by Alan Sokal
As Ross has noted,18 many of the central political issues of the coming decades – from health care to global warming to Third World development – depend in part on subtle (and hotly debated) questions of scientific fact. But they don’t depend only on scientific fact: they depend also on ethical values and – in this journal it hardly needs to be added – on naked economic interests. No Left can be effective unless it takes seriously questions of scientific fact and of ethical values and of economic interests. The issues at stake are too important to be left to the capitalists or to the scientists – or to the postmodernists.
A quarter-century ago, at the height of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, Noam Chomsky observed that:
George Orwell once remarked that political thought, especially on the left, is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of fact hardly matters. That’s true, unfortunately, and it’s part of the reason that our society lacks a genuine, responsible, serious left-wing movement.19
Perhaps that’s unduly harsh, but there’s unfortunately a significant kernel of truth in it. Nowadays the erotic text tends to be written in (broken) French rather than Chinese, but the real-life consequences remain the same. Here’s Alan Ryan in 1992, concluding his wry analysis of American intellectual fashions with a lament that
the number of people who combine intellectual toughness with even a modest political radicalism is pitifully small. Which, in a country that has George Bush as President and Danforth Quayle lined up for 1996, is not very funny.20
Four years later, with Bill Clinton installed as our supposedly “progressive” president and Newt Gingrich already preparing for the new millennium, it still isn’t funny.
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