Alan Sokal, of the famous (or infamous (or, if you’re Julia Kristeva (in)famous)) ‘Sokal hoax’ had an interesting piece in the Guardian recently on ‘Taking evidence seriously’, a defence of scientific rationality when it comes to public spending and opposed to government support for pseudo-sciences like homeopathy or intelligent. The piece appears to be a flag-raiser for his forthcoming Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture. While it’s not published yet, the blurb on Amazon reads as follows:
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at New York University, wrote a paper for the cultural-studies journal Social Text, entitled: ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’. It was reviewed, accepted and published. Sokal immediately confessed that the whole article was a hoax - a cunningly worded paper designed to expose and parody the style of extreme postmodernist criticism of science. The story became front-page news around the world and triggered fierce and wide-ranging controversy.
Sokal is one of the most powerful voices in the continuing debate about the status of evidence-based knowledge. In Beyond the Hoax he turns his attention to a new set of targets - pseudo-science, religion, and misinformation in public life. Whether my targets are the postmodernists of the left, the fundamentalists of the right, or the muddle-headed of all political and apolitical stripes, the bottom line is that clear thinking, combined with a respect for evidence, are of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race in the twenty-first century.
This conflation of what might describe as post-modern, post-structuralist, or Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy (none of which are perfect descriptions, but are about as good as we have) with religious or pseudo-religious irrationality is a well-worn theme in recent years. It’s found in the work of writers like Francis Wheen (in his How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World), Johann Hari, the Butterflies and Wheels crew and most of the guests on Little Atoms. While many of the criticisms made of contemporary or not-so-contemporary phenomena like crystal healing, astrology or the much and deservedly maligned homeopathy are valid, it’s quite a stretch to see them as part of some kind of continuum with the work of Lacan, Foucault or Derrida. In fact, one can tell how poorly a particular writer understands ‘postmodern’ philosophy by the extent to which they rely on the arguments of Sokal and his book Intellectual Impostures (also published as Fashionable Nonsense).
Sokal’s book (co-written with Jean Bricmont) itself is insightful, informed and important. However, it is also rather limited in its argument, as Sokal would be the first to acknowledge. It is not by any stretch a comprehensive attack on ‘postmodern’ philosophy. Rather, it specifically focuses on the systematic abuse and misrepresentation of scientific concepts by a number of key ‘postmodern’ thinkers and writers. In the case of writers like Kristeva or Baudrilliard, the abuse of scientific concepts is not central to their overall philosophy although it might reasonably cause one to question the extent to which anything they write should be taken seriously. For someone like Lacan, the criticism is more damning, but still not overwhelming; much still remains of Lacan’s work even with the ‘topology’ removed. It’s also particularly notable that arguably the two greatest bêtes noires of the anti-’postmodern’ists - Derrida and Foucault - are decidely absent from Sokal’s attack. Derrida is mentioned for an off-hand comment at a seminar about the Einsteinian constant not being a constant and Foucault is only invoked in passing.
For Francis Wheen or Johann Hari (despite his much vaunted - primarily by himself - First) to dismiss the work of these writers on the basis of Sokal’s criticism reflects a profound ignorance on their part. A particularly egregious example of this approach is that of Nick Cohen. Although he once popped in to this site to rebut the suggestion that he didn’t actually understand what he was talking about, the arguments he puts forward in his postscript to the revised edition of What’s Left (reprinted in Democratiya) demonstrates that some of the lessons just aren’t sinking in. Nick writes, with an almost epic lack of self-awareness:
[P]ost-modernists took the liberal idea of tolerance and pushed group-based identity politics into an extreme relativism. I am unqualified to discuss their philosophy, although I instinctively feel it is wrong, but a child could understand their politics, which is why they had to hide them in such convoluted prose.
“I don’t understand the philosophy, but I understand the politics behind it”? Is this any different from the approach taken by those criticised by Sokal? Surely the key error on the part of the Luce Irigirarys and Bruno Latours’ is that they don’t understand the science but claim (incorrectly) to understand the philosophy underlying it. Indeed, the one concrete example that Cohen gives of the ‘politics’ of postmodernism shows that he’s confused even when it comes to basic facts. He writes, of the much-maligned Michel Foucault:
When the Islamic revolution in Iran began its persecution of leftists, the nominally left-wing Michel Foucault said Europeans should not condemn because Iranians ‘did not have the same regime of truth as ours’.
This is simply and factually incorrect. Foucault’s endorsement of the Iranian revolution has been used as a stick to beat ‘postmodern relativists’ for decades now. What’s rarely, if ever, pointed out is that Foucault’s support for the revolution came prior to the fall of the Shah. As Eric Paras shows in his Foucault 2.0 ,which examines the support for human rights and liberty in Foucault’s later work, Foucault never supported Khomeni’s theocracy, nor should his support for the revolution in its early stages be confused with a tacit endorsement of the current regime. Paras writes of Foucault’s support for the opposition to the Shah’s rule:
Foucault expressed scepticism that the opposition movement was primarily religious in its orientation or in its goals. Behind the Islamist rhetoric of the mullahs, he detected “a movement traversed by the breath of a religion that speaks less of the beyond than of the transfiguration of this world”. Even as the Ayatollah Khomeni rallied dissident elements from his haven in France, Foucault was writing “One fact should be clear: by ‘Islamic government’, no one in Iran means a political regime in which the clergy would play a role of direction or leadership”.
He goes on to write:
[I]t should be said that the events of the winter of 1978-79 went far toward suppressing his early enthusiasm for the Iranian experiment. On February 1, 1979, Khomeni returned to Iran in triumph and established a theocracy that promptly and bloodily settled accounts with its opponents. Attacked in the French press for his support of the revolution, Foucault told the reporters of Le Monde, “There is, certainly, no shame in changing one’s opinion: but there is no reason to say that one has changed it when one is today against the cutting-off of hands, after being yesterday against the tortures of the Savak”. Elsewhere in the piece, he argued that “[t]he spirituality to which those who rose up and died referred is in no way comparable to the bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy”.
While one can never be sure what the heroic Iranian bus drivers think about the Death of the Subject, but coupled with his meeting of minds on human rights issues with Nouvelle Philosophes like André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Levy Foucault seems little different from that doyenne of muscular liberalism, Azar Nafisi (except, perhaps, for the fact that Nafisi’s support for the revolution - grounded as it was in a rather extreme form of Maoism - was rather more bloodthirsty than Foucault’s).
To return in conclusion, however, to Sokal’s article, it’s hard to argue with his insistence that public policy and state spending should be grounded in evidence-based rationality and honest and open debate. He writes:
The bottom line is that all of us - conservative and liberal, believer and atheist - live in the same real world, whether we like it or not. Public policy must be based on the best available evidence about that world. In a free society each person has the right to believe whatever nonsense he wishes, but the rest of us should pay attention only to those opinions that are based on evidence.
Who could argue with that? The problem, however, is his choice of target in the article. Certainly homeopathy, creationism and, indeed, the worldview of the Bush administration are not representative of a clear-thinking which is grounded in science and objective reasoning. But surely a greater hazard to an informed public debate around what might be termed ’scientific’ issues is much of the scientific industry itself. As Dan Hinds points out in his The Threat to Reason, the influence of market capitalism is a far more pernicious obstacle to the disinterested search for the truth in Western society than any amount of religious fundamentalism or New Age quakery. We saw it in the past with the success of tobacco companies in concealing the link between smoking and cancer for decades, we see it in the attempt to create some kind of false ‘debate’ in relation to man-made climate change and it most recently arose in the story about pharmaceutical companies not releasing the results of clinical trials showing that a number of anti-depressant drugs, including Prozac, had little or no effect on all but the most serious illnesses.
At least when it comes to religious superstition or other discourses which don’t even pretend to be rational, we can point to an objective standard of proof and evidence through scientific enquiry in response. When it comes to the very corruption of scientific enquiry itself through vested economic interests, however, many of the current defenders of Truth and the Enlightenment fall silent. This includes, unfortunately, certain self-proclamed ‘leftists’ like Sokal.
There 
What I remember of 1972 is searching through front page headlines to see who’d been killed the night before, and all but on one occasion being thankful it wasn’t anyone I knew. Even traumatic events like Bloody Sunday quickly faded as Republican and Loyalists took it upon themselves to conduct a particularly nasty game of tit for tat, snuffing out the lives of many ordinary people in the wider population as a kind of macabre tally of success. One Protestant assassinated one night, possibly meant two Catholics the next: a bloody arithmetic, that seemed to have no end. In the middle of it were journalists, the local variety used to writing up stories about lost budgies, new roads, and lovely girls who, in three years of sustained civil disorder barely knew what had hit them. It was Malachi O’Doherty’s first year as a journalist. A year he recounts with unremitting honesty in his book, 
