Alan Sokal gained some fame a few years ago by making up some academic sounding bullshit and sending it to the radical "postmodernist" journal Social Text, who then published it, not recognizing it as a hoax, thus the infamous Sokal Hoax of this book's title.
This book builds on that "social experiment" and w
Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and CultureRead the whole review.
by Alan SokalTruth's Caper
A Review by Simon BlackburnEvery reader of this magazine is likely to have heard of the "Sokal hoax," the most celebrated academic escapade of our time. Everyone is also likely to know the story in outline: how in 1996 the radical "postmodernist" journal Social Text published an article submitted by Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at New York University, with the mouthwatering title "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Sokal then revealed the article to be a spoof, a tissue of nonsense that he had painstakingly assembled in order to parody the portentous rubbish that flew under the colors of postmodernism. By publishing Sokal's submission, the emperors of that tendency revealed themselves to be as naked as the rest of academia had always suspected, and with this one coup Sokal himself became the toast of the town, a celebrity, a hero of the resistance.
Since then, he and others have written extensively about the hoax and its significance. Some have attempted to defend the editors of Social Text, but they could not do much to stop the laughter. Some pursed their lips at the impropriety of hoaxing, but ridicule is a good weapon. Most thought that the editors had brought it on themselves. Sokal himself has written numerous essays, and also a book about it, with Jean Bricmont (Impostures intellectuelles, published in America in 1998 as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science). His new book brings together ten essays, beginning with a thoroughly annotated text of the hoax submission itself. Most of these essays have been published at various times since the hoax came out, and the hoax itself, in all its delicious pottiness, is easily available on the Web.
For dedicated followers of the aftermath of Sokal's useful mischief, there may be a sense of deja vu here. Indeed, Sokal begins his preface somewhat defensively: "I have a visceral distaste for books that have been confected by pasting together a collection of loosely connected, previously published essays.... So the reader may legitimately wonder: Am I not now publishing just such a compilation?" The answer, he assures us, is that he is not, because the essays form a coherent whole. I expect most authors of collections feel the same, viscerally or otherwise.
But the more pressing problem is that the kind of postmodernism that was Sokal's special target is now widely held to belong to yesterday. Before September 11, the story goes, academe allowed its "anything goes" tendency to grow unchecked. With long prosperity, the disappearance of the Cold War, and the lack of any great causes to substitute for it, a certain playfulness--an ironic, aesthetic, and disengaged attitude to life -- was quite tolerable. This was history's leisure time. We did not need too much self-scrutiny, and certainly not nervous and serious books about who we are and what we stand for and where we may be heading. The relativist could hold court as the lord of misrule. You disagree with me? Whatever. That's your view, and who's to say? I expect it is true for you.
It didn't do to thump the table or insist too much: philosophers, it was supposed, had taught us to see any such exhibition of critical reason as nothing more than a bid for power, a rhetorical trick for imposing ourselves on others, and with such bad manners, or worse. Especially it would not do if the ones who were being thumped at were victims of the colonial past, or descendants anxious to claim the status of victim. In that sacred sector, respect was the order of the day, even if it meant smiling politely at creationist timetables of earth history, Hindu versions of science, homeopathic medicine, and any other stumbling pre-scientific attempt at understanding the world. In fact, the only proper targets of disrespect were those "metaphysical prigs," as Richard Rorty liked to call them, who wanted to keep the inverted commas off words such as truth, reason, or knowledge.
Relativism can certainly go along with complacency, and I think it is fair to say that even philosophers more serious than Rorty were tainted by that. The philosophy of the right, mainly market triumphalism, is of course an old friend, and still survives, even if it now looks a little battered; but consider in this connection also "political liberalism," the heading under which John Rawls could imagine the peoples of the world willingly leaving their ideological and cultural differences at the door and coming into the political arena carrying only that which they hold in common. What they had in common turned out to be a birthright of reason sufficient all by itself to enchant them with a nice liberal democratic constitution, amazingly like that of the United States, or perhaps western Europe. Conflict could be talked through and violence abated. When the philosophers explained the right way to live, everyone would fall happily into line. Innocent times.
But no longer. The present decade is different. The United States has had its wake-up call, and may have others just as loud. It has been told, brutally, that disagreement matters, and that if our grasp of what we need to defend is feeble enough, there are people out there only too happy to wrest it away from us. It has reacted even more brutally to that alarm by declaring war on people who had nothing to do with it in the first place, and then conducting that war with counterproductive barbarity. It has learned that there is not much common reason that is everyone's birthright -- that when disagreement comes, people cannot afford to shrug.
There are times when we have to do better than "whatever" and "anything goes." A country needs to understand what is good, and also what is not good, about its preferred ways of living. It needs to understand what is good, and why, about its science, history, and self-understandings; and it even needs to understand what was good, and why, about the politics and the ethics that it may have, let us hope temporarily, abandoned. When we behold a postmodernist White House where the president and his advisers sneer at the "reality-based community," then carnival time in academe is well and truly over.
I greatly enjoyed Sokal's hoax. There is little in academic life more irritating than people pretending to understand things that they do not understand. Who cannot want to explode the long lines of intellectuals posing as having a close acquaintance with iconic items of twentieth-century progress -- relativity theory, of course, but also quantum mechanics, set theory, Godel's theorems, Tarski's work on formal logic, and much else? Custard pies are exactly what is needed.
Still, I found myself not quite as wholehearted as some of my colleagues. I felt a little guilty about laughing, even if the joke was a good one.
While I find the Sokal Hoax amusing, I suspect I might have made the same mistake as the editors. And while it revealed some problems in postmodern academics, it threw out the baby with the bathwater. I agree with this passage:
I also found something a shade distasteful about the position of those triumphalists who were crowing about the hoax. Very few of them would be able to make head or tail of a page of any contemporary physics journal. So when Sokal tells them that some sentences in his hoax were physically perfectly correct, while others were egregiously false or nonsensical, they have to take him on trust, and this alone puts them in a rather poor position from which to crow over the hapless others who took all of them, including the wrong ones, on trust.A lot of conservatives reject all postmodernism because it's postmodernism, not because they can tell why it's wrong. And that's just silly.
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