by Alan Sokal
4. The social sciences’ ‘natural’ relativism
In certain branches of the social sciences, notably in anthropology, a certain ‘relativistic’ attitude is methodologically natural, especially when one is studying tastes or customs: the anthropologist is seeking to understand these customs’ role in a given society, and it is difficult to see what she would gain by dragging into her research her own aesthetic preferences. Similarly, when studying certain cognitive aspects of a culture, such as the social role of the culture’s cosmological beliefs, the anthropologist is not principally concerned with knowing whether those beliefs are true or false.255
However, this reasonable methodological relativism has sometimes led, through confusions of thought and language, to a radical cognitive relativism: namely, the claim that assertions of fact – be they traditional myths or modern scientific theories – can be considered true or false only ‘relative to a particular culture’. But this amounts to confusing the psychological and social functions of a system of thought with its cognitive value, and to ignoring the strength of the empirical arguments that can be put forward in favour of one system of thought over another.
Here is a concrete example of such a confusion: There are at least two competing theories concerning the origin of Native American populations. The scientific consensus, based on extensive archaeological evidence, is that humans first came to the Americas from Asia around 10–20,000 years ago, crossing the Bering Strait. On the other hand, many Native American creation accounts hold that native peoples have always lived in the Americas, ever since their ancestors emerged onto the surface of the earth from a subterranean world of spirits. And a report in the New York Times (22 October 1996) observed that many archaeologists, ‘pulled between their scientific temperaments and their appreciation for native culture ... have been driven close to a postmodern relativism in which science is just one more belief system.’ For example, Roger Anyon, a British archaeologist who has worked for the Zuni people, was quoted as saying that ‘science is just one of many ways of knowing the world. ... [The Zunis’ world view is] just as valid as the archeological viewpoint of what prehistory is about.’256
Perhaps Dr. Anyon was misquoted257, but one does hear this type of assertion rather frequently nowadays, and we would like to analyse it. Note first that the word ‘valid’ is ambiguous: is it intended in a cognitive sense, or in some other sense? If the latter, we have no objection; but the reference to ‘knowing the world’ suggests the former. Now, both in philosophy and in everyday language, there is a distinction between knowledge (understood, roughly, as justified true belief) and mere belief; that is why the word ‘knowledge’ has a positive connotation, while ‘belief’ is neutral. What, then, does Anyon mean by ‘knowing the world’? If he intends the word ‘knowing’ in its traditional sense, then his assertion is simply false: the two theories in question are mutually incompatible, so they cannot both be true (or even approximately true).258 If, on the other hand, he is simply noting that different people have different beliefs, then his assertion is true (and banal), but it is misleading to employ the success-word ‘knowledge’.259
Most likely, the archaeologist has quite simply allowed his political and cultural sympathies to cloud his reasoning. But there is no justification for such intellectual confusion: we can perfectly well remember the victims of a horrible genocide, and support their descendants’ valid political goals, without endorsing uncritically (or hypocritically) their societies’ traditional creation myths. (After all, if you want to support Native American land claims, does it really matter whether Native Americans have been in North America ‘forever’ or merely for 10,000 years?) Moreover, the relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.
5. The traditional philosophical and literary training
We have no desire to criticize this training as such; indeed, it is probably adequate for the goals it pursues. Nevertheless, it may be a handicap when one turns to scientific texts, for two reasons.
First of all, the author or the literality of the text have, in literature or even in philosophy, a relevance they do not have in science. One can learn physics without ever reading Galileo, Newton or Einstein, and study biology without reading a line of Darwin.260 What matters are the factual and theoretical arguments these authors offer, not the words they used. Besides, their ideas may have been radically modified or even overturned by subsequent developments in their disciplines. Furthermore, scientists’ personal qualities and extra-scientific beliefs are irrelevant to the evaluation of their theories. Newton’s mysticism and alchemy, for example, are important for the history of science and more generally for the history of human thought, but not for physics.
The second problem comes from the privilege granted to theories over experiments (which is related to the privilege granted to texts over facts). The link between a scientific theory and its experimental test is often extremely complex and indirect. Therefore, a philosopher will tend to approach the sciences preferentially through their conceptual aspect (so do we, in fact). But the whole problem comes precisely from the fact that, if one does not also take into account the empirical aspects, then scientific discourse indeed becomes nothing more than a ‘myth’ or ‘narration’ among many others.
The role of politics
It’s not we who lord it over things, it seems, but things which lord it over us. But that’s only because some people make use of things in order to lord it over others. We shall only be freed from the forces of nature when we are free of human force. Our knowledge of nature must be supplemented with a knowledge of human society if we are to use our knowledge of nature in a human way.
(Bertolt Brecht, 1965 [1939–40], pp. 42–43)
The origins of postmodernism are not purely intellectual. Both philosophical relativism and the works of the authors analysed here have had a specific appeal to some political tendencies that can be characterized (or characterize themselves) as left-wing or progressive. Moreover, the ‘science wars’ are often viewed as a political conflict between ‘progressives’ and ‘conservatives’.261 Of course, there is also a long anti-rationalist tradition in some right-wing movements, but what is new and curious about postmodernism is that it is an anti-rationalist form of thought that has seduced part of the left.262 We shall try here to analyse how this sociological link came to be, and to explain why it is due, in our opinion, to a number of conceptual confusions. We shall limit ourselves mainly to the situation in the United States, where the link between postmodernism and some tendencies on the political left is particularly clear.
When one discusses a set of ideas, such as postmodernism, from a political point of view, it is important to distinguish carefully between the intrinsic intellectual value of those ideas, the objective political role they play, and the subjective reasons for which various people defend or attack them. Now, it often happens that a given social group shares two ideas (or two groups of ideas), call them A and B. Let us suppose that A is relatively valid, that B is much less valid, and that there is no real logical link between the two. People belonging to the social group will often try to legitimize B by invoking the validity of A and the existence of a sociological link between A and B. Conversely, their opponents will try to denigrate A by citing the lack of validity of B and the same sociological link.263
The existence of such a link between postmodernism and the left constitutes, prima facie, a serious paradox. For most of the past two centuries, the left has been identified with science and against obscurantism, believing that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful – not to mention being desirable human ends in their own right. And yet, over the past two decades, a large number of ‘progressive’ or ‘leftist’ academic humanists and social scientists (though
virtually no natural scientists, whatever their political views) have turned away from this Enlightenment legacy and – bolstered by French imports such as deconstruction as well as by home-grown doctrines like feminist standpoint epistemology – have embraced one or another version of epistemic relativism. Our aim here is to understand the causes of this historical volte-face.
We shall distinguish below three types of intellectual sources linked to the emergence of postmodernism within the political left:264
1. The new social movements
The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of new social movements – the black liberation movement, the feminist movement and the gay-rights movement, among others – struggling against forms of oppression that had largely been underestimated by the traditional political left. More recently, some tendencies within these movements have concluded that postmodernism, in one form or another, is the philosophy most suited to their aspirations.
There are two separate issues to discuss. One is conceptual: is there a logical link, in either direction, between the new social movements and postmodernism? The other is sociological: to what extent have the members of these movements embraced postmodernism, and for what reasons?
One factor driving the new social movements toward postmodernism was, undoubtedly, a dissatisfaction with the old leftist orthodoxies. The traditional left, in both its Marxist and non-Marxist variants, generally saw itself as the rightful inheritor of the Enlightenment and as the embodiment of science and rationality. Moreover, Marxism explicitly linked philosophical materialism to a theory of history giving primacy – in some versions, near-exclusivity – to economic and class struggles. The evident narrowness of this latter perspective understandably led some currents within the new social movements to reject, or at least distrust, science and rationality as such.
But this is a conceptual error, which mirrors an identical error committed by the traditional Marxist left. In fact, concrete sociopolitical theories can never be deduced logically from abstract philosophical schemes; and conversely, there is no unique philosophical position compatible with a given sociopolitical program. In particular, as Bertrand Russell observed long ago, there is no logical connection between philosophical materialism and Marxian historical materialism. Philosophical materialism is compatible with the idea that history is determined primarily by religion, sexuality or climate (which would run counter to historical materialism); and conversely, economic factors could be the primary determinants of human history even if mental events were sufficiently independent of physical events to make philosophical materialism false. Russell concludes: ‘It is of some moment to realize such facts as this, because otherwise political theories are both supported and opposed for quite irrelevant reasons, and arguments of theoretical philosophy are employed to determine questions which depend upon concrete facts of human nature. This mixture damages both philosophy and politics, and is therefore important to avoid.’265
The sociological link between postmodernism and the new social movements is an exceedingly complicated one. A satisfactory analysis would require, at the very least, disentangling the various strands that compose ‘postmodernism’ (as the logical relations between them are quite weak), treating each of the new social movements individually (as their histories are quite different), sorting out the distinct currents within these movements, and distinguishing the roles played by activists and theorists. This is a problem requiring (dare we say it?) careful empirical investigation, and we leave it to sociologists and intellectual historians. Let us nevertheless state our conjecture that the new social movements’ penchant for postmodernism exists mostly within academia and is much weaker than both the postmodernist left and the traditionalist right generally portray it to be.266
2. Political discouragement
Another source of postmodern ideas is the desperate situation and general disorientation of the left, a situation that appears to be unique in its history. The communist regimes have collapsed; the social-democratic parties, where they remain in power, apply watered-down neo-liberal policies; and the Third World movements that led their countries to independence have, in most cases, abandoned any attempt at autonomous development. In short, the harshest form of ‘free market’ capitalism seems to have become the implacable reality for the foreseeable future. Never before have the ideals of justice and equality seemed so utopian. Without entering into an analysis of the causes of this situation (much less proposing solutions), it is easy to understand that it generates a kind of discouragement that expresses itself in part in postmodernism. The linguist and activist Noam Chomsky has described this evolution very well:267
If you really feel, Look, it’s too hard to deal with real problems, there are lots of ways to avoid doing so. One of them is to go off on wild goose chases that don’t matter. Another is to get involved in academic cults that are very divorced from any reality and that provide a defense against dealing with the world as it actually is. There’s plenty of that going on, including in the left. I just saw some very depressing examples of it in my trip to Egypt a couple of weeks ago. I was there to talk on international affairs. There’s a very lively, civilized intellectual community, very courageous people who spent years in Nasser’s jails being practically tortured to death and came out struggling. Now throughout the Third World there’s a sense of great despair and hopelessness. The way it showed up there, in very educated circles with European connections, was to become totally immersed in the latest lunacies of Paris culture and to focus totally on those. For example, when I would give talks about current realities, even in research institutes dealing with strategic issues, participants wanted it to be translated into postmodern gibberish. For example, rather than have me talk about the details of what’s going on in US policy or the Middle East, where they live, which is too grubby and uninteresting, they would like to know how does modern linguistics provide a new paradigm for discourse about international affairs that will supplant the post-structuralist text. That would really fascinate them. But not what do Israeli cabinet records show about internal planning. That’s really depressing.
(Chomsky 1994, pp. 163–4)
In this way, the remnants of the left have collaborated in driving the last nail in the coffin of the ideals of justice and progress. We modestly suggest letting in a little bit of air, in the hope that one day the corpse will awaken.
3. Science as an easy target
In this atmosphere of general discouragement, it is tempting to attack something that is sufficiently linked to the powers-that-be so as not to appear very sympathetic, but sufficiently weak to be a more-or-less accessible target (since the concentration of power and money are beyond reach). Science fulfils these conditions, and this partly explains the attacks against it. In order to analyse these attacks, it is crucial to distinguish at least four different senses of the word ‘science’: an intellectual endeavour aimed at a rational understanding of the world; a collection of accepted theoretical and experimental ideas; a social community with particular mores, institutions and links to the larger society; and, finally, applied science and technology (with which science is often confused). All too frequently, valid critiques of ‘science’, understood in one of these senses, are taken to be arguments against science in a different sense.268 Thus, it is undeniable that science, as a social institution, is linked to political, economic and military power, and that the social role played by scientists is often pernicious. It is also true that technology has mixed results – sometimes disastrous ones – and that it rarely yields the miracle solutions that its most fervent advocates regularly promise.269 Finally, science, considered as a body of knowledge, is always fallible, and scientists’ errors are sometimes due to all sorts of social, political, philosophical or religious prejudices. We are in favour of reasonable criticisms of science understood in all these senses. In particular, the critiques of science viewed as a body of knowledge – at least those that are most convincing – follow, in general, a standard pattern: First
one shows, using conventional scientific arguments, why the research in question is flawed according to the ordinary canons of good science; then, and only then, one attempts to explain how the researchers’ social prejudices (which may well have been unconscious) led them to violate these canons. One may be tempted to jump directly to the second step, but the critique then loses much of its force.
Unfortunately, some critiques go beyond attacking the worst aspects of science (militarism, sexism, etc.) and attack its best aspects: the attempt at rationally understanding the world, and the scientific method, understood broadly as a respect for empirical evidence and for logic.270 It is naive to believe that it is not the rational attitude itself that is really challenged by postmodernism. Moreover, this aspect is an easy target, because any attack on rationality can find a host of allies: all those who believe in superstitions, be they traditional ones (e.g. religious fundamentalism) or New Age.271 If one adds to that a facile confusion between science and technology, one arrives at a struggle that is relatively popular, though not particularly progressive.
Those who wield political or economic power will quite naturally prefer that science and technology be attacked as such, because these attacks help conceal the relationships of force on which their own power is based. Furthermore, by attacking rationality, the postmodern left deprives itself of a powerful instrument for criticizing the existing social order. Chomsky observes that, in a not-so-distant past,
Left intellectuals took an active part in the lively working class culture. Some sought to compensate for the class character of the cultural institutions through programs of workers’ education, or by writing best-selling books on mathematics, science, and other topics for the general public. Remarkably, their left counterparts today often seek to deprive working people of these tools of emancipation, informing us that the ‘project of the Enlightenment’ is dead, that we must abandon the ‘illusions’ of science and rationality – a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use.