From: Paul Gallagher <pcg-AT-panix.com> Subject: M-I: Re: Left Conservatism? Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 16:18:14 -0500 (EST) I thought I should reply to some of the response to my post, especially after reading Mark Jones' kind words. Yoshie makes a lot of sense, Whether using relativism or logical positivism or whatever, PR men of the ruling class always try to promote corporate interests. Louis Proyect mentions the Social Text issue. I recommend the article by Levins and the article by Lewontin that appears only in the book version. I haven't read a lot of the other articles, and they may not be worth the trouble. As I wrote, I don't see the Science Wars as having much to do with post- modernism, except in so far as post-modernism is used as a catch-all for whatever the author doesn't like. Certainly, many of the science warriors very clearly state that their problem is with the left in general. Sokal seems to play the role of token leftist in the Science Wars just as people like Genovese played in the Culture Wars. I suspect the left-right issue is the main motivation, but academic authority may be another. Many of the essays in Higher Superstition are filled with complaints by professors about how much they dislike their students. Maybe they're just frustrated that not everyone unquestioningly accepts their opinions? One thing I noticed is that Sokal's hoax deals partly with post-modern jargon but it's based on "quantum philosophy." The idea is that quantum physics shows there is no mind-independent reality comes from physicists like Heisenberg and Bohr. I don't see any reason to accept this idea, but I don't see any reason to blame it on post-modernism. Over on the Science- as-Culture list, some science warriors link post-modernism with "New Age" ideas; one said, most science critics have a "lech for tarot cards." True, the Social Text editors didn't reject quantum philosophy out of hand, but neither did the presumably non-post-modernist editors of quantum philosophy books. It seems more likely Sokal and others are just lumping together people they hate into one big mass. My perspective may be all wrong, since I have little contact with post- modernism or post-modernists, unless post-modernism is defined broadly. I'm not sure, but I doubt most science studies people would identify themselves as post-modernists. In fact, the Social Text article that seemed to get the most ridicule was written by Ruth Hubbard, who may be a Marxist-Leninist (I was told this, but since her writings that I've seen don't make this explicit, I may be wrong). It depends on how you define post-modernism, of course, but post-modernism doesn't seem very important or very influential outside the academic world. and they certainly seem to pose no threat at all to science - or to political revolution, for that matter. I've seen some post-modernist work that I like, some that I don't (especially right-wing and anti- Marxist work like Vincent Descombes' Modern French Philosophy, which was one of the few books I've read on the subject), but it doesn't seem like much of a threat to anyone. I think analyzing scientific texts using the methods used to analyze literary texts can be productive, and scientific texts sometimes refer as much to other texts and to the social world as to the natural world. Now, some people, such as Lewontin, see scientism, especially biological determinism, as the key element in capitalist ideology, since it allows the liberal ideology of liberty and equality to coexist with the reality of capitalism. Now, it maybe he greatly overemphasizes biological determinism's importance. You could view post-modernism and scientism both as academic cults, which capitalists borrow for their purposes, but for which they have no real need. Or it may be they're both important, but then we are forced, as often in politics, to choose between lesser evils, or to explicitly reject, as Yoshie does, both choices. In the Science Wars, we're faced with choices between liberals and conservatives and between an overemphasis on the social, or on the autonomy of texts, on one side, and on ideology pretending to be science, on the other. Aronowitz is frequently criticized, as in David Horowitz's recent article. I have never read his work, but my guess is the statement he made about the harm done by medical science, which Doug Henwood mentions, arises from Aronowitz being confused about the more plausible argument that the advances in human health over the past century are due primarily to public health measures, and that the advances in medicine and surgery come from the practice of surgery and medicine, a process of trial and error, while biological medicine, although contributing to knowledge, has had comparatively little impact and perhaps is often not the best way to allocate resources to solve health problems and distracts attention from the real causes of disease, such as poverty. For example, billions of dollars have been spent on medical science research that might have been more productively spent on public health, and the emphasis on biochemical disease obscures the social roots of most health problems. I'm guessing Arononowitz read such arguments and misunderstood them or misstated them. If this sort of confusion is combined with a belief in some of the sillier alternative medicine, then you have a position that looks very foolish and gets people angry. But I don't see how it's going to lead to people abandoning medical science anytime soon. In contrast, when the science camp says, forget about poverty and buy pharmaceuticals to solve your health problems, I imagine they have real influence. On the other hand, if all the academics in the world starting thinking the right thoughts and saying the right things, the rest of the world might not even notice. Jim Blaut writes: > I've never entered the lists of the "science wars" but I root for the > science side. Some on the science side are reactionary, of course, and > sociobiology is close to fascism, but: I have yet to read or hear a > postmodern discourse that does anything but pacify; that really engages in > or goads people into real, concrete, consequential struggle against > capitalism and for socialism. Perhaps you can enlighten me. > This is a vague thought, but it seems that if post-modernism has done any good, it's to help people cope, individually, with life. It gives great importance to local struggles, to local resistance to power. Sort of like the conflict between Marxism and psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century: post-modernists, like psychoanalysts, may be often silly, and pose no threat to capitalism, and in fact pacify people, but they make life a bit easier. Maybe what I just wrote is wrong: post-modernism may be tangential to these local struggles, at best it may arise from them, at worst it may exploit or distort them (it's easy to think that that ideas are prior to society or that they give rise to social movements when the reverse is true). But when many Marxists often openly oppose local struggles, or seem to view the primary contradictions in the world today as Marxist vs. Amazonian Indians, or vs. Afro-Centrists, or vs. post-modernists, or vs. feminists, I can understand how some people would turn to post-modernism, which attaches great importance to local resistance. Even if most post-modernists reject the struggle for socialism and view power, which Marxists would view as capitalist power, as eternal, Marxist intellectuals haven't done much for the struggle for socialism lately either. One thing I've noticed is that both sociobiology and post-modernism arose in the late 1960's. People often talk about how the failure of the 1968 rebellion in France, the failure of Euro-Communism, the writings of Solzhenitsyn influenced the rise of post-modernist ideas - that may not be true, of course, I suppose fear of radical change could be as much a force as disappointment over its failure. Similarly, the origins of sociobiology seem related to the events of the 1960's. Gould relates the rise of sociobiology to the revival of racism and the failure of social programs, and Lewontin relates it to the threat of revolution and the need for capitalism's intellectuals to defend the "existing social order as biologically inevitable." Although some biological determinist thought is racist or openly conservative (Crick, Wallace, Rushton, Murray, etc.), much is reformist. The leading sociobiologisist of the U. Michigan school, Alexander, in Darwinism and Human Affairs even claims to find in evolution justification for indvidual rights and majority rule. E.O. Wilson and Barzun in the mid-1970's and their predecessors, Waddington, Jacques Monod, and Gunther Stent, in the late 1960's, explicitly say that western civilization is in decline and biological values are needed either to rescue it or replace it or even destroy it. Monod is an intersting case. His family background was Calvinist (and he later called for "scientific Puritanism" renouncing all values but those of science), but his father was a convinced positivist. He was a student of Morgan's at Cal. Tech., equally interested in music as in genetics, in the 1930's, but returning to France, he became a leader in the French Resitance during World War II and a member of the Communist party. He quit the party in 1948 over the Lysenko affair, which singled out for attack Monod's teacher, Morgan. Monod won the Nobel Prize in 1965, the fisrt Frenchman in thirty years, making him a celebrity. Monod remained a socialist and in 1968 offered his support to the rebelling students, who rejected it (I don't know why - I think Judson's The Eight Day of Creation has the story). Then in 1969 and 1970 he wrote his bestseller, Chance and Necessity, where he wrote that Darwinism, finally complete, had refuted religion and its modern substitutes, such as Marxism, and all forms of anthropocentric humanist values, and called for new values and a new society based on science, in particular the theory of natural selection. Anyway, that's more than enough for today! Paul --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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