New at Reason

David Weigel | May 30, 2006

Cathy Young analyzes right-wing and left-wing policy critiques and finds both of them wanting.

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|5.30.06 @ 8:40AM|#

On the right or the left, reason-based and reality-based politics are increasingly hard to find.

When were they ever easy to find?

|5.30.06 @ 8:42AM|#

BTW, it is nice to see someone reading Pope.

|5.30.06 @ 9:03AM|#

How can anyone, for example, take academic feminists seriously when they are discussing whether Newton's physics is a metaphor for rape or whether logic is inherently biased against women?

Not that I'm a fan of a lot of the wacky stuff that comes out of humanities and social science faculties, but was the whole "Newton's rape manual" thing ever more than just a really, really, really bad anecdote? I mean, as a physicist I am of course aware of the incident and I should be ready and willing to claim victim status because of it ("Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!"), but I got through grad school without my lab being shut down by the feminist studies faculty. They never interrupted any of my classes. I was never told to report to their department for reprogramming. They didn't burn any of my articles. Really, they just left us alone.

It's easy to cite some really egregious anecdote so you can once again wring your hands about how awful these darn culture wars are. It's almost as easy as putting some Luddite fish into a barrel, getting them to argue against a scifi fanboy vision of the future, and then blasting those fish with a shotgun and proclaiming yourself a bold defender of scifi fanboy visions of the future.

|5.30.06 @ 9:09AM|#

You wonder sometimes if the public excesses and gaffes of the right aren't the worst things for the left. Inevitably, the left will spend the next year winking and nodding at each other saying things like "I'm reality based, how about you?" Unfortunately, no argument follows. You are just supposed to know that you are on the right team.

Certainly, the right has this sort of thing too, but they have the advantage of driving policy. There is an increased burden on the opposition to raise awareness of alternatives, and the left has been horrible at that.

|5.30.06 @ 9:15AM|#

BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD BOTH SIDES BAD

|5.30.06 @ 9:21AM|#

This is hardly news to the folks who founded
REASON nearly forty years ago.

|5.30.06 @ 9:30AM|#

As much fun it is obviously is for Ms. Young to beat the dusty old carpets of the faculty lounges, I don't think she's being quite honest by identifying humanities professors as the primary source of liberal/leftist policy critiques.

|5.30.06 @ 10:14AM|#

Once again, the underlying problem is that the tidy looking dichotomy of a left versus right political spectrum is (like most ideas of French origin) woefully misleading even in the academy.

Having re-engaged a dialogue with several academics who identify as liberals over the last year or so, it has become increasingly clear to me that there is a profound difference between what many of them perceive to be liberalism and what I would describe as irrational and incoherent leftism. That is not to say that such leftism can't be found in the academy; indeed, its worst excesses appear to originate there. But as is also the case among the non-academic chattering classes, the most egregious examples among leftist academics are most often cited by their opponents as evidence of the intellectual and moral failings of everyone those critics oppose.

In any case, Ms Young's observations suffer from some of the same problem. She writes, "assaults on evolution frequently find a platform in respectable conservative publications. So do attacks on secularism and the separation of church and state [and] many conservatives assert that the American Republic was founded not on the principles of the Enlightenment but as a 'Christian nation.'"

Well, the separation of church and state (itself a problematic formula) isn't necessarily the same thing as secularism, however much she may approve of both. I know Christianity bashing is something of a cottage industry here, but even the phrase "Christian nation" is understood by at least some of its proponents as more about what they perceive to be a threatened cultural heritage than about theological dogma. Finally, whatever the intellectual failings of Intelligent Design theory may be (and they are many and serious), does anyone really believe it is "threatening science"? (Sadly, I suspect the answer will be that many here do.)

dhex|5.30.06 @ 10:31AM|#

thoreau: i used to think this stuff was complete fiction before i saw some of the shit my wife was reading for her phd (english/irish lit).

that's not to say it's terribly influential - i still think that it's grossly inflated - but she read plenty of pieces which suggested point-blank that mathematics was inherently anti-female. most of the backing arguments either hinge on privlege (i.e. if everyone doesn't learn it, it doesn't matter?) or some of the more wingnutty shit from lacanian types. the issue isn't so much reading this stuff, but that none of the other phd students seemed to be very upset about it.

it may be a humanities insecurity thing.

|5.30.06 @ 10:45AM|#

"does anyone really believe [intelligent design] is 'threatening science'"

only when it's pushed by non-scientists, especially those who are likely to use the phrase "christian nation". on the facts, no - it is not threatening science.

Jim Henley|5.30.06 @ 10:46AM|#

Cathy wakes up in the morning, looks in the mirror, says "Let's go split some differences!" and gives a little cheer, doesn't she.

|5.30.06 @ 10:48AM|#

My experience in academia is that the weird political bent of the liberal arts and humanities is true enough. I tend to think that dhex is right--it's an ever-increasing insecurity that the real intellectuals are in the sciences and in technology. I used to hear the most disturbing kinds of sneers about technology optimism, etc. from these sorts of professors. No expert in a discipline likes to feel marginalized, after all. I don't think they should feel that way--with all of the great good that technology has done, I hardly think we want to stop reading, studying history, producing art, philosophizing, etc.

Incidentally, another issue with many of the humanities PhD holders is that they tend to be more critics of their disciplines than practitioners of them. And everybody knows that critics are unhappy little bastards :)

dhex|5.30.06 @ 11:20AM|#

what pl said.

but to be fair, it doesn't help that (at least with english and some overlap with "critical theory" and all that entails) holding onto the science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (freud, lacan, et al) sort of makes your whole discipline seem undisciplined. the marxism thing is never going away entirely but they could do with a little less attachment to the supposed "scientific" insights of psychoanalysis rather than using it as an artistic tool.

i'll never tire of this story: one of my wife's professors claimed in class that telepathy during psychoanalysis was a proven phenomena. no one except my wife objected (and that was done somewhat guardedly) but to my surprise, no one threw a chair at her. if i'm paying nearly a thousand dollars a credit, and someone yanks telepathy out of their ass, i think a stool to the skull is a reasonable response. she's stealing from her students by spreading stupidity; however, unlike the ma program i'm in (corp. communications/marketing/pr/soullessness), there's still a definite wall between the professor and the student in many programs, which i think accounts for some of this shitburgering.

|5.30.06 @ 11:24AM|#

Oh, I don't doubt that there are some tenured people with very loony ideas about science. My questions are:

1) Are they representative of their departments, or are they simply the loudest members of their departments? Never confuse the two. If you were to believe the loudest people in the department where I did my Ph.D., you'd think that string theory is universally accepted among physicists as the key to understanding the universe. But if you talk to some of us that science reporters don't have on speed dial, you'll find that a significant number wonder whether it's even science.

2) Ultimately, how much does that sort of lunacy really matter to the point that Cathy Young is trying to make? Cathy Young seems to want to argue that there is a mutual dearth of good ideas on all sides of American politics, so she drags up a few freaks from various corners and says "Look, I found freaks with different labels!"

While we're on the subject of Reason writers debating strawmen, maybe Ron Bailey can go debate somebody who fears that nanotech will lead to intelligent nanobots in the form of a "gray goo" that takes over the planet.

fyodor|5.30.06 @ 11:24AM|#

even the phrase "Christian nation" is understood by at least some of its proponents as more about what they perceive to be a threatened cultural heritage than about theological dogma.

Um, maybe I'm not reading you right, but the Christian's right's desire to control the nation's culture (in response to said perceived threat) is exactly what makes them dangerous. Otherwise, who cares about their theology?

Finally, whatever the intellectual failings of Intelligent Design theory may be (and they are many and serious), does anyone really believe it is "threatening science"?

Not sure what you mean by "threatening science" (not even sure if you do, hence your scare quotes), but attempts to legislatively force public school science classes to teach ID as valid science may very well threaten optimal science education in the jurisdictions where this is taking place. Now, maybe this hardly means the end of civilization, but it still sucks.

|5.30.06 @ 11:28AM|#

D.A. Ridgely,

The left v. right split isn't a "French idea." They were terms applied to two "classes" of ideas which used the seating arrangements at the 1789 Estates General as model. Another myth busted.

|5.30.06 @ 11:40AM|#

From some comments I made at grylliade:

How much are physicists to blame for the supposedly wrongheaded attitudes post-modernists have towards science? From Mara Beller's article (http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/BohmHome/sokalhoax.html):

Quote:
As telling examples of the views Sokal satirized, one might quote some other statements. Consider the following extrapolation of Heisenberg's uncertainty and Bohr's complementarity into the political realm:,/i>

Quote:
"The thesis `light consists of particles' and the antithesis `light consists of waves' fought with one another until they were united in the synthesis of quantum mechanics. ...Only why not apply it to the thesis Liberalism (or Capitalism), the antithesis Communism, and expect a synthesis, instead of a complete and permanent victory for the antithesis? There seems to be some inconsistency. But the idea of complementarity goes deeper. In fact, this thesis and antithesis represent two psychological motives and economic forces, both justified in themselves, but, in their extremes, mutually exclusive. ...there must exist a relation between the latitudes of freedom df and of regulation dr, of the type df dr=p. ...But what is the `political constant' p? I must leave this to a future quantum theory of human affairs."

Before you burst out laughing at such "absurdities," let me disclose the author: Max Born, one of the venerated founding fathers of quantum theory [3]. Born's words were not written tongue in cheek; he soberly declared that "epistemological lessons [from physics] may help towards a deeper understanding of social and political relations". Such was Born's enthusiasm to infer from the scientific to the political realm, that he devoted a whole book to the subject, unequivocally titled Physics and Politics [3].

...

Quote:
One of the more absurd examples of Sokal's satire, according to the author himself, involves the inference from quantum physics to Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic ideas. "Even non-scientist readers might well wonder what in heaven's name quantum field theory has to do with psychoanalysis" -- exclaimed Sokal in the Lingua Franca article in which he promptly revealed his hoax [1]. Nonetheless, a "deep" connection between quantum theory and psychology was extensively discussed in the writings of Pauli, Niels Bohr and Pascual Jordan. Jordan explored the "formal" parallels between quantum physics and Freudian psychoanalysis, and even parapsychology. Pauli, in all seriousness, proceeded from quantum concepts to the idea of the unconscious, to Jungian archetypes, and even to extra sensory perception.

The following words of Bohr are among the more sober statements of these founding fathers with regard to the connection between the quantum and the psychological domains:

Quote:
"...this domain [psychology] ... is distinguished by reciprocal relationships which depend on the unity of our consciousness abd which exhibit a striking similarity with the physical consequences of the quantum of action. We are thinking here of well-known characteristics of emotion and volition which are quite incapable of being represented by visualizable pictures. In particular, the apparent contrast between the conscious onward flow of associative thinking and the preservation of the unity of the personality exhibit...analogy with the relation between the wave description of the motions of material particles, ... and their indestructible individuality." [5]

...

The article goes on in this in this vein (but touches on a number of subjects like gender in the process). I'd say that when you have such revered figures as these in physics making these sort of pronouncements it is not surprising that non-physicists will try to follow them. Thus one can ask what Beller asks:

Quote:
The opponents of the postmodernist cultural studies of science conclude confidently from the Sokal affair that "the emperors ... have no clothes" [18]. But who, exactly, are all those naked emperors? At whom should we be laughing?

Anyway, I'd say that the Sokal affair is hardly the rout of post-modernism that a lot of people claim that it is. What is of course funny is how apparently unwittingly Sokal attacks some of the intellectual giants of 20th century physics.

|5.30.06 @ 12:10PM|#

thoreau,

Ron Bailey debates straw men? I can't believe it!

;-)

|5.30.06 @ 12:15PM|#

Today, assaults on evolution frequently find a platform in respectable conservative publications.

This is a problem? I thought we were for a free marketplace of ideas here, where no entrenched idea is so sacred as to be beyond criticism. Or is that only applicable to religious ideas?

|5.30.06 @ 12:15PM|#

crimethink-

Even worse, sometimes he defends hype against strawmen.

"I say that this nano stuff is going to cure all diseases, solve all energy problems, and bring about the singularity in less than a decade. My opponent thinks that this would be bad because it would displace traditional tribal cultures."

|5.30.06 @ 12:20PM|#

And Cathy Young would show up at Ron's debate to say:

"Well, on the one hand, Ron Bailey is falling for a bunch of hype. On the other hand, his opponent is a Luddite. So this leads me to the highly original insight that nanotechnology will have its pluses and minuses. And I am utterly incapable of deciding whether this technological advance will follow the trend of most other advances and have pluses that outweigh minuses. Because both sides have some bad points."

|5.30.06 @ 12:31PM|#

crimethink,

I thought we were for a free marketplace of ideas here, where no entrenched idea is so sacred as to be beyond criticism.

One can criticize the concepts of say habeas corpus, free speech, etc. all one likes, but one shouldn't expect such criticisms to be taken seriously.

Or is that only applicable to religious ideas?

Are you being serious?

|5.30.06 @ 12:43PM|#

PL,

I was being ironic. It just amazes me that so many here expect religious people to bend over and take it when their beliefs are mocked in the free marketplace of ideas...but when Evolution -- a quasi-religious dogma to some -- is attacked, the same people get all hot and bothered.

dhex|5.30.06 @ 12:51PM|#

crime-iny: i've actually touched a compound eye. have you ever touched the hem of the robe of god?

i think not!

anyway, onto serious-osity:

"Are they representative of their departments, or are they simply the loudest members of their departments? "

a little bit of both? i guess what i'm saying is that it's disheartening to see such attitudes at play, and that they're not really removed from the mainstream of the field at all. was the crazy telepathy lady the chair? no, but she was teaching a degree course almost every phd student in english at this particular institution ends up having to take for one reason or another. (critical theory)

dhex|5.30.06 @ 12:53PM|#

to further clarify: i'm far more bothered by the fact that none of the students seem to be angered enough to actually challenge professors than immersing them in wonky metaphysics and supergluing them to literature. sure, they don't love or respect the Word, but not many people do these days.

once you let michelle malkin publish a book, it's pretty much all over from there.

|5.30.06 @ 1:05PM|#

dhex-

OK, that's a fair point. You're saying that the nuts not only exist, they actually are allowed to teach important courses and go unchallenged when they say crazy stuff in those courses. I can see the concern there.

I'm not here to defend the crazy stuff that comes out of some university departments, but I don't know how much relevance it has to larger points about society, politics, ideas, etc.

|5.30.06 @ 1:06PM|#

crimethink,

So, you never mock any "crackpot ideas," eh?

Anyway, people are free to think what they want to, but they shouldn't always expect people to take them seriously.

|5.30.06 @ 1:07PM|#

Ok, I can see that it has some relevance, but how much? And is Cathy Young interested in using it for anything more than another "Look, freaks on both sides of the culture war!" article?

|5.30.06 @ 1:08PM|#

fydor --

I don't doubt or deny there is a "Christian right" that desires exactly that. My point is that not everyone who has used that phrase can fairly be lumped in with that particular sort of extremism. The extreme should not serve as the benchmark or defining sample of everyone who, for example, thinks a Nativity Scene on the public square is not objectionable. As for your second point, from what I can gather, science education is so far from optimal now that I would be happy to trade the ID supporters an hour or so of class time in return for funding for lab equipment.

PL --

C'etait une plaisanterie.

|5.30.06 @ 1:23PM|#

D.A. Ridgely,

Ne tente pas le diable! :)

dhex|5.30.06 @ 1:33PM|#

"I'm not here to defend the crazy stuff that comes out of some university departments, but I don't know how much relevance it has to larger points about society, politics, ideas, etc."

i think it's far less relevant than both its critics (mr. horowitz, i'm looking in your generally kooky direction) or it's proponents think.

|5.30.06 @ 3:45PM|#

Good article -- thanks.

|5.30.06 @ 7:31PM|#

this post is damn-near sublime. it should've been titled "shorter every essay ever published in reason".

|5.31.06 @ 4:04AM|#

thoreau,

Cathy Young seems to want to argue that there is a mutual dearth of good ideas on all sides of American politics

Well, I for one wouldn't argue with Cathy Young about that point. Back in D.C. they seem to be unraveling capitalism and individual liberty just as fast as they can.

I'm not here to defend the crazy stuff that comes out of some university departments, but I don't know how much relevance it has to larger points about society, politics, ideas, etc.

It matters more than most people think. The problems are that a) you don't know which of these insane ideas is going to take root in society at large and b) usually by the time it does, it's a generation or two later. Humanities profs most often don't get to live to see the consequences of what they teach.

I'll give you one example: Nazi Germany would not have been possible without kooky humanities profs. Eugenics, for example, was largely popularized among European intelligensia by (European) humanities professors. Most of them targets Jews, for a good century before WWII.

You could argue that Nazi Germany was the outcome of a period of chaos, and that would be true. But the ideas that rose to the top of the chaos and took hold were predominantly ideas that European professors had been hammering into their students for most of the previous century.

See _The Idea of Decline in Western History_ by Herman for more details.

The idiocy coming out of today's humanities departments does matter. But it'll probably be your kids or grand kids who live to see it take a hold of society. By the time it does, it's way too late to refute it with simple rational arguments.

Politics does not bend to simple rational arguments the way science does.

The only thing that humanities profs (majority) have agreed on (and taught) for the past 150 years is that capitalism and individual liberty have got to go. Now, remind me again exactly what's going on D.C. these days.....

Then ask yourself again if it matters what these kooks are saying in the class room.