 54, 79, 96, 101, 102, 128, 26263, 274
Eisenman, Peter, 80, 267
Ekland, Ivar, 26869, 270
Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 36
Ellis, Kate, 8384, 268
Embretson, Janet, 281
Encyclopedists, 18
Engels, Friedrich, 129
Enlightenment, 3, 13, 25, 99, 148, 175, 197, 215, 220, egalitarian
principles of, 1920, 217, 250
and environmentalism, 154, 171
and postmodernism, 4, 38, 72, 85, 134, 288
Entropy, 95, 97
Environmentalism, 34, 8, 14, 15, 14977, 25051, 27679
 conflicts with scientific attitude, 23132
deep ecology, 5, 162, 169, 22728, 231
Environmental piety, 152
Epstein, Steven, 19394, 283
Ethiopia, 173
Ethnic studies programs, 204
Euclid, 2067
Eysenck, Hans, 263
Falwell, Jerry, 193
Fauci, Anthony, 188, 280
Fausto-Sterling, Ann, 125, 274
Feigenbaum, Mitchell, 99, 270
Felman, Shoshanna, 265
Feminism, 3, 6, 8, 25, 26, 32, 38, 39, 72, 151, 152, 198, 203, 204, 216,
221, 288
anti-essentialism, 22931
eco-feminism, 10
essentialism, 22930
feminist standpoint, 13536
hostility to science, 5, 11, 13, 14, 47, 100101, 10748, 227,
23536, 238, 261, 276
science education and, 245, 25152, 25354
 and womens studies, 287
Ferguson, Harvie, 46, 261
Ferris, Timothy, 24, 260
Fertilization, syngamic, 118, 12021
Feuer, Lewis, 24142, 287
Feyerabend, Paul, 49, 51, 52, 62, 102, 261, 27071
Feynman, Richard, 123, 264, 276
Finch, Charles S., 284
Finney, Ross L., 272
Fish, Stanley, 265
Fomenko, Anatolii T., 273
Foner, Philip S., 260
Ford, Henry, 177
Foreman, Dave, 14, 152, 178, 276
Foucault, Michel, 25, 37, 39, 40, 75, 7778, 82, 85, 89, 103, 194, 196,
221, 265, 268, 270, 271, 286
Fourier, Charles, 22
Fox, Robin, 8182, 246, 248
France, 31, 75
French Revolution, 18, 19, 22
Franco, Francisco, 28
Franklin, Benjamin, 244
Freedman, Bill, 279
Freedman, David H., 125
Freemasonry, 18, 224
Frege, Gottlob, 103
Freud, Sigmund. See Psychoanalysis Fromm, Harold, 260
Fumento, Michael, 156, 159, 184, 277, 287
Galilei, Galileo, 16, 24, 106, 128, 148, 218
Gallo, Ernest, 265
Gallo, Robert, 181, 280, 281
Galloway, Alison, 272
Garry, Ann, 134, 272, 275
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 212
Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 22
Gay, Peter, 260
Gay Mens Health Crisis, 187
Geddes, Patrick, 118
Gerdes, Paulus, 286
Germany, 31, 75
Gibbon, Edward, 18
Gilbert, Scott, 11722, 273, 274
Gilbert, William Schwenk, 71
Giroux, Henry, 287
Gitlin, Todd, 284
Gleick, James, 94, 97, 104, 271
Global warming signal, 174
Glorious Revolution, 17
Gobineau, J. A., 209
Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA), 277
Gdel, Kurt, 80, 102
incompleteness theorem, 4, 78, 100, 102, 267
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 2021, 142, 223, 275
as scientist, 13738
Goffman, Erving, 57
Goldman, Emma, 35
Goldsmith, Edward, 155, 277
Goldstein, Sheldon, 26162
Golub, Edward S., 280
Gore, Vice President Albert, Jr., 277
Gori, G. B., 279
Gornick, Vivian, 260
Gould, Stephen J., 44, 56, 69, 143, 171, 261, 269, 275, 279
Goya, Francisco, 21516
Graff, Gerald, 265
Greek mathematics, 207
Green, Douglas R., 280
Greenhouse effect, 15758, 160, 166, 167, 169, 172, 174, 232, 27778,
279
Gross, Paul R., 274, 284
Grossman, Stanley, 273
Grove, J. W., 268
Guggenheim Fellowship, 103
Guth, Alan H., 97
Guzzo, Lou, 278
Hacking, Ian, 260, 261
Halley, Edmund, 16, 6566
Handel, George Frederic, 19
Haraway, Donna, 14, 100, 13234, 193, 227, 251, 275
Harding, Sandra, 14, 107, 109, 115, 12632, 13436, 143, 212, 227,
229, 241, 249, 251, 272, 274, 275, 28586, 288
Harris, Daniel, 19091, 283
Harvey, William, 16, 58
Hawking, Stephen W., 97, 274
Haydn, Franz Joseph, 99
Hayles, N. Katherine, 14
Chaos Bound, 98105, 27071
Heidegger, Martin, 23, 7677, 234
Heisenberg, Werner, 262
uncertainty principle, 4, 5152, 270
Helms, Sen. Jesse, 12526
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 18
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, 240
Herzen, Alexander, 24
Hicks, Karen, 273
High-temperature superconductors, 4344
Hilbert, David. See Hilbert space
Hilbert space, 261
Hitler, Adolf, 28, 260
HIV. See Human immunodeficiency virus
Hobbes, Thomas, 6369, 264
Hodges, Andrew, 264
Hofstadter, Douglas, 276
Holton, Gerald, 262
Homer, 261
Homosexuality, 181, 182, 184, 18788, 197, 203, 216, 266, 282, 283
Hooke, Robert, 63, 65
Hooks, Bell, 211, 285
Hrbacek, Karel, 263
Hughes, Robert, 259, 285
Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), 18182, 18486, 187, 190, 191,
192, 247, 28083
Hume, David, 18, 24
Huygens, Christiaan, 68
Hydroelectric power, 16061
Hypatia, 19899, 284
Imbrie, J., 279
Immunity, cellular basis of, 280
Institute for Creation Research. See Creationism
Italy, 75
Jacob, James R., 264
James, Henry, 36
Jameson, Fredric, 265
Japan, 5, 31
Jay, Martin, 287
Jech, Thomas, 263
Jefferson, Thomas, 18, 85, 244
Johnson, Earvin Magic, 183
Kaku, Michio, 276
Kamminga, Harmke, 95, 97, 269
Kant, Emmanuel, 25, 85
Keeton, William R., 119
Keller, Evelyn Fox, 14, 115, 136, 13742, 143, 171, 251, 273, 275
Kepler, Johannes, 16, 55
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 178
Kimball, Roger, 88, 220
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 26
Kinsey, Alfred, 125
Kirp, David, 194, 283
Klehr, Harvey, 260
Krafft-Ebbing, Richard, 125
Kramer, Larry, 179, 182, 18689, 283
Kuhn, Thomas, 49, 56, 57, 94, 139, 180, 263, 280
Kwinter, S., 267
Laber, Jeri, 286
Lacan, Jacques, 193, 221, 266, 286
Lancet, The, 282
Laplace, Pierre Simon de, 20
Laplaces Demon, 262
Laplacian Operator, 262
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 156
Lather, Patti, 271
Latour, Bruno, 14, 5762, 91, 26364
Aramis project, 6062
 Science in Action, 5760
Lattimer, Lewis, 206
Laudan, Larry, 275, 288
Laudan, Rachel, 288
Layzer, David, 274
Leary, Timothy, 222
LeGuin, Ursula K., 14950, 152
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 17, 69
Lenard, Philip, 129, 131, 274
Lenin (V. I. Ulyanov), 29, 129, 22526, 252
Leninism, 73, 252
Lentricchia, Frank, 83, 268
Lessing, Gotthold, 24
Levin, Margarita, 13132, 275
Lewis, Martin, 149, 164, 165, 177, 279, 280
Lillie, Frank R., 274
Linearity, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 1045, 26667, 269, 27172
Lingua Franca, 39, 190, 260
Literary criticism, 12, 74, 75, 76, 81, 82, 84, 86, 89, 110, 115, 196, 239,
25. 266
Locke, John, 17, 24, 85, 177
Loeb, Jacques, 121
Loeb, Jerod M., 284
Logical positivism, 86, 1013, 144
Longino, Helen, 14, 134, 136, 138, 14248, 241, 251, 276
Lorentz, Hendrik A., 262
Lorenz, Edward N., 100
Loubere, Leo, 260
Lovelock, James, 169
Lukacs, John, 259
Lumpkin, Beatrice, 285
Lyotard, J. F., 25, 37, 80, 85, 88, 95, 26667
Lysenko, Trofim, 156, 226, 252
McCarthy, Sen. Joseph, 30
McClintock, Barbara, 14142
McClung, C. E., 11819
MacDonald, Heather, 75, 265
McDonalds Restaurants, 278
Madonna, 118
Maistre, Joseph de, 21, 23
Malcolm X, 26
Malleus Maleficarum, 37
Mandelbrot, Benoit, 80
Mandelbrot set, 100
Mann, Jonathan, 28081
Manning, Kenneth R., 285
Manson, Charles, 99
Mao Tse-tung, 31
Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods
Hole), 274
Martin, Emily, 125
Marx, Karl. See Marxism
Marxism, 11, 32, 38, 40, 46, 55, 57, 72, 73, 82, 83, 84, 95, 151, 152,
162, 237, 252
and mathematics, 286
post-Marxism, 37, 158, 221
and science, 5, 10, 22, 22526
Maternal messenger RNA, 121, 274
Mathematical Association of America, 272
Maxwell, James Clerk, 103, 262
Maya, 165, 246
Mayles, Peter, 134
Mead, A. D., 274
Melanin scholars, 209, 285
Melville, Herman, 84, 179, 280
Mendelssohn, Felix, 87
Merchant, Carolyn, 14, 152, 162, 171, 177, 24950, 276, 27879, 288
Messiha, Khalil, 207
Metabolism, 118
Metaphor: mongering, 116, 121
quibbles over incidental, 121
Michaels, Patrick J., 279
Michaelson-Morley experiment, 54, 263
Milankovitch theory, 170, 279
Mill, John Stuart, 24
Miller, J. Hillis, 265, 286
Minogue, Kenneth, 136, 275
Mittag-Leffler theorem, 108
Mobius strip, 80
Models, biomedical research and animal, 200203
Modern Language Association, 103
Monoclonal antibodies, 280
Montagnier, Luc, 181, 280
Montaigne, Michel de, 165, 219
On Cannibals, 286
Montgomery, Thomas H., 119
Moralism, 220
of ecoradicals, 16061.
Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 274
Morse functions, 273
Mountcastle, Vernon, 176
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 85, 128, 21819
Muir, John, 28
Multiculturalism, 5, 14, 110, 210, 213, 241, 246, 248, 259, 271, 28
Mussolini, Benedetto, 29
Napoleonic Code, 87
National Association of Scholars, 241, 287
National Institutes of Health, 284
Natural childbirth, 288
Naturphilosophie, 13738
Navasky, Victor, 260
Nazism, 76, 105, 129, 155
Neuronal selection theory, 147
Newton, Isaac, 1617, 6566, 6869, 85, 92, 98, 100, 105, 132, 137,
142, 153, 177, 218, 262
Principia Mathernatica Philosophae Naturalis, 18, 65, 131
New York Academy of Sciences, 28586
Nicolas, Gregoire, 270
Niemczyk, Nancy, 273
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 74, 234, 288
Nobel Prizes, 200201, 274
North Korea, 19
Norway, 208
Nuclear power, 160
Nuclear winter, 167, 169
Occams Razor, 262
October, 266
Oldenburg, Henry, 64, 264
Olmec, 246
ONeill, John, 283
ONeill, William, 260
Operations research, 61
Ortiz de Montellano, Bernard, 213, 24647, 284, 285, 286, 287
Ottoman Empire, 22
Ovum, 11822, 125
Ozone hole, 15859, 162, 167, 172, 174, 278
Pagels, Heinz, 276
Paglia, Camille, 286
Pantaleo, Giuseppe, 281
Parthenogenesis, 121
Pathetic fallacy, 122, 274
Patton, Cindy, 19092, 283
Pauli, Wolfgang, 261
Pax Romana, 20, 128
Peano, Giuseppe, 100, 263
Pearsall, Marilyn, 134, 272, 275
Peat, F. David, 278
Pecora, Vincent, 85, 260, 268
Penrose, Roger, 274
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, 138
Physics, worldview of, 127
Pi, value of, 207
Pinchot, Gifford, 28
Pius IX, 23
Planck, Max, 261
Plato, 40
Plumwood, Val, 176, 280, 286
Poincar, Henri, 9394, 115, 261
Poincar conjecture, 115, 273
Political correctness, 89
Polley, H. Wayne, 279
Pope, Alexander, 19, 100
Popper, Karl, 89, 140
Population growth, 157, 169
Portland Baseline Essays, 2089, 210, 246, 28586
Postmodernism, 6, 8, 21, 175, 180, 204, 255, 26970
and AIDS, 19195, 288
and animal rights, 198200
definition, 45, 7178
and education, 24748, 271, 28788
and environmentalism, 151, 177
and feminism, 109, 13536
and mathematics, 115, 26768
obsolescence of, 272
and poststructuralism, 259
and science, 1011, 13, 14, 47, 78106, 23536, 245, 274, 278
79
Poststructuralism. See Postmodernism
Potynen, Arthur, 287
Prigogine, Ilya, 96
Principia Mathematica (Russell and White-head). See Russell,
Bertrand
Principia Mathematica Philosophae Naturalis. See Newton, Isaac Pro-
life movement, 198
Psychoanalysis, 56, 117, 14041, 263, 266
Puck, Wolfgang, 279
Quantum mechanics, 49, 5152, 59, 96, 98, 100, 25556, 261, 264, 267
Copenhagen interpretation of, 262
Quarterman, Lloyd, 206
Racine, Jean, 87
Rauch, Jonathan, 272
Ray, Dixy Lee, 278
Reagan, President Ronald, 188, 278
Redondi, Pietro, 16
Regan, Tom, 197, 283, 284
Relativism, 26, 134, 225, 268
and anthropology, 246
and cultural constructivism, 44, 133, 162
and feminism, 109, 135
Kuhns rejection of, 139
and postmodernism, 84, 96, 199
and science, 4950, 5960, 62
Relativity. See Einstein, Albert Rembrandt van Rijn, 27
Responsibility of scientists, 68, 1415, 25357
Reynolds number, 62, 26364, 270
Richmond Times-Dispatch, 281
Riemann, Bernhard: Riemannian manifold, 267
Riemannian metric, 262
Rifkin, Jeremy, 14, 9697, 154, 17075, 178, 243, 249, 269, 276, 279,
288
Robeson, Paul, 26
Robinson, Jeffrey, 271
Rodents, carcinogen screening in, 16364
Romania, 203
Romanticism, 2021, 223
Ronell, Avital, 288
Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 29
Root-Bernstein, Robert, 185, 282
Rorty, Richard, 83, 102, 270
Rosen, Charles, 280
Rosenberg, Rebecca, 273
Rosenthal, Michael, 272
Ross, Andrew, 14, 8992, 213, 249, 257, 228
Rosser, Sue V., 272, 28586
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 19, 165
Royal Society, 6369
Ruelle, David, 95, 26869, 270
Russell, Bertrand, 2, 24, 102
Autobiography, 1, 270
Principia Mathematica, 1023
Sagan, Carl, 169
Sahara Desert, 17273
Schaffer, Simon, 14, 6369, 70, 264
Schatten, G. and H., 120
Schiller, Friedrich von, 83
Schneider, Stephen, 16768, 169, 279
Scholarship, craft of, 239
Scholz, Susanne, 277
Schrdinger, Erwin, 52, 98, 261
equation, 261
Schrdingers Cat, 262
Schubert, Franz, 87
Schwinger, Julian, 264
Science: and humanism, 24344
works, 272
Science magazine, 111, 163, 272, 281
Sciences, The, 28586
Science studies, 132
Scott, Eugenie, 24647, 287
Scott, Joan Wallach, 265
Scrivenor, Patrick, 259
Seabrook, John, 279
Sex determination, 11820
Y-chromo-some in, 274
Sexist discrimination, 11013
Sexuality, spin on, 12226
Sexual selection, 44
Shakespeare, William, 27, 85
Shapin, Steven, 14, 6369, 70, 264
Sheehan, Thomas, 265
Sheldrake, Rupert, 169
Sheppard, H. W., 282
Sherrington, Sir Charles, 137, 275
Simondon, Gilbert, 80, 267
Singer, Peter, 197, 283, 284
Slovakia, 203
Small, Meredith F., 124, 274, 288
Smith, Adam, 18, 19
Snow, C. P., 7, 244
Socialism, 19, 2729, 229, 252
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 273
Sociobiology, 288
Solar power, 160
Somalia, 173
Soper, Kate, 83, 268
Space-filling curve. See Peano, Giuseppe
Spermatozoa, 11822, 125, 126
Spinoza, Baruch, 24, 65, 264
Spitzer, Matt, 284
Sprinker, Michael, 55, 263
Squaring the circle, 67, 264
Stalin (Joseph V., b. Dzhugashvili), 25, 28, 29, 91, 156, 226, 256
Steiner, George, 79, 151, 215, 217, 220, 265, 276, 286
Stone, Alluqure Roseanne, 80, 267
Structuralism, 259
Stuart, House of, 64
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 31, 221
Sudan, 173, 203
Sussmann, Hector J., 267
Tanzania, 206
Tarantola, 28081
Taubes, Gary, 278
T-cells, 181, 280
Temin, H. M., 282
Thermodynamics, 96, 97, 98
Thirty Years War, 16
Thorn, Ren, 80, 267
Thomas, George B., 272
Thomas, Lewis, 276
Thomas, Norman, 29
Thomson, John Arthur, 118
Three-body problem, 98
Todd, Alexandra Dundas, 288
Topoi, 266
Topology, 7, 59, 94, 100, 115, 26566, 79
differential, 266
fundamental and higher homotopy groups, 273
Totalism, 22526
Traveling salesman problem, 61
Trotsky (Lev Bronstein), 29
Turgenev, Ivan, 24
Turner, Frederick, 80, 267
Uganda, 206
Uncertainty principle. See Heisenberg, Werner
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 25, 29, 160, 171, 172
Values, constitutive and contextual, of science, 14344
Van Sertima, Ivan, 2069, 21112, 246, 251, 285
Variables, intervening, 146
Velikovsky, Immanuel, 268
Vienna Circle, 101, 271
Vietnam, 19, 30, 32, 33, 163, 164
Vittinghoff, E., 282
Voltaire (F. M. Arouet), 24, 219
Von Neumann, John, 52, 261
Vulcanism, and sulfate aerosols, 277
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 269, 271
Wallis, John, 6667, 264
Ward, Seth, 66, 264
Waters, J. W., 277
Wedel, Andrew, 273
Weinberg, Steven, 288
Weisberg, Jacob, 287
Weiss, Robin A., 281
West, Cornel, 212
Weyl, Hermann, 261
Whitehead, Alfred North, 104
Whitman, Walt, 142
Wilkins, John, 264
Wilson, E. B., 119
Wilson, Edward O., 159, 278, 288
Wilson, Elizabeth, 83, 268
Winkelstein, W., 282
Witten, Edward, 97
Wittes, Benjamin and Janet, 195, 283
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 40
Womens careers, spin on, 123
Wordsworth, William, 2021, 83, 142, 223
Worldwatch Institute, 173, 279
Yoruba, 206
Young, Frank, 188
Young, Robert M., 275
Yugoslavia, 203
Zahler, Raphael S., 267
Zanghi, Nino, 26162
Zaslavsky, Claudia, 206
Zeeman, E. C., 267
Z Magazine, 211, 284
Zmirak, John, 260