Category: Articles

Immigrant, ethnic minority, asylum-seeker – slivers of insinuation separate
the meanings of each term in contemporary Britain. Ethnic minority, black and
Asian, cultural diversity – clouds of obfuscation have distinguished contemporary
arts in Britain over the past 30 years.

That I draw an analogy between socio-political and artistic terminology is
not incidental: socio-political concerns have determined arts-funding policy
for the past three decades. Ever since, in fact, the publication of Naseem Khan’s
seminal report for the Arts Council in 1976, ‘The Arts Britain Ignores’. This
year sees the launch of yet another arts initiative, designed to heap attention
on ‘culturally diverse’ arts, aptly titled ‘decibel’ (noise). Why do we need
a showcase of ethnic arts? And what noise is decibel really making?

In the same year Naseem Khan’s report was published, the writer Amrit Wilson
published her compilation of Asian women’s stories – Finding A Voice.
It seems we ethnics are still deemed to be in need of finding a public voice.
Hence the decibel showcase, where Arts Council England aims to draw the
attention of producers nationally and internationally to work they have hitherto
ignored. This despite ‘ethnic’ artists of the first rank making noises in almost
every category of contemporary arts, from Anish Kapoor to Ben Okri, Akram Khan
to Chewitel Ejiofor, Shobana Jeyasingh to Zadie Smith.

‘Access’ and ‘opportunity’ are the current buzzwords, their roots lying in the
best of British liberal sentiments. It is laudable for any society that considers
itself civilised to seek to promote an equality of opportunity for all its citizens.
But when the wheel is having to be reinvented every 10 years or so, it is time
to question the wheel.

In 1976, it was Naseem Khan’s report that drew attention to the arts Britain
ignored. In 1983, the Arts Council sought, through its ‘Glory of the Garden’
policy, to enforce a minimum representation of ethnic arts in the arts-infrastructure
of the country. In the mid-1990s, the Arts Council adopted the promotion of
cultural diversity as a central part of its mission statement. In 2002, the
Arts Council’s Eclipse Report aimed to change the institutionally racist
face of British theatre.

Significantly, every liberal political measure undertaken so far to correct
injustices – the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry into institutional racism being only
the most recent – has proven ineffectual. Racism is not an intellectual failure
that can be corrected by a greater dose of education. It is a moral value, however
much one may abhor such a morality. It is an imaginative construct and so the
engineers of the imagination – artists – find themselves in the frontline, their
weapons being the pen or the hand or the body or the voice.

But when these troops are divided by ethnicity, it makes the prospect of victory
ever dimmer. Just as we forget that Black Africans, Caribbeans and Americans,
Indians, Chinese, Afghans and other ‘ethnics’ fought alongside the Allies in
two world wars, so by institutionalising ethnic divisions we are prone to forget
that in contemporary British arts there is an ever-present ‘ethnicity’ – and
forgetting is tantamount to devaluing.

What, if any, is the artistic significance of Bombay Dreams as a West
End musical? Is its ability to attract an Asian audience into the West End an
artistic value? Is, conversely, Jerry Springer – The Opera anything
more than a ‘pakora’ musical: say ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’ enough times and you’re
guaranteed to draw in a youthful audience in droves (mirroring what goes on
in the Asian comedy scene, where the mention of ‘pakora’ is a sure-fire route
to cracking-up the audience).

A national theatre critic once admitted to me that he came to review our shows
not because of the particular play we were producing but because it was ethnic
and needed to be brought to wider attention. That was in 1989. Has much changed
since then? And will showcasing culturally diverse work – as the decibel
initiative purports to do – help that critic to drop his ethnic lens? I very
much doubt it.

Of equal concern, however, is how the critic judges: how to evaluate ‘other’
arts. And this is a real challenge. How does one judge, for example, the ‘fusion’
dance of Akram Khan, drawing as much on classical Kathak as it does on contemporary
dance vocabularies? This I take to be the artistic value of ‘cultural diversity’
– challenging our preconceptions, our imaginations.

But when a corral is created around cultural diversity we are being fed, and
we help sustain, difference; rather than be confronted to explore connections.
Merely beating the drum of culturally diverse arts – as decibel seeks
to do – will only help to marginalise these artists within the confines of ‘identity’.
Identity need not be immutable; it can be in dialogue with other identities.
It is only then that we can all participate in the quality of the artistic experience.

The contradictions in arts policies were brought home to me at the recent Asian
Women’s Achievement Awards. The title, of course, is very ghetto. But Cherie
Blair and other leading New Labour women were there to endorse it – as an instance
of the multicultural reality of Britain today. Surely a multicultural, integrated
society would honour women’s achievements, or even just achievements. So are
we in reality talking multi-culture or separate-cultures?

We in the arts world have become so dominated by marketing gurus – and their
dogma of ‘niche marketing’ – that we forget that if I don’t see you in me and
if you can’t see me in you we might as well dispense with the abiding hope of
the arts: to connect one human being with another. This fetishisation of marketing
makes the good ship Arts scythe through the waves of humanism and, like Moses,
we stand before a divided sea.

Jatinder Verma is artistic director of Tara Arts, a theatre company he co-founded
in 1977. Tara Arts is a regular client of Arts Council England, has toured extensively
in Britain and overseas, and co-produced with theatres including the Royal National
Theatre and the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Tara Arts’ latest show, A Taste
For Mangoes, about the Indo-British love affair before the Raj, will open in
London’s oldest music hall, Wilton’s, in November 2003.

The answer to the question in the title is "No one," but it will
take a while to get to the reasons. I thought about the Gepids as I drove through
the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico through incomparable scenery,
a lot of history, and often uncomfortable knowledge about the present, much
of it filtered through the novels of fellow Oklahomans, Tony Hillerman and Ron
Querry. Their books and other sources touch on problems of the contemporary
Navajo, but they are more noted for their celebration of the coherence of Navajo
culture and the sense of "hozho," of oneness with the beauty of the
world. This theme is attractive to many Anglos who buy into a nostalgia for
a culture they don’t know and who, as they learn more about Navajo-white relations,
may not only feel guilty about overrunning other cultures but come to believe
that these cultures are superior to our own. While this attitude is understandable,
does credit to the goodheartedness of those who hold it, and is to a degree
laudable, it is sometimes based on mistaken assumptions about or ignorance of
human beings and the process of human history. More important, it can be a way
of avoiding social and individual problems rather than dealing with them realistically.

Not that it is wrong to find Navajo country and its people attractive. The
landscape is spectacular, and the human scene looks exotic to anyone who has
not driven across other stretches of the American West. Scattered across the
valleys and up gradual slopes to the mountains are ranches and farms, some with
traditional hogans, some with modern, chiefly manufactured, housing, some with
both, some with hogans that have two stories or ells. Here and there, there
are small, dusty towns with wide streets, along which not many people move not
very quickly. Except for the vernacular architecture, it doesn’t look all that
different from west Texas.

Of course, it is different. The people here are darker and more heavily built
and have a different lilt to their speech. And along the highways trudge a few
pedestrians who don’t bother to put out thumbs to the passing cars. Here and
there a man or boy watches a pair of dogs herd sheep along or across the road.
The core of the culture – what attracts the attention of outsiders who romanticize
it – has not, despite missionaries of various sects, been fundamentally changed
by Christian or European influences.

But those influences have been and are profound. The U.S. government’s treatment
of the Navajo, as of other Indians, is not pretty to contemplate: expropriation
of land, deportation, fiddling with or outright breaking of treaties. Poverty
and alcoholism rates are high. Educators struggle to keep the Navajo language
alive, and there is a severe shortage of singers to conduct traditional ceremonies.
No Anglo with any vestige of conscience can look at all of this without feeling
guilty about what our people have done.

But we feel this way because we know what happened and is happening. And that
brings me back to the Gepids and the question in the title. Few people in the
U.S. or for that matter anywhere else ever heard of the Gepids or know that
they were one of the tribes overrun and then obliterated by the Magyar incursion
into the Carpathian Basin, much of which is now Hungary, a bit over a millennium
ago.

Even those who have heard of the Gepids don’t know much about them because,
if they had a written culture, the Magyar did not, and thus would have had no
means of recording and transmitting information in the unlikely event that they
would have been interested. Thus there is no cult of Gepid spirituality or attempt
to revive Gepid rituals or to uphold the Gepid way as superior to that of the
people who displaced it.

In modern times, however, the winners have taken care, though not always the
greatest care, to record information about the winning side, all the way from
preservation, in translation, of the Aztec codex through Joseph Conrad’s impressionistic
account of European incursions into the Congo in Heart of Darkness to
the latest self-styled white shaman’s version of Native American culture.

Moreover, many contemporary marginalized cultures have representatives able
to speak for them. Chinua Achebe, a leading African novelist, attacked Conrad
for presenting issues from the European perspective. N. Scott Momaday speaks
and writes eloquently about the culture of his forbears and other tribes. And
this process continues, as in Geary Hobson’s The Last of the Ofos, in
which the sole survivor of a Louisiana tribe recounts the conditions which he
has survived and, in the moving last chapter, speaks the language that only
he knows to the wind and swamp. Among my own ancestors and distant cousins,
Celts and Confederates have published whole libraries celebrating those ways
of living and of interpreting the world. Celebrating one’s heritage is not only
honorable but necessary.

Of course, these apologists frequently attempt not simply to record ways of
living but assert quite loudly their spiritual and aesthetic superiority to
those of victors who depended on brute technology or accident—stirrups in the
case of the Magyar; horses, steel, guns, and disease in the case of the Europeans
who came to the Americas. The sins of their fathers are conveniently thrown
in the memory hole—partly because people defeated thoroughly enough give themselves,
and frequently get, amnesty for actions which, had they been performed by Europeans,
would be roundly condemned.

Claims for the superiority of marginalized cultures are sometimes honored by
defectors from the majority culture, the more sensitive or disgruntled heirs
of the victors, for several reasons. For one thing, the hearers are impressed
by the testimony of representatives of minority cultures. But many members of
the majority culture are reluctant to examine this testimony critically, making
the unconscious assumption that their status somehow gives their statements
the stamp of infallibility. And this is a subtle form of condescension.

These well-intentioned members of the majority have another reason for accepting
criticism of their society: they can see that what victory has produced is far
from perfect and coherent. On the other hand, a beleaguered minority group can
seem more tightly-knit and coherent than the culture from which the observer
comes. Even as a lapsed Catholic, though not Irish, I found the hair on the
back of my neck rising when I saw my first Orange Lodge. Those more deeply involved
with a minority culture can be unified by outside pressure, like various Indian
tribes who in previous centuries hated, despised, and made war on each other.
Someone who has never heard a Cherokee talk about Kiowas or vice versa, to take
one of many examples, might envy Indian unity in contrast to the divisions he
or she perceives in white society.

Less supportable, at least without critical examination of the testimony, is
the claim that what has been displaced or suppressed is superior to one’s own
culture. Still, it is easy to understand how some people are able to think so.
For one thing, a little knowledge can be consoling, and a lot of knowledge can
be disheartening. We know a great deal about our own society and, unless we
are experts, very little about others. Thus D. H. Lawrence could suppose in
the absence of any hard evidence that the Etruscans had a culture far more balanced
and harmonious than that of the vulgar, expansionist Romans who supplanted them
and, of course, of the far more vulgar and expansionist society in which he
lived. And, according to an anthropologist friend, many students enter her introductory
course with highly romantic views of any people who can be termed "primitive."
The Mayans were once considered to be gentle humanists superior to the Aztecs,
who had a highly developed civilization but also practiced human sacrifice,
because, thanks to a Spanish friar, we have known something about the Aztecs
for a long time. But until recently, when linguists like David Kelley were able
to translate Mayan glyphs, we knew very little about the Mayans. It turns out
that they skinned captives alive, among other things, and what they did when
a king died will make you grab your crotch protectively.

There is also selective use of evidence—or, perhaps, what Orwell called "doublethink.".
In Legends of the American Desert, Alex Shoumatoff has the "impression
that most Navajo, even progressives who live in the cities of the Southwest,
still live by the Navajo Way," which, he quotes a woman as defining as
"’being in harmony with everything—yourself, mainly, all the living things,
the air, Father sky, moon, and on and on." Wouldn’t it be pretty to think
so. But elsewhere Shoumatoff gives figures that suggest otherwise: "five
hundred intoxicated Indians freeze to death or are hit by cars in New Mexico
every year," and in broader terms, alcohol-related deaths, unemployment,
tuberculosis, suicide, and infant mortality rates are much higher than in the
rest of the population. Some of the problems are due to Anglo incursion or neglect,
and whatever their cause, they ought to be corrected as soon as possible. But
it does no good to insist that the traditional system is perfect or necessarily
superior to other ways of looking at life when it has so obviously failed to
deal with these issues.

A second reason for preferring other cultures to one’s own is the assumption
that, because the people are not like us in some ways, they must be totally
different. One example of this attitude can be seen in historical museums, where
spectators and even curators seem fascinated by the possibility that primitive
peoples created social structures and artifacts not wholly unrecognizable to
the people on the other side of the glass in the display case. But for the most
part observers tend to see so-called exotic peoples as wholly other and to regard
as pure and unmixed their motives and responses. This purity is hard to discover
in lived experience. Consider religious rituals. One might ask, though people
rarely do, whether even the most traditional Hopis or Navajos are so much different
from white Christians that they never have doubts about the efficacy of their
rituals or sigh at having to get up and perform a ceremony or show up because
it’s expected of them or enjoy shaking their booty or wish to be somewhere else?
Did all participants have equal faith and fervor? Did no one come for social
or aesthetic reasons?

My experience tells me otherwise. During my college years, when I was a practicing
Catholic, trying to observe not only the letter but the spirit of the law, I
spent weekday mornings one summer vacation singing Requiem Masses at the parish
church with two other college students. I can’t speak to their motives, but
mine were minimally spiritual. Ideally, the Masses were supposed to help spring
the departed from Purgatory. But my decision to get up very early, before going
to work, was primarily aesthetic rather than spiritual: I enjoyed singing, especially
this kind of music, and there were very few aesthetic outlets in small-town
Missouri in the early 1950s.

But at least I believed. A friend, son of a Texas Baptist minister, has lost
his faith but not his taste for hymns, and he meets regularly with a group to
perform "shape note" music, originally religious and now purely recreational.
And many people seem to go to church because they can get out of the house,
meet people, and engage in a different kind of ritual, like Shriners riding
tiny motorcycles in parades.

It’s possible, of course, that people we regard as exotic are really different
from you and me. It’s highly improbable that we can know. Outsiders like Tony
Hillerman can imagine what it’s like to be a Navajo in his mystery stories set
on the reservation. Still, he hedges his bets by concentrating on Joe Leaphorn
and Jim Chee, who have been to Anglo universities. And in any case, his novels
deal with solving problems—whodunnit—rather than with presenting problems, like
alcoholism and alienation from the old ways, in their full complexity. The very
nature of genre fiction distances the reader from these issues. This, by the
way, does not make them bad books, but as Hillerman says, "My readers are
buying a mystery, not a tome of anthropology….the name of the game is telling
stories; no educational digressions allowed." [Tony Hillerman and Ernie
Bulow, Talking Mysteries: A Conversation with Tony Hillerman (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1991), p. 39.]

Nevertheless, Hillerman, like every sensitive student of another culture, performs
a valuable service in making readers more aware of the problems of a culture
obviously under attack. And no one in the majority should regret attempts to
preserve knowledge about other beliefs and ways of life. But no outsider, no
matter how well-intentioned, should be allowed to forget Heisenberg’s Uncertainty
Principle: one cannot study a phenomenon without somehow affecting it. Like
ecotourism, which has much the same effect on an environment as the supposedly
more vulgar kind, contact with other cultures affects them. To put it another
way: consider the Prime Directive in the original "Star Trek." If
Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise had observed it, at least half of the episodes
could never have existed.

But many people who sentimentalize extinct or suppressed cultures do so less
out of love for them than out of distaste for their own. Susan Smith Nash, who
has worked with and translated indigenous writers, sees this process as becoming
"a sort of commodification of history that works because it scandalized
certain behaviors (thus fetishizing them and titillating the audience), and
it makes history (or the construction of it) an artifice to be retooled each
season so that it’s a fashion statement as well. Sentimentalizing is a kind
of sales pitch—what’s being sold? The thrill of voyeuristically contemplating
atrocities? A way to appear enlightened?" Or, as a Navajo put it to Shoumatoff,
"You Americans are looking for instant religious satisfaction, like instant
mashed potatoes." In other words, like Lawrence with the Etruscans, the
Other provides convenient and all too easy weapons with which to attack the
ways of their parents, literal or figurative, in the dominant culture.

But in cooler and more logical terms, it seems unwise to regard the ways of
other cultures as necessarily superior. Take the film "Koyaanisqatsi,"
the title a Hopi word meaning "life out of balance," which indicts
America’s rampant urbanism and mindless embracing of technology. That is a valid
point – but to make it Godfrey Reggio used a number of advanced technological
resources, and the review for the internet’s Apollo web-site concludes that
"To get the full effect on video, you’ll need a big screen, an excellent
sound system, and the audio turned up good and high." Another on-line reviewer,
Vladimir Zelevinsky was left "with the feeling of elation and triumph.
The sheer complexity of the urban activity and power and variety of humanity
on display is enough to make one proud to be a part of these extravagant species
[sic]."

This was a more eloquent version of my reaction to the film, and it leads to
a broader issue: don’t be too quick to despise the familiar. There is plenty
wrong with modern American civilization and with Catholicism. But there is also
a great deal to celebrate, for the traditions and rituals of both are rich and
complex. And there is plenty wrong with colonialism, which Joseph Conrad’s Marlow
defines as "the taking it away from those who have a different complexion
or slightly flatter noses than ourselves." As he says, it’s not a pretty
sight.

But it is a common one. Human beings are opportunistic. Those to whom we did
it almost certainly did it to someone else. My Celtic ancestors moved, or sometimes
were moved, through Europe until they ran against the Atlantic Ocean. The Navajos
and Apaches moved from western Canada to the American Southwest, where they
harassed and, when possible, despoiled the Pueblo and other neighboring tribes,
who helped in Kit Carson’s campaign against them. The Apaches were forced farther
south and west by the incursion of the Comanches. In the anthropologist’s version,
American Indians came from Asia. If one insists on tribal origin stories, the
Navajos came up from a lower world to this one, specially created for them.
That, and the Navajos’ name for themselves, Dineh, The People, sounds a little
like Manifest Destiny. Or consider the case of the Kennewick Man, whose remains,
nine millennia old and not indisputably Mongoloid, were discovered in Washington
state. Scientists wanted to test the DNA; Indian groups maintained that this
was intrusive and that, since he was discovered on their land, he must be Indian.
In any case, they argued, they had always been here, so he had to be one of
their ancestors. There is every reason to respect native culture and traditions,
but imagine what the response would be to similar claims by white Christian
fundamentalists, including the Kansas textbook board which removed textbooks
which so much as mention evolution.

But the Indian claim points to a serious question: which people can be called
indigenous? While I was drafting this essay, I heard a talk by a learned and
earnest young Osage scholar who listed a number of indigenous peoples in the
Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa. With the exception of the Lapps
– and perhaps the Basques, they might argue – Europe apparently has no indigenous
peoples. But the term really means that no one knows when they got where they
are now.

I raise this issue not to quibble and certainly not to justify regarding any
other culture as inferior or to excuse some or even most of the actions of those
who moved in, including EuroAmericans. Nor to make my fellow Americans feel
triumphant: our turn will come.

When it does, those of us who survive may take whatever consolation is possible
in the sight of the disaffected heirs of our conquerors appropriating the outward
and visible signs of our culture. Perhaps really avant-garde youth will wear
three-piece suits; drink Chivas Regal; dine at ethnic restaurants serving meat
loaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans boiled limp; listen to Lawrence Welk
and Neil Diamond; and attend re-creations of tent revivals. They may even hire
us as gurus and tour guides.

In the meantime, it might be well to follow the advice of the strongest character
in Frank Chin’s novel Donald Duk to a boy who hates being Chinese: "History
is war, not sport." And like Donald Duk, you have to learn about your history
in order to celebrate and defend it. And about others’ histories in order to
understand and respect rather than to sentimentalize them.

We also have to deal with internal critics who attempt to deconstruct American
history and institutions. Some of this is necessary: the George Washington cherry
tree type of history persists in the minds of many Americans, including those
who infest the editorial page of the largest newspaper in my state. All we can
say to these criticisms is "Yes."

And then "but." The young Osage scholar speaks of a responsibility
to his own past, his own family, his own history. We have the same responsibility,
made more difficult by the greater burden of knowledge and the even greater
burden of success. It can be tempting, as Geary Hobson points out in "The
Rise of the White Shaman as a New Version of Cultural Imperialism," to
shirk this burden and try to become a reverse image of what blacks, Indians,
and Asians call oreos, apples, bananas – white only on the outside, red, black,
or yellow on the inside. This kind of distortion makes the imitator ludicrous
in the eyes of the people being imitated. As Hobson says, people like this need
"to restore themselves to their own houses – by learning and accepting
their own history and culture."

That doesn’t mean that any of us can afford to ignore, let alone despise, other
cultures. The Osage hasn’t cut himself off from white language and culture;
Frank Chin knows about Westerns and flamenco; Ralph Ellison knew about Hemingway
and Malraux and a whole lot else; and Hobson, a Quapaw-Cherokee-Chickasaw, teaches
Faulkner. But none of them wants to be an imitation white man, and it would
be equally mistaken for whites to try to be Navajos or blacks or anything else
but what we are. And what we are is in part a heritage, a family, and a history,
and none of us can escape these, or should try. As King Duk says in Chin’s novel,
"You gotta keep the history yourself or lose it forever….That’s the mandate
of heaven." Shoumatoff quotes the Navajo phrase about "becoming real"—getting
rid of false values and seeing the true nature of things. All of us need, Chin
would agree, to take responsibility for what we have become and will become.
Perhaps Shoumatoff should consider more directly that there are ways, besides
the Navajo way, of doing so. Owen Wister, often a little too obsessed with his
white heritage and values, nevertheless has a point when his Virginian insists
that there is only one kind of goodness and that he tries to follow it. "And
when I meet it," he adds, "I respect it." And so should every
Asian-American, African-American, Navajo, and anyone else who hopes to become
real—by whatever name it is called and whatever process it is attained.

This article was originally published in Southwest Review, vol. 86,
no. 1, 2001.

This is an edited version of the article, Debunking Edward Said – Edward
Said and Saidists: or Third World Intellectual Terrorism, which
is here. For the purposes of ease of reading, references and bibliographical
information have been removed from this edited version of the article, but the
longer version is fully referenced. Interested readers should follow the link!

Consider the following observations on the state of affairs in the contemporary
Arab world :

The history of the modern Arab world – with all its political failures,
its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing
production, the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic
and technological and scientific development – is disfigured by a whole series
of out-moded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never
suffered and that the holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the
Elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much – far too much – currency;

….[T]o support Roger Garaudy, the French writer convicted earlier this year
on charges of holocaust denial, in the name of ‘freedom of opinion’ is a silly
ruse that discredits us more than we already are discredited in the world’s
eyes for our incompetence, our failure to fight a decent battle, our radical
misunderstanding of history and the world we live in. Why don’t we fight harder
for freedom of opinions in our own societies, a freedom, no one needs to be
told, that scarcely exists?

It takes considerable courage for an Arab to write self-criticism of this kind,
indeed, without the personal pronoun ‘we’ how many would have guessed that an
Arab, let alone Edward Said himself, had written it? And yet, ironically, what
makes self-examination for Arabs and Muslims, and particularly criticism of
Islam in the West very difficult is the totally pernicious influence of Edward
Said’s Orientalism. The latter work taught an entire generation of Arabs
the art of self-pity – “were it not for the wicked imperialists, racists
and Zionists, we would be great once more” – encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist
generation of the 1980s, and bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam,
and even stopped dead the research of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings
might offend Muslims sensibilities, and who dared not risk being labelled “orientalist”.
The aggressive tone of Orientalism is what I have called “intellectual
terrorism,” since it does not seek to convince by arguments or historical
analysis but by spraying charges of racism, imperialism, Eurocentrism, from
a moral high ground; anyone who disagrees with Said has insult heaped upon him.
The moral high ground is an essential element in Said’s tactics; since he believes
his position is morally unimpeachable, Said obviously thinks it justifies him
in using any means possible to defend it, including the distortion of the views
of eminent scholars, interpreting intellectual and political history in a highly
tendentious way, in short twisting the truth. But in any case, he does not believe
in the “truth”.

Said not only attacks the entire discipline of Orientalism, which is devoted
to the academic study of the Orient, but which Said accuses of perpetuating
negative racial stereotypes, anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice, and the myth
of an unchanging, essential “Orient,” but he also accuses Orientalists
as a group of complicity with imperial power, and holds them responsible for
creating the distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority,
which they achieve by suppressing the voice of the “oriental,” and
by their anti-human tendency to make huge, but vague generalizations about entire
populations, which in reality consist of millions of individuals. In other words,
much of what was written about the Orient in general, and Islam and Islamic
civilisation in particular, was false. The Orientalists also stand accused of
creating the “Other” – the non-European, always characterised in a negative
way, as for example, passive, weak, in need of civilizing (western strength
and eastern weakness).

But “Orientalism” is also more generally “a style of thought
based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the
Orient” and (most of the time ) “the Occident.” “Thus European
writers of fiction, epics, travel, social descriptions, customs and people are
all accused of “orientalism”. In short, Orientalism is seen “as
a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the
Orient.” Said makes much of the notion of a discourse derived from Foucault,
who argued that supposedly objective and natural structures in society, which,
for example, privilege some and punish others for noncoformity, are in fact
“discourses of power “. The putative “objectivity ” of a
discipline covered up its real nature; disciplines such as Orientalism participated
in such discourses. Said continues, “…[W]ithout examining Orientalism
as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline
by which European culture was able to manage – even produce – the Orient politically,
sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively
during the post-Enlightenment period.”

From Pretentiousness to Meaninglessness

There are, as I shall show, several contradictory theses buried in Said’s impenetrable
prose, decked with post-modern jargon (“a universe of representative discourse”,
“Orientalist discourse”) (and some kind editor really ought to explain
to Said the meaning of “literally” and the difference between scatological
and eschatological), and pretentious language which often conceals some banal
observation, as when Said talks of “textual attitude”, when all he
means is “bookish” or “bookishness”. Tautologies abound,
as in “the freedom of licentious sex “.

Or take the comments here: “Thus out of the Napoleonic expedition there
issued a whole series of textual children, from Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire
to Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient to Flaubert’s Salammbô,
and in the same tradition, Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians
and Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah
and Meccah. What binds them together is not only their common background
in Oriental legend and experience but also their learned reliance on the Orient
as a kind of womb out of which they were brought forth. If paradoxically these
creations turned out to be highly stylized simulacra, elaborately wrought imitations
of what a live Orient might be thought to look like, that by no means detracts
from the strength of their imaginative conception or from the strength of European
mastery of the Orient, whose prototypes respectively were Cagliostro, the great
European impersonator of the Orient, and Napoleon, its first modern conqueror.”

What does Said mean by “out of the Napoleonic expedition there issued
a whole series of textual children” except that these five very varied
works were written after 1798? The pretentious language of textual children
issuing from the Napeolonic expedition covers up this crushingly obvious fact.
Perhaps there is a profound thesis hidden in the jargon, that these works were
somehow influenced by the Napoleonic expedition, inspired by it, and could not
have been written without it. But no such thesis is offered. This arbitrary
group consists of three Frenchmen, two Englishmen, one work of romantic historical
fiction, three travel books, one detailed study of modern Egyptians. Chateaubriand’s
Itinéraire (1811) describes superbly his visit to the Near East;
Voyage en Orient (1835) is Lamartine’s impressions of Palestine,
Syria, and Greece; Salammbô (1862) is Flaubert’s novel of ancient
Carthage; Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) is
a fascinating first-hand account of life in Egypt, particularly Cairo and Luxor,
written after several years of residence there, Burton’s account of his audacious
visit to Mecca was first published in three volumes between 1855-6. Lane and
Burton both had perfect command of Arabic, Classical and Colloquial, while the
others did not, and Lane and Burton can be said to have made contributions to
Islamic Studies, particularly Lane, but not the three Frenchmen.

What on earth do they have in common? Said tells us that what binds them together
is “their common background in Oriental legend and experience but also
their learned reliance on the Orient as a kind of womb out of which they were
brought forth “. What is the background of Oriental legend that inspired
Burton or Lane? Was Flaubert’s vivid imagination stimulated by “Oriental
legend”, and was this the same legendary material that inspired Burton,
Lane and Lamartine? “Learned reliance on the Orient as a kind of womb…”
is yet another example of Said’s pretentious way of saying the obvious, namely
that they were writing about the Orient about which they had some experience
and intellectual knowledge..

Orientalism is peppered with meaningless sentences. Take, for example,
“Truth, in short, becomes a function of learned judgment, not of the material
itself, which in time seems to owe its existence to the Orientalist”. Said
seems to be saying :‘Truth’ is created by the experts or Orientalists, and does
not correspond to reality, to what is actually out there. So far so good. But
then “what is out there” is also said to owe its existence to the
Orientalist. If that is the case, then the first part of Said’s sentence makes
no sense, and if the first part is true then the second part makes no sense.
Is Said relying on that weasel word “seems” to get him out of the
mess? That ruse will not work either; for what would it mean to say that an
external reality independent of the Orientalist’s judgement also seems to be
a creation of the Orientalist? That would be a simple contradiction. Here is
another example: “The Orientalist can imitate the Orient without the opposite
being true.” Throughout his book, Said is at pains to point out that there
is no such thing as “the Orient”, which, for him, is merely a meaningless
abstraction concocted by Orientalists in the service of imperialists and racists.
In which case, what on earth could “The Orient cannot imitate the Orientalist”
possibly mean? If we replace “the Orient” by the individual countries,
say between Egypt and India, do we get anything more coherent? No, obviously
not : “India, Egypt, and Iran cannot imitate the Orientalists like Renan,
Bernard Lewis, Burton, et al.”. We get nonsense whichever way we try to
gloss Said’s sentence.

Contradictions

At times, Said seems to allow that the Orientalists did achieve genuine positive
knowledge of the Orient, its history, culture, languages, as when he calls Lane’s
work Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians “a classic of historical
and anthropological observation because of its style, its enormously intelligent
and brilliant details”; or when he talks of “a growing systematic
knowledge in Europe about the Orient”, since Said does not have sarcastic
quotation marks around the word knowledge, I presume he means there was a growth
in genuine knowledge. Further on, Said talks of Orientalism producing “a
fair amount of exact positive knowledge about the Orient”. Again I take
it Said is not being ironical when he talks of “philological discoveries
in comparative grammar made by Jones,…”. To give one final example, Said
mentions Orientalism’s “objective discoveries”.

Yet, these acknowledgements of the real discoveries made by Orientalists are
contradicted by Said’s insistence that there is no such thing as “truth”;
or when he characterizes Orientalism as “a form of paranoia, knowledge
of another kind, say, from ordinary historical knowledge”. Or again, “it
is finally Western ignorance which becomes more refined and complex, not some
body of positive Western knowledge which increases in size and accuracy”.
At one point Said seems to deny that the Orientalist had acquired any objective
knowledge at all, and a little later he also writes, “the advances made
by a ‘science’ like Orientalism in its academic form are less objectively true
than we often like to think”. It is true that the last phrase does leave
open the possibility that some of the science may be true though less
than we had hitherto thought. Said also of course wholeheartedly endorses Abdel
Malek’s strictures against Orientalism, and its putatively false “knowledge”
of the Orient.

In his 1994 Afterword, Said insists that he has “no interest in,
much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are”.
And yet he contradicts this outburst of humility and modesty, when he claims
that, “[The Orientalist’s] Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient
as it has been Orientalized”, for such a formulation assumes Said knows
what the real Orient is. Such an assumption is also apparent in his statement
that “the present crisis dramatizes the disparity between texts and reality”.
In order to be able to tell the difference between the two, Said must know what
the reality is. This is equally true when Said complains that “To look
into Orientalism for a lively sense of an Oriental’s human or even social reality…is
to look in vain”.

Historical and Other Howlers

For a work that purports to be a serious work of intellectual history, Orientalism
is full of historical howlers. According to Said, at the end of the seventeenth
century, Britain and France dominated the eastern Mediterranean, when in fact
the Levant was still controlled for the next hundred years by the Ottomans.
British and French merchants needed the permission of the Sultan to land. Egypt
is repeatedly described as a British colony when, in fact, Egypt was never more
than a protectorate; it was never annexed as Said claims. Real colonies, like
Australia or Algeria, were settled by large numbers of Europeans, and this manifestly
was not the case with Egypt.

The most egregious error surely is where Said claims Muslim armies conquered
Turkey before they overran North Africa. In reality, of course, the Arabs invaded
North Africa in the seventh century, and what is now Turkey remained part of
the Eastern Roman Empire and was a Christian country until conquered by the
Seljuk Turks in late eleventh century. Said also writes “Macdonald and
Massignon were widely sought after as experts on Islamic matters by colonial
administrators from North Africa to Pakistan”. But Pakistan was never a
colony, it was created in 1947 when the British left India. Said also talks
rather oddly about the “unchallenged Western dominance” of the Portuguese
in the East Indies, China, and Japan until the nineteenth century. But Portugal
only dominated the trade, especially in the 16^th century, and was
never, as historian J.M.Roberts points out, “interested in the subjugation
or settlement of large areas”. In China, Portugal only had the tiniest
of footholds in Macao. The first decades of the seventeenth century witnessed
the collapse of much of the Portuguese empire in the East, to be replaced by
the Dutch. In the early eighteenth century there was a Dutch supremacy in the
Indian Ocean and Indonesia. However, the Dutch like the Portuguese did not subjugate
“the Orient” but worked through diplomacy with native rulers, and
through a network of trading-stations. Said thinks that Carlyle and Newman were
‘liberal cultural heroes’! Whereas it would be more correct to characterize
Carlyle’s works as the intellectual ancestry of fascism. Nor was Newman a liberal,
rather a High Church Anglican who converted to Catholicism. Said also seems
to think that Goldziher was German; Goldziher was of course a Hungarian. (One
hopes that it is simply a typographical error in his 1994 Afterword which
was responsible for the misspelling of Claude Cahen’s name.)

Tendentious Reinterpretations

The above errors can be put down to ignorance, Said is no historian, but it
does put into doubt Said’s competence for writing such a book.

Said also does not come across as a careful reader of Dante and his masterpiece,
The Divine Comedy. In his trawl through Western literature for filth
to besmirch Western civilization, Said comes across Dante’s description of Muhammad
in Hell, and concludes “Dante’s verse at this point spares the reader none
of the eschatological [sic!] detail that so vivid a punishment entails: Muhammad’s
entrails and his excrement are described with unflinching accuracy”. First,
Said does not seem to know the difference between scatological and eschatological,
and second, we may ask how does he know that Dante’s description is unflinchingly
accurate? He simply means, I presume, that it was highly graphic.

Furthermore these illustrious Muslims were included precisely because of Dante’s
profound reverence for all that was best in the non-Christian world, and their
exclusion from salvation, inevitable under Christian doctrine, saddened him
and put a great strain on his mind – gran duol mi prese al cor quando lo
’ntesi – great grief seized me at heart when I heard this. Dante was even
much influenced by the Averroistic concept of the “possible intellect”.
The same generous impulse that made him revere non-Christians like Avicenna
and their nobleness made Dante relegate Muhammad to eternal punishment in the
eighth circle of Hell, namely Dante’s strong sense of the unity of humanity
and of all its spiritual values – universalis civilitas humani generis
–the universal community of the human race. He and his contemporaries
in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century had only the vaguest of
ideas about the history and theology of Islam and its founder. Dante believed
that Muhammad and Ali were the initiators of the great schism between Christianity
and Islam. Dante like his contemporaries thought Muhammad was originally a Christian
and a cardinal who wanted to become a pope. Hence Muhammad was a divider
of humanity whereas Dante stood for the unity – the essential organic unity
– of humankind. What Said does not see is that Dante perfectly exemplifies Western
culture’s strong tendency towards universalism.

Self -Pity, Post-Imperialist Victimhood and Imperialism

In order to achieve his goal of painting the West in general, and the discipline
of Orientalism in particular, in as negative a way as possible, Said has recourse
to several tactics. One of his preferred moves is to depict the Orient as a
perpetual victim of Western imperialism, dominance, and aggression. The Orient
is never seen as an actor, an agent with free-will, or designs or ideas of its
own. It is to this propensity that we owe that immature and unattractive quality
of much contemporary Middle Eastern culture, self-pity, and the belief that
all its ills are the result of Western-Zionist conspiracies. Here is an example
of Said’s own belief in the usual conspiracies taken from “The Question
of Palestine”: It was perfectly apparent to Western supporters of Zionism
like Balfour that the colonization of Palestine was made a goal for the Western
powers from the very beginning of Zionist planning: Herzl used the idea, Weizmann
used it, every leading Isreali since has used it. Isreal was a device for holding
Islam – later the Soviet Union, or communism – at bay “. So Isreal was
created to hold Islam at bay!

As for the politics of victimhood, Said has “milked it himself to an indecent
degree”. Said wrote: “My own experiences of these matters are in part
what made me write this book. The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly
in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus
that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it
is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes,
political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim
is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to
feel as his uniquely punishing destiny”.

Such wallowing in self-pity from a tenured, and much-feted professor at Columbia
University, where he enjoys privileges which we lesser mortals only dream of,
and a decent salary, all the while spewing forth criticism of the country that
took him in and heaped honours on him, is nauseating. As Ian Buruma concluded
in his review of Said’s memoir, Out of Place, “The more he dwells
on his suffering and his exile status, the more his admirers admire him. On
me, however, it has the opposite effect. Of all the attitudes that shape a memoir,
self-pity is the least attractive”.

 Said’s Anti-Westernism

In his 1994 Afterword, Said denies that he is anti-Western, he denies
that the phenomenon of Orientalism is a synecdoche of the entire West, and claims
that he believes there is no such stable reality as “the Orient” and
“the Occident”, that there is no enduring Oriental reality and even
less an enduring Western essence, that he has no interest in, much less capacity
for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are.

Denials to the contrary, an actual reading of Orientalism is enough
to show Said’s anti-Westernism. While he does occasionally use inverted commas
around “the Orient” and “the Occident”, the entire force
of Said’s polemic comes from the polar opposites and contrasts of the East and
the West, the Orient and Europe, Us and the Other, that he himself has rather
crudely set up.

Said wrote, “I doubt that it is controversial, for example, to say that
an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest
in those countries that was never far from their status in his mind as British
colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic
knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated
by, the gross political fact [of imperialism] – and yet that is what I am
saying in this study of Orientalism”.[ Emphasis in original ]

Here is Said’s characterisation of all Europeans: “It is therefore correct
that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently
a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric”. In other words
not only is every European a racist, but he must necessarily be so.

A part of Said’s tactics is to leave out Western writers and scholars who do
not conform to Said’s theoretical framework. Since, arguably, for Said, all
Europeans are a priori racist, he obviously cannot allow himself to quote
writers who are not. Indeed one could write a parallel work to Orientalism
made up of extracts from Western writers, scholars, and travellers who were
attracted by various aspects of non-European cultures, which they praised and
contrasted favourably with their own decadence, bigotry, intolerance, and bellicosity.

Said makes much of Aeschylus’ The Persians, and its putative permanent
creation of the “Other” in Western civilization. But Aeschylus can
be forgiven his moment of triumphalism when he describes a battle in which he
very probably took part in 480 B.C., the Battle of Salamis,
on which the very existence of fifth-century Athens depended. The Greeks destroyed
or captured 200 ships for the loss of forty, which for Aeschylus was symbolic
of the triumph of liberty over tyranny, Athenian democracy over Persian Imperialism,
for it must not be forgotten that the Persians were ruthless imperialists whose
rule did not endear them to several generations of Greeks.

Furthermore had he delved a little deeper into Greek civilization and history,
and looked at Herodotus’ great history, Said would have encountered two features
which were also deep characteristics of Western civilization and which Said
is at pains to conceal and refuses to allow: the seeking after knowledge for
its own sake, and its profound belief in the unity of mankind, in other words
its universalism. The Greek word, historia, from which we get our “history”,
means “research” or “inquiry”, and Herodotus believed his
work was the outcome of research: what he had seen, heard, and read but supplemented
and verified by inquiry. For Herodotus, “historical facts have intrinsic
value and rational meaning”. He was totally devoid of racial prejudice
– indeed Plutarch later branded him a philobarbaros, whose nearest modern
equivalent would be “nigger-lover”- and his work showed considerable
sympathy for Persians and Persian civilization. Herodotus represents Persians
as honest – “they consider telling lies more disgraceful than anything
else” – brave, dignified, and loyal to their king. As to the religions
of the various peoples he studied, Herodotus showed his customary intellectual
curiosity but also his reverence for all of them, because “all men know
equally about divine things”.

It was left to Montaigne, under the influence of Peter Martyr, to develop the
first full- length portrait of the noble savage in his celebrated essay “On
Cannibals“,( c. 1580) which is also the source of the idea of cultural
relativism. Deriving his rather shaky information from a plain, simple fellow,
Montaigne describes some of the more gruesome customs of the Brazilian Indians
and concludes:

I am not so anxious that we should note the horrible savagery of these
acts as concerned that, whilst judging their faults so correctly, we should
be so blind to our own. I consider it more barbarous to eat a man alive than
to eat him dead; to tear by rack and torture a body still full of feeling, to
roast it by degrees, and then give it to be trampled and eaten by dogs and swine
– a practice which we have not only read about but seen within recent memory,
not between ancient enemies, but between neighbours and fellow-citizens and,
what is worse, under the cloak of piety and religion – than to roast and eat
a man after he is dead.

Elsewhere in the essay, Montaigne emphasises their inevitable simplicity, state
of purity and freedom from corruption. Even their “fighting is entirely
noble”. Like Peter Martyr, Montaigne’s rather dubious, second hand knowledge
of these noble savages does not prevent him from criticising and morally condemning
his own culture and civilisation: “[We] surpass them in every kind of barbarity”.

The attitude of Voltaire can be seen as typical of the entire 18th century.
Voltaire seems to have regretted what he had written of Muhammad in his scurrilous,
and to a Muslim blasphemous, play Mahomet (1742), where the Prophet is presented as
an impostor who enslaved men’s souls: “Assuredly, I have made him out to
be more evil than he was”.

But, Voltaire, in his Essai sur les Moeurs,1756, and various entries
in the Philosophical Dictionary, shows himself to be prejudiced in Islam’s favour
at the expense of Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular.

Gibbon, like Voltaire, painted Islam in as favourable a light as possible in
order to better contrast it with Christianity. He emphasised Muhammad’s humanity
as a means of indirectly criticising the Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ. His
anti-clericalism led Gibbon to underline Islam’s supposed freedom from that
accursed class, the priesthood. Gibbon’ s deistic view of Islam as a rational,
priest-free religion, with Muhammad as a wise and tolerant lawgiver enormously
influenced the way all Europeans perceived a sister religion for years to come.

The important thing to emphasize here is the biased nature of Said’s apparently
learned and definitive selection; I could just as easily go through Western
Literature and illustrate the opposite point to the one he is making. Furthermore,
my selection is not of some peripheral figures culled from the margins of Western
culture, but the very makers of that culture, figures like Montaigne, Bayle,
Voltaire, Gibbon, Lessing and some I have not quoted like Montesquieu (The
Persian Letters, 1721) and Diderot (Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville,
1772), the latter two exemplifying the European Enlightenment’s appeal to reason,
objective truth and universalist values.

Misunderstanding of Western Civilization

The golden thread running through Western civilization is rationalism. As Aristotle
said, Man by nature strives to know. This striving for knowledge results in
science, which is but the application of reason. Intellectual inquisitiveness
is one of the hall marks of Western civilisation.

Vulgar Marxists, Freudians, and Anti-Imperialists, who crudely reduce all human
activities to money, sex, and power respectively, have difficulties in understanding
the very notion of disinterested intellectual inquiry, knowledge for knowledge’s
sake.

One should remind Said that it was this desire for knowledge on the part of
Europeans that led to the people of the Near East recovering and discovering
their own past and their own identity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth
century archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia, Ancient Syria, Ancient Palestine
and Iran were carried out entirely by Europeans and later Americans – the disciplines
of Egyptology, Assyriology, Iranology which restored to mankind a large part
of its heritage were the exclusive creations of inquisitive Europeans and Americans.
Whereas, for doctrinal reasons, Islam deliberately refused to look at its pre-Islamic
past, which was considered a period of ignorance.

It is also worth pointing out that often the motives, desires, and prejudices
of a scholar have no bearing upon the scientific worth of a scholar’s contribution.
Again, vulgar Marxists, for example, dismiss an opponent’s arguments not on
any scientific or rational grounds but merely because of the social origins
of the scholar concerned.

Said, Sex, and Psychoanalysis

If Said can be said to have a bête-noir, it must surely be Bernard
Lewis. Said has a sentence where he accuses Lewis of persisting “in such
‘philological’ tricks as deriving an aspect of the predilection in contemporary
Arab Islam for revolutionary violence from Bedouin descriptions of a camel rising”.
Said, twenty five years on, still has not forgotten his battle with Lewis on
the issue of a camel rising, to which I will now turn. In Orientalism,
Said quotes from Lewis’ essay “Islamic Concepts of Revolution”:

In the Arabic-speaking countries a different word was used for [revolution]
thawra. The root th-w-r in Classical Arabic meant to rise up (e.g.
of a camel), to be stirred or excited, and hence, especially in Maghribi usage,
to rebel. It is often used in the context of establishing a petty, independent
sovereignty; thus, for example, the so-called party kings who ruled in eleventh
century Spain after the break-up of the Caliphate of Cordova are called thuwwar
(sing. tha’ir). The noun thawra at first means excitement, as
in the phrase, cited in the Sihah, a standard medieval Arabic dictionary, intazir
hatta taskun hadhihi ’lthawra, wait till this excitement dies down – very
apt recommendation. The verb is used by al-Iji, in the form of thawaran
or itharat fitna, stirring up sedition, as one of the dangers which should
discourage a man from practising the duty of resistance to bad government. Thawra
is the term used by Arabic writers in the nineteenth century for the French
Revolution, and by their successors for the approved revolutions, domestic and
foreign, of our own time.

Among Said ’s conclusions is :

Lewis’s association of thawra with a camel rising and generally
with excitement (and not with a struggle on behalf of values) hints much more
broadly than is usual for him that the Arab is scarcely more than a neurotic
sexual being. Each of the words or phrases he uses to describe revolution is
tinged with sexuality: stirred, excited, rising up. But for the most
part it is a ‘bad’ sexuality he ascribes to the Arab.

Can any rational person have drawn any conclusion which even remotely resembled
that of Edward Said’s from Lewis’s scholarly discussion of Classical Arabic
etymology?

Orientalists’ Complicity in Imperialism

One of Said’s major theses is that Orientalism was not a disinterested activity
but a political one, with Orientalists preparing the ground for and colluding
with imperialists: “To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization
of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified
in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact”. The Orientalist
provides the knowledge that keeps the Oriental under control: “Once again,
knowledge of subject races or Orientals is what makes their management easy
and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and
so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control”.

This is combined with Said’s thesis derived from the Coptic socialist thinker,
Anwar Abdel Malek, that the Orient is always seen by the Orientalists as unchanging,
uniform and peculiar, and Orientals have been reduced to racist stereotypes,
and are seen as ahistorical ‘objects’ of study “stamped with an otherness…of
an essentialist character….”. The Orientalists have provided a false
picture of Islam: “Islam has been fundamentally misrepresented in the West”.
Said adds Foucault to the heady mix; the French guru convinced Said that Orientalist
scholarship took place within the ideological framework he called ‘discourse’
and that “the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation
of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are
representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture,
institutions, and political ambience of the representer. If the latter alternative
is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept
the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded,
interwoven with a great many other things besides the ‘truth,’ which is itself
a representation”.

It takes little thought to see that there is a contradiction in Said’s major
thesis. If Orientalists have produced a false picture of the Orient, Orientals,
Islam, Arabs, and Arabic society – and, in any case, for Said, there is no such
thing as “the truth” – then how could this false or pseudo- knowledge
have helped European imperialists to dominate three-quarters of the globe? ‘Information
and control’ wrote Said, but what of ‘false information and control ’?

Orientalists Fight back

For a number of years now, Islamologists have been aware of the disastrous
effect of Said’s Orientalism on their discipline. Professor Berg has
complained that the latter’s influence has resulted in “a fear of asking
and answering potentially embarrassing questions – ones which might upset Muslim
sensibilities….”.

For Clive Dewey, Said’s book “was, technically, so bad; in every respect,
in its use of sources, in its deductions, it lacked rigour and balance. The
outcome was a caricature of Western knowledge of the Orient, driven by an overtly
political agenda. Yet it clearly touched a deep vein of vulgar prejudice running
through American academe”.

The most famous modern scholar who not only replied to but who wiped the floor
with Said was, of course, Bernard Lewis. Lewis points to many serious errors
of history, interpretation, analysis and omission. Lewis has never been answered
let alone refuted.

Negative Arab and Asian Reaction to Said’s Orientalism

It must have been particularly galling for Said to see the hostile reviews
of his Orientalism from Arab, Iranian or Asian intellectuals, some of
whom he admired and singled out for praise in many of his works. For example,
Nikki Keddie, praised in Covering Islam, talked of the disastrous influence
of Orientalism, even though she herself admired parts of it:

I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt
the word ‘orientalism’ as a generalized swear-word essentially referring to
people who take the ‘wrong’ position on the Arab-Israeli dispute or to people
who are judged too ‘conservative’. It has nothing to do with whether they are
good or not good in their disciplines. So “orientalism” for many people
is a word that substitutes for thought and enables people to dismiss certain
scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what
Edward Said meant at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan.

Kanan Makiya, the eminent Iraqi scholar, chronicled Said’s disastrous influence
particularly in the Arab world:

Orientalism as an intellectual project influenced a whole generation
of young Arab scholars, and it shaped the discipline of modern Middle East studies
in the 1980s.The original book was never intended as a critique of contemporary
Arab politics, yet it fed into a deeply rooted populist politics of resentment
against the West. The distortions it analyzed came from the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, but these were marshalled by young Arab and “pro-Arab “scholars
into an intellectual-political agenda that was out of kilter with the real needs
of Arabs who were living in a world characterized by rapidly escalating cruelty,
not ever-increasing imperial domination.

Though he finds much to admire in Said’s Orientalism, the Syrian philosopher
Sadiq al- ‘Azm finds that “the stylist and polemicist in Edward Said very
often runs away with the systematic thinker”. Al-‘Azm also finds Said guilty
of the very essentialism that Said ostensibly sets out to criticise, perpetuating
the distinction between East and West.

Nadim al-Bitar, a Lebanese Muslim, finds Said‘s generalizations about all Orientalists
hard to accept, and is very skeptical about Said having read more than a handful
of Orientalist works. Al-Bitar also accuses Said of essentialism, “[Said]
does to [Western] Orientalism what he accuses the latter of doing to the Orient.
He dichotomizes it and essentializes it. East is East and West is West and each
has its own intrinsic and permanent nature….”

The most pernicious legacy of Said’s Orientalism is its support for
religious fundamentalism, and on its insistence that “all the ills [of
the Arab world] emanate from Orientalism and have nothing to do with the socio-economic,
political and ideological makeup of the Arab lands or with the cultural historical
backwardness which stands behind it”.

What was it you wanted from that big new novel? If you’re looking for an education
about Victorian brothels, Dante studies during the 19^th century,
iconography and iconology in art history, the structure and function of railroads,
the Allied retreat to Dunkirk, British scientific expeditions in the Himalaya,
Bobby Thomson’s Brooklyn-crushing dinger or any number of other subtopics in
history, philosophy, business or law, then you’ll likely find it satisfying
enough. But if you’re looking for the promise of invention, for a world created
and set in motion, for characters who grapple with ethical and moral dilemmas
that radically transform their perspective – the elements that make a great
and true novel – you’ll be disappointed.

I’m not arguing that the novel is dead. Partly because it’s not – sales of
both new literary fiction and classics are up over the last few years, if anemically
– and partly because it’s such a tedious argument to make. (And inevitably,
someone else will make it.) Rather, it’s become a bloated, creaking mess. The
contemporary novel, as Jonathan Safron Foer recently remarked, is ‘stuffed with
crap.’ It’s filled to the gills. What happened?

Novelists have traded a critical literary mission for one dictated by literary
critics. Indeed, it’s not even true literary critics who have mislaid the course
of the contemporary novel. Rather, cultural theorists posing as English professors
but primarily engaged in interdisciplinary studies seek to understand literature
in terms of another field that is, invariably, their real interest. The list
of theorists and their disciplines is long and marvelously varied. Anthropology
and sociology animated Claude Levi Strauss and informs the work of Structuralists;
linguistics preoccupied de Saussure, Chomsky and Barthes; communism and the
relationship of labor to capital drove Terry Eagleton and the dialectical materialists
years after the end of history; psychoanalysis was the true profession of Lacan
and Kristeva; queer theory and socially constructed ideas about sexuality were
Foucault’s overarching interest, just as cultural hegemony and colonialism remain
Edward Said’s focus (we are to understand Pride and Prejudice in terms
of the exploitation of far-flung colonies, which made the English estate such
a magnificent place for a fling); gender studies is the passion of Judith Butler;
race the central concern of an array of critics such as Appiah and Gates; and
of course semiotics and its derivatives the play of Derrida and his merry if
baffling band of pranksters. These critics have widely divergent aims, yet they
share a single prejudice: each has relegated novelists to aimless scriveners
and novels to texts no more authoritative than advertising copy or the back
of a cereal box. The kind of close reading favored by the New Critics, which
presupposed a view of literature as worthy of analysis on its own terms, hasn’t
been seriously undertaken in a half century.

It’s not surprising that critics celebrate novels which reflect their own prejudices
and presuppositions. Fiction built on nonlinear narratives, informed by indeterminacy,
skepticism, and of course moral relativism, and stuffed with reams of data about
topics in finance, philosophy, technology and history, usually with swatches
of intertextual material (letters, legal briefs, patents, pop songs, schema
and diagrams) are fashionably media-friendly. There is also a discernible political
element to the trend. Theorists tend to reside on the Left, and they invariably
conflate conservative aesthetics with right-wing politics, essays and reviews.
The kind of well-made novel that John Irving produces is implicitly denigrated
as conservative regardless of its characters impressive capacity for extramarital
sex, drug use and general debauchery.

Critical theorists have been the real stars of the academy for nearly three
decades, their supremacy challenged only for a few years in the late 1990s,
when intellectual property mavens, electrical engineers and an assortment of
related technologists briefly eclipsed them. The popularity of the technologists
has proved only modestly more durable than the stock market bubble they inspired,
while the influence of theorists prevails. It does not stop at the university
gates; it suffuses the popular, book-reviewing press. Novelists are hip to critical
theory as well, particularly now that so many of them spend less time in cafes
than classrooms, the royalties from their art insufficient to cover the cost
of a latte.

The Info-novel is the inexorable result. Novelists have proved impressionable,
quick studies, recalibrating their aesthetic objectives to reflect those of
the critical theorists they emulate. In an effort to lend weight to narrative
and justify fiction at a time when literary criticism has displaced literature
and technology has displaced religion as a source of meaning (to the extent
it can be ascertained), fiction writers have unmoored blocks of sociological,
industrial, pop-culture, linguistic and political information and dropped them
in, largely undigested, into their work. Just as theorists have brought interdisciplinary
studies to bear on fiction, novelists have taken whole subject areas and downloaded
them into their novels. It is as if, confronted by the infinite amount of information
available online, they have decided to cram in as much of it as possible. Perhaps
writers believe information is the representative condition of our time, and
the novel must reflect it.

If so, you’d expect characters who tangle with overwhelming mass of information
and complexity, who are either defeated or alienated by it – a L’Etrangere for
the information age – but the Info-novel is something quite different. It exists
to convey information rather than comment upon it. It is more interested in
its structural and technical components than in utilizing them in the service
of an imaginative world. And it represents a radical diminution, a failure of
nerve, a crisis of faith in the project of fiction.

Mailer once despaired of timid talents, exhorting younger authors to write
as if they were running for president. (This was the political Mailer of the
late 60s, and he meant it as a great complement.) The old pugilist hasn’t mellowed
– in a recent talk with Charlie Rose, Mailer demanded the same of Franzen –
proving he’s more perceptive than the critics, who have mistaken the Info-novel
for literary ambition. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Judith
Shulevitz gushed, ‘Novelists, in short, have become our public intellectuals
– our polymaths, our geographers, our scholars of the material world.’ Shulevitz’
sole reservation is that the characters in works by Delillo, Franzen and Eugenides
aren’t themselves intellectuals, or even particularly perceptive. For a really
smart and self-aware fictional character, she writes, you have to wade through
a Richard Powers novel.

Powers’ characters are a well-educated and hyperarticulate bunch, but they’re
not, as Harold Bloom wrote of Shakespeare’s leads, capable of interpreting their
own thoughts and actions, changing and growing as a result. Shakespeare may
set too high a bar, but even with more modest expectations, encyclopedic novels
fail.

It is a truism of creative writing programs that in serious fiction character
drives plot, not the other way around. In spy novels, murder mysteries and prefabbed
legal thrillers, characters serve plot, which tends to chew them up and spit
them out. In literary fiction, characters fill and organize the story around
them. Fully realized characters demand to be understood on their own terms.
The big new tomes violate this maxim, which is no less true for being tired.
Franzen’s The Corrections has much to say about campus politics at second-tier
schools, the aftermath of the 1990s technology bubble, corrupt business practices
in post-Soviet economies, even restaurant operations, but its characters can
barely find their way through the maze and are hemmed in by towers of information.
They are slathered with it, and drowning. This is not to conflate Franzen, who
won last year’s Pulitzer Prize, or Andrea Barrett, whose collection, Servants
of the Map was nominated for this year’s honor, with John Grisham. A Grisham
thriller has very different ambitions, and they usually succeed on their own
terms. The same cannot be said for Barrett, whose characters are 19^th-century
botanists, biologists, physicians and explorers, and who exist primarily to
convey the historical and scientific information that animates them – unless
Barrett’s real interest is the history of science, particularly Victorian-era
science, and not fiction. But then why is she wasting our time?

American critics have trumpeted Franzen, Delillo and Powers, but the Info-novel
is hardly a U.S. phenomenon. Michel Houellebecq’s wildly celebrated Atomized,
contains tracts of political and moral philosophy, chemical and nuclear science,
even modern French social history more befitting a monograph. Julian Barnes,
who might have been expected to know better, called Atomized ‘a novel
which hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits.’ The sort of
hunting Barnes got so excited about typically runs something like:

Individuality, and the sense of freedom that flows from it, is the natural
basis of democracy. In a democratic regime, relations between individuals
are commonly regulated by a social contract. A pact which exceeds the natural
rights of the co-contractors, or which does not correspond to a clear retraction
clause, is considered de facto null and void.

And big game included tracts that might otherwise have passed for hack journalism:

A number of other important events in 1974 further advanced the cause of
moral relativism. The first Vitatop club opened in Pars on 20 March; it was
to play a pioneering role in the cult of the body beautiful. The age of majority
was lowered to 18 on 5 July, and divorce by mutual consent was officially
recognized on the eleventh, thus removing adultery from the penal code. Lastly,
on 28 November, after a stormy debate described by commentators as ‘historic’,
the Veil act legalizing abortion was adopted, largely thanks to lobbying by
the left.

The agnosticism at the heart of the French republic would facilitate the
progressive, hypocritical and slightly sinister triumph of the determinist
worldview. On temperate climates, the body of a bird or mammal first attracts
specific species of flies (Musca, Curtoneura), but once decomposition has
begun to set in, these are joined by others, particularly Calliphora and Lucilia.
Under the combined action of bacteria and the digestive juices disgorged by
the larvae, the corpse begins to liquefy and becomes a ferment of butyric
and ammoniac reactions.

Barnes wasn’t alone. Magazines and newspapers described Atomized as
a novel of ideas. It isn’t. A novel of ideas is something else, in which characters
grapple with ethical and moral challenges. The Magic Mountain, for example,
is among other things a richly animated version of Nietzschean tragedy. A reader
finishing Mann’s masterpiece has a serviceable understanding of Nietzsche’s
opposing forces: the Apollonian, which represented order, reason, clarity and
harmony; and the Dionysian, denoting wild creativity, free-spirited and usually
drunken play. Many philosophers incorrectly interpret Nietzsche’s conception
of tragedy to elevate the Dionysian over the sterile Apollonian, but Nietzsche
was a subtler thinker, and Mann was subtler still. Just as Nietzsche demanded
an ethics beyond good and evil, Mann created characters who balance, at least
for a time, Apollonian and Dionysian forces in their personality and the world
they inhabit.

Other great writers have approached the novel of ideas similarly. Tolstoy understood
the difference between fiction and historiography, and probably for that reason
his discourses on military history in War and Peace are segregated in
separate chapters. It was as if he didn’t want to spoil the novel itself. Even
without these discursions, War and Peace is a novel of ideas, for in
one respect it is about how people function in wartime, continue to fall in
and out of love in a rapidly changing society. Maybe there’s something about
the Russians. Brothers Karamazov may be the apotheosis of the novel of
ideas. Dostoevsky’s fiction examines good and evil, faith and despair, realism
and mysticism – all without telling the reader anything, without requiring a
lesson.

The novel of ideas need not run on for 800 pages, nor is it the province of
long-dead white guys. Alice Munro has been turning out brilliant stories for
the past two decades. Sebald evoked memory and time as well as Proust, and a
lot more economically. And while Updike and Mailer have slowed and turned out
their weakest work in decades, and Bellow is powering down the laptop, the last
three or four Philip Roth novels have been daring and brilliant.

The most celebrated younger writers have ignored these examples to pursue Tom
Wolfe’s prescription for reflecting modern society whole, attuned to its cartooned,
pop-culture components. Their novels are usually delivered in a steroid-juiced
voice that critic and novelist James Woods has called ‘hysterical realism:’
clever compilations of consumer references splattered throughout essays on politics,
business and pop culture. This has happened before. The naturalistic novel,
particularly in its 19^th century French instantiation (Dickens never
lost sight of his story), was preoccupied with the mechanics of recently industrialized
society, and its vast plots impressed characters into an overpopulated chorus.
Naturalism had a long hangover, even in English, as anyone who’s tried to wade
through Dreiser must know. And yet from naturalism sprang the multivalent brilliance
of modernism. There is hope.

The novel has no Platonic form, and there is certainly no requirement that
writers adhere to a formula or set of rules. The novel is not a haiku or sonnet,
nor even a movie, with its well-observed limits of length and perspective. Fiction
must have room to grow, reinvent and reassert itself. As readers, we must stand
aside and grant it some latitude. Yet we can be both open-minded and demanding.
As Dr. Johnson said, the essence of poetry is invention. Art strives to answer
the question, What is life? The Info-novel, bereft of poetry and barren of invention,
succeeds only as a clever construction, an amalgamation of data, posing again
and again the same stupid question.

Peter Lurie is general counsel of Virgin Mobile USA, a wireless voice and
internet service. The views expressed are his own.

Early on every thinking man makes the conscious or unconscious decision whether
to view the cup of life as half full, or dry as the Garagum Desert. Those whose
cup is half full are the world’s optimists, the Pollyannas and the kind of people
to be avoided at all costs, particularly at parties. In America they are, according
to Gallup, the majority (64 percent). These are the same folks who wave flags,
join the PTA, bet on the Cubs, and get caught in thunderstorms without an umbrella
and hopefully catch pneumonia. Pessimists, by my estimate, make up about 10
percent of the American population. The other 26 percent couldn’t care less,
and were probably too busy watching professional wrestling to bother answering
the survey. Curiously, Kenyans are the world’s most optimistic people, though
god knows why. And their neighbors in Zimbabwe are the most pessimistic, which
raises the question: what do the Zimbabs know that the Kenyans don’t?

My suspicion is that the reason for the generally low opinion held of the pessimist
is related to his close ties to the critic, the cynic, the misanthrope, the
whiner and the curmudgeon. Personally, the only one of these people I find objectionable
is the whiner. The critic plays a vital role in society by helping us to distinguish
the gold from the dross, the wheat from the chaff. The cynic – who by definition
distrusts people’s motives – is the type I want checking other people’s baggage
at the airport, though not necessarily my own. The misanthrope is a harmless
cuss, keeping mainly to herself and bothering no one, asking only that you not
bother her. And the loveable curmudgeon is responsible for most of literature’s
best quotations, maxims and aphorisms. But the whiner is another animal altogether.
The whiner has no saving grace whatsoever, and is as annoying as fingers on
a dry chalkboard.

I find the pessimist to be, if not exactly pleasant, then at least sincere.
You always know what a pessimist is thinking, and if you don’t he will likely
tell you anyway. The optimist, on the other hand, has always struck me as an
imposter, walking around with her nose toward the heavens as if she inhabited
a better world than you and me, a land of warm green meadows where the sun always
shines and there is never a drought because of it. Not only that but the optimist
is forever hypocritically criticizing your negativity as though it were some
kind of birth defect. The pessimist does not go around saying, "Quit being
so dadgum happy!" Or "Stop that smiling will you!" But the optimist
has no problem trying to change your natural disposition. "Smile!"
she snaps. "Quit being so pessimistic!" It may also be that I associate
the optimist with the affected cheerfulness of the politician angling for votes,
or the faux-friendly, chirpy male or female who goes into public relations,
used car sales and telemarketing. And anyone who has spent any amount of time
with one of these phonies can testify that once off the clock they morph into
the most cynical, black-hearted bastards in the land.

But even the pessimist can become weary of too much pessimism, and, as in all
things, moderation is key. It would be folly to think that the pessimist is
without hope, without expectations. He simply tempers his hopefulness with common
sense, reason and those lessons gained from hard experience. Every man, from
time to time, has a few good words for his fellows, even the pessimist, but
the optimist goes overboard. She gazes at the world through grossly distorted
glasses, refusing to focus on reality.

Since the optimist has failed miserably in transforming the pessimist through
various methods of harassment and blacklisting, she has come to rely more and
more heavily on pseudo-science and quackery to make her case. Such a study,
undertaken recently by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, found that optimists
live longer and are healthier than pessimists. By reviewing medical records
of 839 people living around Rochester, Minnesota, researchers were able to relate
a patient’s health and longevity to his or her outlook on life, and found that
pessimists are less likely to reach their life expectancy. This presupposes
that pessimists necessarily want to live longer, which is highly debatable,
particularly if you have to spend your life around Rochester, Minnesota.

The godfather of the positive-thinking mafia was the Rev. Dr. Norman Vincent
Peale, whose famous book of sermons The Power of Positive Thinking launched
the multi-billion dollar self-help book industry and gave wings to the motivational
speaker racket. Dr. Peale’s book can be summarized simply and succinctly, based
on this one commandment: Pray more and put your faith in God, and happiness
and confidence shall be yours. This kind of simplistic direction went over big
with the Arkansas fishwives, who, I am given to understand, since putting Dr.
Peale’s wizardries to work have never been happier. And I couldn’t be happier
for them.

The psychologist Julie K. Norem has done all us critics a great service with
her book, The Power of Negative Thinking. Unlike the Rev. Dr. Peale,
Dr. Norem has her lovely toes planted firmly in the black soil of this world
and helpfully suggests that one sure-fire way to avoid embarrassment, disaster
and heart-break is by "imagining all of the worst-case scenarios."
This is Dr. Norem’s prescription so as not to be taken off guard by sudden and
unpleasant surprises. Conversely, if Dr. Peale were delivering a talk, and suddenly
found his notes whisked away by a cyclone wind and his bloomers set afire, his
positive thinking would scarcely see him through the remainder of his sermon,
which is no doubt a good thing for those of us in the audience.

If pessimism has a spiritual godfather it is perhaps the German philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer. It has undoubtedly not escaped your notice that the godfather
of optimism was a quack doctor and backwoods preacher, while the founder of
the school of doomsaying was a legitimate philosopher. Likewise, I’m going to
assume you know what Herr Schopenhauer stood for, since it is impolite to talk
down to your readers, and since I myself can’t make heads or tails out of half
of what he’s saying. But since he was a pessimist we can safely assume that
he thought things were pretty rotten in Denmark, or Prussia, or wherever he
happened to be staying at the time.

As a philosophy, I cannot say that I find pessimism very useful in its practical
applications. The fact is I don’t find any philosophies very useful, especially
on a job resume. The pessimist philosopher holds the doctrine or belief that
this is the worst of all possible worlds and that all things ultimately tend
toward evil. I happen to know that the worst of possible worlds is Mercury where
it is always hotter than a July firecracker! As for all things ultimately tending
toward evil, well that may be stretching things a bit. I’d say all things ultimately
tend to suck. Case in point: Have you seen The Simpsons lately?

Going back even farther, we find the Cynics, a school of philosophers who haunted
the back roads and academies of ancient Greece around 4 BC. The Cynics preached
that independence and self-control are essential to virtue. Despising the budding
Greek civilization, as well as money, pleasure, and personal comfort, they advocated
the simple life, which in 4 BC, probably wasn’t all that difficult. That is,
how much money and how many luxuries did a philosophy major in Ancient Greece
really have to give up? "Instead of driving my Mercedes to my non-job I’ll
take the train. Wait, there are no trains. So I’ll walk. Wait, everybody else
is walking too. Maybe I’ll walk backwards. Or crawl…"

Oscar Wilde believed the basis for optimism was sheer terror – that optimists
are simply unable to deal with the likely outcomes and common tragedies of life.
In other words, the optimist lives in a deluded, unreal mind-state whose sunny,
evergreen landscapes in no way resemble the real world. The optimist, it follows,
may be said to have mental health issues, which explains Havelock Ellis’ observation
that "the place where optimism flourishes is the lunatic asylum."
Pessimism, then, tempered with a fine sense of humor and the ability to laugh
at life’s numerous and constant absurdities, may be the healthiest response
of all. And I say that with all of the unbounded confidence and positivity of
a true sourpuss.

Christopher Orlet can be emailed here.

Some years ago, a mentor of mine put forth the argument: “Would you try to build a cabinet when you did not posses even the rudimentary woodworking skills or knowledge of the tools necessary to build the cabinet? Of course not, then why do so many people think they can write poetry without an iota of preparation?”

Still, many do. “Pop vocalists pose as opera singers. Important art museums exhibit installations that the cleaning staff mistakes for trash. Obscenity-riddled recitations, imposed over rhythm tracks, are reckoned to be music.” (Sarah Bryan Miller, St. Louis Post-Dispatch) So why should poetry be held to any standard – other than the “validation” of its author and his inalienable right to self-expression?

Numerous surveys, declining SAT scores, and classroom anecdotes have established that many (and their numbers are growing) young Americans can barely read, cannot spell or do arithmetic, and know next to nothing of their own history; but they do not let mere ignorance get in the way of self-expression. And this popular wave of “self-expression,” more often than not, takes the form of poetry. This is not to say that we’ve become a nation of Whitmans, Dickinsons, and Frosts. Far from it, the result of this self-expression is far more likely to fall into what a friend of mine refers to as “solipsistic prose arranged in random line breaks.”

Many, if not most, teenagers write poetry. Most of it is bad. Fortunately, this poetry, like many communicable childhood diseases such as mumps, chickenpox and measles, afflicts its authors for a short time and then they are forever immune to the pathogen. Of course, these “poems” are sincere, but as Oscar Wilde advised us, “all bad poetry is sincere.” These “journals” – notebooks filled with angst, self-loathing, raging egotism and cryptic marginalia – are then shut forever, packed away in mom and dad’s attic, forgotten, and if there is any justice in the universe, eventually incinerated.

Occasionally, a well-meaning English teacher in a misguided attempt to promote “self-esteem” (of which self-expression is an ancillary component) encourages the young poets to explore their feelings and present these exercises in therapeutic catharsis in some sort of school-sponsored publication. There seems to be little harm done on the surface, but in the ego-centered world of the young and semi-literate, this practice only creates the illusion that there might be a talent denied – cruelly suppressed by the capricious, unfeeling (and profoundly unjust) critical standards of the literary establishment.

In a recent article entitled “Hip Hop vs. Hip Not: The struggle for Poetic Validity in the Halls of Academia,” a locally acclaimed hip hop artist, writing under the style “Abiyah,” argues for the acceptance of hip hop poetry by the “Eurocentric” gatekeepers of our universities’ English departments. It might be an interesting argument, however, it seems Ms. Abiyah has arrived a little late to the party. The gatekeepers have been sent home, replaced by the functionaries of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and gender studies. I shouldn’t think “hip-hop” should have too long a wait to be welcomed into the hallowed halls of academia. (Why exactly they seek this “validation” is a bit of a mystery as they have attained fame, fortune, and public acceptance far beyond the wildest dreams of “academically approved” poets.)

But, my point is not to argue the relative merits of hip hop or any other genre of poetry, it is about self-expression, and Ms. Abiyah has some interesting things to say on that matter:

Certainly, there are basics of poetry that may need to be learned, but the learning of these techniques may inhibit rather than enhance the Hip Hop poet’s ability to express himself or herself. Academia or academic settings tend to discourage the Hip Hop poet, especially those who are innovative and experimental. Poems cannot and will not be created by recipe. In a classroom setting, particularly one focusing on creative writing, pre-emptive judgment calls by an instructor on the validity of a student’s poetry can be extremely detrimental. The instructor must be well-versed in cross-cultural contexts in order to fairly interpret each individual student’s poems.

If one were to strip away the highly shellacked multicultural mumbo-jumbo, this passage could be reduced to the single line of an iconic pop reference; “We don’t need no education.” Imagine, if you will, the temerity of a teacher who would actually want to teach rather than “interpret” his students’ poems! Ms. Abiyah generously concedes that students “may” need to learn some “basics of poetry” but that should never, ever stand in the way of a young poet’s need to express herself, regardless of how ill-conceived and poorly executed this form of self-expression might be. After all, any form of criticism might prove to be detrimental to the fragile psyches of these fledgling sons and daughters of the Muse.

(At this point I must confess to being perplexed by what is meant by “pre-emptive judgment calls.” In a flight of fancy I envisioned a harried teacher exasperated with his students’ unwillingness or inability to learn, taking aim with personal sized heat-seeking missiles at the more offending miscreants.)

Of course the gem in this is the sentence, “the instructor must be well-versed in cross-cultural contexts in order to fairly interpret each individual student’s poems.” Besides being a sterling example of the doublespeak of multicultural prosody, it leaves open the question of quantity. Just how many “cross-cultural contexts” must an instructor have under his belt in order be worthy of guiding (no criticizing, mind you!) our rights-sodden youth? Ten? Twenty? I cannot help but wonder whether, had I been more insightful in my misspent youth, I would have demanded that (fully expecting that my rights would be honored!) my instructors should be well versed in the intricate meters of the 18th century Gaelic poets which best represented my particular cultural context. Even now, I am brought to the brink of weeping knowing that the power elite’s unjust criticism of my garbled syntax was merely a cultural imperialist agenda to eradicate the vestiges of Hiberno-English from my speech and writing.

All this leaves me wondering how, in the bad old days before political correctness became the law of the land, these little darlings would have fared with raw, unfiltered criticism. I once had an editor (who had obviously skipped his sensitivity training) tell me that I should rewrite my article before I threw it away. Stung, bewildered, and dismayed that he did not think every one of my musings was twenty-four carat gold and that I needed a paycheck that Friday, I set about rewriting the article. Three things occurred: my editor received a coherent, if not brilliant, article he could put in front of his readers, I learned I could take constructive (or for that matter, any other) criticism without too fine a point on it, and I got paid. Perhaps my stock on the self-esteem exchange plummeted momentarily, but as with so many things, I got over it. This same editor was also fond of telling me that writers should have the hides of rhinoceroses and that when he was finished with me, I would be at least an armadillo.

With the advent of the Internet and inexpensive publishing programs, writing poetry has been thoroughly democratized. Never mind the fact that the demos can barely register anything beyond a yawn, scratching its collective head while wondering what in the world were they saying? In short, anyone who wants to be published can. Still, many fail to muster the minimal effort this requires. One should, I suppose, never underestimate the power of indolence.

Small “literary” or “culture” ‘zines now flourish like mayflies in the spring, and enjoy equally short life spans. Their detritus litters cyberspace as well as the physical world. Within half an hour I could find dozens of these screeds to ego driven self-pity, but for the sake of brevity I shall present one particularly egregious specimen:

“i’m (sic) trying to get out there,/to make myself known,/ i dont (sic) read other poets/ afraid they’ll mess up my flow.”

God forbid three thousand years of accomplished verse should “mess up” his flow. The reader, if she is prepared to ignore the lapses in grammar, punctuation and syntax (and after all, they are outdated elitist modes of discourse designed to subjugate their individuality) is left only to conclude that she is dealing with (a) an egomaniac of unparalleled proportions, (b) willful ignorance of unparalleled proportions, or (c) a paranoid amateur who is simply too lazy to pick up a book.

Hardly an inducement to read further, I would think.

Talent is a funny thing. Well-honed and practiced, it can delight and enrich the human experience in ways very few things can, while ill-prepared, undisciplined talent can only aspire to disappointment and eventually, tragic waste.

For those of you who might be less than charitable in regarding me as an “elitist,” “reactionary,” or my personal favorite, “cultural imperialist” (I have visions of a snappy uniform, perhaps some sort of crown, maybe?) or any number of tired invectives that those who cannot be troubled to mount any sort of intellectual response would use, I have this to say: Hey, I’m only expressing myself!

Barney F. McClelland’s work has appeared in Electric Acorn 2001 (Dublin), The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Aura Literary Arts Review and The New Formalist. In 2001 he was awarded the KotaPress Anthology Award for Poetry. In his spare time, Mr. McClelland enjoys reading the works of dead white European males, smoking cigarettes, and plotting revenge.

There is a certain caricature of philosophers which has it that they spend
their time arguing about whether things like tables and chairs exist. This is
just a caricature, but nevertheless there is an element of truth in it when
it comes to the debate about realism and anti-realism. Put crudely, realists
– or, more precisely, external realists – think both that the world exists
independently of our perceptions of it and thoughts about it, and that we can
reliably know about the world. Anti-realists, for a variety of reasons, doubt
both these propositions.

The philosophical debate about realism and anti-realism – which involves arguments
about, for example, sense experience, language, and the nature of knowledge
– is complex and esoteric. However, in recent times, as Jonathan Rée
points out, it has found more public expression in the concern that scientists
have about the way that their endeavours are treated by the humanities.

In fact, this is a long-standing concern. It was in 1959 that C. P. Snow gave
his famous lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’, in which he expressed dismay at the
division between the arts and the sciences, and the hostility with which the
practitioners of each viewed the other. It appeared to him that ‘the intellectual
life of the whole of western society… [was] increasingly being split into two
polar groups.’ This he considered both culturally and politically damaging.

More than forty years on, the divide and hostility remain. These came to the
fore a few years ago in l’affaire Sokal. Inspired
by what he saw as the obscurity and ambiguity of much post-modernist writing,
the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed the journal Social Text into publishing
an ostensibly serious article on ‘postmodern physics’ that was in fact a clever
parody. He followed this up with the book Intellectual Impostures, jointly
authored with Jean Bricmont, which was sharply critical of the work of some
of the most fashionable names in the humanities. His motivation, he said in
The Philosophers’ Magazine, had to do with challenging the rise in a
‘sloppily thought-out relativism’ and with exposing ‘the gross abuse of terminology
from the natural sciences in the writings of French, American and British authors.’

Sokal is not the only scientist to rail against the shortcomings of the humanities.
Twenty-eight years earlier, Peter Medawar had warned in Science and Literature
that he ‘could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against
the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement
has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their
profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear.
What a preposterously silly idea!’ And Richard Dawkins, in a review of Intellectual
Impostures in the journal Nature, encourages people to ‘Visit the
Postmodernism Generator [http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern]. It
is a literally infinite source of randomly generated, syntactically correct
nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read…Manuscripts
should be submitted to the "Editorial Collective" of Social Text,
double-spaced and in triplicate.’

It is in the context of these vituperative exchanges that Rée, over
the last few years, has published a number of essays and articles, which argue
that the ‘Science Wars’ are based more on misunderstanding than on real disagreements
about the status of scientific knowledge. Why, I ask him, is he relatively unmoved
by the clash between the purported ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ of science?

"One reason that I am unmoved by the melodrama," he replies, "is
that historically people have had absolutely no problem with the idea that science
is a social phenomenon. Scientists such as J. G. Crowther and J. B. S. Haldane
were very keen on the idea that science was the product of various kinds of
social relations and that these were the social relations that made it possible
to produce knowledge that was testable and reliable. They celebrated historical
studies of science as ways of explaining the heroic progress of science towards
truth. Now if you imagine yourself back in that situation, then you are reminded
that there is not necessarily a conflict between social studies of science and
a belief in the truth content of science."

However, Rée has one caveat. "It seems to me that these scientists,
who thought there was no conflict between science and history, had a notion
of scientific progress that I think was superficial – one that nobody really
ought to believe anymore. Their model suggested that there was a pre-ordained
destination which scientific enquiry was going to end up at. But I think that
one can have a very strong idea of scientific progress, without supposing that
it is predetermined what is going to be the better form of knowledge that emerges.
So my notion is that there are lots of possible ways in which science could
progress in the next century, all of them would be progress, but none of them
would be the only possible way in which progress could be made."

The importance of this caveat is that it is suggestive of an anti-realist strand
in Rée’s thought. Particularly, it seems that in his conception, the
progress of science is not governed by the nature of the objects of scientific
enquiry. However, a critic might respond that whilst indeed it is impossible
to predict how science will progress, it is nevertheless the case that its progression
will be constrained by the nature of the objects it investigates. And moreover,
that there are certain ways of looking at the world, certain theories, that
are effectively dead, for example, Lamarckism – the belief that it is possible
to inherit acquired characteristics. I asked Rée whether this was a point
that he would accept and if so whether he felt there was, therefore, no contradiction
at all between the objectivity of scientific truth claims and the fact that
science is a social and historical phenomenon.

"Yes, I think that I would accept these points," he replies. "But
one of my proposals for advancing this debate is that there should be an embargo
both on the word ‘objective’ and on the word ‘relativism’. I mean it’s ludicrous
to think that adding the word ‘objective’ makes a truth any more true. There
is a very important distinction between propositions that are true and propositions
that are false. But I don’t know what further distinction is intended by adding
the word ‘objective’. It is simply a rhetorical move that does mischief to the
whole debate. What people need to understand is that the only truths that are
available to us are those of specific historical contexts, but that they are
no less true for that."

In a sociological sense, the claim that truths are necessarily historical is
unproblematic. However, it does raise the question as to the criteria for assessing
truth-claims. I ask Rée whether he has any settled thoughts on what these
are?

"I don’t think," Rée says, "that there is a useful general
answer to that. I mean there are textbook distinctions between correspondence,
coherence, and pragmatism, that kind of thing,
but it doesn’t seem to me that these add up to very much. I think you need to
ask in more detail about how particular communities work out methods for attaining
the kinds of true propositions that they want to get agreement on."

The problem with this kind of answer is that the absence of general criteria
for assessing truth-claims does seem to suggest the kinds of relativism that
scientists find so infuriating. If the claim is that both truths and the criteria
for truth are constituted in particular discourses, then, without adding in
some extra ingredient, how is it possible to distinguish true propositions from
false propositions?

"Well," responds Rée, "I suppose I should first say that
one should always be cautious before deciding that something is false. It is
necessary to establish conversations with people who believe seemingly false
propositions to determine exactly what it is they believe, then, once you’ve
understood it, you may well find that there is something true in their belief.
I think one of the side-effects of getting worked up about the idea of objective
truth is that people do tend to get too impatient to investigate the possibility
that there may be something they can learn from things that they are at first
appalled by. But, of course, that is not to say that there are not some beliefs
that are completely false."

But again, if the criteria for truth are themselves constituted within discourse,
what is it that enables us to privilege certain of these criteria so that we
can meaningfully say that some beliefs are completely false?

"I think this is why Rorty, who is quite wise about this matter, says
that you should talk about intersubjectivity rather than objectivity,"
replies Rée. "The question is not about different realities and
how they connect up, but different conceptions, different vocabularies, and
how they connect up. What you need to do is to experiment with trying to have
conversations with people and to see whether you can negotiate some kind of
linkage between the way that you’re talking about things and the way that they
do. To the extent that this strategy is unsatisfactory, it is because our epistemological
condition is unsatisfactory. I mean the fact is that it can always turn out
that the things that we are convinced are unrevisably true might in fact be
problematic in completely unexpected ways.

""I said that there are two terms that should be embargoed,"
continues Rée, "the second one being ‘relativism’. It does seem
to me that people who put themselves forward as friends of science, use the
word ‘relativism’ to describe a position that they regard as being totally opposed
to the notion that there can be such a thing as scientific progress. But if
that is what relativism is, then I don’t know anyone that believes in it. An
alternative tactic is to say ‘Sure, we should all be relativists’, because it
seems to me that when we actually think about what the term relativism means,
then it is a theory about how you get truth and how you know you’ve got it.
And it is simply an unfair debating point to suggest that to be a relativist
is to be someone who does not believe there is such a thing as truth. It is
just that a relativist is someone who tries to be explicit about the various
standards by which truth is measured in different contexts."

All this seems perfectly reasonable. It is, of course, important that people
who make conflicting truth-claims should attempt to establish points of connection
in order to examine their respective beliefs and belief systems more closely.
It is also at least arguable that scientific truths are by their very nature
provisional. And further, it is the case that truths are constructed within
particular discourses, and, in that sense at least, they are contextual. But
a nagging doubt remains. And it is the same point as before. If the validity
of truth-claims can only be established in terms of criteria that are
themselves internal to particular discourses, what happens when a person inhabiting
a non-scientific discourse refuses to accept, despite all attempts at persuasion,
some of the established truths of science – for example, that the earth is more
than 6000 years old or that it is not flat? It seems that the logic of the kind
of position outlined by Rée means that it is not possible to privilege
the scientific version of truth over the non-scientific version. But surely
he cannot be happy with that outcome?

"Well, the truth is," Rée admits, pausing, "that I’m
not really able to give an interesting answer to the question, as you pose it.
But I wonder why you put it in terms of beliefs that are so barmy that they
are scarcely intelligible? What if it were in terms of something like Holocaust
denial, where there is a genuine disagreement and it’s not really a disagreement
over criteria. It seems to me that whilst it is undeniably exasperating to find
people who stubbornly refuse to accept what you take to be pretty conclusive
evidence, it is not fair to be asked ‘What are you going to do about the fact
that you can’t change their minds?’ – at some point you just have to shrug your
shoulders and simply say ‘Well, I can’t.’"

But there are reasons for posing the question in terms of ‘barmy’ beliefs.
Firstly, plenty of people believe things which in scientific terms are very
bizarre – for example, opinion poll data suggests that about a third of Americans
reject the idea of human evolution, and another third are undecided. And secondly,
the more bizarre the beliefs, the more it becomes clear what is at stake in
committing oneself to a conception which holds that the criteria for truth are
only internal to particular discourses. Specifically, it brings into sharp focus
the fact that this conception allows no definitive grounds for rejecting propositions
that we nevertheless are certain are false. So I ask Rée what exactly
he would say to someone who insisted that the earth was flat or that mermaids
lived under the sea?

"What you have to say is that, as far as I can see – and I may always
be wrong – these beliefs are barmy. I think that the phenomenon that you are
pointing to is just the fact that people can get into disagreements where it
is extremely difficult to make any progress. But I think that that is just our
shared epistemological condition, and I don’t see that claiming that what you’ve
got is absolute truth and what they have got is not, is going to help. I would
use the example of barmy beliefs as a way to bring you round to my slogan, which
is ‘Neither a realist nor an anti-realist be.’

"Listen," Rée goes on, "everything that the ‘friends
of science’ want to say about the extraordinary achievements and progress of
the natural sciences, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of technique,
all of these things can be said by someone who describes themselves as a ‘relativist’
and there is no intelligible sense of relativism that would lead you to deny
the reality of scientific progress."

So what then about the ultimate structure of the external world? Does the contextual
nature of all truth-claims mean that this structure is always beyond our reach?

"Well," says Rée, "I don’t think there is anything more
satisfactory than invoking the Rorty move that I have already mentioned. This
consists in saying that there is no real difference between talking in an upbeat
way about getting to know more about the ultimate structure of the world, and
talking in a more depressed kind of way about the possibilities of including
more people in a conversation. It seems to me that they really come to the same
thing. So the question becomes: how do the particular discourses of specialised
sciences relate to other scientific discourses and to discourses outside science?

"If you’re in a conversation with someone who is worried about having
the ultimate structure of the world taken away from them, then you need to make
them see that what they’re asking for is beyond what any possible agreement
in the future about how to look at the world can deliver. They keep saying that
they want objectivity, but they don’t actually need it, so the point is to close
the gap and to say ‘You’re worried about being deprived of something that actually
you haven’t got, and you wouldn’t know if you had.’ It’s a chimera, this thing
that they’re worried about having taken away from them.

"Imagine that we’re talking with a scientist," Rée continues,
"worried about his work not being taken seriously – I think that we’re
paying all the respect that a scientist could dream that we’d pay to the scientific
enterprise if we say that relative to human discourses, science improves the
knowledge and control we have over things that matter to us. Of course, you
can say ‘Well, it does that because it tells us the truth about the objective
structure of the world’ – and that’s fine, you can say that, but it’s hardly
an ontological big deal."

But if that is what Rée thinks is going on in scientific discourses,
that they are telling us truths about the objective structure of the world,
then surely that is a realist position, it is not some kind of half-way house
position.

"Yes," admits Rée, "that is what I’m saying, except that
I think the word objective is a waste of space. Or are you trying to contrast
the objective structure of the world with its subjective structure? I wouldn’t
if I were you. But rather than ‘Neither a realist nor an anti-realist be’, perhaps
I should say, ‘Neither an anti-realist nor an anti anti-realist be!’"

Selected Bibliography
‘Rorty’s Nation’, Radical Philosophy, No. 87, Jan/Feb 1998.

This interview is extracted from What
Philosophers Think, edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom, and published
by Continuum (2003).

There is an old Chinese folk tale in which a fool
deposits 300 pieces of silver in a hole. In order to conceal his largesse, he
puts up a sign nearby to announce that “300 pieces of silver do not lie here.”
The moral of the tale was that the more you try to cover something up, the more
obvious it is that something is being concealed.

The Chinese government, fiercely vigilant when
it comes to any manifestation of press freedom, are learning this lesson the
hard way with regard to the viral condition known as SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome. It used to be thought that in China, the only way of confirming if
a story was true was if the state-owned press had already emphatically and categorically
denied it. The belief persists.

When there is a sort of institutional wall of
silence on every possible issue, information of some description still squeezes
itself out somehow. The thirst for news must be slaked, even when there is no
news. During the brouhaha of the APEC conference, held in Shanghai in Autumn
2001, the city pricked up its ears amid rumours about unexploded bombs in airports
and a terrorist assault on a hotel on the city’s main thoroughfare, Nanjing
Road. Similarly, one could hear whispers in local bars following the outrage
of 9-11, with stories concerning Shanghai-based Muslim terrorists being rounded
up by the authorities, and several of them going underground or fleeing to the
remote West, where, according to another rumour, a fierce military campaign
against insurrectionaries was being conducted by a joint Chinese-Kazakh army.
Which of these stories was true? None of them were mentioned in the People’s
Daily, the organ of the Communist Party, and even if they had been, most readers
would have remained suspicious. In the West, where the press is considered to
be relatively free, such a “wilderness of mirrors” approach to the honesty of
the media is quite commonplace in conspiracy theory circles. In China, with
the media compelled to “follow Xinhua”, the state-run news agency, scepticism
is obligatory.

The internet has offered a valuable outlet for
a nation starved of debate. But with the internet, any cockeyed rumour one cares
to invent very quickly rolls out of control. Indeed, one of the main scares
about SARS in Hong Kong was caused by a fourteen-year old boy who faked a story
saying that the region had been declared an “infected city”, prompting a wave
of panic buying throughout the former colony and a volley of denials from the
authorities.

No one, of course, trusts the local Chinese press.
Not even the local Chinese press. Couple that with an insidious network of chatroomers
and e-mailers, most of whom have heard talk of SARS victims being dragged away
in the dead of night to secret military hospitals, or of snifflers being dragged
off aeroplanes just before take-off, and at the very least you have an atmosphere
of panic. And by the beginning of April, there was a crisis of confidence. Conferences
were being cancelled from Beijing to Jakarta, and before long, everyone would
surely be wearing tin-foil hats and gas masks and joining the queue for rations.
Most of us were running through the list of symptoms, checking our temperatures
and pulses and wondering whether the malaise, myalgia and dry coughing that
had been an inevitable part of everday life over the past several years could
still be attributed merely to the drinking, smoking and late-night parties.

The lonely fight for facts, it seemed, would be
left to the foreign press stationed here in China. Meanwhile, the authorities
finally decided to make their move.

At the beginning of April, the municipal government
in Shanghai finally acknowledged that the virus had hit the city. Most of the
foreign journalists stationed in Shanghai had arrived at a small conference
room in the International Hotel. The place hissed with gossip, and there was
a pervasive sense that something momentous was about to be disclosed, that somehow,
the big SARS balloon that had been blowing up for weeks was about to burst.

Although the Health Bureau official announced
that there was only one SARS case in Shanghai, the assumption was, naturally
enough, that he was lying. At best, a turning point had been reached. This seemed
to be a compromise, face-saving revelation that would allow more frankness further
down the line. After all, the government had responded with blanket denials
up to then, and to shift suddenly from total disavowal to the announcement of
a dozen deaths would have been too great a volte face. As I write, the
official figure in Shanghai has risen, but only to two – the victim’s father
had also succumbed to the illness – and there were also a number of suspected
cases.

The reporters at that first press conference were,
of course, spitting feathers. “The Shanghai government are a responsible government,”
the spokesman said, to a chorus of groans.

The natural assumption was, and remains, that
behind all the reassuring smiles, the city’s hospitals actually resembled scenes
from Night of the Living Dead. The government had denied the issue for
so long that it came as no surprise that no one believed them when they began
to make noises.

And so, sensitive observers were suddenly noticing
the ambulances nipping through the traffic, presumably rushing to deal with
the latest sighting of SARS. Late at night, cleaners were seen to emerge, spraying
the streets with gallons of Dettol. Minor coughs and colds, common at this time
of year, were thought to be the beginning of a viral cataclysm.

It seemed at one point that the scourge of SARS
was about to bring (a) economic growth, and (b) civilization to an end. It was
probably unfair to conclude that, finally, after years covering Communist Party
puppet shows and international business junkets, the hacks at last had something
to get really indignant about: after all, the panic was palpable, and
the statistics – particularly from Hong Kong – were thoroughly disturbing. And
it was undeniable that the Chinese government, despite 20 years of economic
reform, remain culturally disinclined towards the sort of openness and transparency
that might have curtailed the spread.

Last weekend, following the revelation that there
were as many as 339 diagnosed cases in the capital, almost ten times the previously
acknowledged figure, a couple of scapegoats were identified, with the mayor
of Beijing and the head of the Ministry of Health both dismissed. The government
are now promising full disclosure, but the e-mails continue to flow, the rumours
keep on rumbling. Who the hell believes them now?

And so, the panic grows. Staff at the US consulate
here in Shanghai were heard on Friday April 11 to be suffering from SARS-related
symptoms, and Reuters breathlessly issued a report. “The US consulate
in Shanghai said in an email seen by Reuters that two Americans were
among nine being treated at the Shanghai Pulmonary Disease Hospital with symptoms
of SARS.” That night, an ominous air seemed to pervade the clubs and bars scattered
throughout Shanghai.

But it turned out to be untrue. The victims were
released from hospital shortly after having been shown to be suffering from
nothing more than severe colds.

Meanwhile, the Australian government have now
put SARS in the same category as the Plague, Cholera and Yellow Fever. This
follows comments by the New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, warning that
the problem could be even worse than the 1918 flu epidemic.

Many of the news agencies based in China have
imposed emergency measures. Among the foreign community, rumours spread very
quickly, and an otherwise luxurious existence has been laced with danger.

Even sceptics are hedging their bets, citing the
belated reaction of the Chinese government as well as the traditional sources
at the World Health Organization. Public occasions are marked with a curious
sense of esprit de corps in a climate of pre-storm calm, almost as if
we are amazed that we have found the courage to leave our homes. The vocabulary
of foreign residents is now larded with the jargon of virology, and their tales
– hushed and weary – resonate with all the old fears. We listen to third-hand
hearsay about the woman in the flat below or some friend of a friend currently
manning the hospital barricades

It is better to be safe than sorry, say some.
Hong Kong – which has already seen its confidence battered in recent years –
has been shaken to its boots by the SARS crisis. Receipts at Hong Kong’s restaurants
are reportedly down 50-80%, and its cinemas are empty. Housing sales are down
65%. There are 70% fewer tourists. One estimate suggests monthly economic losses
of HK$8billion.

Analysing the current figures is a difficult business,
not least because they are rising every day. It is worth noting, however, that
even if the accumulated total number of cases in Beijing reaches 1,000 in the
coming days or weeks, it still represents only 0.0075% of the total population,
and that of all the cases, there seems to be a survival rate of well over 90%.
The rate is much more worrying in Hong Kong, with an infection rate of about
0.02% and a fatality rate currently at 6.7%.

But is the figure worrying enough to justify the
recent claim made by the popular local e-newsletter and website, www.c-biz.org,
unerring advocates of the “we’re all going to die” school of journalism? Citing
the Hong Kong Standard, the newsletter claimed that preventative measures had
come too late, and that the virus was now “threatening virtually all the country’s
1.3 billion people”.

There are other things happening throughout China,
of course, none of which are covered by the domestic media. There are mass lay-offs
at state-owned companies leading to strikes and police crackdowns. There is
the endemic corruption and gangsterism throughout the provincial-level cities.
There is the ongoing scandal of the Falungong, a tawdry, superstitious little
cult that was transfigured by the excesses of the State into a pious order of
martyrs, to which Western pilgrims regularly pay homage on Tiananmen Square
before being unceremoniously expelled.

The spread of HIV/AIDS in China has also become
a subject of concern, with the official number of sufferers currently standing
at 850,000 and thought to underestimate the real total. According to the darkest
predictions cited by Kofi Annan in his visit to China last year, that figure
threatens to multiply to as many as 10 million by 2010. Meanwhile, a recent
report revealed that tuberculosis still kills 2 million people worldwide every
year, 98% in developing countries, and that a third of the world’s population
is infected with the TB bacillus.

There is something about infectious diseases that
brings out the worst in us. On April 20, the International Herald and Tribune,
reporting from Hong Kong, told of yet another side effect of SARS. Victims,
the report said, were being ostracised. In accordance with government regulations,
buildings in which infections have taken place are marked clearly with a sign.
Hong Kong officials were initially reluctant to impose harsh restrictions for
fear that victims would be “driven underground”.

Amid the mayhem, I look for rational voices. I
am consoled by the words of Christine McNab, a spokesman for the WHO speaking
to The Guardian, who said that most of the cases were in a hospital setting.
“The rest seem to be people in very close contact with affected people. That
narrows the risk to the general population. The pattern of how this is moving
does not indicate at this point that there is a widespread risk to the general
population.”

I listen carefully to the words of John Oxford,
professor of virology at the Queen Mary School of Medicine in London, who said
that more attention should be paid to the potentially greater threat posed by
new strains of influenza. “SARS does not look like it is explosively infectious,”
he said. “Most of the cases seem to have come out of hospitals, among doctors
and nurses, all of whom have been in very close contact with ill people. It
is causing problems in certain environments, but it’s not zipping around the
globe.”

And yet, by now the panic is more infectious than
the virus itself, and even the sturdiest of observers are struck regularly by
the thought that infection is just a stray droplet or contaminated elevator
button away. As is the case in most health scares, the very act of paying attention
– of isolating, analysing and comparing statistics – creates a potent symbolic
space, one which draws on all our fears about mutating bacteria, outfought immune
systems, and mass pandemics, and leaves very little room for a sense of proportion.

David Stanway is a writer, editor and translator living in Shanghai.

Postmodernist anti-science thought was once primarily associated with European
and North American academics in the humanities. Now not only has its influence
become international, but it has become integrally intertwined with a number
of other issues such as anti-globalization, anti-transgenic technology in agriculture,
and conservation. Nobody can fault the prevailing internationalism of postmodernists
and their respect for different cultures and peoples (except for the culture
of those who are committed to modern science/technology and its benefits). Nor
can we fault their argument that all of us have biases, though they fail to
comprehend the vital role that scientific method plays in helping to overcome
the limitations which personal and cultural biases impose. Their belief in the
worth and dignity of all human beings is unexceptionable. Some of us critics
would suspect, however, that in going global, postmodernist thought does not
necessarily impact on other political/cultural traditions in a way which upholds
the worthy ideas that most postmodernists claim to espouse. To the extent that
these postmodernist ideas have become part of the globalization debates, there
is a legitimate issue of consistency if in fact what is being forcefully advocated
produces adverse outcomes contrary to what its proponents claim for them.

None of us are totally consistent in all our beliefs, nor can we find total
consistency in the various political or social movements we may be committed
to. Life and the world of ideas are messy, and so we can take heart with Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s strictures against that foolish consistency which is the hobgoblin
of petty minds. A little untidiness and a few gaps in our knowledge here and
there are probably healthy, and facilitate the emergence of new ideas. However,
the argument to be pursued here is that there is a basic inconsistency, or more
accurately, a fundamental contradiction between what has been advocated
by a type of postmodernist thought, and its practical outcome in developing
countries. It is a contradiction that is often so blatant as to undermine whatever
merit there may be in the avowed postmodernist respect for other cultures. Stated
baldly, the respect for “local ways” of knowing, rather than promoting multi-culturalism,
ends up instead promoting crass forms of cultural chauvinism and intolerance
that can devolve into violence. In our internet/information age, there is no
excuse for those who have entered various globalization debates without knowing
the outcomes and implications of their advocacy.

 

Local knowledge and reactionary politics

Dr. Vandana Shiva is likely the world’s most celebrated holistic ecofeminist,
deep ecologist, postmodernist luddite, anti-globalizer, and spokesperson for
those she claims are without a voice. Because she has advanced degrees in science,
Shiva is useful for providing legitimacy to a range of anti-science views on
the part of those who mistrust scientific inquiry (except where they think that
it will promote their ideological agenda). Contemporary ecofeminist literature
is almost unreadable, particularly on the Green Revolution, which ecofeminists
deem to be a failure, and on “organic” agriculture, which they favor. Being
able to cite Shiva as a presumed authority allows them to talk about global
agriculture without any substantive knowledge of how peoples around the world
raise crops and feed their families. One wonders how many academics obtained
tenure on the basis of books and articles for which Shiva was a major source.

One leader does not fully define a movement, to be sure, but Shiva with her
condemnation of “scientific reductionism” has become so preeminent in the global
deep ecology/ecofeminist movement against modern science that raising serious
questions about her does in many respects raise questions about the entire movement.
Shiva’s ideas, which are shared and promoted in the West by ecofeminists and
others as radical and revolutionary, often turn out to have reactionary consequences
where they are practiced in India.

This may come as a shock to the true believers, but for many the faith in the
fundamental rightness of Shiva’s message is so firm that it would be a near
impossibility to convince them otherwise. The philosopher of science Meera Nanda
shows that the much revered “holistic way of knowing … lies at the very heart
of caste and gender hierarchy in India” (Nanda 2002, 54).”The role that the
goddesses and the idea of sacredness of nature have played (and still play)
in perpetuating the oppression of actual women is not adequately understood
by the enthusiasts for alternative sciences” (Nanda 2003a). It is the much venerated
“local knowledge” of the Hindu cosmology of “Karma and caste” which was used
to justify the repression of Dalits (the crushed or oppressed – untouchable).
The liberation of women is “linked” to overcoming the “kind of cultural assumptions
about sacredness and holism” that are promoted by Shiva (Nanda 2003c).

Many of those now promoting the virtues of “local ways of knowing” were, we
hope, opponents of it in its pre-postmodernist manifestations. From 1948, with
the election of the National Party in South Africa, to the early 1990s, a similar
reverence for “local ways of knowing” appropriate to the culture was proclaimed
and promoted as “Bantu education.” It was called Apartheid and many of us spent
most of our adult life in active opposition to it, as, undoubtedly, did many
of today’s activists who tout the special virtues of local knowledge.

Among the many reasons for opposition to Apartheid and its repressive policies,
was that the so-called “Bantu education” would handicap the student even in
a non-Apartheid society by not providing her or him with the knowledge necessary
to survive economically. Today we have what is misnamed as “Science Studies”
promoting a “Navajo way of knowing” (which is “assuredly more spiritual and
holistic than European ways”) in learning mathematics by “teaching calculus
before fractions” (Olson 1999). Among many problems with this method of teaching
is the “difficulty of expressing the slope of a line, one of the fundamentals
of calculus, in any way other than by using a fraction or decimal” (Olson 1999).
Thus, “while well-meaning teachers puzzle out such difficulties, Navajo children
are … to grow up without learning how to compute sales tax” (Olson 1999).
From the elite precincts of Western universities, “multi-culturalism” has spread
to other parts of the world. Across the border from where Shiva’s ecofeminism
lends support to Hindu chauvinism, Pakistani proponents of “Islamic science”
and “Islamic epistemology” have been:

citing the work of feminist science critics in their campaign to purge
many Western ideas from the schools, and certain feminist professors in
the West–perhaps caught up in the thrill of having their work cited half
a world away–have favorably cited the Islamicists right back (Olson 1999).

Not to be outdone by Shiva’s Indian advocacy, in the United States there are
advocates of a mysterious entity called “feminist algebra” (Bookchin 1995, 212).
When the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in Uttar Pradesh,
India, in 1992, they sought to awaken “national pride” by making “Vedic mathematics
compulsory for high school students” (Nanda 1996). “Hindu ways of knowing” involved
government-approved texts replacing standard algebra and calculus with sixteen
Sanskrit verses. Leading Indian mathematicians and historians examined the verses
and found “nothing Vedic about them,” thinking them merely a “set of clever
formulas for quick computation” and not a “piece of ancient wisdom” (Nanda 1996).
According to Meera Nanda (1996), “in the name of national pride, students are
being deprived of conceptual tools that are crucial in solving real-world mathematical
problems they will encounter as scientists and engineers.”

Hinduization extends beyond mathematics to promoting the “Aryan race” together
with a disdain for all “foreigners including Muslims.” The BJP along with the
VHP (Vishva Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Council) are offsprings of the RSS
(Rashtirya Svyamsevak Sangh or Organization of National Volunteers) which has
been actively promoting hatred of Muslims and Christians in India, and has been
involved in the destruction of Muslim and Christian places of worship and fostering
deadly riots against non-Hindus. Postmodernist/ecofeminist multi-culturalism
might be a worthy idea in some ways, but when it is integrated with a “suspicion
of modern science as a metanarrative of binary dualism, reductionism and consequently
domination of nature, women and Third World people” it supports Hindu reactionary
modernists who claim the “same holist, non-logocentric ways of knowing not as
a standpoint of the oppressed but for the glory of the Hindu nation itself”
(Nanda 2000, 2001a).

 

The Chipko "Movement"

Many activists like Shiva, who are promoted in the West by the anti-globalization
Greens and who receive uncritical acclaim, are often the object of very severe
criticism in their own countries, a fact which goes largely unreported. After
an article in a Malaysian newspaper talked about Shiva in highly flattering
terms, claiming that she was a leader of the famed Chipko (tree huggers) movement
in India, the Chipko local activists sent a letter of protest to the editor,
arguing that the interview was based on false claims and noting that it had
angered many people. Those writing the letter saw themselves as being the “real
activists,” who do not understand why Shiva is “reportedly publishing wrong
claims about Chipko in the foreign press.”

Shiva uses Chipko as a model for Green ideologies from deep ecology to eco-feminism.
Jayanta Bandyopadhyay, a distinguished scientist and environmentalist, examines
each of these ideologies and deems them myths without any basis in fact (1999).
He is an active supporter of the Chipko villages, in which he finds “a movement
rooted in economic conflicts over mountain forests,” and a “social movement
based on gender collaboration” and not a “feminist movement based on gender
conflicts” (Bandyopadhyay 1999).

Chipko is but one example where external activists, even those who may be well
intentioned idealists, in effect hijack a movement and use it to promote an
ideological agenda. The original motivation for “participating in Chipko protests”
was to gain local control of forest resources in order to create a forest-based
industry which offered the Himalayan villagers the possibility that their kinsmen
who had to migrate to find work, might be employed closer to home. Further,
increased local access to forest resources might “have offered women the possibility
of adding to their meagre incomes and insuring themselves from potential crisis
if remittances ceased or became intermittent” (Rangan 2000, 199-200).

Chipko is one of many cases of environmental groups in developed countries
co-opting a cause like wildlife or habitat conservation, or a local movement
with legitimate grievances, and then subverting them. In the case of Chipko,
the co-option was initially by people from the urban elite in India, who received
international acclaim as a result. As with other cases that I have examined,
in places like Africa and the Americas, not only do local concerns get brushed
aside, but often the locals are worse off because of the external “support.”
This is particularly true in case after case that I have examined for conservation
projects, be they in Africa, Central America or India, where local interests
are swept aside in favor of saving the environment from those who live there
(DeGregori, 2004, Chapters 4, 10 & 11 and DeGregori 2002, Chapter 2).

One of Shiva’s ‘Chipko women’ from the Pindar Valley in Chamoli District, Gayatri
Devi, bitterly states that the movement has made life worse in the valley:

Now they tell me that because of Chipko the road cannot be built [to her
village], because everything has become parovarian [environment] … We
cannot get even wood to build a house … our ha-haycock [rights and concessions]
have been snatched away (Rangan 2000, 42).

This helps to answer the questions which Rangan raises:

Why do words like environment and ecology make so many people living in
the Garhwal Himalayas see red? Why do so many of them make derisive comments
when the Chipko movement figures in any discussion? Why is it that in most
parts of Garhwal today, local populations are angry and resentful of being
held hostage by Chipko, an environmental movement of their own making (Rangan
1993, 155)?

When the world community was ready to hear the claims of the Garhwal Himalayan
villages,

their voice in the Chipko movement had all but ceased to exist. The brief
love affair between Chipko’s activists and the state had resulted in the
romantic ideal that the Himalayan environment by itself mattered more than
the people who eked out their existence within it.

Rangan adds that:

if some of the communities are ready to banish their axes today, it must
be seen as yet another attempt to affirm themselves and give voice to the
difficulties of sustaining livelihoods within their localities (174-175).

From Agarwal and Narain, we learn that the situation has driven some to advocate
practices that violate laws which the urban conservationists have imposed. “Uttarkhand,
the land which gave birth to the Chipko movement, now even has a Jungle Kato
Andolan (cut the forest movement). Thanks to the ministry of environment, ‘environment’
is no longer a nice word in Uttarkhand” (1991). Rangan argues that the Chipko
today is a “fairy tale,” a myth sustained and propagated by a few self-appointed
spokespeople through conferences, books, and journal articles that eulogize
it as a social movement, peasant movement, environmental movement, women’s movement,
Ghandian movement–in short, an all-encompassing movement (Rangan 1993, 158).

 

The Green Revolution

Dr. Vandana Shiva, in a book length diatribe against the Green Revolution,
frequently refers to its voracious demand for chemical fertilizers and indicates
that there are alternative ways, more benign, of achieving these outputs (Shiva
1991). Plants need ingredients (nutrients) in order to grow. If a molecule is
in the plant, it or its constituent elements must come from somewhere. Except
for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, plants derive their nutrients from the
soil, or in the case of nitrogen from atmospheric nitrogen mediated by cyanobacteria
(other than that from fertilizer). More plant output means more nutrient input.
The often repeated claim that Green Revolution plants need more fertilizer has
about as much meaning as saying that it takes more food to raise three children
than it does to raise one. If sufficient nutrient is not in the soil, it must
be added. Shiva’s argument in essence is that one can grow plants without nutrients
or that one can achieve the same output as Green Revolution seeds yield without
providing nutrient input other than available “organic” sources. This is patently
nonsensical and violates our fundamental knowledge of physics.

Shiva has made a number preposterous statements over the years about yields
in traditional Indian agriculture or traditional agriculture elsewhere such
as among the Maya. Even before the Green Revolution dramatically increased the
demand for and use of synthetic fertilizer, there was a large difference between
the nutrients extracted from the soil in India and the “organic” nutrients available
to be returned to it. In fact, nearly twice as much nutrient was being withdrawn
from the soil as was being returned. Contrary to Shiva’s assertions, this process
was not sustainable. Given the dramatic increases in Indian agricultural output
over the last four decades (which more than accommodated a doubling of the population),
the deficit in “organic” nutrient must be vastly greater today. Shiva cites
Sir Albert Howard, whose vitalist ideas on “organic” agriculture were developed
in colonial India (Howard 1940). But though he was a strong proponent of composting
(“Indore method”), Howard recognized the need for additional synthetic fertilizer
and improved seeds, which means he might have favored GM crops if he were alive
today.

Shiva has a belief that “food crops for local needs” are “water prudent” (Shiva
2000). For the Green Revolution grains, the primary output is a larger percentage
of the plant (harvest index) and therefore requires less nutrient input per
unit of output. These gains in agricultural efficiency and in yields per hectare,
particularly for the Green Revolution grains, has accommodated a doubling of
the world’s population, with about a 30% increase in per capita food consumption
with only a slight increase in land under cultivation (about 4% for grains).
For rice, the gains in water use efficiency have been nothing less than astounding.
According to a recent FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) report, “the
modern rice varieties have about a threefold increase in water productivity
compared with traditional varieties” (FAO 2003, 28). Overall, for water use
in agriculture, “water productivity increased by at least 100 percent between
1961 and 2001” while water use per capita was falling about in half (FAO 2003,
25-26). What the FAO is primarily describing is the yield increases and greater
plant efficiency of the Green Revolution technologies so sharply criticized
by Shiva.

Biotechnologists are working to create even more efficient plants, a goal which
is opposed by Shiva and her followers. In her paeans in praise of cow dung,
Shiva’s pre-Green Revolution Indian agriculture is one of a healthy, self-sufficient,
calorically adequate, nutritious food supply produced in an ecologically sustainable
manner (Avery 2000; for a critique of Shiva by an Indian scholar, see Nanda
1991, 1997 & 1998.). Why hundreds of millions of peasant agriculturalists
in India and around the world have forsaken this utopian existence and adopted
the Green Revolution’s crops and modern agricultural technologies is never explained.
Maybe those actually raising crops and feeding their families know something
about agriculture that Shiva and her fellow activists don’t?

Equally unexplained is why, if, as Shiva argues, modern technology is pauperizing
populations and in many cases driving people to suicide, life expectancies have
risen so dramatically throughout Asia for both rural and urban populations.
Even more difficult to explain is why those in developed countries, who are
presumed to be educated and informed, uncritically accept her musings and pay
her homage, including selecting her to give prestigious presentations such as
the Reith Lecture (Shiva 2000 and Scruton 2000).

 

Contradictions, Mistakes and Double Standards

Contradictions and mistakes are all too prevalent in the work of Shiva and
those who revere her. For example, in a public lecture in Toronto, Canada, she
claimed both that the price level of food in India was doubling and that it
was falling. Arguing that the technologies of the Green Revolution have failed,
she has the price of food in India doubling so that consumers can no longer
afford it. But when she wishes to criticize the United States for “dumping”
food on the Indian market, pushing Indian farmers to commit suicide, she claims
that subsidized foreign food is “driving down prices” (O’Hara 2000 and Oakley
2000).

The following excerpt from a news item on Shiva’s visit to Houston in the October
of 2000 is indicative. Shiva appears not to know the difference between a field
of rice and one of weeds.

Shiva walked across the road and looked out into a shaggy field.
“They look unhappy,” she said. “The rice plants. Ours at home look very
happy.”
“That,” RiceTec reports, “is because it’s not rice. That’s our test field,
it was harvested in August. That’s weeds” (Tyer 2000).

Shiva inspired anti-technology criticism reached its true nadir when humanitarian
aid for people in need was attacked because of the technology used to produce
it. In India, following a “super-cyclone,” a team from Vandana, Shiva’s “research
foundation”, gathered samples of donated grain while involved in “relief work”
and had them tested in the United States to see if they were genetically modified.
Claiming that they were genetically modified, Diverse Women for Diversity
then demanded that the government of India “immediately withdraw the corn-soya
blend from Orissa,” seemingly preferring starvation for the cyclone victims
to a presumed but unproven contamination from GM food (RFSTE 2000, Devraj 2000,
Lean 2000 and Jayarsman 2000c).

Possibly, Shiva could arrange for “organic” agriculturalists like Prince Charles
to provide famine relief using funds from Greenpeace and other environmental
groups with annual budgets into the tens of millions of dollars. And once again,
it is appropriate to ask how many poor farmers have Shiva’s Diverse Women
for Diversity or The Research Foundation for Science, Technology and
Ecology helped to grow more food? How many of those in need have they helped
to feed? And in the name of transparency, what are the sources of its funding?

These questions are legitimate because too many groups that raise and spend
significant amounts of money and help feed no one, demand transparency from
others and criticize groups and individuals who have assisted those in need
by helping them to grow more food or by providing relief food that modern agricultural
surpluses facilitate. Many “Civil Society” groups in developing countries are
largely and in some cases fully funded by developed country NGOs, so one can
legitimately ask questions about the independence of their judgements in much
the same way that one would question the independence of a statement by a developing
country employee of a multinational corporation (see DeGregori 2002c).

Nanda accuses “populist intellectuals like Shiva” of being “guilty of hypocrisy
and double standards” for failing to recognize that “their own growth as intellectuals
and activists owes a tremendous debt” to the very ideas that they disparage
(Nanda 1991, 55). It has not gone unobserved that those like Shiva who are most
critical of modern science have gained favor in Western universities and have
often benefited greatly as a result.

Furthermore, the jet-setting, globe-trotting neopopulist intellectuals’
propensity to project the life style of the poor as being morally superior
and socially richer than that of the Western oppressors is hypocritical
to say the least … (and) fails to offer a progressive and feasible program
for change (Nanda 1991, 39).

 

Local Knowledge versus Modern Knowledge

We talked earlier about the Chipko movement in the Himalayan Garhwal region
of Uttar Pradesh, India for whom Shiva presumes to speak and for which she has
won international acclaim. When the Chipko movement’s battle for local control
of vital forest resources was taken up by Shiva and other “deep ecologists,”
the local struggles for resources and development were sacrificed to global
environmental concerns by groups that “tacitly support coercive conservation
tactics that weaken local claims to resource access for sustaining livelihoods”
(Rangan 2000, 239, see also Peluso, N. 1993).

Those who champion local wisdom too often respect it only so long as it is
in line with their ideological agenda. Ideas that are presumed to liberate end
up being instruments of oppression. Their advocates in developed countries seem
to live in a virtual Potemkin village, blissfully unaware that local knowledge
and control privileges traditional elites who tend to be dominating upper class
males who find the rhetoric of ecofeminism useful, but not its desire for equality
of classes, races and genders. Anyone who has been involved in economic development
is aware of the importance of local knowledge and the need to use it along with
any other available knowledge. But there is a very big difference between using
local knowledge and being dominated by it. And it is important to distinguish
between local knowledge and local myth, particularly myths of domination that
deny some people access to productive resources.

Intellectual elites in some developing countries such as Mexico promote local
use and custom (usos y costumbres) with the same outcome of male domination.
The modernism which opened up society and allowed racial and other minorities
to demand equal rights and women to challenge male domination is being denied
those who are most in need of change in poorer countries. “The oppressed Others
do not need patronizing affirmations of their ways of knowing, as much as they
need ways to challenge these ways of knowing” (Nanda 1996 and Nanda 2003b).

Modern knowledge allowed Nanda to escape from such practices as forced marriage
and other forms of domination but still allowed her to retain a sense of shared
identity with the culture of her origin. It is the rationality of the Enlightenment,
science and modernity that were instrumental in the creation of more tolerant
multi-cultural societies. As Nanda states it, “We Are All Hybrids Now” (Nanda
2001). I would add that we have been hybrids for some time. Over 60 years ago,
the anthropologist Ralph Linton had a sketch of a “solid American citizen” awakening
in a “bed built on a pattern which originated in the Near East” traversing the
day taking for granted the diverse global origins of the items of his daily
routine, ending it by thanking a “Hebrew deity in an Indo-European language
that he is 100% American (Linton 1963, 326-327).

More important, modernity allows one the freedom to participate fully in modernity
while still being able to retain a more localized personal identity. This is
a tolerance for diversity which is rare in the traditional societies that Shiva
seeks to promote. Modern science and technology are central to this hybridity.
As many of us (including Nanda) have long argued, calling science and technology
“Western” is to accept the 19th century claim of exclusive authorship to what
has been and remains a universal endeavor to which all peoples have contributed
just as they contributed to the artifacts of Linton’s 100% American.

Shiva and others can call modern science logophallocentric reductionism and
any number of other pejorative slogans in contrast to Prakriti or the feminine
principle, but, in fact, modern knowledge is liberating. Shiva and her cohorts
may feel “victimized” by “alien” ideas, but it is doubtful that this is the
case for many throughout the world who have benefited from it, whether by a
larger crop or lives saved by immunization or antibiotics. Nanda suggests that
it would be “interesting” to see the reaction of “untouchables” to the “knowledge
that DNA material … has the same composition in all living beings, be it brahmin
or bacterium. Or what would a women do with the knowledge that it is the chromosome
in sperm that determines the sex of the new born?” (1991, 38).

May we add that over 99.9% of the human genome is shared by all human beings
and that of the less than 0.1% that differentiate us, only about 3 to 5% of
it is between groups, with about 95% being intra group variation (Rosenberg
et al. 2002). If Shiva wishes to help women and those in need in India, she
should be promoting an understanding of DNA and molecular biology and its liberating
implications rather than fostering false fears of its use for human betterment.
Not only is the genome that unites us as humans vastly greater than that which
differentiates us, but the portion of the genome that defines our individual
biological differences within our culture is vastly greater than the minuscule
portion of the genome, 0.05%, that defines differences between groups (Rosenberg
et al. 2002, King et al. 2002 and Wade 2002).

We can argue as to how far we have come on the road to a more just society
or how much farther we have to go, but it is undeniable that in countries like
the United States, the rights of minorities and women have been greatly expanded
over the last decades. Shiva has been promoting a road to a past that never
existed and to a future where nobody really wants to go, including those who
blindly follow her.

 

*(The article is largely drawn from the author’s book manuscript, Origins of the Organic Agriculture Debate. Ames:
Iowa State Press, A Blackwell Scientific Publisher (in press) http://store.yahoo.com/isupress/0813805139.html. Additional material
is taken from two recently published books, Thomas R. DeGregori, The Environment,
Our Natural Resources, and Modern Technology. Ames: Iowa State Press, A
Blackwell Scientific Publisher and Thomas R. DeGregori, Bountiful Harvest:
Technology, Food Safety, And The Environment. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute,
which was originally published as Agriculture and Modern Technology: A Defense,
Ames: Iowa State University Press. Author’s homepage is http:www.uh.edu/~trdegreg).

 

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One day in 1995, biologist Armand Leroi walked into Manhattan’s Strand Bookshop
and made a remarkable discovery. He came across a rather plain-looking remaindered
volume bearing the title Cancer Selection . The postdoc student had not heard of the book or its author, James
Graham. But, Leroi recalls: “I’m a sucker for odd theories of evolution, so
I bought it.” It was an impulse decision that was to have profound implications.
For buried in the book was a bold new idea that has become a muse to the young
scientist.

The book was lying on a table in front of him when I visited his South London
flat. Leroi, a reader in evolutionary developmental biology at London’s Imperial
College, is an articulate and rather intense man with a hint of an accent betraying
his Dutch origins. He says he knew the book was not a work by a professional
scientist: “In fact, Graham’s very frank about this. His whole thing is he’s
an outsider.” At this point Leroi reads aloud from the book’s cover blurb. “James
Graham began work on his theory in 1977 while working as a senior executive
in a large multinational corporation. He now devotes his full time to writing.
He is a member of Mensa” He pauses. “Well, these are obviously not standard
scientific credentials. And scientists who are members of Mensa don’t usually
advertise it.”

In 1995, Leroi read Graham’s book but then put it aside. He now credits it
as having spurred him and two colleagues at Imperial to reconsider a piece of
received wisdom in the field of evolutionary biology. Like the book, Leroi’s
paper in last month’s Nature Reviews Cancer is titled “Cancer Selection”. In it, he asks whether cancer may
have played a hitherto overlooked role in the evolution of complex animal life.

Biologists view events that are both common and life-threatening as among the
driving forces of evolutionary change. The occasional creature born genetically
endowed to cope more successfully with such an event has a greater chance of
surviving to reproduce and pass on whatever useful genes underpinned its good
fortune. Thus is evolution guided by the adaptive hand of natural selection.

Cancer is a common occurrence, and certainly a life-threatening one. But biologists
generally regard it as having no effect on evolutionary change because it mostly
afflicts people beyond their child-bearing years. As a result, cancer cannot
affect their chances of passing on any protective genes they may possess to
the next generation.

But not all malignancies are confined to the elderly: a minority of children
also develop lethal cancers. Leroi and his co-authors suggest that perhaps childhood
cancer mostly affects organs that have undergone recent and rapid evolution.
It is a radical proposal. In the first page of their paper is an acknowledgement:
“The idea that changes in morphology and life-history can expose animals to
an increased risk of cancer has been argued forcefully by James Graham in his
1992 book Cancer Selection .”

Graham – now in his early 70s and living in Lexington, Virginia – started to
think about cancer after reading The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins. He had no particular knowledge of the disease.
What Graham knew about was manufacturing. He had spent much of his working life
in multinational corporations, and had become the chief financial officer of
a leading cosmetics company. From his industrial background he was well aware
that design improvements in a product often lead to an initial fall-off in the
quality of the manufactured goods. To retain the advantages of the improvement
while restoring the lost quality, adjustments have to be made to the production
process. Among living things, Graham reasoned, death caused by cancer might
play a similar role. It could serve to eliminate those individuals who inherited
a genetic programme unable to cope with any damaging side-effects associated
with change. Cancer, in other words, is evolution’s method of quality control.

Having received what he laughingly calls this “gift from the unconscious” he
began garnering the evidence. “I guess I went about it backwards,” Graham says.
“The typical scientist studies for years before he even attempts to deal with
evolutionary theory. I knew nothing when I had this idea.”

In a determined attempt to persuade others, Graham started writing to learned
journals, initially with some modesty. “I was looking for someone to come back
with intelligent comments about my inept efforts, and to advise me. That didn’t
happen. The reception I got was more like swatting a fly.”

He also wrote to evolutionary biologists. “I knocked on so many doors my knuckles
were bleeding. My dream was that someone would say to me, ‘Mr Graham, you’ve
got a good idea here. Why don’t we collaborate?’ I would have jumped at the
opportunity.” This didn’t happen either. Graham’s modesty began to evaporate.
One journal, Evolution , did take a more sympathetic view but an attempt to set up a collaboration fell through.

Eventually, he managed to get two severely pruned letters published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology .
“I then put on my PR hat,” Graham says. “I wrote a press release, and even hand-delivered
it to media people in Manhattan.” But there was still no serious consideration
from the scientific community.

Nevertheless, Graham persevered. “I was convinced I was correct, and if an
idea is correct it’s important.” As simple as that. And his conviction drove
him to the only remaining option: to publish himself. He did so under the imprint
Aculeus Press. Aculeus is Latin for needle or sting. The book received several reviews, not least in Nature
, whose critic wrote: “I, at least, like the idea.” But then silence.

Frustrated at years of being ignored by the scientific establishment, Graham’s
tone had, by this time, grown belligerent. Many biologists reading his book
would balk at the first chapter. Provocatively titled “Biology’s dirty little
secret” it dismisses conventional thinking about Darwinian evolution as “utter
nonsense” and an “intellectual error of the rankest sort”. Although the prose
is clear and readable it is also assertive, didactic and sometimes patronising.
The reader is constantly warned that all contrary views are foolish, absurd
or self-evidently wrong: “Unlike the old theory, mine is correct.”

Graham goes on to compare himself to Darwin (neither had been educated as a
scientist) and Friedrich Wegener of continental drift fame (as a meteorologist
not a geologist, Wegener too was an outsider). Thomas Kuhn’s classic The
Nature of Scientific Revolutions is wheeled out to remind us that people responsible for the “fundamental inventions
of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field
whose paradigm they change”. (The italics are Graham’s.) He even
compares his method of work to Albert Einstein’s.

At this point it is difficult not to lose patience. “Its whole tenor as it
rails against the biological establishment is that scientists are just too thick,”
Leroi says. “They’ve missed it all. They’re stuck in their paradigms of conventional
Darwinian evolution. But James Graham is going to set them right.”

Happily for Graham, Leroi had the forebearance to judge the work on its merits.
“When I’d originally read Graham’s book, I thought there was something in it.
But I forgot it,” he admits. Then he moved to the UK and started working with
another evolutionary biologist, Austin Burt. “I can’t remember whether he was
in my office or I was in his, but we looked on each other’s bookshelves and
said, ‘Gosh, Cancer Selection , you’ve got it too’.”

It turned out that Burt had also picked up a remaindered copy of the volume
in Moe’s Bookshop, Berkeley, while in California as a postdoc.

An extraordinary chain of coincidences that began with two postdoc biologists
buying the same rare book on opposite sides of America has now brought them
together in London with a third colleague, Vassiliki Koufopanou, to pen their
own thoughts on cancer.

They accept Graham’s premise that the disease is ancient and ubiquitous and
can be a force in natural selection. “That idea is the central one,” Leroi admits.
Needless to say, Graham doesn’t stop there. He reinterprets the diversity of
animals in the light of his discovery, opining, for example, that snails evolved
shells to protect themselves not from birds but from ultraviolet light and hence
cancer. “You can apply this approach to any feature of the biological world,”
Leroi says, “and Graham does so, willy-nilly.”

Graham claims that cancer selection is not a but the driving
force in the emergence of complex animal life. “He believes that with good,
clear thinking one can arrive at an answer,” Leroi says. “But this isn’t enough.

Because something could be a certain way doesn’t mean that it actually is
that way. All those biologists who spend their time trying to test
evolutionary theory – well, he thinks they’re just number-crunchers who can’t
see the big picture.”

Nevertheless, spurred on by Graham’s reasoning, Leroi began to consider cancer
in children. It turns out that only a few of the body’s organs are particularly
susceptible to childhood cancer, such as the bones and the brain. Both incorporate
recent evolutionary novelties. “As Homo sapiens, we are famous for our big brains that have evolved so enormously
over the past few million years,” Leroi says. And then there’s our pubertal
growth spurt.

“Chimpanzees don’t have it. It’s possible that the osteosarcomas that kids
get in the bones undergoing the growth spurt are a consequence of this being
an evolutionary novelty.” Although admitting that the evidence is circumstantial,
Leroi also thinks it is persuasive.

Childhood cancer kills before the age of reproduction, and is therefore amenable
to selection. Yet it continues to exist. Why? Because natural selection has
not yet had the time to deal with it.

The possibilities for speculation are limitless. For example, one outcome of
evolution can be an increase in size. But bigger animals have more dividing
cells, and therefore more cells to turn cancerous. So why don’t elephants suffer
cancer more than mice? Maybe they do; maybe it’s the success of large animals
in developing better anti-cancer mechanisms that has allowed them to become
large.

As diseases go, cancer is seldom far from our attention. The thought that this
much-feared disease might have played a major role in shaping our evolution
is tantalising. But it took an outsider to see this possibility, and the chance
interest of an insider to draw it to our attention.

This article first appeared in the Times Higher Education Supplement.
Check out their web page here.

A committee has met behind closed doors in London over the last two years to
decide the future of old bones in British cultural and scientific institutions.
Their deliberations and decision will have consequences for all of us. The skeletons
in the closets could tell us about history, humanity and our health, if only
we would let them.

There is a growing feeling amongst many in the museum profession that
old human remains should be returned to where they were originally found. Tony
Blair raised the issue of repatriation in 2000 when he agreed to increase efforts
to send back remains from Australian indigenous communities. The Department
for Culture Media and Sport subsequently set up a working group to examine the
issue and consider how the law might be changed to allow institutions to repatriate
all human remains.

The working group is made up of a few lawyers, museums professionals and anthropologists,
among them Dr Neil Chalmers, director of The Natural History Museum; Norman
Palmer, Professor of Commercial Law at University College London, and Tristram
Besterman, director of the Manchester University Museum, who was until recently
the convenor of the Museums Association Ethics Committee.

The group was asked to examine the legal status of human remains in the collections
of publicly funded Museums and Galleries in the UK and the powers of these institutions
to deaccession the remains. They had to consider the desirability of deaccession,
the form of changes in legislation that would be necessary, and a statement
of principles for guidance. The group will also make recommendations on how
to include non-human remains associated with human remains in these changes.

The group is expected to issue recommendations to government soon. The main
suggestion will be the relaxation of laws that currently prevent institutions
from parting with bones. Overall it will advocate the return, for moral reasons,
of skeletons presently held in national collections.

The bones are evidence from the past that speak to us about life from between
one century to many thousands of years ago. Under scrutiny they reveal patterns
of migration, the effect of environment upon body form, and the relationship
between different populations. We can learn who lived where and when, about
patterns in health, origin, gene flow and microevolutionary change

When the law changes, large and significant collections could be broken up
and sent away. A survey by the committee found human remains from all over the
world in more than sixty British museums. The Natural History Museum, for example,
has a broad collection of at least twenty thousand remains that are used extensively
by scientists for comparative research. University collections include those
held at Edinburgh and Cambridge.

If returned, the collections will probably be treated as sacred and then buried.
This has already happened in similar cases, and the likelihood that it will
continue was reinforced at the annual conference for the Museum Association.
The keynote speech was given by Rodney Dillon, a Tasmanian Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Commissioner who travels the world campaigning for the return
of old aboriginal skeletons. Speaking to a welcoming audience Dillon proclaimed,
‘We take pride in our people’s past. Without our remains where they should be,
buried where they belong, we can’t cope. People are walking around with their
heads down as their ancestors are not there.’

The pending ruling won’t remove all the material, of course. Not every group
wants the remains returned, and in some situations no link can be found to any
group at all. Some remains are of no research value, so there is no reason for
them to be in a lab collecting dust. And research may well continue around the
world. But on the whole it is likely that some of the most crucial material
about humanity will be lost.

America has gone further down this path and indicates what could happen in
the UK. In 1990, NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation
Act) set new criteria for who should make the decisions regarding the disposition
of human remains and artefacts. It is a mandate for researchers and museums
to return all human remains to their closest hereditary or cultural descendants.
The descendants decide the future of the bones whether they throw them into
the sea, examine them, or bury them six feet under.

There has been a steady impact upon collections. Museums backed by government
have sent back vital collections and remains, most of which have been covered
in soil. It is estimated that the Smithsonian alone has transferred more than
3,335 sets of human remains. In 1999 the Peabody Museum based at Harvard University
returned remains of nearly two thousand individuals to the Pecos and Jemez Pueblo
in New Mexico.

The Pecos were at their peak between 1300 and 1600 and ruled over a trade path
between the Pueblo farmers of the Rio Grande and tribes of the buffalo plains.
The bones have been studied since their discovery in 1915. The collection was
the largest available skeletal population from a single community and was large
enough to be statistically significant. As a result we have learned about the
influence of diet and disease on populations. We know more about osteoporosis,
head injuries, and the development of dental cavities. This was brought to an
end upon return of the collection when the bones were covered in earth. We can
learn nothing further from these bones.

The Kennewick Man found on a riverbank in Washington state in 1996 is one of
the most important skeletons to be found, but it cannot at present be examined.
Initial radiocarbon samples showed the bones to be around 9,500 years old, proving
the skeleton to be of Paleo-Indian age, and one of the oldest prehistoric individuals
to be found in North America. Preliminary analysis suggested the bones were
not American Indian but possibly European. Before further research could be
done the bones were confiscated. Under NAGPRA any human remains found in North
American that predate Columbus (1492), no matter how old the bones are, are
considered American Indian.

The case has been contested by anthropologists who have gone from court to
court asking to be allowed to examine the skeleton. Early this year a federal
judge denied the motion that had put their investigations on hold. Scientists
and historians held their breath eager to start work only to have their hopes
dashed a month later with another court hearing blocking the study of the bones.
Eight years after the discovery of an amazing piece of history, it still cannot
be investigated.

Legislation backing the right of one group to decide prevents us all from ever
finding out more, or challenging what we think we know. In the name of protecting
ancient and sacred beliefs, what ought to be a rational legal system is blocking
the furthering of our knowledge of humanity.

At the heart of the battle is the idea that a group identity owns the sole
rights to investigate the past and can prevent all others from doing so. Yet
the very idea of fixed groupings and cultural continuity over thousands of years
is a flawed supposition. The history of human beings is not one of separate
and permanent cultures, but one of continual migration, amalgamation, fission
and disintegration. Neither people nor language, and certainly not geographic
location remain stable for more than a small period of time. The idea that there
is a clear link to thousands of years ago is fundamentally wrong. It also advances
notions of fixed and separate races that should not be tolerated today. These
are ideas that science and a rational understanding of history have proven incorrect.

The idea that one group should dictate to others what can and cannot be investigated
is a serious and dangerous problem for all. The collections should belong to
the world rather than any one group. That one group can censor and obscure access
to knowledge on the basis of an identity from hundreds or thousands of years
ago, is seriously wrong and threatens the future of ideas and understanding.

At last years Museums Association conference, Rodney Dillon exclaimed in his
keynote address, ‘We have no clean water, there is petrol sniffing and crime
is rife.’ It was a moving speech that filled me with outrage. But he used this
terrible situation to argue that the bones should be returned and buried. ‘It
is no good worrying about the future, we need to think about the past,’ he claimed.

Destroying history, understanding, and knowledge is not the solution to the
very serious problems of this community. Indeed there is a great danger in rooting
today’s pressing problems in the bones from thousands of years ago. The current
circumstances of aborigines need to change in the here and now. Worrying about
the past only obscures the nature and urgency of the problems.

The UK working group is eager to send the bones back. Members admit their recommendations
will be "anti-scientific" but those in the nervous and unconfident
museum profession welcome an opportunity to improve their image. They feel that
they can benefit from this gesture. At a recent meeting on the bones someone
from the Heritage Lottery Fund declared we ‘need to understand the spiritual
role of these objects and sacred artefacts that can help us find our place.’
It seems that many are turning their backs on the scientific project of making
new discoveries, and instead want to find new meaning in old myths.

Secrets at our fingertips about the past are being covered up. The opportunity
to explore and ask questions of our ancestors, to reaffirm or challenge conventional
views, to evaluate what we discover against what we have been led to believe,
is at stake. Those in charge of cultural institutions should not turn their
backs on their responsibility to honour access to knowledge, for the sake of
humanity’s past and all our futures.

Tiffany Jenkins is a director at the Institute of Ideas.

Ever since science became a going concern in the ancient world, people have
asked: “What is this thing called science?” An early answer was given by Aristotle
in his Organon, its focus being largely on the logic and methodology
of scientific reasoning. Even if its substantive claims are now no longer central,
it inaugurated a tradition of philosophical thought about science that has had
wide acceptance by many scientists and philosophers; in their different ways
recent philosophers such as Carnap, Popper, Lakatos and the Bayesians are all
within this tradition. It involves belief in, and the application of, principles
of logic, methodology and of rationality generally; on the whole such principles
have been instrumental in leading scientists, if not others, to hold the scientific
beliefs they do.

But these days this tradition has fallen out of fashion and has been replaced
by the burgeoning fields of sociology of science, cultural studies of science,
constructivism, postmodernism, and the like. Reasons for the change in fashion
are several, one having to do with the political, economic and social uses of
science, some of which, rather than enhance our lives, threaten our very existence.
By blaming these ills on science itself, rather than, say, the uses to which
it is put by the military, industry, commerce, governments and others, advocates
of anti-science have placed the philosophical "ideologists" who talk
of the rationality of science under a cloud of suspicion.

Another reason has to do with the status claimed by science. In countering
claims about its rational basis, attempts have been made to de-legitimate and
"demystify" science. Here the attack on the Aristotelian tradition
is at its most profound. Science is alleged to be no more legitimate than many
other non-scientific practices such as those embodied in "local knowledge",
"ethnoscience" and what the postmodernist Lyotard calls "narratives".
To claim otherwise is to indulge in philosophical metanarratives towards which
Lyotard invites us to be incredulous, this being his definition of the postmodern.
Nor, it is also alleged, can science claim to give us a picture of what the
world is like, or a picture that is better than that given in non-sciences.
It is not that science gives us, as many philosophers claim, either an ideal
model of the world that approximates reality, or a picture that has only truthlikeness.
Rather science is likened to a discourse that gives no picture at all since
it fails to represent anything. Here critics of the Aristotelian tradition join
hands with those who have strongly empiricist and anti-realist or irrealist
inclinations about science.

So, what are the causes of our beliefs in matters scientific if the canons
of rationality are to be abandoned as an unbelievable metanarrative, or if scientific
beliefs do not represent? The Ancient Greek Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes,
rather than Aristotle, gives us a clue. Xenophanes was a sceptic who denied
that knowledge could be obtained by us humans; at best we merely have beliefs,
the truth or falsity of which will remain largely unknown to us. Our beliefs
are not a response to reality – but something else. Xenophanes illustrates his
view in the case of belief about God, but it has wider application. He says
of the causes of beliefs in the gods, or God: ‘Each group of men paint the shape
of the gods in a fashion similar to themselves; the Ethiopians draw them dark
and snub-nosed, the Thracians red-haired and blue-eyed’. And he has similar
remarks about the gods that cows, horses and lions would draw if they had hands;
they would, respectively, look just like cows, horses or lions.

One of the several points being made here is that if the gods are believed
to be dark and snub-nosed, then the cause of this belief has nothing to do with
the gods themselves; rather its cause has to do with some feature of ourselves.
The gods themselves are not causally involved in our representations of them;
rather it is something about ourselves that leads us to make the representations
we do. It is as if the gods drop out of the picture as far as the causes of
our beliefs is concerned; something completely non-god-like plays a causal role
in the production of belief. In so far as this something else concerns social
aspects of ourselves, then Xenophanes is the first sociologist of "knowledge"
or, as we should more correctly say, the first sociologist of belief.

Subsequent sociologists have extended Xenophanes’ views on the causes of beliefs
about God to scientific belief itself. A Xenophanes-like account of scientific
belief has come to be adopted by a wide range of people such as Marx, Mannheim,
contemporary sociologists of scientific belief, Foucault, Nietzsche, to mention
a few. Surprisingly, even though they differ markedly over what they claim are
the specific causes of belief, they all espouse the same general form of explanatory
theory which is intended to replace explanations that appeal to scientific rationality.
For many of them, scientific belief is not a rational response to the world;
scientific "knowledge", as the title of David Bloor’s influential
book has it, is nothing but social imagery.

Karl Marx was one of the first to suggest that the sciences, along with
ideology, forms of consciousness, religious belief and the like, are also determined,
shaped or caused by the prevailing forces and relations of production. Marx
proposed a two-tiered view of all social factors in his doctrine of historical
materialism. Forces and relations of production constituted the economic foundation
of society while anything that has to do with ideas ("forms of consciousness")
is to be placed in the superstructure, which depends, in some unspecified way,
on the foundation. Marx bequeathed to the sociology of belief a problem that
it has never been able to solve, viz., what exactly the relation of dependence
is between beliefs or ideas and their alleged foundation.

In his programmatic pronouncements about historical materialism, Marx does
not specifically mention science in the superstructure. But some of his other
comments do indicate that he saw science this way, while yet other comments
indicate that perhaps science might not fit into such a simple two-tiered model
after all. Either the model is deficient, or science is simply a third item
outside the two-tiered model. His followers from Engels onward were not so ambivalent;
they see science as something "determined" by forces and relations
of production.

Put this way, there is an evident confusion between the very content of science,
such as its laws or theories, and other aspects of science such as the choices
as to which lines of research to pursue, what programmes to fund, what applications
of theory might be the most commercially promising, and so on. A case might
be made for forces and relations of production playing some limited role concerning
the latter; but they play no role in determining the former, the very content
of science. It is here that those within the Aristotelian tradition of understanding
science would claim that methodological principles play an important role (along
with other factors) as a cause of belief. But this is denied by those who follow
Marx and Engels in regarding such beliefs, even in the very content of science,
as arising from the interplay between forces and relations of production.

As an illustration of not just the claims that Marxists might make, but also
most sociologists of scientific "knowledge", consider Forman’s account
of how German physicists in the Weimar period were caused to believe in physical
acausality. In Xenophanes style, the causes have nothing to do with their purported
objects, viz., indeterministic laws and happenings in the physical world. Rather
it is the social milieu of the physicists of the Weimar period with its Spenglerian
hostility to science and causality that is the cause of their beliefs. Forman’s
story does not appeal to any forces and relations of production; so it does
not fit Marx’s model. But as will be seen it supports other sociological stories
about the cause of belief.

Such sociological explanations of scientific belief can be used to expose the
"false consciousness" of the kind of explanations offered by philosophers
in terms of (belief in) principles of rational methodology, and to debunk them.
Physicists in Weimar Germany were deluded if they thought that methodological
principles played a role in bringing about their scientific beliefs. Their beliefs
are "social imagery’ caused by "socio-cultural conditions" (or
by belief in such conditions). They are not caused by any (belief in) rational
principles which accompany their theoretical and experimental endeavours. The
"ideological" pretensions of rationalist philosophers, still working
within the misleading framework bequeathed to us by the enlightenment, is now
exposed, and debunked, by the rival explanations of the sociologists of "knowledge".

However one might well ask how the sociologists manage to establish their claims
about the causes of belief if the do not accept some principles of rationality.
What they need to show, but do not, is that that the physicists’ current beliefs
in physics, and in methodology, are causally impotent in bringing about the
Weimar physicists’ belief in acausality; what allegedly does all the work is
their concurrent socio-cultural circumstance, or their beliefs about this. A
necessary smoke screen is raised to obscure their failure to employ causal methodology
at some point.

Karl Mannheim held that the two important progenitors of the sociology of “knowledge" were Marx and Nietzsche. We will turn to Nietzsche shortly.
Mannheim himself proposed a sociology of "knowledge" in which, as
he obscurely puts it, there is an “existential determination of knowledge”.
Mannheim does not get much further than talk of bare relations of thought or
knowledge to "historical-social existence". But he does importantly
suggest that there are some areas of thought or knowledge, such as mathematics
and science, that are independent of historical-social existence and that evolve
according to their own “inner dialectic” or “imminent laws”. This liberality
towards the independence of science is criticised by advocates of the Strong
Programme in the sociology of scientific "knowledge". They claim that
Mannheim lost his nerve in failing to extend the programme of the sociology
of “knowledge” to science and mathematics.

The most recent incarnation of the basic ideas of Marx and Mannheim can be
found in the Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific "knowledge".
Its central causality tenet tells us that all scientific belief or "knowledge"
is to be causally explained by social, historical or cultural conditions (or
belief in such conditions, an important ambiguity in many formulations
of the doctrine often passed over). These operate in conjunction with non-social
causes which, because of their general occurrence across humanity, cannot be
used to explain variation in belief; this is something only variable social
factors can provide. Importantly, there is no mention of (belief in) any norms
of method in the causality tenet as a possible cause of scientific belief. These
are ruled out as explainers not only on the basis of the naturalism espoused
by the Strong Programme, but also on the basis of the all-important symmetry
tenet which says that the same kind of explanation must apply to all beliefs
regardless of their truth or falsity, or their rationality or irrationality.
Since on their view the only viable explanations are those which appeal to socio-historical
causes, the symmetry tenet then rules out all explanation of scientific belief
on the basis of normative methodological principles. Such normative explanations
are said to be an unnatural intrusion upon the causal realm in which only naturalistic
social (and naturalistic non-social) factors can be causally efficacious in
bringing about belief. Such restrictions are imposed by the scientism of the
Strong Programme in which, like any other science, only naturalistic causal
factors and causal laws are to be admitted.

While there is some debate among sociologists of scientific “knowledge” as
to the applicability of all the tenets of the Strong Programme, the symmetry
tenet remains central. Explanations on the basis of rational principles of method
are out. If such principles are admitted, then they are only accepted locally
as what the community endorses; they have no further underlying authority or
status. At this point advocates of the Strong Programme recruit Wittgenstein’s
doctrine of rule following to their cause. In fact they adopt the communitarian
interpretation of rule following in which what the community determines is the
ultimate Court of Appeal and there is no further fact of the matter concerning
the correctness of any rule of method. The crucial issue here is whether advocates
of the Strong Programme deny that there is such a thing as scientific rationality
expressed in methodological principles; or whether they think there are such
principles but they are only locally accepted as such, and so are simply more
grist to the mill of the causality tenet of their programme. If the latter,
then advocates of the Strong Programme have undercut the authority of methodology
(they believe it can be given no account) and instead of continuing the traditional
discussion of scientific rationality they have, in effect, changed the subject
under debate.

Much criticism of the Strong Programme centres around the many case studies
its advocates have given of episodes in the history of science. One example
already mentioned is that of the physicists in Weimar Germany and the allegedly
social causes of their beliefs in acausality in physics. As always, the alleged
causes of belief are all socio-cultural with no role for principles of method.
But as already noted, principles of causal methodology have to be assumed in
order to establish any causal link between scientists’ social circumstances
and their scientific beliefs. So appeal to methods that are not merely locally
accepted as such cannot be avoided even within the Strong Programme if any case
studies in support of the central causality tenet are to be established. The
general verdict of outsiders is that causal methodology has been badly applied
and no convincing case has been established.

The power/knowledge doctrine of Michel Foucault bears a striking resemblance
to the claims of Marx, Mannheim and advocates of the Strong Programme. Where
he differs is in his claims about power and its alleged efficaciousness in bringing
about “knowledge”. In turn “knowledge” itself bringing about further power relations;
and so on in a spiral of successive connections. While Foucault denies that
“power is knowledge” he never makes fully clear what connection there
might be between power and "knowledge"; but he always assumes that
there must be one and never thinks that there might be none. He talks of power
producing "knowledge", or of their being no "knowledge"
without power, without further exploring the assumed connection. But as we have
seen, lack of clarity about connection is endemic in social studies of belief.

Foucault has many perorations about the nature of power. Since he conceives
it broadly as the effect that the actions of one person can have on the actions
of another (either opening them up or closing them down but not completely),
then power is simply everywhere, as Foucault notices. But this is more a defect
in his implausibly broad notion of power than a new interesting discovery about
its ubiquity. Nor does Foucault always talk about “knowledge” as being related
to power. Power is also linked to a whole host of other items such as truth,
discourses of truth, or simply discourses. Though many claim that Foucault restricted
his claims about power to "knowledge’ in the human sciences, there is in
fact evidence that Foucault also intended his doctrine to apply to other sciences
such as chemistry and mathematics. Whatever the scope of Foucault’s doctrine,
the boundaries of a plausible sociological investigation of aspects of science
have been burst and extended in a quite unfounded way into the sociology of
scientific “knowledge", that is, the very cognitive content of the sciences
themselves. Finally Foucault does claim that his own genealogy of power is a
better explainer of belief than, say, Marxism or Freudian analysis. But since
he never discusses what he means by "better explanation" in a methodological
context, or modifies the scope of his "power/knowledge" doctrine,
this quite late appeal to methodology can have little force.

Finally turn very briefly to Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the “will to
power” strongly influenced Foucault’s "power/knowledge" doctrine.
Nietzsche’s doctrine shares the same form as all the other doctrines mentioned.
But it is broader in that the "will to power" is both a metaphysical
and psycho-social force at work in all of nature and life, including human life.
Understood as a primitive psychological drive within people, it is causally
efficacious in bringing about not only our beliefs in ordinary matters and in
morality, but also our presuppositional philosophical beliefs in logic, in the
identity that ordinary objects have and in the existence of ordinary everyday
objects themselves. Nietzsche’s doctrine is best illustrated in the case he
makes about the origins of Christian moral values such as altruism, pity and
the like. He famously claims that they are due to the resentment of those “slaves
of morality” who advocated them while overthrowing the values of "master"
morality. Here the will to power operates as a psychological drive of resentment
in people causing them to bring about, and maintain, certain moral beliefs.
In allegedly uncovering the sordid origins of Christian morality in resentment,
Nietzsche hoped to debunk it.

Nietzsche is a master at proposing theories of the origins of our beliefs that
rival those that are commonly accepted. In this way he hopes to unmask them,
and then debunk them. The double unmasking/debunking move makes him the darling
of postmodernism. This double move can be played out not only in the sphere
of moral belief, but in any sphere of belief, such as our beliefs concerning
logic, or truth, or our everyday framework of belief about objects. One of Nietzsche’s
prime targets in this respect is Kant who, like a good modernist, attempted
to give, as far as is possible, rational grounds for our ordinary beliefs and
for morality. But one can be a critic of much of Kantian philosophy without
accepting Nietzsche’s critique and its alternative worldview. What is important
for our purposes is that the Nietzschean unmasking and debunking moves have
wide application. Nietzsche extended it to a "genealogical" critique
of truth and our pursuit of it; and it can be extended to the sciences and the
methodological principles that many of a rational persuasion believe have been
instrumental in the growth of science knowledge.

Those of a modernist persuasion hold that principles of rationality and of
methodology can play an important role in bringing about beliefs in science
and elsewhere, for some of us some of the time. But this is not so for the writers
mentioned. Marxists regard all scientific belief as a response to the forces
and relations of production. Mannheim holds that most belief is a response to
the conditions of social existence in which we think and believe. Advocates
of the Strong Programme postulate a strong causal role for social, historical
and cultural factors in bringing about all belief. Foucault sees power is the
prime mover of all belief in the sciences. And finally Nietzsche claims that
the will to power operates even in the sphere of belief.

All these theorists have an in-house disagreement about what does the causal
work, be it forces and relations of production, existential conditions, socio-historico-cultural
factors, power or "will to power". But they all agree that, whatever
it is, it cannot be anything rational. Rational explanations of belief are mystifications
that need to be dragged out, unmasked and debunked. There are alternative explanations
for why we believe what we do (though the grounds on why they may be better
explanations remain obscure). In some cases they might be right – but not always.
Each case needs to be determined on its merits. Moreover, one might well ask
what kind of explanations do they offer. Often their model of explanation is
one that a rationalist could also accept; what they resist are any explanations
that appeal to rationality or methodology. But their reasons (assuming they
believe that holding reasons can be efficacious) for the wide scope of their
claims are quite lame.

What these theorists might also jibe at is that their own belief in the very
doctrines they proclaim is itself merely an instance of the social, historical,
cultural or psycho-causal theories of belief they advocate. More often than
not they advance what they take to be profound truths; but at the same time
they take themselves to be unmasking and debunking the failed modernist programme,
part of which is the unmasking and debunking of the very notion of truth they
employ. Their own views often fall victim to arguments similar to those Plato
first advanced against the advocates of power, rhetoric and relativism about
truth that he encountered in his own time from Protagoras to Callicles. The
first time these considerations were played out they might have been tragedy
(for Plato’s opponents); but to repeat them now is only farce.

Robert Nola’s most recent book is Rescuing Reason: A Critique of Anti-Rationalist Views of Science and Knowledge (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, V. 230), published by Kluwer. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland.

Here is a story you probably haven’t heard, about how a team of American researchers
inadvertently introduced a virus into a third world country they were studying.⁽¹⁾
They were experts in their field, and they had the best intentions; they thought
they were helping the people they were studying, but in fact they had never
really seriously considered whether what they were doing might have ill effects.
It had not occurred to them that a side-effect of their research might be damaging
to the fragile ecology of the country they were studying. The virus they introduced
had some dire effects indeed: it raised infant mortality rates, led to a general
decline in the health and wellbeing of women and children, and, perhaps worst
of all, indirectly undermined the only effective political force for democracy
in the country, strengthening the hand of the traditional despot who ruled the
nation. These American researchers had something to answer for, surely, but
when confronted with the devastation they had wrought, their response was frustrating,
to say the least: they still thought that what they were doing was, all things
considered, in the interests of the people, and declared that the standards
by which this so-called devastation was being measured were simply not appropriate.
Their critics, they contended, were trying to impose “Western” standards in
a cultural environment that had no use for such standards. In this strange defense
they were warmly supported by the country’s leaders–not surprisingly–and little
was heard–not surprisingly–from those who might have been said, by
Western standards, to have suffered as a result of their activities.

These researchers were not biologists intent on introducing new strains of
rice, nor were they agri-business chemists testing new pesticides, or doctors
trying out vaccines that couldn’t legally be tested in the U.S.A. They were
postmodernist science critics and other multiculturalists who were arguing,
in the course of their professional researches on the culture and traditional
“science” of this country, that Western science was just one among many equally
valid narratives, not to be “privileged” in its competition with native traditions
which other researchers–biologists, chemists, doctors and others–were eager
to supplant. The virus they introduced was not a macromolecule but a meme (a
replicating idea): the idea that science was a “colonial” imposition, not a
worthy substitute for the practices and beliefs that had carried the third-world
country to its current condition. And the reason you have not heard of this
particular incident is that I made it up, to dramatize the issue and to try
to unsettle what seems to be current orthodoxy among the literati about
such matters. But it is inspired by real incidents–that is to say, true reports.
Events of just this sort have occurred in India and elsewhere, reported, movingly,
by a number of writers, among them:

Meera Nanda, “The Epistemic Charity of the Social Constructivist Critics of
Science and Why the Third World Should Refuse the Offer,” in N. Koertge, ed.,
A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science, Oxford
University Press, 1998, pp286-311

Reza Afshari, “An Essay on Islamic Cultural Relativism in the Discourse of
Human Rights,” in Human Rights Quarterly, 16, 1994, pp.235-76.

Susan Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” Boston Review, October/November,
1997, pp 25-28.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for
Rationality, London and New Jersey, Zed Books Ltd. 1991.

My little fable is also inspired by a wonderful remark of E. O. Wilson, in
Atlantic Monthly a few months ago: “Scientists, being held responsible
for what they say, have not found postmodernism useful.” Actually, of course,
we are all held responsible for what we say. The laws of libel and slander,
for instance, exempt none of us, but most of us–including scientists in many
or even most fields–do not typically make assertions that, independently of
libel and slander considerations, might bring harm to others, even indirectly.
A handy measure of this fact is the evident ridiculousness we discover in the
idea of malpractice insurance for . . . . literary critics, philosophers, mathematicians,
historians, cosmologists. What on earth could a mathematician or literary critic
do, in the course of executing her profession duties, that might need the security
blanket of malpractice insurance? She might inadvertently trip a student in
the corridor, or drop a book on somebody‘s head, but aside from such
outré side-effects, our activities are paradigmatically innocuous.
One would think. But in those fields where the stakes are higher–and more direct–there
is a longstanding tradition of being especially cautious, and of taking particular
responsibility for ensuring that no harm results (as explicitly honored in the
Hippocratic Oath). Engineers, knowing that thousands of people’s safety may
depend on the bridge they design, engage in focussed exercises with specified
constraints designed to determine that, according to all current knowledge,
their designs are safe and sound. Even economists–often derided for the risks
they take with other people’s livelihoods–when they find themselves
in positions to endorse specific economic measures considered by government
bodies or by their private clients, are known to attempt to put a salutary strain
on their underlying assumptions, just to be safe. They are used to asking themselves,
and to being expected to ask themselves: “What if I’m wrong?” We others seldom
ask ourselves this question, since we have spent our student and professional
lives working on topics that are, according both to tradition and common sense,
incapable of affecting any lives in ways worth worrying about. If my topic is
whether or not Vlastos had the best interpretation of Plato’s Parmenides
or how the wool trade affected imagery in Tudor poetry, or what the best version
of string theory says about time, or how to recast proofs in topology in some
new formalism, if I am wrong, dead wrong, in what I say, the only damage I am
likely to do is to my own scholarly reputation. But when we aspire to have a
greater impact on the “real” (as opposed to “academic”) world– and many philosophers
do aspire to this today–we need to adopt the attitudes and habits of these
more applied disciplines. We need to hold ourselves responsible for what we
say, recognizing that our words, if believed, can have profound effects for
good or ill.

When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once received a visit
from a colleague from the Comparative Literature Department, an eminent and
fashionable literary theorist, who wanted some help from me. I was flattered
to be asked, and did my best to oblige, but the drift of his questions about
various philosophical topics was strangely perplexing to me. For quite a while
we were getting nowhere, until finally he managed to make clear to me what he
had come for. He wanted “an epistemology,” he said. An epistemology.
Every self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that season,
it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology
to wear–it was the very next fashion, he was sure, and he wanted the dernier
cri in epistemologies. It didn’t matter to him that it be sound, or defensible,
or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different
and stylish. Accessorize, my good fellow, or be overlooked at the party.

At that moment I perceived a gulf between us that I had only dimly seen before.
It struck me at first as simply the gulf between being serious and being frivolous.
But that initial surge of self-righteousness on my part was, in fact, a naive
reaction. My sense of outrage, my sense that my time had been wasted by this
man’s bizarre project, was in its own way as unsophisticated as the reaction
of the first-time theater-goer who leaps on the stage to protect the heroine
from the villain. “Don’t you understand?” we ask incredulously. “It’s make
believe. It’s art. It isn’t supposed to be taken literally!”
Put in that context, perhaps this man’s quest was not so disreputable after
all. I would not have been offended, would I, if a colleague in the Drama Department
had come by and asked if he could borrow a few yards of my books to put on the
shelves of the set for his production of Tom Stoppard’s play, Jumpers.
What if anything would be wrong in outfitting this fellow with a snazzy set
of outrageous epistemological doctrines with which he could titillate or confound
his colleagues?

What would be wrong would be that since this man didn’t acknowledge the gulf,
didn’t even recognize that it existed, my acquiescence in his shopping spree
would have contributed to the debasement of a precious commodity, the erosion
of a valuable distinction. Many people, including both onlookers and participants,
don’t see this gulf, or actively deny its existence, and therein lies the problem.
The sad fact is that in some intellectual circles, inhabited by some of our
more advanced thinkers in the arts and humanities, this attitude passes as a
sophisticated appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all
knowledge claims. In fact this opinion, far from being sophisticated, is the
height of sheltered naiveté, made possible only by flatfooted ignorance
of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power. Like many
another naif, these thinkers, reflecting on the manifest inability of their
methods of truth-seeking to achieve stable and valuable results, innocently
generalize from their own cases and conclude that nobody else knows how
to discover the truth either.

Among those who contribute to this problem, I am sorry to say, is, my good
friend Dick Rorty. Richard Rorty and I have been constructively disagreeing
with each other for over a quarter of a century now. Each of us has taught the
other a great deal, I believe, in the reciprocal process of chipping away at
our residual points of disagreement. I can’t name a living philosopher from
whom I have learned more. Rorty has opened up the horizons of contemporary philosophy,
shrewdly showing us philosophers many things about how our own projects have
grown out of the philosophical projects of the distant and recent past, while
boldly describing and prescribing future paths for us to take. But there is
one point over which he and I do not agree at all–not yet–and that concerns
his attempt over the years to show that philosophers’ debates about Truth and
Reality really do erase the gulf, really do license a slide into some form of
relativism. In the end, Rorty tells us, it is all just “conversations,” and
there are only political or historical or aesthetic grounds for taking one role
or another in an ongoing conversation.

Rorty has often tried to enlist me in his campaign, declaring that he could
find in my own work one explosive insight or another that would help him with
his project of destroying the illusory edifice of objectivity. One of his favorite
passages is the one with which I ended my book Consciousness Explained
(1991):

It’s just a war of metaphors, you say–but metaphors are not “just” metaphors;
metaphors are the tools of thought. No one can think about consciousness without
them, so it is important to equip yourself with the best set of tools available.
Look what we have built with our tools. Could you have imagined it without them?
[p.455]

“I wish,” Rorty says, “he had taken one step further, and had added that such
tools are all that inquiry can ever provide, because inquiry is never ‘pure’
in the sense of [Bernard] Williams’ ‘project of pure inquiry.’ It is always
a matter of getting us something we want.” (“Holism, Intrinsicality, Transcendence,”
in Dahlbom, ed., Dennett and his Critics. 1993.) But I would never take
that step, for although metaphors are indeed irreplaceable tools of thought,
they are not the only such tools. Microscopes and mathematics and MRI scanners
are among the others. Yes, any inquiry is a matter of getting us something we
want: the truth about something that matters to us, if all goes as it should.

When philosophers argue about truth, they are arguing about how not to inflate
the truth about truth into the Truth about Truth, some absolutistic doctrine
that makes indefensible demands on our systems of thought. It is in this regard
similar to debates about, say, the reality of time, or the reality of the past.
There are some deep, sophisticated, worthy philosophical investigations into
whether, properly speaking, the past is real. Opinion is divided, but you entirely
misunderstand the point of these disagreements if you suppose that they undercut
claims such as the following:

Life first emerged on this planet more than three thousand million years ago.
The Holocaust happened during World War II.
Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald at 11:21 am, Dallas time, November
24, 1963.

These are truths about events that really happened. Their denials are falsehoods.
No sane philosopher has ever thought otherwise, though in the heat of battle,
they have sometimes made claims that could be so interpreted.

Richard Rorty deserves his large and enthralled readership in the arts and
humanities, and in the “humanistic” social sciences, but when his readers enthusiastically
interpret him as encouraging their postmodernist skepticism about truth, they
trundle down paths he himself has refrained from traveling. When I press him
on these points, he concedes that there is indeed a useful concept of truth
that survives intact after all the corrosive philosophical objections have been
duly entered. This serviceable, modest concept of truth, Rorty acknowledges,
has its uses: when we want to compare two maps of the countryside for reliability,
for instance, or when the issue is whether the accused did or did not commit
the crime as charged.

Even Richard Rorty, then, acknowledges the gap, and the importance of the
gap, between appearance and reality, between those theatrical exercises that
may entertain us without pretence of truth-telling, and those that aim for,
and often hit, the truth. He calls it a “vegetarian” concept of truth. Very
well, then, let’s all be vegetarians about the truth. Scientists never wanted
to go the whole hog anyway.

So now, let’s ask about the sources or foundations of this mild, uncontroversial,
vegetarian concept of truth.

Right now, as I speak, billions of organisms on this planet are engaged in
a game of hide and seek. It is not just a game for them. It is a matter of life
and death. Getting it right, not making mistakes, has been of paramount
importance to every living thing on this planet for more than three billion
years, and so these organisms have evolved thousands of different ways of finding
out about the world they live in, discriminating friends from foes, meals from
mates, and ignoring the rest for the most part. It matters to them that they
not be misinformed about these matters–indeed nothing matters more–but they
don’t, as a rule, appreciate this. They are the beneficiaries of equipment exquisitely
designed to get what matters right but when their equipment malfunctions and
gets matters wrong, they have no resources, as a rule, for noticing this, let
alone deploring it. They soldier on, unwittingly. The difference between how
things seem and how things really are is just as fatal a gap for them as it
can be for us, but they are largely oblivious to it. The recognition
of the difference between appearance and reality is a human discovery. A few
other species–some primates, some cetaceans, maybe even some birds–shows signs
of appreciating the phenomenon of “false belief”–getting it wrong. They
exhibit sensitivity to the errors of others, and perhaps even some sensitivity
to their own errors as errors, but they lack the capacity for the reflection
required to dwell on this possibility, and so they cannot use this sensitivity
in the deliberate design of repairs or improvements of their own seeking gear
or hiding gear. That sort of bridging of the gap between appearance and reality
is a wrinkle that we human beings alone have mastered.

We are the species that discovered doubt. Is there enough food laid by for
winter? Have I miscalculated? Is my mate cheating on me? Should we have moved
south? Is it safe to enter this cave? Other creatures are often visibly agitated
by their own uncertainties about just such questions, but because they cannot
actually ask themselves these questions, they cannot articulate their
predicaments for themselves or take steps to improve their grip on the truth.
They are stuck in a world of appearances, making the best they can of how things
seem and seldom if ever worrying about whether how things seem is how they truly
are.

We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that
epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. Wanting to keep
better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies,
we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions,
passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring, and arithmetic,
and maps, and writing. These communicative and recording innovations come with
a built-in ideal: truth. The point of asking questions is to find true
answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of
making maps is to find your way to your destination. There may be an
Island of the Colour-blind (allowing Oliver Sacks his usual large dose of poetic
license), but no Island of the People Who Do Not Recognize Their Own Children.
The Land of the Liars could exist only in philosophers’ puzzles; there are no
traditions of False Calendar Systems for mis-recording the passage of time.
In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture.

We human beings use our communicative skills not just for truth-telling, but
also for promise-making, threatening, bargaining, story-telling, entertaining,
mystifying, inducing hypnotic trances, and just plain kidding around, but prince
of these activities is truth-telling, and for this activity we have invented
ever better tools. Alongside our tools for agriculture, building, warfare, and
transportation, we have created a technology of truth: science. Try to draw
a straight line, or a circle, “freehand.” Unless you have considerable artistic
talent, the result will not be impressive. With a straight edge and a compass,
on the other hand, you can practically eliminate the sources of human variability
and get a nice clean, objective result, the same every time.

Is the line really straight? How straight is it? In response to these questions,
we develop ever finer tests, and then tests of the accuracy of those tests,
and so forth, bootstrapping our way to ever greater accuracy and objectivity.
Scientists are just as vulnerable to wishful thinking, just as likely to be
tempted by base motives, just as venal and gullible and forgetful as the rest
of humankind. Scientists don’t consider themselves to be saints; they don’t
even pretend to be priests (who according to tradition are supposed to do a
better job than the rest of us at fighting off human temptation and frailty).
Scientists take themselves to be just as weak and fallible as anybody else,
but recognizing those very sources of error in themselves and in the groups
to which they belong, they have devised elaborate systems to tie their own hands,
forcibly preventing their frailties and prejudices from infecting their results.

It is not just the implements, the physical tools of the trade, that are designed
to be resistant to human error. The organization of methods is also under severe
selection pressure for improved reliability and objectivity. The classic example
is the double blind experiment, in which, for instance, neither the human subjects
nor the experimenters themselves are permitted to know which subjects get the
test drug and which the placebo, so that nobody’s subliminal hankerings and
hunches can influence the perception of the results. The statistical design
of both individual experiments and suites of experiments, is then embedded in
the larger practice of routine attempts at replication by independent investigators,
which is further embedded in a tradition–flawed, but recognized–of publication
of both positive and negative results.

What inspires faith in arithmetic is the fact that hundreds of scribblers,
working independently on the same problem, will all arrive at the same answer
(except for those negligible few whose errors can be found and identified to
the mutual satisfaction of all). This unrivalled objectivity is also found in
geometry and the other branches of mathematics, which since antiquity have been
the very model of certain knowledge set against the world of flux and controversy.
In Plato’s early dialogue, the Meno, Socrates and the slave boy work
out together a special case of the Pythagorean theorem. Plato’s example expresses
the frank recognition of a standard of truth to be aspired to by all truth-seekers,
a standard that has not only never been seriously challenged, but that has been
tacitly accepted–indeed heavily relied upon, even in matters of life and death–by
the most vigorous opponents of science. (Or do you know a church that keeps
track of its flock, and their donations, without benefit of arithmetic?)

Yes, but science almost never looks as uncontroversial, as cut-and-dried,
as arithmetic. Indeed rival scientific factions often engage in propaganda battles
as ferocious as anything to be found in politics, or even in religious conflict.
The fury with which the defenders of scientific orthodoxy often defend their
doctrines against the heretics is probably unmatched in other arenas of human
rhetorical combat. These competitions for allegiance–and, of course, funding–are
designed to capture attention, and being well-designed, they typically succeed.
This has the side effect that the warfare on the cutting edge of any science
draws attention away from the huge uncontested background, the dull metal heft
of the axe that gives the cutting edge its power. What goes without saying,
during these heated disagreements, is an organized, encyclopedic collection
of agreed-upon, humdrum scientific fact.

Robert Proctor usefully draws our attention to a distinction between neutrality
and objectivity.⁽²⁾ Geologists, he notes, know
a lot more about oil-bearing shales than about other rocks–for the obvious
economic and political reasons–but they do know objectively about oil
bearing shales. And much of what they learn about oil-bearing shales can be
generalized to other, less favored rocks. We want science to be objective; we
should not want science to be neutral. Biologists know a lot more about the
fruit-fly, Drosophila, than they do about other insects–not because
you can get rich off fruit flies, but because you can get knowledge out of fruit
flies easier than you can get it out of most other species. Biologists also
know a lot more about mosquitoes than about other insects, and here it is because
mosquitoes are more harmful to people than other species that might be much
easier to study. Many are the reasons for concentrating attention in science,
and they all conspire to making the paths of investigation far from neutral;
they do not, in general, make those paths any less objective. Sometimes, to
be sure, one bias or another leads to a violation of the canons of scientific
method. Studying the pattern of a disease in men, for instance, while neglecting
to gather the data on the same disease in women, is not just not neutral; it
is bad science, as indefensible in scientific terms as it is in political terms.

It is true that past scientific orthodoxies have themselves inspired policies
that hindsight reveals to be seriously flawed. One can sympathize, for instance,
with Ashis Nandy, editor of the passionately anti-scientific anthology, Science,
Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press,
1988. Having lived through Atoms for Peace, and the Green Revolution, to name
two of the most ballyhooed scientific juggernauts that have seriously disrupted
third world societies, he sees how “the adaptation in India of decades-old western
technologies are advertised and purchased as great leaps forward in science,
even when such adaptations turn entire disciplines or areas of knowledge into
mere intellectual machines for the adaptation, replication and testing of shop-worn
western models which have often been given up in the west itself as too dangerous
or as ecologically non-viable.” (p8) But we should recognize this as a political
misuse of science, not as a fundamental flaw in science itself.

The methods of science aren’t foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible.
Just as important: there is a tradition of criticism that enforces improvement
whenever and wherever flaws are discovered. The methods of science, like everything
else under the sun, are themselves objects of scientific scrutiny, as method
becomes methodology, the analysis of methods. Methodology in turn falls
under the gaze of epistemology, the investigation of investigation itself–nothing
is off limits to scientific questioning. The irony is that these fruits of scientific
reflection, showing us the ineliminable smudges of imperfection, are sometimes
used by those who are suspicious of science as their grounds for denying it
a privileged status in the truth-seeking department–as if the institutions
and practices they see competing with it were no worse off in these regards.
But where are the examples of religious orthodoxy being simply abandoned in
the face of irresistible evidence? Again and again in science, yesterday’s heresies
have become today’s new orthodoxies. No religion exhibits that pattern in its
history.

1. Portions of this paper are derived from “Faith in the
Truth,” my Amnesty Lecture, Oxford, February 17, 1997.
2. Value-Free Science?, Harvard Univ. Press, 1991.

This is the final draft of a paper given at the 1998 World Congress of Philosophy. Daniel Dennett’s most recent book, Freedom Evolves, has just been published by Viking Press.

There are philosophers (‘absolutists’) who like to stress truth, objectivity, rationality, and knowledge. Then there are others (‘relativists’) who like to stress contingency, mutability, culture, historicity, situatedness. The first group think that the second group have no standards. The second group are accused of encouraging ‘postmodernism’, or the licentious thinking and bullshitting that goes on in some parts of the humanities. The second group think the first group are conservative and complacent, and that their words simply mark fetishes.

I like to illustrate the way these groups talk past each other with an anecdote of a friend of mine (I apologise to readers of my book Being Good, where I also tell this story). He was present at a high-powered ethics institute which had put on a forum in which representatives of the great religions held a panel. First the Buddhist talked of the ways to calm, the mastery of desire, the path of enlightenment. The panellists all said ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’. Then the Hindu talked of the cycles of suffering and birth and rebirth, the teachings of Krishna and the way to release, and they all said ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’. And so on, until the Catholic priest talked of the message of Jesus Christ, the promise of salvation and the way to life eternal, and they all said ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’. And he thumped the table and shouted: ‘No! It’s not a question of it if works for me! It’s the true word of the living God, and if you don’t believe it you’re all damned to Hell!’

And they all said: ‘Wow, terrific, if that works for you that’s great’.

The joke here lies in the mismatch between what the priest intends – a claim to unique authority and truth – and what he is heard as offering, which is one more saying like all the others. Of course that person talks of certainty and truth, says the relativist. That’s just his certainty and truth, made absolute in his eyes, which means no more than: made into a fetish.

Having said this, the relativist need not attack people for putting words like ‘true’ on their doctrines. Of course people do this, because to have a belief and to hold it to be true are the same thing. In the story the priest will not be the only one who seizes on the word ‘true’: a Buddhist holds Buddhist doctrine to be true, and a Hindu holds Hindu doctrine to be true, just as inevitably.

So far the absolutists seem to be on the defensive. The relativists mock them for adding nothing with their big words, or disapprove of them for being insufficiently tolerant of other perspectives and points of view. And toleration is surely a Good Thing. But is the relativist view really so attractive?

Suppose I believe that fox-hunting is cruel and should be banned. And then I come across someone (Genghis, let us call him) who holds that it is not cruel, and should be allowed. We dispute, and perhaps neither of us can convince the other. Suppose now a relativist (Rosie) comes in, and mocks our conversation. ‘You absolutists’, she says, ‘always banging on as if there is just one truth. What you don’t realize is that there is a plurality of truths. It’s true for you that fox-hunting should be banned – but don’t forget that it’s true for Genghis that it should not’

How does Rosie’s contribution help? Indeed, what does it mean? ‘It’s true for me that hunting should be banned’ just means that I believe that hunting should be banned. And the same thing said about Genghis just means that he believes the opposite. But we already knew that: that‘s why we are in disagreement!

Perhaps Rosie is trying to get us to see that there is no real disagreement. But how can that be so? I want people to aim at one outcome, that hunting be banned, and Genghis wants another. At most one of us can succeed, and I want it to be me. Rosie cannot stop us from seeing each other as opponents.

Perhaps Rosie is trying to get us to respect and tolerate each other’s point of view. But why should I respect and tolerate another point of view simply on the grounds that someone else holds it? I already have my suspicions of Genghis: in my book he is perhaps cruel and insensitive, so why should his point of view be ‘tolerated’? And in any case, I should be suspicious of any encouragement to toleration here. The whole point of my position is that hunting should not be tolerated – it should be banned. Tolerating Genghis’s point of view is too near to tolerating Genghis’s hunting, which I am not going to do.

Rosie seems to be skating on thin ice in another way as well. Suppose she gets ruffled by what I have just written: ‘Look’, she says, ‘you must learn that Genghis is a human being like you; respect and toleration of his views and his activities are essential. If you did not fetishize absolute truth you would see that’. I on the other hand say ‘toleration of Genghis is just soggy; it is time to take a stand’. If Rosie thumps the table and says that tolerating Genghis is really good, then isn’t she sounding just like the fetishists she mocked? She has taken the fact that there are no absolute values to justify elevating toleration into an absolute value!

Rosie has to avoid that contradiction. So perhaps she needs to say that she has her truth (tolerating Genghis is good) and I have mine (tolerating Genghis is bad) and that’s the end of it. But that sounds like bowing out of the conversation, leaving Genghis and I to go on arguing exactly as before. In practice, Rosie’s intervention hasn’t helped at all. She hasn’t made foxes, or those who hunt them, look one jot more or less likeable. Her intervention seems just to have been a distraction.

Perhaps Rosie wanted to stop the conversation: she is like someone asking ‘Will you two just stop bickering?’ This can be a good thing to say. Some conversations are pointless. If you and I are in an art gallery, and I say Rembrandt is better than Vermeer and you say Vermeer is better than Rembrandt, and we start bickering about it, the best advice may well be that we stop. Perhaps we can agree to differ, because nothing practical hangs on our different taste. It is not as if we have enough money to buy just one, and I want it to be one and you want it to be the other (on the other hand, it does not follow that our conversation is useless. We might be forcing each other to look closer and see things we would otherwise have missed, or to reconsider what we find valuable about art in general).

But however it may be in the art gallery, in moral issues we often cannot agree to differ. Agreeing to differ with Genghis is in effect agreeing to tolerate fox-hunting, and my whole stance was against that. Moral issues are frequently ones where we want to coordinate, and where we are finding what to forbid and what to allow. Naturally, the burden falls on those who want to forbid: in liberal societies, freedom is the default. But this cannot be a carte blanche for any kind of behaviour, however sickening or distressful or damaging. It is just not true that anything goes. So conversation has to go on about what to allow and what to forbid. Again, Rosie is not helping: she seems just to be a distraction.

So why do people like to chip in with remarks like ‘it’s all relative’ or ‘I suppose it depends on your point of view’? What you say of course depends on your point of view, and whether another person agrees with it depends on their point of view. But the phrase is dangerous, and can be misleading. The spatial metaphor of points of view might be taken to imply that all points of view are equally ‘valid’. After all, there is no one place from which it is right to look at the Eiffel tower, and indeed no one place that is better than another, except for one purpose or another. But when it comes to our commitments, we cannot think this. If I believe that O.J. Simpson murdered his wife, then I cannot at the same time hold that the point of view that he did not, is equally good. It follows from my belief that anyone who holds he did not murder his wife is wrong. They may be excusable, but they are out of touch or misled or thinking wishfully. It is only if I do not hold a belief at all, but am just indulging in an idle play of fancy, that I can admit that an inconsistent fancy is equally good. If I like fancying Henry VIII to have been a disguised Indian, I am not in opposition to someone who enjoys fancying him to have been a Chinese. But that’s just the difference between fiction, where the brakes are off, and history, where they are on.

Relativists are more apt to stay away from mundane historical truth. Relativism really grips us when we are talking of contested moral issues, although it also rears its head when we think of difficult theoretical issues. In these cases we are more apt to think that ‘there is no fact of the matter’. Some philosophers think that this is true in such areas, and that our commitments are better seen as taking up stances or attitudes, rather than believing in strict and literal truths. But to have a stance is to stand somewhere, and in practical matters just as in history, that means being set to disagree with those who stand somewhere else.

If relativism, then, is just a distraction, is it a valuable one or a dangerous one? I think it all depends. Sometimes we need reminding of alternative ways of thinking, alternative practices and ways of life, from which we can learn and which we have no reason to condemn. We need to appreciate our differences. Hence, in academic circles, relativism has often been associated with the expansion of literature and history to include alternatives that went unnoticed in previous times. That is excellent. But sometimes we need reminding that there is time to draw a line and take a stand, and that alternative ways of looking at things can be corrupt, ignorant, superstitious, wishful, out of touch, or plain evil. It is a moral issue, whether we tolerate and learn or regret and oppose. Rosie the relativist may do well to highlight that decision. But she does not do well to suggest that it always falls out the one way.

Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge.

This article was originally published in the Royal Institute of Philosophy journal, Think. It has a web site here.

Peter Singer looks a very tired man. It’s not
so much the early morning start of the interview, but the weeks of media scrutiny,
misrepresentation and criticism, which seem to have taken their toll.

Singer came to England to talk about “A Darwinian
Left”, but no sooner had he stepped off the plane than the Daily Express
was reviving the old controversy over Singer’s view that in certain circumstances,
it may be better to end the life of a very severely handicapped baby in a humane
way, rather than use all modern medicine can do to let it live a painful and
often brief life. Singer tried to defend himself on Radio Four’s Today
programme, but in such a brief news item, his calm reasoning was always likely
to have less impact than the emotive pleas of his opponent.

So once again, what Singer really wanted to say
was overshadowed by his reputation. Which is a pity, because in
his LSE lecture, A Darwinian Left?,
which formed the centrepiece of his visit, Singer challenges a rather different
taboo: the exclusion from left-wing thought of the ideas of Charles Darwin.

Singer argues that the left’s utopianism has failed
to take account of human nature, because it has denied there is such a thing
as a human nature. For Marx, it is the “ensemble of social relations” which
makes us the people we are, and so, as Singer points out, “It follows from this
belief that if you can change the ‘ensemble of social relations’, you can totally
change human nature.”

The corruption and authoritarianism of so-called
Marxist and communist states in this century is testament to the naïveté
of this view. As the anarchist Bakunin said, once even workers are given absolute
power, “they represent not the people but themselves … Those who doubt this
know nothing at all about human nature.”

But what then is this human nature? Singer believes
the answer comes from Darwin. Human nature is an evolved human nature. To understand
why we are the way we are and the origins of ethics, we have to understand how
we have evolved not just physically, but mentally. Evolutionary psychology,
as it is known, is the intellectual growth industry of the last decade of the
millennium, though it is not without its detractors.

If the left takes account of evolutionary psychology,
Singer argues, it will be better able to harness that understanding of human
nature to implement policies which have a better chance of success. In doing
so, two evolutionary fallacies have to be cleared up. First of all, we have
evolved not to be ruthless proto-capitalists, but to “enter into mutually beneficial
forms of co-operation.” It is the evolutionary psychologist’s work in explaining
how ‘survival of the fittest’ translates into co-operative behaviour which has
been, arguably, its greatest success. Secondly, there is the “is/ought” gap.
To say a certain type of behaviour has evolved is not to say it is morally right.
To accept a need to understand how our minds evolved is not to endorse every
human trait with an evolutionary origin.

When I spoke to Peter Singer, I wanted to get
clearer about what he thinks Darwinism can do to help us understand ethics.
Singer is a preference utilitarian, which means he thinks the morally right
action is that which has the consequences of satisfying the preferences of the
greatest number of people. Singer seems now to be saying
that the importance of Darwinism is that if we take it into account, we will
be better at producing the greatest utility – the satisfaction of people’s preferences.

“That’s my philosophical goal,” acknowledges Singer.
“I was speaking more broadly for anyone who shares a whole range of values.
You don’t have to be a preference utilitarian. But I think it would be true
generally that anyone who has views about how society should end up will have
a better chance to achieve that if they understand the Darwinian framework of
human nature.”

Singer also argues that Darwinism has a destructive
effect, in that if you accept it, certain other positions are fatally undermined.
For example, the idea that God gave Adam, and by proxy, us, dominion over the
animal kingdom is a view “thoroughly refuted by the theory of evolution.” I
was unsure that those victories are always so straightforward. For example,
there are, presumably, many Christians who don’t buy the Adam and Eve creation
myth as literal truth. Nevertheless, can’t they live with Darwinism and have
their ethics?

“I don’t think Darwinism is incompatible with
any Christian ethic,” Singer is happy to allow, “except a really fundamentalist
one that takes Genesis literally. And it’s not even incompatible strictly with
the divine command theory, it just means the divine command theory is based
on all sorts of hypotheses which you don’t need because you’ve got other explanations.”

So how is the divine command theory undermined
by evolution? Couldn’t the Christian, for example, say, yes, evolution is how
man came to be, but given there is an is/ought gap, can’t the ethical commands
come from on high, as it were?

“Entirely possible. I was just saying that a lot
of the impetus for a divine command theory comes from the question ‘where could
ethics come from?’. It’s something totally different, out of this world, so
therefore you have to assume we’re talking about the will of God or something.
Once you have a Darwinian understanding of how ethics can emerge, you absolutely
don’t have to assume that, but it’s still possible to assume it. It’s really
the ‘I have no need of the hypothesis’ rather than ‘that hypothesis is hereby
refuted’.”

The question of how far evolution can help us
understand the origin of ethics is perhaps the most contentious part of evolutionary
psychologists’ claims in general and Singer’s thesis in particular. Singer believes
Darwinian theory gives us an understanding of the origin of ethics, because,
for example, it gives an evolutionary explanation of how reciprocity came to
be. Put crudely, if you model the survival prospects for different kinds of
creatures with different ways of interacting with others – from serial exploiters
to serial co-operators and every shade in between – it turns out that the creatures
who thrive in the long run are those that adopt a strategy called ‘tit for tat’.
This means that they always seek to co-operate with others, but withdraw that
co-operation as soon as they are taken advantage of. Because this is the attitude
which increases the survival value of a species, it would seem to follow that
humans have evolved an in-built tendency to co-operation, along with a tendency
to withdraw that co-operation if exploited. Hence, it is argued, and essential
feature of ethics – reciprocity – is explained by evolution.

But, I put it to Singer, does the is/ought gap
reappear in a historical version if you follow that theory? When we give an
evolutionary explanation of how reciprocity came to be, so far we’re only describing
evolved behaviour, but it’s quite clear that what you think ethics is now goes
beyond a mere description of our evolved behaviour. So how, historically or
logically, is that gap bridged?

“It’s not bridged historically at all. Of any
culture and people you can describe their ethic, but that remains entirely on
the level of description. ‘The Inuit people do this and this and this, the British
people do that and that and that’. You can describe that ethic but you don’t
get from the answer to ‘what ought I to do?’ So the gap is a logical one and
it just arises from the fact that when we seek to answer the question, ‘What
ought I to do?’ we’re asking for a prescription, we’re not asking for a description.
Any description of existing morals in our culture or the origins of morals is
not going to enable us to deduce what ought we to do.”

But, I insist, doesn’t evolution then merely explain
the descriptive part of how certain behaviours came to be? It doesn’t really
explain our ethics, it explains social codes, rules of social conduct. If ethics
is a prescriptive field rather than a descriptive one, how does evolutionary
explanation of how merely described behaviour comes to be explain how ethics
came to be?

“I think in a way that’s so obvious that it doesn’t
need any explanation,” retorts Singer. “That’s just that we have the capacity
to make choices and that we make judgements which are prescriptive: first person,
second person or third person judgements. So, in a way, that is not what I’m
trying to explain the origins of, although you can see how if you add it to
the kinds of accounts I’ve given, we have language and we are a social animals
you can see why we end up talking about these things and discussing them. It’s
not something that I talked about. We know that we do that, and that’s a process
you would expect beings, once they had a certain degree of language, faced with
these choices, to do.”

The question is important, because some prominent
workers in the area of decision-theory and evolution argue that evolution explains
how it comes to be that we have social rules and that in fact understanding
these origins shows us that there’s no extra moral dimension to these things.
They are merely evolved and we deceive ourselves if we think there is an ethical
dimension.

I tried to probe this apparent gap between evolution
and ethics by considering two of Singer’s examples of how our ethics must account
for our evolved human nature. If we take into account the fact that we feel
more protective towards our own offspring than towards children in general,
it’s a good rule that parents should take care of their children because there’s
a greater chance it will increase the general happiness. On the other hand,
the double standard towards female and male sexual behaviour, even though it
may have an evolutionary explanation, is something that should not be tolerated.
I put it to Singer that, it follows that the moral judgements that we’re going
to make are going to be of the sort, ‘If the evolved behaviour is going to lead
to the morally desirable result follow it and if the evolved behaviour does
not lead to the morally desirable result, don’t follow it’. So isn’t the observation
of what has evolved going to drop out of the equation? It’s not going to feed
at all directly into what our moral rules are going to be.

Singer’s answer reveals more precisely the limited,
but important role, he believes Darwinian explanations play in our ethics. “I
think the Darwinian is going to alert us to what rules are going to work and
what rules are going to meet a lot of resistance and I think we have to bear
that in mind. But always there’s a trade off between how important the values
are to us and the strength of the evolved tendency in our natures.”

Given Singer’s willingness to challenge established
views, I was a little surprised that he still talks in terms of the left and
right, particularly as it seems his conception of the left is a long way from
any traditional view. Singer characterises the left as being concerned with
eliminating the sufferings of others and of the oppressed. A lot of people on
the left would consider that quite a diluted view of the left, which is generally
thought to have something to do with common ownership. I wondered if it was
useful to maintain the label ‘the left’.

“The label’s kind of there to stay,” replies Singer.
“It’s been there so long. We’re not about to get rid of it. You would have to
be rather far on the left now to think that a lot of common ownership is a good
idea, beyond some major utilities. I wouldn’t say the left ought to be committed
to common ownership. Common Ownership is possibly a means to achieving the goals
of the left. That debate should continue. But I wouldn’t say it was a prerequisite
for being part of the left.”

But is Singer’s view really leftist at all? Take
what he says about tit-for tat, for example. He argues that tit-for-tat would
appeal to people on the left because it is a ‘nice’ strategy, but presumably
a lot of people who wouldn’t identify themselves as left-wing would be keen
on adopting what he calls nice strategies. And similarly a number of people
on the left might be against the nicer strategies – the more revolutionary left
wing, for example. So I’m left wondering if there really is a significant distinction
to be made between the left and other political stances that are committed to
the reduction of inequality.

But it’s quite clear that Singer, though keen
to identify himself as being on the left, isn’t as interested this particular
issue as I am. He simply replies, “I think there’s a lot less to the distinction
[left/right] than there was, undoubtedly.”

Singer’s interest in Darwin pre-dates the current
revival in evolutionary explanations, and goes back to his earlier work in animal
liberation.

“It was there in the background. It wasn’t central
to it but I did talk about it a bit in Animal Liberation. I certainly
was interested in it before Wilson’s Sociobiology came out, but my interest
in it as an aid to understanding what ethics is really does date from Sociobiology
because I then addressed that in the Expanding Circle, which was published
in 1982, and that was explicitly a response to Wilson.”

What, I wondered, explains the current explosion
of interest in Darwin, particularly in philosophy and psychology?

“Well, Darwin’s been around for such a long period
of time but understanding Darwinian accounts of human affairs has not been about
for such a long time. It’s been neglected after Darwin himself. And then there
was this great taboo against applying Darwinian hypotheses to human social behaviour
until Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1975 and that was greeted with a huge
amount of hostility, which is evidence of the taboo. Even then a lot of people
shuddered because they saw it as something that was associated with nasty, right-wing
biological determinism, which is not really true. So it’s only more recently
than 1975 that the taboo has broken down and people have started to accept that
there are interesting and important insights into human affairs that come from
applying Darwinian thinking to human social conduct.”

Singer may feel that his new take on Darwin ought
to have been the main focus of his visit to London. But aside from Singer the
academic philosopher, there is also Singer the campaigner and polemicist. If
the media have focused on other things, it is at least partly due to Singer’s
own outspokenness about issues that matter to him.

One of the first controversies to blow up in the
press during Singer’s visit was his withdrawal of a lecture he was due to give
at the King’s Centre for Philosophy, because of its sponsorship by Shell UK,
and his very public letter to the Guardian explaining why.

Singer’s reason for pulling out is that, “I did
not really want to appear on a programme that says ‘supported by Shell’ and
is seen as therefore promoting the idea that Shell is a good corporate citizen.
It’s not that I’m against taking corporate money under any circumstances. I
think there are some circumstances in which I would take it, but I think that
you always have to be careful about taking corporate money. At present Shell’s
record, particularly in Nigeria, is really lamentable. I think that you can
see a connection between the money that is going here [to the King’s Centre]
and the profits made out of the extraction of oil in Nigeria, with all of the
consequences that has for the Ogoni people, both in terms of environmental damage
to their land, the way in which Shell revenues support the Nigerian dictatorship,
which is one of the most oppressive around. So I just didn’t want to be part
of that.”

Interestingly, at one recent Environmental Ethics
conference, at which the Shell issue in particular was in the forefront of people’s
minds, a lot of the people who ran consequentialist arguments at the conference
actually came out in favour of taking the money because they felt that the benefits
of having the conference supported would outweigh the very marginal benefits
that Shell would receive for having its logo in the corner of the posters. People
said thinks like “It’s better this money is spent on a conference in environmental
ethics, which should be discussed, than the money should go to a big billboard
poster for Shell or something.” What does Singer, as a consequentialist, make
of this argument?

“The consequentialist could go both ways, I don’t
deny that. I don’t think it’s all that important to have another environmental
ethics conference frankly – there are plenty of environmental ethics conferences
and discussions about environmental ethics around. There’s certainly an argument
about what else would happen to the money. But I think that in fact it’s clear
that as far as my gesture of refusing to take Shell’s sponsorship is concerned
– and it was a gesture, there’s no doubt about it – it’s had worthwhile consequences.
What it’s meant is that there’s one lecture in my London programme that did
not go ahead as sponsored, but in fact that was made up for by the fact that
I gave a lecture organised at King’s College by some students who were opposed
to Shell’s sponsorship. So people at King’s still got to hear me give a lecture,
if that’s what the were interested in. Because I refused and because I wrote
a letter to The Guardian about my refusing to do so, there was a whole
lot more discussion of the issue, so people have again become more aware that
there is a real issue about corporate sponsorship and the question about Shell
in particular has got aired. So, it seems to me that’s clearly been a good thing.
In other words, it’s clear that I made the right decision on consequentialist
grounds.

“But I think it’s important that people enter
some discussion, that it’s not just a silent gesture that I didn’t give a lecture
and no one ever heard about why I didn’t.”

Singer is always very open in showing the full
implications, consequences and ramifications of his viewpoint, which doesn’t
always make him popular. As a consequentialist, how does he feel about the argument
that the best way to bring about a better society from a utilitarian point of
view is not to advance complex utilitarian arguments but to appeal to more simple
concepts?

“I think people are in different positions and
different roles. For a political heavyweight involved in strategies for a political
party to achieve office, it probably wouldn’t be possible to be quite so open.
But I think philosophers can have a role in clarifying people’s thinking, with
broader aims than simply saying ‘I want the political party with these view
to get into office and do this and that’.”

As an animal rights campaigner, I suggest, his
roles perhaps are more mixed and I asked Singer whether he felt that being so
open, and talking about the implications of his views on animals for mentally
handicapped children, has had the effect of blunting his points on animal liberation,
because people are inevitably not going to focus on his positive points about
animals, they focus on the perceived negative implications for the sanctity
of life.

“Maybe that’s true. It’s become a larger focus
in recent years. I’m not quite sure why, but I think that what you’d have to
say there was that if you take the line that that was a mistake to write Should
the Baby Live? back in 1985. It’s done now and I think the book’s done some
good in alerting people to the nature of that particular problem and making
parents of the disabled able to discuss it more openly. I’m not going to deny
that the conclusions still seem to be sound ones.

“I think you could say that politically it’s been
a mistake to accept invitations to debate it. What’s happened in Britain over
the last couple of weeks is that there was a rather silly article in the Daily
Express that raised this issue, which probably should have been ignored,
and I was called by the BBC for the Today programme and a lot of people
heard that, so maybe I would be more prudent to tell the BBC that I didn’t really
want to discuss that anymore and that wasn’t what I was coming here to discuss
this time.

“It’s very hard because on the other hand some
of the discussions were quite useful and it wasn’t all silly stuff as the one
on the Today programme I think was. So you have to say, well, it gets
more attention and more read about my views, maybe some of them will think,
‘Well, this is not so silly and bad, maybe I should look at some of his books’,
and maybe more people will get involved in it. It’s very hard to say, I think.”

Singer is always going to be a controversial thinker
because of his willingness to confront political and ethical issues without
being constrained by current orthodoxy. His application of Darwin to left-wing
thought is certainly not going to make him popular with the right, but it is
also likely to lose him some friends on the left, just as his measured contribution
to the issue of animal rights challenges society’s attitudes while not going
far enough to satisfy many activists.

Singer returned to his native Australia leaving
behind a big question and a tentative answer. Can the scientific theories of
Charles Darwin really contribute to our philosophical understanding of ethics?
Singer has tried to show how it can, but this is a debate which clearly has
a lot further to run.

This article was originally published in Issue 4 of The Philosophers’ Magazine.

Julian Baggini has a web site here.

During the last decades of the twentieth century researchers showed that much
of the received history of psychoanalysis consisted of stories that were largely
mythological. Perhaps the most enduring of all these myths is that Freud postulated
his seduction theory as a result of hearing frequent reports from his female
patients that they had been sexually abused in childhood. In this article I
want to focus on this story, one that for most of the twentieth century was
taken as historical fact, and is still widely believed to be so.
According to the traditional account, in the 1890s most of Freud’s female patients
told him that they had been sexually abused in early childhood, usually by their
father. How the story continues depends on whether it is based on received history
or on the revised version embraced by many feminists and popularised by Jeffrey
Masson. In the orthodox version we are told that within a short time Freud came
to realise that many of the reports he was hearing were not authentic, that
the women were fantasizing, and that this led to his epoch-making discovery
of infantile incestuous fantasies. But according to the feminist account, it
was the staunch opposition of colleagues outraged by his claims of widespread
childhood sexual abuse that led Freud to abandon the theory. Previously a sympathetic
listener, Freud now betrayed the women who had had the courage to reveal their
terrible experiences of abuse.
Whichever version you choose to believe, both make dramatic stories, and each
has its strong adherents. The basic elements are the same, but the interpretation
of them is very different. I suspect that most people rely on their gut feeling
and opt for Masson and the suppression of the truth about the widespread sexual
abuse of girls at that time. But it’s time for a reality check.
The articles that Freud published in the 1890s, and his correspondence with
his confidant Wilhelm Fliess, tell a very different story. Putting it briefly,
Freud’s patients in the mid-1890s did not tell him that they had been
sexually abused in early childhood. In contrast to what he was to assert in
his later accounts, at the time he wrote that they assured him “emphatically
of their unbelief” in the preconceived infantile sexual traumas that he
insisted they had experienced.
The essential features of the episode can be outlined as follows. During the
early 1890s Freud had become convinced that repressed memories of sexual ideas
or experiences, not necessarily from childhood, lay at the root of the symptoms
of patients he had diagnosed as hysterics. Then in October 1895, on the basis
of a speculative notion, he alighted on a theory that he was convinced had solved
once and for all the problem of the causes of the psychoneuroses. Hysterical
symptoms were invariably caused by unconscious memories of sexual molestations
in infancy.
Using his newly developed analytic technique for uncovering unconscious ideas
in the minds of his patients, he immediately set about showing that he was right.
Although he had not previously reported any instances of his having uncovered
sexual abuse in infancy, within four months of announcing the new theory to
Fliess he completed two papers in which he claimed that with every one of thirteen
“hysterical” patients, plus some obsessionals, he had been able “trace
back” to infantile experiences of sexual abuse. A few months later he delivered
a lecture, “The Aetiology of Hysteria”, in which he gave a more detailed
exposition of his theory, claiming confirmation for eighteen patients diagnosed
as hysterics.

How did he manage to access deeply repressed experiences of this nature with
all his patients in such a short time? Although he claimed that he had induced
patients to “reproduce” the infantile experiences (what he meant by
“reproductions” is open to a wide range of interpretations), it is
evident that he typically arrived at his clinical findings by the decoding of
symptoms, and the analytic interpretation of patients’ ideas produced under
the influence of the “pressure” procedure he was using at that time.
He explained that patients’ symptoms correspond to the “sensory content
of the infantile scenes” of sexual abuse that he had inferred to lie at
their root. His analytic procedure, he wrote, was analogous to that of forensic
physician who can arrive at the cause of an injury “even if he has to do
without any information from the injured person”.

This is exemplified by the case of a patient who had a facial tic and eczema
around the mouth. On the basis of these symptoms Freud analytically inferred
that she had in infancy been forced to engage in fellatio. “I thrust the
explanation at her”, he told Fliess. And when she expressed her disbelief
he “threatened to send her away” if she persisted in her scepticism.
Of course for Freud a rejection of his inference was evidence of the patient’s
“resistance”, providing further confirmation that his analytic reconstruction
was valid.
For reasons impossible to deal with in a short space, within two years of announcing
publicly his solution to the aetiology of the neuroses Freud lost faith in it.
But instead of this leading him to question the reliability of his newly developed
technique for reconstructing unconscious memories, he sought to explain his
claimed findings as patients’ unconscious fantasies. This necessitated some
retrospective emendation of the original claims to make the new theory minimally
plausible. In fact the story went through a number of stages before finally
arriving at the familiar version in New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis
(1933): “In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering
infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had
been seduced by their father.” (Incidentally, no one seemed to think it
odd that it was only in this short period that “almost all” his female
patients should have reported early childhood sexual abuse.)
It is important to appreciate that the traditional accounts give no idea that
the putative “fantasies” were unconscious ideas or memories
in the patients’ minds that Freud believed he had uncovered (i.e., reconstructed)
by his analytic technique of interpretation. (Freud’s use of the word Phantasie
is translated as ‘phantasy’ by James Strachey in the Hogarth Standard Edition,
but usually as ‘fantasy’ elsewhere in the literature, giving readers the misleading
impression that Freud was generally referring to conscious ideas that
patients reported to him.)
There are a considerable number of anomalies in Freud’s retrospective accounts
of the episode, too many to be dealt with here. One of these is that originally
he had claimed that the “infantile traumas” he had uncovered could
be described “without exception” as “grave sexual injuries”.
How putative ‘memories’ of experiences that he had described as “brutal”
and “absolutely appalling” could plausibly turn out to be unconscious
fantasies of “seduction” that had the purpose (according to his first
explanation) of “fending off” patients’ disturbing memories of infantile
masturbation, Freud made no attempt to explain. The same objection applies to
his later story that the putative “seduction fantasies” were projections
of patients’ Oedipal desires. In any case, he was in no position to know whether
his analytic reconstructions represented repressed memories of actual events,
or patients’ unconscious fantasies — or indeed, as was actually the case, imaginative
scenarios originating in his own mind.
A little known fact is that, in accord with his theoretical requirements, Freud
claimed in 1896 that for each of his six obsessional patients he had uncovered
repressed memories not only of passive infantile sexual abuse scenes, but also
of active sexual experiences at a slightly older age. Nothing was heard again
of these remarkable clinical ‘findings’, and Freud made no attempt to explain
how his later unconscious fantasy theory could possibly account for them.
The above arguments, of course, refute Jeffrey Masson’s version of events as
well as the received psychoanalytic story, though his case lacks cogency for
other reasons. He suggested in The Assault on Truth that Freud’s motive
for abandoning the seduction theory was in part an attempt to ingratiate himself
with his colleagues, who supposedly were outraged by his clinical claims. This
thesis is undermined by the fact that Masson’s account of the ostracizing of
Freud by his colleagues is entirely erroneous. But it is also invalidated by
the fact that Freud did not reveal his abandonment of the seduction theory to
his colleagues for some seven years after he had privately renounced it. (Masson
erroneously stated that “the critical period for Freud’s change of heart
about the seduction hypothesis” was “during the years 1900-1903”.
This vague dating effectively closes most of the gap between the abandonment
of the theory and Freud’s public announcement of his change of view, and tallies
with Masson’s thesis, but Freud’s letters to Fliess show clearly that he had
completely given up the theory by the end of 1898.)
That the traditional story of the seduction theory episode is false in all
its essentials is especially important in recent times, when it has been drawn
into the debate about the repression of memories of childhood abuse that are
supposedly ‘recovered’ some decades later. People need to get the historical
facts straight before Freud’s supposed early clinical experiences are erroneously
cited to support the arguments of one side or the other. More generally, as
Cioffi has emphasized, an accurate account of the transition from the seduction
theory to its successor fantasy theory calls into question the reasoning which
Freud was to employ for the rest of his career to reconstruct infantile fantasy
life and the contents of the unconscious.
References
Cioffi, F. (1998 [1974]). “Was Freud a liar?” In Freud and
the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, pp. 199-204.
Esterson, A. (1993). Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund
Freud, Chicago: Open Court.
Esterson, A. (1998). “Jeffrey Masson and Freud’s Seduction Theory: a New
Fable Based on Old Myths.” History of the Human Sciences, 11
(1), pp. 1-21.
Esterson, A. (2001). “The Mythologizing of Psychoanalytic History: Deception
and Self-deception in Freud’s Accounts of the Seduction Theory Episode.”
History of Psychiatry, xii, pp. 329-352.
Esterson, A. (2002). “The Myth of Freud’s Ostracism by the Medical Community
in 1896-1905.” History of Psychology, 5 (2), pp. 115-134.
Freud, S. (1953-1974). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by J. Strachey et al. London: Hogarth
Press.
Israëls, H. and Schatzman, M. (1993). “The Seduction Theory.”
History of Psychiatry, iv, pp. 23-59.
Masson, J. M. (1984). The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction
Theory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Masson, J. M. (ed. and trans.) (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud
to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Scharnberg, M. (1993). The Non-Authentic Nature of Freud’s Observations:
Vol. 1. The Seduction Theory. Uppsala Studies in Education, No
47 and 48. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.
Schimek, J.G. (1987). “Fact and fantasy in the seduction theory: a historical
review.” Journal of the American Pyschoanalytic Association, 35,
pp. 937-965.

political correctness (noun): conformity to a belief that language and
practices which could offend political sensibilities should be eliminated.
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

I’ve been invited to write about political correctness and philosophy
in the North American academy. What qualifies me? I’m a refugee
from political correctness. I emigrated from Canada to the USA because
of an insidious quota system, euphemistically called ’employment
equity’, which decrees that there are too many white male philosophers
in Canadian universities. The Nuremburg Laws excluded Jews from
Nazified German universities because we were ‘non-Aryan’; Jews are
now excluded from Canadian universities because we are ‘white’.
This is a compelling irony. It compelled me to get the hell out.

Before quitting Canada in 1994, I penned a satire on political correctness,
called Fair New World. Libertarian lawyer Karen Selick called
it "the most politically incorrect work of art I have ever
seen. It’s also hilariously funny and scathingly insightful."
Since no Canadian publisher had the courage to bring it out, I founded
my own press, Backlash Books, and published it myself. Fair New
World continues to be taught in colleges and universities, by
politically absolutely incorrect professors, all of whom have received
Backlash Books’ highest award: ‘Offender of the Faith’. So much
for my political credentials.

I am currently tenured at The City College of New York, which graduated
eight eventual Nobel laureates among its illustrious alumni of halcyon
years, but where thanks to a generation of open admissions Great
Books have been replaced by Comic Books. What kind of refuge is
this? I offer two stock answers. To the cognoscenti, I reply that
I have Bertrand Russell’s job. Russell’s appointment at CCNY was
infamously denied by the New York Supreme Court, which convicted
him, much as Athens convicted Socrates, of moral corruption. Instead
of putting Russell to death, they merely denied him employment.
This is called ‘social progress’. To the incognoscenti, I reply
that I was hired by CCNY to fill a quota system: New York City was
running short of Jews, so they imported me.

By now you should be persuaded that I am politically incorrect enough
to write this piece. Now let me unpack Webster’s definition. First,
to which ‘political sensibilities’ does it allude? These generally
entail a Rousseauesque-cum-Marxist vision of the world, which perceives
humanity as an innocent and well-meaning horde of erstwhile noble
savages, inequitably differentiated by race, class and gender by
an evil conspiracy of white male heterosexual patriarchal hegemonists,
who use logic, mathematics, science, classics, capitalism, democracy
and testosterone to disenfranchise politically and deprive socio-economically
the rest of the world, who are the ‘victims’ of ‘oppression’.

While Marx’s putative ‘remedy’ was partly predicated on his slogan ‘from
each according to his ability, to each according to his need’, current
political correctness is incomparably more surreal: it has no truck
with ability at all, which it finds intolerably offensive and therefore
among the first things slated for elimination. For example, many
primary schools now give ribbons to all children who run in field-day
races, because they are terrified of ‘offending’ and therefore also
(by the puerile etiology that informs their world-view) of traumatising
the children who do not win or place in the contest. Thus they have
confused fleetness of foot with moral worthiness. This has two serious
consequences.

First, at the grass-roots level, political correctness fails to teach children
that sportsmanship and self-development are the lasting lessons
of competition. Win or lose, one is morally worthy if one runs the
race and does one’s best. If Jane is a better runner than Sally,
there is nothing wrong (i.e. ‘offensive’) about rewarding Jane for
fleetness of foot. If Jane wins a gold medal and Sally finishes
out of the medals, it means that Jane is a better runner than
Sally: it does not mean that Jane is better than Sally. But
a politically correct race is socially-engineered: all runners must
finish together, or all must receive identical ribbons regardless
of place. This is an offence against fleetness of foot. It is typical
of a pervasive unwillingness to acknowledge natural and acquired
differences among human beings, which in turn devalues individual
excellence and obliterates moral worthiness. That is an offence
against humanity.

The second consequence marks a death-threat to American democracy. Tocqueville
had observed presciently that Americans must choose between liberty
and equality. Any undeluded person knows that equality of opportunity
leads inevitably to inequality of outcome. However, the inability
of political correctness to tolerate unequal outcomes in the wake
of equal opportunities, and its dogmatic commitment to a neo-Marxist
doctrine that equates justice and fairness with a levelling of outcomes,
have contorted the North American Academy into a sublime estate,
in which equal outcomes in higher education are guaranteed by pervasive
illiteracy, innumeracy and aculturality. The Academy has become
a neo-Procrustean Inn, whose former halls of learning are converted
into dormitories of indoctrination, whose patrons (the students)
have their heads chopped off instead of their legs, so that all
fit equally into its deconstructed cots.

The ‘language and practices’ that offend the deepest sensibilities of political
correctness form the very foundations of Western civilization: the languages
of logic, mathematics, classics, philosophy – along with the language of Shakespeare
too – and the practices of science, capitalism, democracy and due legal process-along
with the inescapably allied and respective notions of reliable method, generation
of wealth, government by consent of the governed, and protection of inalienable
individual rights. By metastasising like an opportunistic cancer throughout
the mind-politic of the academy, political correctness has proceeded, true to
Webster’s definition, to eliminate the language and practice of Western civilization
itself, and therefore to kill the very body-politic upon which it parasitically
feeds. Lest you deem my accusations implausible or exaggerated, I will regale
you with a few examples.

Grade inflation is rampant in American universities, to the extent that
undergraduate degrees are increasingly worthless pieces of paper.
From the Ivy to the Poison Ivy Leagues, institutions have capitulated
to ‘egalitarian’ demands that students receive A’s for attendance.
They graduate hapless victims of victimology, who can neither read
with comprehension nor write grammatically correct sentences. When
such students receive D’s or F’s in my upper-level philosophy electives,
they complain that they are ‘straight-A’ majors in psychology, or
education, or in some other department that subscribes to the barker’s
slogan ‘Everybody plays, everybody wins’. By the same token, one
very bright and hard-working student, who happened to be a black
female, asked me if she had really ‘earned’ the A she received in
my course. When I assured her that she merited the grade based on
her performance and nothing else, she actually wept with gratitude
– at having been allowed to display her merit. By contrast, politically
correct ideology systematically deprives excellent students of opportunities
to excel, so as not to ‘offend’ mediocrity and worse.

Political correctness eradicates individual liberties as well as merit. Princeton
University’s Office of Student Life annually prints a handbook lauding
‘tolerance’ and extolling the ‘virtues’ of cultural diversity. The
office also compels attendance at freshman orientation films, one
of which illustrates methods of contraception and abortion. When
a Roman Catholic student tried to exit the cinema, asserting that
she had no need watch these practices because her religion forbade
them, she was physically prevented from leaving. She was coerced
(in the name of tolerance and diversity!) to watch the entire film.
This is another face of political correctness: rank hypocrisy.

Freedom of speech was an early casualty. In denial, Katherine Whitehorn wrote
in the London Observer: "The thing has been blown up out of all
proportion. PC language is not enjoined on one and all – there are a lot more
places where you can say ‘spic’ and ‘bitch’ with impunity than places where
you can smoke a cigarette." She should have been at a Canadian University
in 1994, when a professor of political science remarked jocularly to a teaching
assistant noted for her stern grading: "I’ll bet the students think you’re
a real black bitch." The president of that university promptly shut down
the graduate studies program in political science, while the teaching assistant
sued the university and pocketed more than $300,000. (Hey, for that kind of
cash, you can call me anything you like.) This catapulted UBC onto the national
news, and cost the president his job. Stand-up comedy proliferates precisely
because the comics remain at liberty to say what – thanks to political correctness
– their audiences are increasingly afraid to think.

Around the same time, Yale University was busily refusing a gift of 20
million dollars, offered by a Texas oilman and patron of high culture.
He wanted the money spent on a humanities program that celebrated
Great Books of Western civilization. Unfortunately, Yale was long-since
committed to the politically correct doctrine that there are no
great books, that the idea of great books is a pernicious myth used
to oppress illiterate and innumerate savages, to keep women barefoot
and pregnant, to exploit the developing world, and to glorify dead
white European males who apparently plagiarised Western civilization
from an unidentified tribe of transvestites. Thus Yale could not
possibly accept 20 million dollars to teach so-called ‘Great Books’,
either because ‘greatness’ is entirely arbitrary, or because recognising
a few ‘Great Books’ would be offensive to a great many inconsequential
ones.

PC hiring practices are utterly Orwellian. In a Canadian university,
a male and a female candidate were finalists for a tenurable position
in philosophy. The male was demonstrably better qualified, but the
female was offered the position owing to an alleged ‘gender imbalance’.
Two members of the selection committee were willing to testify to
the province’s Human Rights Commission that the female’s appointment
had been politically orchestrated. But when the male finalist formally
asked the province’s HRC to investigate, his request was summarily
denied. He was informed by the HRC that, since he was a white male,
it was impossible for anyone to discriminate against him.

The siege engines of political correctness have been dragged to the very walls
of MIT, where cries of ‘gender imbalance’ herald the administrative re-allocation
of scientific funding to satisfy arbitrary gender quotas. Copious evidence on
sex difference, much of it accumulated by female researchers themselves, shows
that males are, on average and by nature, more adept than females at mathematical
and spatio-temporal reasoning. But any fact that offends regnant political sensibility
is dismissed as a ‘social construct’, and ignored by wishful thinking. The politically
correct explanation for the dearth of female Newtons and Einsteins is that female
geniuses have been ‘oppressed’ by the usual conspiracy of white males, and by
the very institution of civilization itself.

And what is philosophy’s explicit role in all this? It varies across
a continuum. In so far as academic philosophers are political animals,
prey to the edicts of a brain-dead academy, they either resist political
correctness, or pay lip-service to it, or embrace it according to
their respective lights or darknesses. But those who fail to resist
its fatuous tyranny, or who revel in its egregious self-righteousness
become apologists for the deconstruction of the very intellectual
culture that makes philosophy possible, and accomplices to the sapping
of the principles which sustain that culture itself. Thus North
American philosophers who champion group rights and trample individual
liberties (epitomised by proponents of quota-based hirings), who
hysterically demonise reason, and who absurdly deny Hume’s distinction
between fact and value on the alleged grounds that all ideas are
‘social constructs’, excepting this idea itself, which they take
as brute fact (epitomised by Richard Rorty’s flagrant anti-realism)
– these are not lovers of wisdom, but high priests and handmaidens
of hubris.

To philosophy students who can yet read, I recommend J S Mill’s On
Liberty. His enlightened conception entails

…liberty of tastes and pursuits, of framing the plan of our life to suit
our own character, of doing as we like, without impediment from
our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them,
even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or
wrong.

Mill’s salient distinction is between offence and harm; its implications
for political correctness are pellucid. People who are offended
by others’ languages and practices should not have the liberty to
eliminate them, as long as such words and deeds are not harmful.
But once this critical distinction between offence and harm is blurred,
as it is daily and extravagantly by the politically correct, then
those who blur it arrogate to themselves the supremely illegitimate
authority to proscribe whatever conduct they deem ‘offensive’ (for
example, affairs between professors and graduate students, or ideologically
unpopular research), to silence whatever speech they deem ‘offensive’
(such as ethnic humour or sexual innuendo), and to censor whatever
ideas they deem ‘offensive’ (for example that there are biologically-based
human differences that may not be eradicable by social engineering,
or that equal opportunity virtually guarantees unequal outcomes).
The near-ubiquitous conflation of offence with harm has sanctioned
a thirty-year reign of political terror in North American universities,
whose degenerate administrative ideologues daily micromanage the
minutiae of thought, speech and deed.

In such a totalitarian climate, philosophers who fail to draw and defend
Mill’s distinction between offence and harm are not only professionally
derelict, but are also party to the catastrophe that has ensued
from its blurring.

The ‘dark side’ of philosophy is compassed both by what it has failed
to do in defence and preservation its own mission – the love of
wisdom – and by what this failure has permitted the enemies of open
and reasoned inquiry to entrench in its place – the worship of folly.

This article was originally published in Issue 14 of The Philosophers’ Magazine.

Steven Pinker has a new book out, The Blank Slate. We have been closely observing and reporting on the reception of this particular volume of science for the public, because that reception and the probable reasons for it are closely related to the subject matter of Butterflies and Wheels. Evolutionary explanations of human nature and behavior and ways of thinking make many people very suspicious and afraid, and hence willing to make some highly dubious arguments.

But as many people have noticed and pointed out in the last few years (e.g. E.O. Wilson in The Philosophers’ Magazine), the tide does seem to be turning. Pinker’s book has been getting a largely favorable or at least attentively respectful hearing, including even a favorable review in the US magazine The Nation. Steven Pinker generously took some time from his busy schedule complete with book tour, to answer some questions for us.

 

Butterflies and Wheels: You wrote The Blank Slate to address the fears people have about evolutionary psychology. Although the days of emptying pitchers of water over peaceable entomologists may be over, I’ve noticed that many opponents of the field still resort to highly questionable tactics, including guilt by association, confusion of terms, loaded questions. Are there any critics of evolutionary psychology you respect? Any who have doubts about the evidence, the methods, the interpretations, but pose the questions without resorting to rhetoric or consequentialist arguments?

Pinker: If “evolutionary psychology” just means bringing evolutionary biology to bear on the human mind, frankly I don’t think there could be honest criticism of evolutionary psychology, because it would simply be obscurantism or disciplinary parochialism. It would be in effect declaring that the insights of one discipline must never be brought to bear on another, as if one were attacking neuroscience, or sociolinguistics, or the history of science. This is especially true given that evolutionary thinking is already pervasive in the less politically sensitive areas of psychology, like perception and motivation. It would be perverse to insist that researchers in stereo vision not be allowed to take into consideration the evolutionary function of being able to see in depth, or if scientists who study thirst were condemned for analyzing how thirst works to keep the body’s fluids and electrolytes in balance. Ultimately that is what evolutionary psychology is about, but applied to more contentious domains cognition and the social emotions.

Now, “evolutionary psychology” has also come to refer to a particular way of applying evolutionary theory to the mind, with an emphasis on adaptation, gene-level selection, and modularity. Obviously that can be criticized, just like any other empirical theory; some of the sharper critics include David Sloan Wilson, Elliot Sober, Robert Boyd, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

But ultimately “evolutionary psychology” is not a single theory but a large set of hypotheses about particular topics, and any one of them can be, indeed, should be, criticized, just like any scientific hypothesis. Indeed, just about every concrete hypothesis in evolutionary psychology has come under criticism in the technical literature (and been defended in turn), just like the rest of empirical psychology. Did a preference for symmetrical faces evolve because symmetrical organisms are fitter and hence better mates, or does the visual system like symmetrical patterns even in artifacts, where mating is irrelevant? Are people especially good at detecting logical violations when they pertain to social contracts, or can they detect them more generally, whenever such a violation is relevant to our current interests? Can the nongenetic variation in personality be explained in terms of sibling competition over parental investment, in terms of carving out a niche in a peer group, or in terms of sheer chance? The researchers who raise these objections to hypotheses emerging from evolutionary psychology are, of course, doing their job as scientists. Many of these issues can take decades to resolve, again, just like the rest of psychology. It is conceivable that when the dust settles not a single hypothesis motivated by evolutionary biology will survive (but I doubt it).

B and W: One reservation that I hear from rational people is the “just-so stories” aspect. That evolutionary explanations of human nature can operate the way Freud’s did: simply twist and turn to meet objections, interpret the evidence so that it fits the theory rather than adjusting the theory. Is there any merit to this idea, or is evolutionary psychology just as falsifiable as any other science?

Pinker: “Evolutionary psychology” is an approach and a set of theories, not a single hypothesis, so no single experiment can falsify it, just as no single experiment can falsify the theory of evolution or the connectionist (neural network) approach to cognition. But particular hypotheses can be individually tested, such as the ones on the relation of symmetry to beauty or the relation of logical cognition to social contracts, and tests of these are the day-to-day activity of evolutionary psychology. Journals such as Evolution and Human Behavior are not filled with speculative articles; they contain experiments, survey data, meta-analyses, and so on, hashing out particular hypotheses. And as I mentioned above, over the long run the approach called evolutionary psychology could be found unhelpful if all of its specific hypotheses are individually falsified.

B and W: You discuss, in The Blank Slate, the way an excessively optimistic view of human plasticity can lead to social engineering, coercion, and genocide. But you also point out that though we have drives and instincts that served us well in the distant past but don’t serve us well now, we also have a cerebral cortex that can override those drives. Is there any tension between those two thoughts? Is there any way to distinguish between dangerous social engineering on the one hand, and necessary laws that seek to restrain such drives, laws against rape for example, on the other?

Pinker: I don’t think there is a contradiction because I don’t think the cerebral cortex is an infinitely malleable substance or an all-powerful problem solver. In language, a finite set of rules can generate an infinite set of sentences; not just any old set (million-word sentences, programs in Java, musical notation, humpback whale songs, etc.), but only sets conforming to “Universal Grammar.” Likewise there is an infinite space of possible thoughts and goals, but they are subject to the quirks and limitations of human nature.

Your question about a middle ground between coercive social engineering and necessary restraints on antisocial behavior is basically the age-old question (debated by Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, and the framers of the American constitution, among others) of whether there can be a middle ground between anarchy and totalitarianism. Democratic government, the rule of law, and civil-libertarian restraint on the power of government and the police are, in my view, solutions that do make such distinctions. Ultimately the distinctions hinge on the promotion of human well-being and the reduction of human suffering – some medium-sized amount of government coercion (constitutionally limited, and operating with the consent of the governed) seems to maximize this function better than anarchy or totalitarianism.

B and W: It seemed to me that the audience was at least not hostile when I saw you on your book tour. Indeed, when one man tried the rhetorical move of wondering what use future tyrants might make of your books and you replied that you wouldn’t worry about it as long as they read them with understanding, the audience applauded. Has the reaction been generally favourable so far? And was there any difference between the responses in the UK and the US?

Pinker: People who come to my talks are not a random sample, of course, but you are correct that I have not received anything like the abuse that greeted E. O. Wilson or Richard Herrnstein in the 1970s. The only truly intemperate reaction was from a British psychoanalyst who (correctly) inferred that if people’s personalities and neuroses are not shaped by parental treatment in the first six years of life, he and his colleagues are guilty of malpractice. I also have received a small number of nasty – and I would say grossly unfair — reviews from academics and journalists who vaguely sensed that their 1960s-era leftism was not being affirmed by the book, who could not put their finger on anything wrong with the arguments, and who resorted to distortion and sweeping dismissal. But that has been true of a minority of the reviews and probably could be expected of any book that takes on controversial subjects. Indeed, with the exception of the man you noticed, I have not received any hostile reaction among the hundreds of audience questions and pieces of correspondence I have received so far.

One of the reasons is that the climate has changed – I first noticed this a few years ago when my the students in my classes at MIT were not outraged by hearing about research on, say, violence or sex differences that would have been inflammatory a few years ago. (They are a whole new generation – it was their parents, or even their grandparents, who were carrying placards in the 1960s and 1970s!) Also, whereas Wilson was blindsided by the attacks, not realizing that his proposals might have political implications, The Blank Slate is about the political implications (and non-implications) of human nature, and shows how an acknowledgment of human nature does not, in fact, justify racism, sexism, reactionary politics, or moral nihilism. Anyone who is morally incensed by the book cannot have read it.

Steven Pinker is Peter de Florez Professor of Psychology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works, and The Language Instinct.

Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition appeared
in 1994, rattled a good many cages, and prompted the Sokal Hoax. The book describes
a bizarre situation in American universities in which academics in various (mostly
new-minted) fields such as Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, and Science Studies,
plus a few more familiar ones such as Sociology, Comparative Literature and
the like, make a career of writing about science without taking the trouble
to know anything about it. Gross and Levitt have a good deal of fun exposing
the absurd mistakes perpetrated by people who rhapsodise about quantum mechanics
and chaos theory without having the faintest idea what they’re talking about.

But hilarity aside, there are serious issues involved. The Cultural Studies
brigade attack not only the misuses to which science can be put, but scientific
ways of thinking themselves; not only possible inequities in hiring and promotion,
but logic, truth and the ‘Enlightenment project’. Gross and Levitt did an admirable
job of sounding the alarm which Butterflies and Wheels plans to go on sounding.
Norman Levitt very kindly agreed to answer some question for us.

 

Benson: Do you think the situation has improved since you wrote Higher
Superstition? Do people seem any more embarrassed or self-conscious about
writing ignorant absurdities? Or do they merely congratulate themselves all
the more on how “transgressive” they are?

Levitt: This is a complicated question in that it depends on the parameters
one chooses to measure improvement or deterioration. My main motivation for
writing HS was to alert scientists to the fact that bizarre views of
science were being taught and fervently advocated in various enclaves of the
humanities and social sciences. The main immediate danger, I thought, was that
"science studies" imperialists were, in many schools, proposing that
the "science requirement" for non-science students be replaced by
courses in "science and society" or some such. This was an attractive
proposition for some of the scientists, who view "Physics for Poets"
and the like as joyless and time-wasting tasks. But since word has gotten round
that science studies is a dubious cult and actively hostile to science to boot,
the prospects for this kind of coup have pretty much crashed. Of course, HS
can’t by any means claim all the credit. The real shocker was the Sokal Hoax,
and there were other instructive flaps as well, such as the Science in American
Life exhibit at the Smithsonian.

Another fact worth noting with some satisfaction is that the enthusiasm for
extreme constructivist claims regarding the nature of scientific knowledge has
cooled considerably. Constructivist slogans are no longer reflexively adopted
and mouthed in literature and sociology departments. This doesn’t mean that
science studies has become any more worthwhile or intellectually responsible,
or that its hostility toward science has lessened. But a lot of the rebellious
glee has gone out of it, as has the smug delight in being outrageous.

Most important, the ultimate ambition of many postmodern science-studies enthusiasts–that
is, to become the primary mediators between science and political institutions
(the commissars, as it were, of science and technology)–have largely been squelched.
Embarrassing questions were raised far too early in the game, well before any
successful infiltration of the corridors of power.

On the other hand, alas, few of the more notorious academic anti-science celebrities
have lost out, career-wise, as a result of being flayed by HS, A House
Built on Sand, The Flight from Science and Reason, and so forth.
There are some partial exceptions to this, most notably the failure of the silly
attempts to appoint a science studies professor at the Institute for Advanced
Study. But even the characters gulled by Sokal’s prank remain pretty much immune
to retribution for their intellectual dereliction. Indeed, being attacked by
one of those dreaded scientists in warpaint amounts to a crown of martyrdom
that nicely adorns one’s curriculum vita. Most so attacked have prospered
quite nicely, thank you. One laments the injustice of it all!

But then, we’re not talking about child rape or looting employee pension funds.
It’s just the university culture being its customary silly self, which is hardly
surprising or curable.

Finally, something should be said about the leaching of postmodern antiscience
attitudes into the more general culture. Some real damage has been done. Schools
of education have picked up a bit of this nonsense, especially in connection
with "constructivist" theories of pedagogy. Even worse, so have some
schools of nursing, which invoke shoddy philosophy and pomo slogans to justify
their flirtation with worthless alternative medicine dogmas and practices. Some
of the same stuff works its way into environmental activism or into the kind
of ethnic activism that has set up western science as an ideological enemy.
Postmodern cant has also softened up many intellectuals for the renewed assaults
of creationists, now taking form as "Intelligent Design Theory." (An
example may be found in The Nation, the best-known American leftist journal,
which recently ran a bizarre, effectively pro-ID review of Stephen Gould’s last
book. It was written by an au courant literary critic with scant knowledge of
biology but a thorough grounding in social-constructivist drivel.)

 

Benson: Are undergraduates aware of the controversies? Do science teachers
have to waste much energy combatting trendy notions about the situatedness of
truth, or is that one area where ignorance is an advantage?

Levitt: Speaking as a mathematics teacher, I waste a lot of energy,
perhaps, but not in order to combat postmodern attitudinizing. In lower-level
courses, I talk and I write stuff on the blackboard, the undergraduates listen
and take notes (or not). Hence, there’s little interchange that isn’t initiated
by "Is this going to be on the exam?" In upper-level courses, things
are a bit more relaxed and clubby, but students who get as far as upper-level
mathematics are hardly the type to pay much attention to the archdruids of deconstruction,
the pythonesses of feminist theory, or the jongleurs of multiculturalism.

Nonetheless, one can get a sense of overall undergraduate attitudes toward
the spectrum of experiences encountered at a university. I’m specifically talking
about a large, multiplex American state university, which encompasses, academically,
all sorts of activity, from hard-nosed engineering to the squishiest, touchy-feely
"oppression studies," and which serves a host of other functions by
way of baby sitting young people between late adolescence and the grim, inevitable
day they have to go out and earn a living. Most students invest most of their
ardor in having a helluva good time-sex, rock ‘n’ roll, and partying down, with
the occasional foray to the football stadium or the basketball arena for those
rituals of mass mindlessness. To extent that they take education seriously,
it’s as a gateway to the possibility of making a decent income-upper middle-class
or better. So they fight like hell to get into the business and management programs,
and sometimes do some serious grinding to qualify for law or medical school.
But the issues that raise tempers in purely academic circles-the culture wars,
the fights over "diversity," and all that rot-are not undergraduate
issues, by and large.

The PC/Pomo faction, to describe it as tersely as possible, certainly has a
death-grip on a lot of instructional turf. Basic courses like expository writing
are in their hands, and many students have to go through the mill of a pious
course on "diversity" or some such. There they get a fairly strong
whiff of academic-left doxology. But the upshot is not, on the whole, a cohort
of enthusiastic recruits, but rather a mass of skeptical-to-cynical young people
who have caught on to the fact that their instructors, or at least, those who
give pedagogical marching orders to their instructors, can often be prigs, bores,
and bigots-and none too bright, at that. PC/Pomo preaching far more readily
generates disdain for itself than hostility toward its declared foes. This is
even true for black and Hispanic students. It is an obvious corollary that the
quirky attitudes toward science common amongst the pomo faithful do not diffuse
very far or very fast into mainstream undergraduate culture.

This is not to say that undergrads are generally knowledgeable about science
or that they have a sophisticated grasp of the canons of reliable knowledge.
Even science majors have a shallow knowledge of science beyond what they’ve
specifically acquired in courses. The non-science majors know little and care
little about science and tend to be clueless and inarticulate when scientific
matters arise at any level. But PC/Pomo demonology, per se, doesn’t seem to
have been responsible for this.

 

Benson: Is the issue still alive among the faculty? Are there arguments,
debates, quarrels? Do you personally have to deal with bristling, indignant
colleagues from “Cultural Studies” and such who are outraged by your work?

Levitt: The basic story is this: A certain camp within the PC/Pomo enterprise
made a fetish of "science criticism" and, at its high water mark 10
or 12 years ago, even dreamt of becoming a powerful oracular presence on the
societal scale, a major player in determining science and technology policy.
However, it couldn’t fly below the radar forever; its vanguard was spotted and
chased back to the starting line fairly easily. The "science wars"
have dissolved such susceptibility to its wiles as might have existed among
scientists and science administrators. But its own turf is pretty secure, thanks
to the inertia of the academic world. Its members have their little club and
retain their power to praise and promote each other for as long as the money
holds out (which it will for some time to come).

Hurt feelings persist, and folks like Paul Gross and me, not to mention Sokal,
are still excoriated for our villainy and obtuseness, evoking imprecations from
many courses and published papers (and a good thing, too, since it keeps our
books in print!). Yet people in the science-studies racket have also grown more
prudent; they are chary of making outrageous epistemological claims with flags
flying and trumpets blaring the way they used to on a daily basis. Their dreams
of exercising actual political power over science and scientists are on the
back shelf. But the academic cult as such keeps grinding away on its own narrow
terms.

Debates do continue, in some sense, but they have moved to such arenas as schools
of education and-quite frightening-into medicine, where bits and pieces of the
radical science-studies litany are now and then recruited to defend quackery.
But, as I see it, the main thing to keep in mind is that the academic assault
on science began, when you get down to it, because antiscientific attitudes
widespread in the general culture penetrated the academy, becoming over time
increasingly stark and explicit in the thinking of intellectuals who think of
themselves as radically opposed to middle-class politics, culture, and values.
In the universities, this antagonism acquired a particular rationale-philosophies
propounding the situated and socially-constructed character of knowledge claims
and the malign effects of a Eurocentric episteme. It also acquired a vocabulary
and a certain characteristic rhetorical style. At that point, it leached back
into the wider culture, slightly altering the rhetoric, but not necessarily
the essential substance, of demotic antiscience. But it is well to remember
that the basic problem is not that of an assault on rationality by a cabal of
reckless university intellectuals; the assault was going on long before these
guys came on the scene, and will continue even if each and every poststructuralist
and feminist-epistemologist were to convert overnight to logical positivism.

As for my personal experiences; obviously there are people who don’t like me
at all because of HS et seq. Once in a while I get roundly attacked
at a conference where I’m speaking. But this is hardly terrifying; superannuated
as I am, I love being denounced as a dangerous character. In defense of my own
institution, Rutgers University, I must say that it has treated me rather well
as a result of my involvement in the science wars (while treating some of my
local enemies quite well, too!) Post 9/11, we-scientists, intellectuals along
with all the rest–seem to be headed into "interesting times," which
takes a lot of the ginger out of academic quarrels. All this science-wars stuff
may be fading irrelevancy within a few years.

 

Benson: If some faculty members are indignant, are others as it were
recruited? Do you find new allies in departments such as History, Sociology,
Anthropology, where evidence and the validity of evidence are highly relevant?
If so, could this be a hopeful sign? Could one by-product be a heightened awareness
in many disciplines of the need to ground truth-claims and knowledge-claims
with evidence and logic?

Levitt: Though one could hardly call it a mass movement, there has been
a recurrent "Rally round the flag, boys!" mood amongst some scholars
in areas besieged by relativism and anti-rationality, with the serio-comic episode
of the science wars providing some ground for renewed hope that terminal silliness
will not prevail. I’ve been in touch with quite a few of these people in areas
like psychology, anthropology, and even philosophy. It’s no longer quite so
easy to sneer at words like evidence"" and "objectivity,"
and, to a certain extent, it’s become possible to sneer at the sneerers. Things
are changing slowly, but largely they are changing for the good. The project
of serious inquiry in all kinds of fields is in better shape than it was a few
years ago, and the intellectual fops are no longer quite so sure of their ground.

 

Norman Levitt is Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. He is author,
with Paul R. Gross, of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels
with Science (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Edward O. Wilson
said about this book that it was "original" and "brilliant".

Postmodernism comes in many guises and many varieties,
and it has had many kinds of positive influences on historical scholarship.
It has encouraged historians to take the irrational in the past more seriously,
to pay more attention to ideas, beliefs and culture as influences in their own
right, to devote more effort to framing our work in literary terms, to put individuals,
often humble individuals, back into history, to emancipate ourselves from what
became in the end a constricting straitjacket of social-science approaches,
quantification and socio-economic determinism.

But this is postmodernism in its more moderate
guise. The literature on postmodernism usefully distinguishes between the moderate
and the radical. What I call radical postmodernism takes its cue from another
post, post-structuralism, roughly speaking the idea that language is arbitrarily
constructed, and represents nothing but itself, so that whenever we read something,
the meaning we put into it is necessarily our own and nobody else’s, except
of course insofar as our own way of reading is part of a wider discourse or
set of beliefs.

It must be obvious that this idea has a corrosive
effect on the discipline of history, which depends on the belief that the sources
the historian reads can enable us to reconstruct past reality. It is just this
idea that many post-structuralists have attacked. Alan Munslow, for example,
proclaims: ‘The past is not discovered or found. It is created and represented
by the historian as a text.’ Keith Jenkins believes that ‘history is just ideology’.’
And Hans Kellner complains that historians‚ ’routinely behave as though their
researches were into the past, as though their writings were about “it”, and
as though “it” were as real as the text which is the object of their labours.’
The past is unknowable; all we can know about is historians’ writings, so history
disappears and we are left with historiography as a species of literary endeavour.
What historians write depends on their own purposes and their own point of view,
and there is no way of deciding whether one representation of the past is true
and another, contradictory one, untrue.

Arguments such as these are extremely self-contradictory,
however. If the statement, commonly made by postmodernists, that truth is always
relative to a particular society or culture or group in society, is true, then
it is true in an absolute sense, not a relative one, since as a statement, it
must hold good for all societies and cultures. Similarly, when postmodernists
claim that nobody has access to the truth, they must believe that this is in
fact a true statement, so the person making it does have access to the truth.
If texts are given meaning by the reader and not the writer, then why
have so many postmodernists complained that when I have criticized them I have
been basing my criticisms on a misrepresentation of what they have written?
Presumably postmodernists believe that the texts they are writing are
not capable of an infinity of interpretations, that they make their meaning
unmistakeably clear so that the reader is left with only one way of interpreting
it. Again, therefore, the postmodernist proposition refutes itself.

All of these points are in the end fairly obvious.
Postmodernism of the Jenkins/Munslow variety shows what one might call a naive
cynicism that is too simple-minded to cope with doubt and imperfection. Let
me illustrate this by looking at the concept of Truth, a term one usually
finds in post-structuralist writings placed inside a cordon sanitaire of
quotation marks, as if it would cause some horrible infection of old-fashioned
empiricism in the writer or reader if it was let out.

Of course it is right to say that we can never
know the whole or absolute truth about anything in the past. But just because
we can never attain the whole or absolute truth, just because we make mistakes
in our search for the truth about the past, just because there will always be
something new to say about any historical subject, it does not follow that there
is no such thing as the truth at all. In a similar way, just because what is
accepted as true isn’t necessarily so, does not mean that the concept of the
truth itself is merely ideological. Truth, as I noted earlier, is not relative
to perspective, though what is accepted as true is; ‘a statement is true
if and only if things are as it represents them to be.’ So there cannot be incompatible
truths; after all, ‘incompatible’ actually means ‘cannot be jointly true’.

So if we claim that there is no such thing as
truth, then either that statement is true, in which case there is such as thing
as truth, or it is not true, which amounts to the same thing. The point is,
of course, that postmodernists passionately want us to believe that what they
are saying is true and objective, even when they say that nothing anybody says
is true and objective.

You’ll notice that I’ve finally introduced the
term ‘objective’ here. This has been the source of a lot of confusion. It does
not mean the same as absolutely, completely and irrefutably true, and postmodernists
who say it does, are setting up a target deliberately manufactured to be able
to knock over without too many problems. Objectivity does not really
have this strong meaning, however; it generally means, fairly obviously, a perspective
or representation deriving from something external to the mind, the object,
rather than from the mind of the person doing the representation, the subject.
We see a car coming towards us as we’re crossing the road, and we recognise
it as an object, so we jump out of its way. The evidence that it’s coming is
provided by our senses, sight and hearing, possibly also smell, though hopefully
it’s not such a close call that we have to involve touching and feeling as well.

When we read a historical document, or look at
an archaeological site, we can’t read into it, or see in it, anything we want
to. We can read it for a variety of purposes and in a variety of ways, but the
possibilities are not unlimited. We bring to our sources all kinds of theories,
ideas, beliefs, questions, and the more conscious we are of them, the better,
but what happens when all of this comes into contact with the sources is a dialogue,
a two-way process, not the simple one-way imposition of our own views on a blank
sheet of paper or an empty piece of ground. We can argue about what the sources
tell us, but it’s not the case that one interpretation is always going to be
as good as another; some are more persuasive than others because they achieve
a better fit with the evidence, and sometimes, some are actually right and others
wrong.

Postmodernists like Keith Jenkins and Frank Ankersmit
have tried to respond to points like these by insisting that there is a huge
difference between historical fact and historical interpretation. Facts are
easy to establish, it’s interpretation that is the problem. Postmodernists,
Jenkins has recently claimed, have never argued that there was no ‘cognitive
element in history‚ at the level of the individual statement, only that certainty
and objectivity were impossible at the level of interpretation (narrative discourse).’
But enormous amounts of postmodernist ink have been spilled on trying to prove
that documents are so unreliable you can never tell anything from them at all,
that we can never recover the intentions of their authors, and so on. It is
a fundamental premise of postmodernist critiques of history that a document
is re-invented and re-interpreted every time someone looks at it, so that it
can never have any fixed meaning at all. If this claim doesn’t mean that we
can never use documents to find out basic historical facts, then it doesn’t
mean anything at all.

The point here is that it is not really possible
to distinguish so sharply between fact and interpretation in history as this.
There’s an element of interpretation, however small, involved in the establishment
of even the most basic historical facts. It’s not in practice possible to draw
a clear line between fact and meaning in history; rather, it’s a sliding scale,
so that the larger the fact, or ensemble of facts, the historian wants to establish,
the larger the element of interpretation involved. The ultimate test of any
historical statement is the extent to which it fits with the evidence, but just
because no fit is ever perfect, just because no fact can be established as anything
more than an overwhelming probability, doesn’t mean that we can naively and
impatiently discard all historical statements as mere inventions of the historian.
Let’s have a bit of subtlety and sophistication here, qualities that postmodernists
are always urging us to adopt.

Let me make this a bit clearer by giving you an
example. In the David Irving libel trial held two years ago, in which I served
as an expert witness for the High Court in London, Irving was suing Penguin
Books and their author Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier and
a falsifier of history. It was not difficult to show that Irving had claimed
on many occasions that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at the Auschwitz
concentration camp. He argued in the courtroom, however, that his claim was
supported by the historical evidence. The defence therefore brought forward
the world’s leading expert on Auschwitz, Robert Jan Van Pelt, to present the
evidence that showed that hundreds of thousands of Jews were in fact killed
in this way. Van Pelt examined eyewitness testimony from camp officials and
inmates, he looked at photographic evidence of the physical remains of the camp,
and he studied contemporary documents such as plans, blueprints, letters, equipment
orders, architectural designs, reports and so on. Each of these three kinds
of evidence, as the judge concluded, had its flaws and its problems. But all
three converged along the same lines, creating an overwhelming probability that
Irving was wrong.

Just as important as this was the fact that it
was possible to demonstrate that Irving’s historical works deliberately falsified
the documentary evidence in order to lend plausibility to his preconceived arguments,
principally his belief that Hitler was, as he said on one occasion, ‘probably
the best friend the Jews ever had in the Third Reich’. Falsifying documents
involved not just leaving words out from quotes but even putting extra words
in to change the meaning. For example, quoting an order from Himmler that a
‘Jew-transport from Berlin’ to the East should not be annihilated as if it were
a general order that no Jews at all, anywhere, were to be killed, by the simple
expedients of adding an ‘e’ to the German word Transport, making it plural,
and omitting the words ‘from Berlin’, and hoping that other researchers wouldn’t
trouble to check the source, or if they did, wouldn’t be able to read the handwriting
(which is actually very clear and unambiguous). Or by adding the word ‘All’
to the note of a judge at the Nuremberg Trial in 1946 on the testimony of an
Auschwitz survivor which actually said ‘this I do not believe’, after a small
part of her testimony, to make it look as if he did not believe any of it. If
we actually believed that documents could say anything we wanted them to, then
none of this would actually matter, and it would not be possible to expose historical
fraud for what it really is.

This brings me to my final point about the postmodernist
positions I’ve been describing, and that is, postmodernists tend to think of
themselves as left-wing, and their views as liberating and emancipatory, but
in fact they are none of these things at all. Postmodernist hyper-relativism
has no political implications of a positive kind at all. If history really is
nothing more than propaganda, then there’s nothing to say it has to be left-wing
propaganda, it can just as easily be right-wing propaganda, or racist propaganda,
or neo-fascist propaganda, as the High Court in London decided in the end that
David Irving’s writings were. If we don’t believe it’s possible to distinguish
between truth and falsehood, then we have no means of exposing racism, antisemitism,
and neo-fascism as doctrines of hate built on an edifice of lies, indeed we
have no real means of discrediting them at all. We can say of course that we
disapprove of them in moral and political terms, but neo-fascists can just put
forward opposing moral and political arguments of their own in response, and
in the end there are no objective criteria by which we can choose between the
two positions.

What the Irving trial showed in the end was the
ability of historians to come to reasoned and persuasive conclusions about the
past on the basis of a fair-minded and objective examination of the evidence.
It didn’t show that the evidence in question was totally flawless, but it did
show that attempts to discredit it rested on demonstrable forgery and falsification.
If there is such a thing as historical untruth, there must also be such a thing
as historical truth. And if there is such a thing as a biased, tendentious historian
who tried to support preconceived ideas about the past by a selective use of
the evidence and by doctoring the documents, there must be such a thing as an
objective historian who puts preconceived ideas about the past to the test of
whether or not they are supported by the evidence, and modifies or abandons
them if they are not.

Contribution to the ‘Great Debate on History
and Postmodernism’, University of Sydney, Australia, 27 July 2002