Return of Steve Fuller
Perhaps you saw the unpleasant spectacle of Steve Fuller being more disgusting than one would have thought possible.
Norman Levitt has died…I imagine that Levitt as someone of great unfulfilled promise — mathematicians typically fulfil their promise much earlier than other academics – who then decided that he would defend the scientific establishment from those who questioned its legitimacy. Why? Well, one reason would be to render his own sense of failure intelligible…And yes, what I am offering is an ad hominem argument, but ad hominem arguments are fallacies only when they are used indiscriminately. In this case, it helps to explain – and perhaps even excuse – Levitt’s evolution into a minor science fascist…I believe that Levitt’s ultimate claim to fame may rest on his having been as a pioneer of cyber-fascism.
How about that? Impressive? A long stream of commenters have dropped in to say what they think of it, Ben Goldacre among them. Fuller augments his standing even further by sniggering, talking more trash about Norm, sniggering some more, and pretending to be a persecuted victim.
Nick Matske is as impressed as I am.
Yes, a disgusting spectacle it is. There’s something supremely irritating about people who present themselves conspicuously as sophisticated intellects, but who are plainly intellectually bankrupt or just daft.
Steve Fuller is the exemplary case. And he’s so smug about it, as if every criticism of his content-free musings was a self-evident demonstration of his intellectual correctness. God, I loathe such people.
Well, it is nice to know that
(and that this includes, specifically, speculating upon someone’s less than noble motives for espousing the opinions they do) in light of the fact that
Also, this was funny:
Fascism: declaring what is right and wrong and backing it up with invective.
But really, cyber-fascism is so 1980s-sounding. Couldn’t he come up with a better name? I suggest iFascism.
Thanks for the link OB. I would never have found it otherwise. Yes, occasionally on the www one encounters a real gem.
This original post of Fuller’s (all his own work I will believe) has backfired brilliantly, calling down a comment shitstorm of breathtaking magnitude upon his own head, and on his own blog site. It really needs Cinerama to do it justice.
Just in case Fuller decides to take the whole thing down and pretend it all never happened, I have filed away my own copy of it (under the filename ‘Steve Fullers Progress’ – as in Rake’s, or should that be Pilgrim’s?).
N&C habitues like me will recognise some of the names of the commenters. Check those out, they are all good. But the best IMHO are #68 from Dan Styer, which should be read in context: ‘Want an example of that [Levitt] sense of fun? “The one comforting fact in all of this is that those most eager to challenge the efficacy and reliability of rational thought have not, as a general rule, shown themselves to be particularly good at it.” (The Flight from Science and Reason, page 49.)” ‘; #80 from Will H, ‘Note: I found the anti-spam question very amusing in this case; “my t-shirt is red. What colour is my t-shirt?” “Well, SOCIETY says your t-shirt is red but how oh how can I ever know???”]’; and #81 from Dale, ‘I gather you’ve made a career of issuing “postmodernist” twaddle (heroically fracturing doxas, problematizing metanarratives, reveling in discoveries of heretofore underappreciated polysemy, and otherwise typing gibberish) and have long since become weary of situations where you have to defend your ideas using coherent English sentences. I concede it must be frustrating, but then again, you’ve managed to rub that sand grain into a pearl of self-declared bravery (and success!) that, today, manifests as trashing one of your tormentors even as his body chills.’
I haven’t seen someone blown up by his own bomb and hoist by his own rope and bent tree in this way since my days of watching Tom and Jerry cartoons, or the Road Runner and the Coyote.
Also had my two cents worth in there; having had such low regard for Fuller over the years, there is some satisfaction in expressing it where he’s bound to see it.
Not that he was ever all there, but maybe he’s really deteriorating. I mean clinically. Or on some substance or other. Can it be sheer carelessness that leads him to claim that Nick Matzke quoting him as saying Levitt was a fascist means Matzke has done so himself?
Tenure is good. It allows people to carry on their research without fear of the authorities simply dismissing them. Tenure is bad. It allows people like Fuller to go on saying made things despite the fact that practically everything he says is mad. I say, pity his poor students. Do they need to parrot his drivel in order to pass, or, perhaps, is it the case that they can say anything at all? After all, there is no Grand Narrative, not even Fuller’s I suppose. But then, since his own thinking is in the nature of the accidental colocation of words, would he ever recognise something as disagreeing with him? Contrary to Fuller, ad hominem arguments are never good arguments, so this is not one. But it’s really difficult to argue with someone who doesn’t think.
Ian is right. Fuller is buried under so many words in response to his mean spirited piece, that it will take him months to dig himself out again.
As if being a witness for the ID side at Dover had not been enough…
Oh lordy, that’s brilliant – now he’s threatening to shut down the comments because they’re so horrid and bad and stupid.
“Look, people, smarten up or I’ll shut this down. You’re not saying anything initeresting [sic], other than simply reinforcing my point about Levitt and his fan base.”
While what he said in the post was smart and interesting? Jeezis.
I mentioned this over at John Lynch’s blog, but it’s probably worth bringing up here as well. I have spoken to others who suspect that Fuller might have a genuine mental illness. I find this credible, because it really is the only way to explain his incredibly irrational and disgusting behavior. I can’t understand how anyone who is thinking rationally could write a hit piece on a man who recently died calling him a fascist and comparing oneself to the Jews in the Holocaust. It just simply beggars belief.
I was going to add a comment to his ever-growing pile, but decided against. He seems to be revelling in it, regarding it as proof that he is relevant, paid-attention-to, “provocative”, edgy, hip, unfairly persecuted, etc…
I have a six-year old at home with many of the same characteristics.
Except he’s better-versed in Hume-ian empiricism and “the scientific method” than Doctor (how? HOW???) Fuller.
I think most of us, when we feel the urge to lash out at something we find unbearable, try to factor the consequences to ourselves into our decision of how to act. And it looks like Fuller’s lash-out impulse has begun to dwarf any thoughts he might have had about not making a laughing-stock of himself. It’s not inconceivable that a situation might exist in which inflicting damage elsewhere becomes a higher priority than preventing damage to oneself. The problem in Fuller’s case is that the target for whose discomfiture he seems prepared to risk all is already dead. Mental illness? I don’t think ghosts actually need to exist in order for Fuller to be haunted by Levitt’s.
Ohhhhhhh, I think he’s just pretending to revel in it. He doesn’t like being nailed – he can dish it out but he can’t take it, as Jimmy Cagney types used to say. He was not at all pleased by my attention to his doings a couple of years ago. His vanity easily matches his nastiness.
He was very rude to our late lamented friend Christian Jago at Talking Philosophy at that time, too. I wonder if I can find those posts…
Not only that, Stewart, but it’s not even working. Note that comment by ‘Wes’ in STS. (Is that our Wes? Wes is that you?) “The strong social constructivism that Fuller promotes is a thing of the past, an embarrassment to STS.” Yay!
Even Fuller must realise it’s a little bit telling when there are over a hundred posts and only one single poster is not attacking him. Even if his supporters were greatly outnumbered… but he seems not to actually have any at all.
Yes I’ve been wondering where the hell all his friends and students and fans are.
Found the main post, at least –
http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=50
He and Christian (‘potentilla’ went back and forth about the use of the word ‘design’ – he was consistently snotty and condescending to everyone, as he’d been in a couple of threads at Michael Bérubé’s blog, to which I provided links.
(That was then, before I was banned from Talking Philosophy…)
Skimmed it a little. Julian was bending over backwards to be fair to Fuller. Could we find out what Julian thinks of Fuller since Levitt’s passing?
Yeah, that was me. I was getting tired of “Mike” in that thread whining about how scientists at his college were so mean for acting like science might actually be right about how the world works, and giving a Pop Tart version of the history of science to back up his whining.
The best work going on in STS right now is critical, as it should be, but not anti-science, as Fuller and many other strong constructivists are.
Not right away, Julian’s having fun in Mexico – well, he’s working in Mexico but I expect he’s having fun too.
He was being very extra-fair to Fuller. I wondered at the time if he’d paid enough attention to the tone of Fuller’s replies.
I know they are, I read some Barnes and Bloor for Why Truth Matters.
Mike is the best Fuller can do – which is reassuring.
I see it’s up, with a succint update and reading the extract again, seeing how he tries to usurp Jewish suffering for the post-modernists, really makes my gorge rise. It’s hard to think of two groups of people less comparable, in terms of origin, ideas, tactics, yes, and scapegoating, not to even mention fates – and yet that’s the comparison he arrogates for himself.
Just the person a forward-thinking university needs to design its next curriculum. The first commenter, at least, wasn’t fooled:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408850
I am in the middle of reading Why Truth Matters.
Really enjoying it so far. And I have yet to come to the bit where you tear Midgley limb from limb.
Just in case you hadn’t seen it yet, Fuller closed comments after adding a two-parter no more connected to the real world than anything else he wrote and concluding with a special award to you, Ophelia. By mentioning Christian, you have assuaged any conscience Fuller might have had, because: “Obviously there are others who take people’s deaths even less seriously.”
The sentence before that is an extremely explicit admission that your acts carry so much weight with him that you actually reduced the amount of guilt he thus admits to having felt for “having commented on Levitt so soon after his death.”
100+ commenters did have the effect of making him feel guilty, but just one had the power to turn it all around.
Have read more Levitt on Fuller again. Brilliant stuff.
Looking at his last couple of sentences again a thought of true enormity crossed my mind. Seeing what kind of tactics he uses on those who are almost strangers to him, I wondered what it must be like to be in an unsuccessful personal relationship with him. The manipulation and projection bring Borderline Personality Disorder to mind.
I noticed the two-parter flourish and then the closing of comments which Stewart mentioned. I suspect this has been a reputation defining moment for Fuller, and I thought he had already achieved that with Kitzmiller.
Good god! That’s incredible!
Well no I guess it isn’t, because nothing is with him. But it’s pretty amazing.
I added the bit about Christian’s death partly as a kind of warning – just in case he felt inspired to slag her off in a comment. I certainly did NOT mean to suggest that he killed her! But then no sane person would think I did.
I suppose I mentioned it partly because the end of that thread is a little more poignant, knowing that Christian died a few months later, and that her engagement with Talking Philos (and B&W) was one of her pleasures as she got iller and weaker. It made me a little sad seeing that she’d asked Fuller, again, to reply to her perfectly good (in fact very good, and very knowledgeable) questions. I certainly don’t think it made Christian sad – I think it probably amused her. All the same, she was interested, and she would have been interested in a serious reply. None was forthcoming.
Anyway, Fuller’s attempt to displace his disgrace onto me is revealing and…….utterly futile.
You know, before he did that closing flourish, but after you mentioned that Christian had died, I had this unpleasant and over-the-top thought that telling Fuller someone is dead is something he takes as an invitation to slag them off. I rejected this as too tasteless to share and now that I see what he actually did do… Truth really can be stranger than fiction.
I don’t think he really intends to suggest you were implying he had a hand in her death, but because you said she is missed, like Norm, in whose side he really does wish he’d been a major thorn, he ended up drawing a parallel that owes nothing to anything outside his sick mind.
Well he did say that thing about cause and effect.
Mind you, he’s right that there was some element of guilt-tripping – a kind of implicit ‘perhaps you’d like to be rude about her too.’ But tough – it fits, after all.
‘Game over!’ Steve Fuller pulls the plug as he threatened to so that nobody can reply, and then throws the bomb he has been saving up for just this moment.
Ah, what a privilege it is to be alive in such a time!
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Steve Fuller’s blog.
I think I have that quotation right.
I never go on talkback radio, because inevitably the shock-jock running the program holds the power of the switch. Steve Fuller should have let the comments fizzle out as they inevitably do on any blog thread.
But no. He turns off the comments and then puts in the jackboot: “Now, you would have thought that across the 100+ responses to my obituary, someone might have made some clear noises about Levitt’s positive intellectual contribution to one of the many academic fields that he accused postmodernists of polluting. As a matter of fact, the most we have seen here are apologetic remarks about Levitt’s apparent failure to live up to his early promise, and that such is often the fate of mathematicians. I appreciate the pathos invoked here, I really do, but that still does not license – let alone excuse – cyber-fascism.”
However ‘cyber-fascism’ might be defined, Fuller would have to be one of its leading blackshirts.
It is as if John McEnroe got to be umpire as well as player.
It would have been as truthful if he’d said “Since everyone has agreed with me and there’s no discussion going on, I think there’s no point in keeping comments open.”
I wonder if he paused to realize that his stuff about me is actually, under the circumstances, a big compliment. Heehee.
A postscript: AC Grayling reviews Fuller’s new book:
‘It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible, like Dissent over Descent, the latest book from Steve Fuller, are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism. I suppose putatively sincere extrusions of the post-modern sensibility might henceforth deserve to be known as “the Steve Fuller syndrome”. For this offering by the American-born sociologist is a classic case of the absurdity to which that sensibility leads.
‘There is an added thought. Fuller claims to be a “secular humanist”. But having been educated by the Jesuits, so he tellingingly informs us, he “knows how to reconcile the irreconcilable”. Indeed! For at the end of these nearly 300 pages of wasted forest he tells us what science needs in order to justify its continuation (oh dear, poor science, eh?) and what Intelligent Design, a theory he defended before a US Federal Court in the 2005 Dover Trial, needs to “realise its full potential in the public debate” – that is: how a theory trying to bend the facts to prove its antecedent conviction that Fred (or any arbitrary and itself unexplained conscious agency) designed and created the world and all in it, can attain its full potential in the public debate. This, note, from a professor at a proper British university. Well: if this is not proof of the efficacy of Jesuit educational methods, nothing is.
‘I shall not bore you, or waste my own time, with detailed rebuttals of the argument in the chapters “Is there a middle ground between creation and evolution?” and “Is Intelligent Design any less scientific than evolution?”, because once one has tackled the premises on which this farrago proceeds, that effort is rendered unnecessary. As follows…’
Read the rest, spread over four parts: Grayling’s review, linked to Fuller’s reply, linked to Grayling’s response to Fuller and a link to a blog free for all starting at http://newhumanist.org.uk/1856.
Most entertaining.
And to think that I had never even heard of Steve Fuller until 2 days ago.
I’m pretty sure I read the Grayling-Fuller stuff back when it came out, but it was worth being reminded of. Fuller has been making me vomit since well before Dover. Here’s another glaring internal inconsistency, in case it needed pointing out. From his original “obit” for Levitt:
“… it helps to explain – and perhaps even excuse – Levitt’s evolution into a minor science fascist.”
And from his “Game Over” closing posts:
“… but that still does not license – let alone excuse – cyber-fascism.”
I suppose it’s what one might expect from someone whose modus operandi is to make things up as he goes along. I wonder how he defines “fascist” when he doesn’t have anyone particular in mind to whom he can tailor the definition.
Yes, I’m sure you did, Stewart – it was here, for one thing. (In News at least. Oh and in that In Focus, I think.)
He’s been making lots of people vomit since before Dover – like Norm Levitt for one!
His definition of fascist seems to be ‘person who disagrees with Steve Fuller in public.’
Well, there’s a little-known clause that appears in all early 20th-century Fascist manifestos, declaring the aim of publicly disagreeing with Steve Fuller, once he’s born. It wasn’t easy for Levitt to sign on, given his ethnic background. No, wait, I got that bit wrong, it’s the post-modernists who weren’t allowed to join the party, unless they could prove, with the help of church records, that none of their ancestors in the previous four generations had had anything to do with Theory.