The Reformers - Part 1
Alan Sokal Transgresses the Boundaries... of Academic Nonsense
This is a 2-part series (hopefully in time I will find more examples… Roland Fryer comes to mind, as does Jordan Peterson). Part 1 is about Alan Sokal, and his brilliant and hilarious “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (1994). Part 2 covers the efforts of James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian and their ‘Grievance Studies’ hoaxes. Like many of the most profound and incisive events in our culture these ideology-crippling confrontations have been almost entirely ignored, minimized, and dismissed by the mainstream. That’s why they should be shared and discussed as much as possible!
“Truth? What is truth?” -Pontius Pilate
“[D]eep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.”
-Alan Sokal (written in jest)
Alan Sokal, in a Daily News illustration of an article by George Will, 2017
When can we be certain that theories are simply ridiculous… bereft of any legitimacy or epistemological rigor? Perhaps when detractors write self-conscious satires of the theories, and those satires are completely indistinguishable from the real thing?
The mid-nineties seems like a sleepy, quaint, bygone period of moral simplicity from our contemporary vantage point. Technology was structuring and enhancing our lives but hadn’t achieved its current addictive quality. Our mental health was significantly better, on average (and I do think there is a connection between the two). The political spectrum was still a useful heuristic and many fewer Americans had adopted moralistic total worldviews in which almost every word or thought or individual was layered in suspicion. The Right still trusted federal law enforcement and the military and the Left still cared about poor people and medical care and was still years from seeing literally every problem and every institution and interaction through a magnifying glass of presumed racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia. As is often the case in life, you don’t really understand the blessings you have until they’re gone.
Still, though, if we look back from now until then we can see the threads of today being woven into reality. The trends and ideas that shape our lives these days mostly existed then, at least in nascent form.
Critical Theory (CT) is the intellectual superstructure behind a huge swathe of academia, the modern Left, and dozens of ideas that are now de mode (or just assumed) by the generations younger than me. There are several major ideological tributaries that feed that river and the ideas are contradictory and too extensive to fully explain here. In brief, critical theory begins with the axiom that society is all about power dynamics. While most social scientists would probably say that human behavior is mediated by biology, evolved habits, cultural exchange, innovation, norms and values AND (often hidden) power dynamics the critical theorists don’t believe any of those other things are real or that they’re worth discussing. While they exist they, too, are expressions of power. Your study habits, your ability to drive a car, your diet, and your love for your parents can fundamentally all best be explained using the language of control and domination.
Furthermore, only certain categories of power dynamics interest the critical theorists: race, sex, sexuality, body type. Many of the biggest factors in defining modern identity groups are included. That’s not an accident, as the formation of these groups into self-conscious collectives is a central part of the critical theory project. It would be a mistake to say that they are interested in historical oppression. Jews can claim at least as much of that throughout history (and are still the main victims of US hate crimes by a huge margin) but critical theorists are distinctly hostile to Jewish identity and to including them in the ‘victim roster’. Jews are white, you see. The real reason is that Jews will never support radical change for the most part. They have benefitted brilliantly from the opportunities of capitalism and liberal democracy. The same basically goes for East- and South-Asians. It would also be a mistake to say that critical theorists are concerned with marginalization. The mentally ill have been and are operating at a huge disadvantage in our society based on factors outside their control. Schizophrenics have a much tougher time of it than black people in the US, and there are fairly obvious policy reforms that could be very helpful. Schizophrenics will never be an organized group promoting radical change, though, so they’re mostly ignored. There are certainly few people less marginalized in our society than addicts… yet, as an addict in recovery, I have never seen any CT nod to the burdens of addiction or the ‘structural inequalities’ we face. In fact, addicts learn that it’s only through nonpolitical fellowship and prayer and personal growth that we can heal. These lessons are anathema to CT. Why are schizophrenics and addicts and single mothers and orphans not included in the victim hierarchy? Because they are not politically useful demographics. Critical Theory is not, ultimately, interested in forming a just or fair society… they are concerned with gaining power for their ideology. That is why they are fervent in their desire to defame and ruin black academics and gay volunteers and trans YouTubers who resist their ideas.
Critical theory only has one immutable truth and all other truths and values must bend to its service: our society is deeply oppressive on the basis of multiple factors and it needs revolutionary change. I’ve written elsewhere about how strange it is that such ideas might become popular in such a prosperous and free society, and how dangerous the idea of radical change is without a clearly defined end state. Here I aim only to briefly summarize the main thrust of critical theory.
The profusion of such ideas probably accounts for the diminution of patriotism and increasing cynicism about concepts like gender roles and national borders and private property among young people. There’s a widespread sense that these time-tested and necessary constructs are gross or unfashionable and so many young people attack them without proposing any reforms or alternatives… while they rely upon and benefit from them. Hypocritical and unconstructive moral condemnation is truly the affliction of our current age.
These ideas began, developed, and spread in the universities. For whatever reason (some combination of intellectual shortsightedness, the ever present elite fear of being seen as a reactionary or a bigot, simple greed for status and research grants and tenure, and a crippling degree of personal and institutional cowardice, no doubt) the Critical Theorists have mostly completed their ‘long march’ through the institutions. By now you can see their intellectual poisoned fruit in our Hollywood films, in our medical associations, our judicial system, and federal agencies. Even the blurry divide between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ (social) sciences has proven to be less impermeable than liberals long assumed and hoped. Economics teeters on the brink, preserved only by its tradition of market-oriented ideas and its methodological rigor. History still retains some sensible voices but the discipline has been hopelessly polluted by thinkers who are more concerned with reinforcing their ideological narratives than they are rendering a nuanced and factually accurate view of the past. Sociology and psychology fell long ago. Gender studies and cultural studies never really had any rigor or objectivity and, like all fake epistemologies, they have become increasingly weird and disconnected without the natural bracket of reality to constrain them.
Alan Sokal wrote Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in 1994, while a member of the NYU Physics Department. It was published in a minor CT-dominated sociological journal (Social Text) in 1996. I highly recommend you click the link and begin reading his piece, although you can be forgiven for not finishing it.
The main gist of the piece is that science (particularly physics) is constrained by race and sex and gender biases and that even physical reality is essentially a linguistic and social construction, totally mediated by power dynamics. This is an absurd idea but it is one that many French intellectuals (and their Critical descendants) have seriously claimed and spent many thousands of words writing about (‘exploring’ isn’t really apt in this context, for these writings are pure blather and opacity).
In his submission, Sokal was deliberately ridiculous and outrageous. The essay was "liberally salted with nonsense," as he writes. He calls complex number theory a "new and still quite speculative branch of mathematical physics," although it is nearly 200 years old and is the basis for advanced algebra and many other subdisciplines. As Steven Weinberg writes, in his deeply satisfying summary of the paper (Sokal’s Hoax): “[A]fter correctly remarking that its description of curved spacetime allows arbitrary changes in the spacetime coordinates that we use to describe nature, Sokal solemnly pronounces that "the pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity." This is absurd -- the meaning of a mathematically defined quantity like pi cannot be affected by discoveries in physics, and in any case both pi and G continue to appear as universal constants in the equations of general relativity.”
Sokal LOADED his paper with flattering references to the editors of Social Text, which he must have calculated would make them more amenable to publishing his work, and which make its publication much funnier in retrospect.
He also includes quotations (which must have been sincerely written in their original works) from Derrida, Lacan, and Luce Irigarary. These excerpts are completely incomprehensible and reveal the giants of the discipline to be, largely, woolly thinkers and impenetrable writers (a handicap which all Critical Theorists still seem to labor under… I have spent hundreds of hours reading this nonsense). Here are some outstanding examples:
The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability -- it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something -- of a center starting from which an observer could master the field -- but the very concept of the game. (Derrida)
[H]is diagram [the Möbius strip] can be considered the basis of a sort of essential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject. This goes much further than you may think at first, because you can search for the sort of surface able to receive such inscriptions. You can perhaps see that the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable. A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut. And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease. (Lacan)
[T]he mathematical sciences, in the theory of wholes [théorie des ensembles], concern themselves with closed and open spaces ... They concern themselves very little with the question of the partially open, with wholes that are not clearly delineated [ensembles flous], with any analysis of the problem of borders [bords].
Notably, Luce Irigaray’s excerpted piece is titled “Is the Subject of Science Sexed?”, which is the kind of question CT scholars spend endless hours debating. I’m not sure if they understand what sexism is, in the final analysis, but they DEFINITELY don’t understand science.
Weinberg writes:
“I suppose that it might be argued that articles in physics journals are also incomprehensible to the uninitiated. But physicists are forced to use a technical language, the language of mathematics. Within this limitation, we try to be clear, and when we fail we do not expect our readers to confuse obscurity with profundity. It never was true that only a dozen people could understand Einstein's papers on general relativity, but if it had been true, it would have been a failure of Einstein's, not a mark of his brilliance. The papers of Edward Witten, which are today consistently among the most significant in the promising field of string theory, are notably easier for a physicist to read than most other work in string theory. In contrast, Derrida and other postmoderns do not seem to be saying anything that requires a special technical language, and they do not seem to be trying very hard to be clear. But those who admire such writings presumably would not have been embarrassed by Sokal's quotations from them.”
There are several issues with current academic sociology, of the kind mocked by Alan Sokal:
They begin with contestable and overly-broad assumptions, which are never themselves questioned. Not only can the idea that the United States is saturated with white supremacy never be critically examined, but even described how that might be the case or measuring the degree of institutional or cultural racism are endeavors which are strictly forbidden. This limits the academics to masturbatory word games and examinations of unimportant or unrelated social phenomenon (dog parks-as we shall see-or grammatical conventions or film scripts). The question can never be: ‘is this product infected by racism?’ It must remain, according to the rules of the game, ‘where is the racism here?’. It sounds like an exaggeration (but it is not) to say that examining if racism (or sexism, or anti-fat bias, etc. etc.) exists in a space or how exactly it works are proscribed. If you read these works you will quickly notice that these kinds of questions are never dealt with. In effect, the entire edifice of sociology as it is practiced today is developing zealously-held articles of faith into more refined and esoteric directions. This is not science… and it shouldn’t even be academic inquiry.
There is rarely any effective peer review. Academics write these things to build their careers. Most are almost never cited. About half of all academics who receive tenure nearly stop their production of published papers soon after. Peer review for papers like these are impossible because peer review depends upon some objective standard of accuracy and quality and these papers are entirely comprised of summaries of the basic theoretical framework, followed by assumptions and strange opinions, with bits of culture or poorly-understood data thrown in to support the starting assumptions.
These ideas are completely unfalsifiable. Science demands that your conclusion be tested or measured… but that would admit the possibility that you are wrong and if your starting assumption (and, hence, your conclusion) is that ‘public education in the U.S. is racist’ this can never be falsified by the followers of these disciplines. It is, quite literally, a possibility which cannot even be acknowledged, much less explored.
Sokal himself minimized the effects of his hoax. He publicly stated that, effectively, his fake submission only really demonstrated that the editors of a single minor academic journal did not practice effective peer review and were only too happy to publish gibberish, as long as it flattered their self-regard and (more importantly) their ideological biases. This kind of epistemological humility and reluctance to over-generalize or exaggerate his effects is admirable. Ironically, it is the mark of a true scientist… and a key quality which is totally lacking among Critical Theorists themselves.
Damn. Loved this. I am so interested in jargon- I never read scientific papers, but it is certainly interesting how many of the points you make relate to art and artist statements. They are certainly masturbatory and are caked and layered with the same academic jargon that was laid out here.
Many times, it seems, is this jargon phrasing allows people to either get away with saying nothing, or allows them to hide or protect an area of thought with an elitist language all of their own. I certainly think of the way many artists speak, also law, particularly tax law, economic verbiage (of the kind the Big Short film exposed), and the sociology papers mentioned here.
Whatever the case, I enjoyed the article and the reminder that even Einstein (particularly) wrote fairly clearly. I absolutely detest writing that feels like someone's homework that has something to prove or someone to impress.