File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9802, message 504


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



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