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Philosophy, sociology and religion

Philosophy, sociology and religion

Postmodernism, politics and religion

01 Aug 2008

Beyond the Hoax
Alan Sokal
2008 Oxford University Press
£20.00/$34.95 hb 448pp

Star turn

Alan Sokal really likes footnotes, which may have made him uniquely qualified as a hoaxer of “science studies”. The original hoax, a purposely and wonderfully nonsensical paper about the epistemology of quantum gravity, appeared in 1996 in the cultural- studies journal Social Text, with the enthusiastic endorsement of its editorship of eminent postmodernists. There were 107 footnotes.

The first chapter of Sokal’s new book Beyond the Hoax revisits the original Social Text paper, adding 142 “annotations” in which Sokal explains at length much of the complex fabric of in-jokes and bouleversements that made it so exquisitely wacky to anyone with even a modest knowledge of physics. The remainder of the first part of the book contains four well-footnoted essays on his reasons for undertaking this exercise in foolery, and on the various responses he has received.

Sokal maintains that, at the time of his 1996 paper, a serious assault against rationality by postmodernists was under way, led by a relatively small number of left-leaning academics in humanities departments. He felt that this would be self-defeating for the Left (whom he identifies with, describing it as “the political current that denounces the injustices and inequalities of capitalist society and that seeks more egalitarian and democratic social and economic arrangements”) while opening up great opportunities for the Right to employ obfuscatory tactics. Indeed, as Chris Mooney’s recent book The Republican War on Science amply testifies, the “faith-based” administration of George W Bush has done its best to obscure a variety of “inconvenient” scientific truths, although Sokal has found little confirmation that it has borrowed this obfuscation from the postmodern relativists and deconstructionists in the leftist fringes of academia.

The second part of the book, which is co-authored with his collaborator the Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont, is a serious philosophical discussion of epistemology (the theory of knowledge). Its first chapter condemns the cognitive relativism of the postmodernists — the idea than fact A (for instance the Big Bang) may really be true for person A but not for person B — while the second chapter makes a trial run at a reasonable epistemology for science. I was delighted to find as part of their vision “the renormalization group view of the world”, according to which one sees every level of the hierarchical structure of science as an “effective theory” valid at a particular scale and for particular kinds of phenomena but never in contradiction with lower-level laws. This leads the authors to emphasize emergence as well as reductionism. I have seen few better expositions of how thoughtful theoretical scientists actually build up their picture of reality.

On the other hand, the Sokal/Bricmont view of science as a whole may be a bit idealized, and is perhaps best suited to relatively clean fields like relativistic field theory. In the murkier and more controversial field of materials science, for example, reality is not so cleanly revealed, particularly when it contradicts the personal interests of the investigators.

Part three of the book encompasses more general subjects. For example, one very long chapter explores the close relationships between pseudoscience and the postmodernists. It is easy enough to find ignominious stories about pseudoscience; some striking and important ones that Sokal picked, for example, are the widespread teaching of “therapeutic touch” (a practice with its roots in theosophy, and not involving actual touch) in many estimable schools of nursing, and, going farther afield, the close ties between conservative Hindu nationalism and the teaching of Vedic astrology and folk medicine in state schools in India.

Whether or not postmodernism has any causal relation to pseudoscience, when attacked, proponents of such pseudosciences are seen to defend themselves by referring to the postmodernist philosophers. And the postmodernists have been known to be supportive of such views — often, for example, favouring Vedic myths or tribal creation stories over the verifiable truths of modern science.

Finally, Sokal enters into the much-discussed intertwined fields of religion, politics and ethics. His essay takes the form of a long, discursive review of two recent books on religion: Sam Harris’ The End of Faith and Michael Lerner’s Spirit Matters. He promises a critical review, but I found him to be rather more critical of Lerner than of Harris. He supports Harris in considering Stephen Jay Gould’s description of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria” to be a cop-out.

Sokal is an implacable enemy of fuzzy-mindedness, and makes the point that religion cannot avoid inventing factual but unlikely claims about actual events. Even if one abandons young-Earth creationism or reincarnation, or those fascinating inventions heaven and hell, the idea that there is an actual personal God listening to one’s prayers and responding is not that far from believing that He is talking to me in Morse code via the raindrops tapping on my windowsill (which Harris suggests would be considered a sign of mental illness). Lerner’s book addresses the conundrum of religion as “spirituality”, incorporating, for instance, the sense of wonder that we scientists feel at the marvels that are revealed to us (I think a more interesting book in this vein is Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred). Sokal, though he lets Lerner get away with dubious claims about studies of the efficacy of prayer, rather dismisses this view.

He then moves on into the political. He asks, if we want voters to actually vote for their true economic and social interests, should we take away from them what are correctly known as the “consolations of religion”? Do we not then risk their perceiving the political Left as condescending and elitist? How do we attempt to break through misperceptions about the true values of the conservative elite? This is not a problem to which anyone, Sokal included, has a good answer.

I too cherish long explanatory footnotes crammed with extra ideas. But even skipping all the footnotes (which would be a great loss) this book is not a page-turner. The author is not one to drop a line of argument just because it wanders “off message”. Nonetheless, Sokal writes lucidly; and one must not forget that his main targets — the postmodern theorists in English, philosophy, sociology or “science studies” departments — are still doing well in even the most respected of our universities, and command enough respect for election into such august bodies as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (I count two of Sokal’s prime targets in as many years). They aim to persuade the elite among our students that scientific rationality is just the invention of a few white males eager to hang on to positions of power, whereas Sokal (and he may be right) sees such rationality as our main hope.

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