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Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science ReviewThis book, by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, both scientists (the former a biologist, the latter a mathematician), airs the grievances of science against the new post-modernist movement in the academia.A movement that started as a deconstructionist method of literary criticism, postmodernism is now a way of thinking that is proposed by some proponents as an explanatory method for everything, including science. Briefly, post-modernism proposes that science is nothing more than a cultural construct, and has no more objective validity than any other form of knowledge. While natural sciences have remained untouched by this movement, it is taking over the social sciences, spurred over by the latter's failures at establishing its scientific basis as firmly as the former has done.
The subtitle of this book is "the academic left and its quarrels with science", and suitably, the first two chapters discuss politics. While politics should, ideally, be informed by science, it is a sad fact that science is also often informed by politics. The Academic Left demands that, rather than using science to inform the political process, the reverse should happen : feminist postmodernism demands "a complete overthrown of traditional gender categories", racial justice entails a society which prioritizes "black values" (in this case, Afrocentrism - the idea that Africa and black people are inherently superior), and environmental postmodernism "envisons a trancendence of the values of Western industrial society and the restoration of an imagined prelapsarian harmony to humanity's relations with nature".
The most used method to effect these views of the world is postmodernism, that is, the view that our ideological system (including science) is under the purview of cultural constructivism, that is, a product of the culture it exists in. It was first a product of literary criticism and history, places where no doubt it had much use, but is now widespread. Variants of this view posit that science is really a bourgeois construct, or the product of gender bias, or of a one-sided Western perspective, or of an impulse to objectify nature and alienate man from direct experience of nature.
Chapter 5 to 7 are worth the price of admission alone. Here, the authors examine the desperate attempts by "feminist" postmodernists (chapter 5), "environmentalist" postmodernists (chapter 6) and other movements - "anti-AIDS", animal rights, Afrocentrism (chapter 7). Note that I put their position in quotes : as I have mentioned earlier, what the postmodernist holders of these ideologies seek is not a reasoned position but brute social revolution thru obliteration of knowledge.
The most remarquable conclusion of these examinations is that, while the postmodernists in these disciplines claim that science is a social construct, they have very little actual evidence (the mere attempt to provide evidence is surprising, in the view that any ideology is a construct : we would expect total presuppositionalism here, but like any such people, they are forced to at least try).
For example, the best feminist attack against science we have are that : the little problems in math books (you know, the if-John-gives-half-his-money-to-Jill type of problems for children) are too white-male-oriented, and that the language used to describe sperm-ovula interactions are too aggressive. We have the idea that technological societies hate life more than others, and that to eat animals is born out of a desire to control.
The authors elegantly dispatch such nonsense and give us a bird's eye view of the biggest publications on the subject. The field is highly entertaining, and they do not hesitate to say what they think, even though science can be un-PC in many circumstances (such as when fighting Afrocentric myths). They state at the beginning that they intend to take no quarters, and they don't.
Science, despite its faults, is the crowning achievement of Western Enlightment. Books like "Higher Superstition" make us reflect on the intellectual threats to our future, and forces each of us to take a position. Despite some small ideological flaws, I give this book a hearty four out of five.Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science Overview
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