“There is a growing disdain for reason and science [and] it is not simply a bugbear of conservatives looking for a pretext to discredit the left,” writes University of Virginia microbiologist Paul R. Gross and Rutgers University mathematician Norman Levitt in this often-mesmeric book. “Indeed, left and right are curiously united on these issues.”
In this book, Gross and Levitt reveal the sometimes hilarious, more often grotesque, but always hollow arguments from our New Left postmodernist humanities, straining after all these decades to be relevant through their “demystification” of science by trying to tear it down. Why? Because it is the crowning achievement of the West’s “Eurocentric, white-male, patriarchy,” say the authors. While scientific methodology, discoveries, and laws are all “deconstructed” by Marxist claims that it’s really “bourgeois” science corrupted by “ineradicable gender bias” with a dash of multiculturalist posturing (“science fails inclusivity of all voices”), not once do postmoderns actually address the science. All the while, those devices science built—from Voyager to the Covid vaccine—work just as science designed. And yet, the solution to this success is to replace “Western science”—well worn by China, India, and Japan—with “feminist science,” “black science,” “queer science.” (Yes, this is what academics call it.) Like Hitler’s “Nazi science,” as they claimed, “free of Jews,” and Stalin’s “Proletariat science,” free of capitalists, this proves that today’s humanities academics haven’t a clue what science is either. A non-race-gender-sex-political description of nature so accurate it can measure gravity wave amplitudes one-ten-thousandth of a proton’s diameter, created by black hole mergers one billion light-years away. “The key function of these [academic] myths is to gratify the resentment and self-righteousness of those who propose them,” write the authors, “to serve as symbolic wish-fulfillment in a world that is notably indifferent to them.” Why? Despite postmodern liberalism’s remarkable pop, media, and social influence, “the rule of thumb [in academia] has been that the hard scientists produce reliable knowledge, assembled into coherent theories… The more theoretical the social ‘scientists’ are, the less respect they get… out of the running in the epistemological sweepstakes.”
For the New Left, science is merely a “social construct,” no more valid than any other. As U.C. Berkley’s Paul Feyerabend put it, science is no more valid than voodoo. Yet, the late Feyerabend sought Western medicine (too late) to save him from the brain tumor that killed him. What happened to voodoo? All postmoderns, like Feyerabend, write their books on computers, fly on commercial aircraft, drive cars, and watch television, all products of science, proving science knows what it’s doing. Gross and Levitt show with published examples from our university humanities how postmodernist claptrap is pampered and indulged by university administrators who fear labeling of racist, sexist, homophobe, in order to cut loose politically correct authoritarian student radicals for retribution. It is, writes the authors, “the manifestation of a certain intellectual debility afflicting the contemporary university: one that will ultimately threaten it.” And pushed at taxpayer expense from a wide array of university disciplines: Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, Fat Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies (yes, this is what they’re labeled in the university syllabus), Feminist Theorists who claim Newton’s Principia is a “rape manual” (that would be UCLA’s Sandra Harding) and Afrocentrism which holds that black Egyptians were on the U.S. continent long before Columbus, guiding Native Americans. Despite the utter absence of evidence—like “Stop the Steal” coddled by our New Right cult—this yarn is protected by academia because it “engenders pride in black students” to believe lies. “The ‘politics of identity’ is now sanctified on campus,” say Gross and Levitt. “Increasingly, many groups are held to deserve their own separate inviolable space.” (And their own “alternative facts,” as likewise promoted by Trumpers.) Segregation, just as the Klan hoped for, each with its own “science,” which isn't science.
A good survey of the dogmatic toxin destroying our university humanities, and one of the trio of anti-science movements including this, the economic Right (Merchants of Doubt), and religious fundamentalists (Darwin Day).
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Top reviews from other countries
Michael X Smith
Science versus Superstition
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 7, 2013
