Author: Ophelia Benson

Introduction

Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene is the kind of book
that changes the way that people look at the world. Its importance
is that it articulates a gene’s-eye view of evolution. According
to this view, all organisms, including human beings, are ‘survival
machines’ which have been ‘blindly programmed’ to preserve their
genes (see The Selfish Gene, p. v). Of course, extant
survival machines take a myriad of different forms – for example,
it is estimated that there are some three million different species
of insect alone – but they all have in common that they have been
built according to the instructions of successful genes; that
is, genes whose replicas in previous generations managed to get
themselves copied.

At the level of genes, things are competitive. Genes that contribute
to making good bodies – bodies that stay alive and reproduce –
come to dominate a gene pool (the whole set of genes in a breeding
population). So, for example, if a gene emerges which has the
effect of improving the camouflage of stick-insects, it will in
time likely achieve a preponderance over alternative genes (alleles)
which produce less effective camouflage. There are no such things
as long-lived, altruistic genes. If a gene has the effect of increasing
the welfare of its alleles to its own detriment, it will in the
end perish. In this sense, then, all long-lived genes are ‘selfish’,
concerned only with their own survival – and the world is necessarily
full of genes which have successfully looked after their own interests.

There are good reasons for seeing evolution as operating at the
level of genes. Alternative theories are either unworkable (group
selectionism) or not as successful (individual selectionism).
However, despite the fact that the central message of The Selfish
Gene has become scientific orthodoxy, the book, and the ideas
associated with it, have gained something of a reputation for
extremism. In part, this is because they been subject to sustained
criticism by a number of high profile, often media friendly, people
working in the sciences and humanities. On the science side of
things, critics have included Steven Rose, Richard Lewontin and
Stephen Jay Gould. On the humanities side, there have been, amongst
others, David Stove, Hilary Rose and, perhaps most notoriously,
Mary Midgley.

Midgley’s ‘Gene-Juggling’

Mary Midgley first turned her attention to Richard Dawkins’s
ideas in her 1979 article ‘Gene Juggling’, published in the journal
Philosophy. On the first page of the article, she had this
to say about Dawkins and The Selfish Gene:

His central point is that the emotional nature of man is
exclusively self-interested, and he argues this by claiming
that all emotional nature is so. Since the emotional nature
of animals clearly is not exclusively self-interested, nor
based on any long-term calculation at all, he resorts to arguing
from speculations about the emotional nature of genes, which
he treats as the source and archetype of all emotional nature.
(‘Gene Juggling’, pp. 439-440).

Unfortunately, as Andrew Brown – who, incidentally, is usually
sympathetic to Midgley – points out in his book, The Darwin
Wars, this is just about as wrong as it is possible to get
about selfish gene theory.[1] It is wrong on
a number of counts.

First: Dawkins makes it absolutely clear in The Selfish Gene
that he is not using the word ‘selfishness’ – or its opposite
‘altruism’ – to refer to the psychological states, emotional or
otherwise, of any entity. Rather, as he pointed out in his reply
to Midgley (‘In Defence of Selfish Genes’), he gives the word
an explicitly behaviouristic definition:

An entity…is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such
a way as to increase another such entity’s welfare at the
expense of its own. Selfish behaviour has exactly the opposite
effect. ‘Welfare’ is defined as ‘chances of survival’….It
is important to realise that the…definitions of altruism and
selfishness are behavioural, not subjective. I am not
concerned here with the psychology of motives. (The Selfish
Gene, p. 4)

There are no grounds, then, for supposing, as Midgley did, that
the central message of The Selfish Gene has anything to
do with the emotional natures of man, animals or genes.

Second: the very idea that Dawkins might think that genes have
an emotional nature is so bizarre that it is hard to know what
to make of it. One would be tempted to conclude that Midgley didn’t
really mean it, except that she started her article in a similar
fashion:

Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms
can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological.
This should not need mentioning, but…The Selfish Gene
has succeeded in confusing a number of people about it… (‘Gene
Juggling’, p. 439)

Whatever she meant, two things are clear: (a) no reputable biologist
thinks that genes have an emotional nature; and (b) genes can
be selfish in the sense that Dawkins – and other sociobiologists[2]
– use the term.

Third: Midgley was confused about levels of analysis. It isn’t
possible to make straightforward claims about the behaviour of
organisms from the fact that their genes are selfish. There is
no requirement for individual organisms to be selfish in the service
of their genes. Indeed, one of the central messages of The
Selfish Gene is precisely that it is possible to explain the
altruistic behaviour of individual animals in terms of
selfish gene theory.

These kinds of mistakes are typical of Midgley’s article as a
whole. Dawkins, in his response, claimed that the article had
‘no good point to make’ and argued that the details of her criticisms
were incorrect because they were based on a misunderstanding and
misapplication of a technical language. This conclusion is echoed
by Andrew Brown, who states: ‘It has to be said that by the end
of Dawkins’s piece…any impartial reader will see that she misunderstood
him.’ (Darwin Wars, p. 92) Indeed, Midgley herself has
conceded that she should have expressed her objections to The
Selfish Gene ‘more clearly and temperately’. (‘Selfish Genes
and Social Darwinism’, p. 365).

What’s going on?

It is possible to tell a very complicated story in order to explain
how it is that Dawkins’s ideas, and those of other sociobiologists,
provoke the kinds of extreme reaction and misunderstanding characterised
by Midgley’s ‘Gene Juggling’. At its most convoluted, this tale
would include episodes dealing with: scientism; biological determinism;
reductionism; metaphor; motives; moral theory; modes of explanation;
levels of selection; and more. Happily, though, there is an alternative
story to tell, less comprehensive, but with the advantage of clarity.
It also gets to the heart of an important aspect of the worries
that people have about sociobiological ideas. It is a story about
moral and political commitments.

The proper starting point of this story is the constellation
of ideas associated with what has become known as social Darwinism.[3]
The most general claim of the social Darwinists was that it is
possible to make use of Darwinian concepts in order to understand
society and the relationships that people have with each other.
Specifically, they argued that societies progress because people
aggressively pursue their own self-interest in competition with
other people doing the same thing. They are competing primarily
for economic success, and the ‘fittest’ – those people most adapted
to the demands of competition – deservedly rise to the top. If
a person is not successful, it indicates a lack of ‘fitness’,
and, by extension, that they are not deserving of the rewards
that fitness brings.

The nineteenth century social theorist Herbert Spencer is probably
the best known exponent of social Darwinist ideas. In his view,
social Darwinism translated naturally into a celebration of the
individualistic, competitive ethos of laissez-faire capitalism.
Spencer thought it quite natural that there were economic winners
and losers under capitalism. He opposed social reform and government
intervention to help those disadvantaged by the system, on the
grounds that there should be no interference in what was a natural
mechanism for sorting out the fit from the unfit. Not surprisingly,
Spencer’s ideas were enthusiastically adopted by many capitalists
at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in the United
States, as a means to justify their wealth and resist the call
for social reform.

This kind of crude social Darwinism was relatively short-lived.
Indeed, even by the first decade of the twentieth century, Spencer’s
ideas were beginning to fall into disrepute. Nevertheless, social
Darwinism remains a factor in the way in which people think about
sociobiological ideas. Perhaps the major reason for this lasting
impact is that the history of social Darwinism is tarnished by
its association with some of the more shameful episodes of the
twentieth century. Not only, as we have seen, was it used to legitimate
the painful consequences of untrammelled capitalism, it was also,
for example: (a) implicated in the emergence of eugenics movements
at the beginning of the century, something which led directly
to compulsory sterilisation programmes in the United States and
indirectly to Nazi concentration camps; (b) integral to ‘scientific
racism’, which sought to ground racial discrimination in notions
of biological superiority and inferiority; and (c) a contributor
to an atmosphere of ‘war apologetics’ that was prevalent in Europe
in the period leading up to the 1914-1918 war.

However, it is important to note that people tend now not to
talk specifically about social Darwinism in relation to sociobiology.
Rather, its impact is felt through people’s concern with a constellation
of ideas which are linked by the fact that they are presupposed
by social Darwinism. Of these, perhaps the most significant are:
(a) the notion that the behaviour of human beings is solely determined
by their biology (what is now called biological or genetic determinism);
and (b) the idea that it is possible to invoke biology in order
to justify particular social or political arrangements
(as, for example, extreme right-wing political parties will, in
order to justify their racist agendas).

Dawkins and social Darwinism

Is it the case, then, that Richard Dawkins’s ideas in The
Selfish Gene amount to a kind of social Darwinism? The answer
to this question is a simple no. There is nothing in Richard Dawkins’s
work which remotely adds up to social Darwinism. There are three
main reasons why this conclusion is easy to draw.

First: Dawkins says clearly that he is not, unlike the social
Darwinists, advocating any particular way of living. He puts it
this way in The Selfish Gene:

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying
how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally
ought to behave.… My own feeling is that a human society based
simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness
would be a very nasty society in which to live. (The Selfish
Gene, p. 2-3).

What Dawkins is doing here is flagging up the ‘is/ought gap’;
that is, the fact that it is not possible to derive moral statements
about how things ought to be from statements about how things
stand in the world. For example, if it turns out that we are genetically
disposed towards murder, it does not follow that we should, therefore,
go around murdering people. Biological facts do not entail moral
facts – a point, incidentally, which is ruinous for social Darwinism.

Second: Dawkins explicitly disavows irrevocable ‘genetic determinism’;
indeed, he has called it ‘pernicious rubbish on an almost astrological
scale’ (The Extended Phenotype, p. 13). Genes affect behaviour.
If you want to do Darwinian theorising, then you’ve got to look
at the effects of genes. But there are no grounds for thinking
that these effects are any more inexorable than the effects of
the environment. Inevitability is not part of the equation. This
is how Dawkins puts it in The Extended Phenotype:

Genetic causes and environmental causes are in principle
no different from each other. Some influences of both types
may be hard to reverse; others may be easy to reverse. Some
may be usually hard to reverse but easy if the right agent
is applied. The important point is that there is no general
reason for expecting genetic influences to be any more irrevocable
than environmental ones. (The Extended Phenotype, p.
13).

Third: Dawkins’s work is rarely specifically about human beings.
Rather, he is dealing with general questions to do with evolutionary
theory, many of which are only marginally relevant for understanding
human behaviour. Moreover, he is on record as saying that he has
little interest in human ethics and does not know a great deal
about human psychology. (‘In Defence of Selfish Genes’, p. 558)
Of course, the argument here is not that Dawkins’s work
never has implications for understanding human behaviour. Rather,
it is that where it does, it is not usually because human beings
are specifically his subject, but because humans are evolved animals,
and evolution is his subject.

Politics, morals and biology

If the ideas of Richard Dawkins cannot be construed as a kind
of social Darwinism, what has social Darwinism got to do with
the extreme reactions and misunderstanding that his work provokes?
The answer is that it is the measure against which many
people assess the merits of those biological theories they judge
to have implications for the understanding of human behaviour.[4]
To appreciate the significance of this point, it is important
to recall that social Darwinism remains a factor in people’s thinking
because of its association with the horrors of things like racism,
war and eugenics. Consequently, for many of those people whose
political and moral inclinations are structured by notions of
equality and common humanity, social Darwinism is a wickedness
to be sought out and then vigorously contested wherever it might
be found.

The consequence of this injunction to combat social Darwinism
has been the emergence of a mindset amongst certain sectors of
the educated public which undermines the proper examination of
sociobiological arguments. It is a mindset which subjugates science
to political and moral commitments. It results in sociobiological
texts being read from a default position of suspicion. Any perception
that the arguments they contain might conceivably be co-opted
for the purposes of articulating a social Darwinist agenda – however
this is construed – is taken as confirmation that this is where
the sympathies of the author lie. And the scientific merit
of sociobiological arguments is assessed in terms of the extent
to which they fit with a political and moral agenda governed by
notions of equality and common humanity.

It is easy to point to instances where this mindset prevails.
For example, it is involved:

1. In Mary Midgley’s confusion about selfish genes and selfish
   individuals; in her accusation that Dawkins’s ‘crude, cheap,
   blurred genetics….is the kingpin of his crude, cheap, blurred
   psychology’ (‘Gene-Juggling’, p. 449); and her statement that
   her main aim is ‘to show people that they can use Darwin’s methods
   on human behaviour without being committed to a shoddy psychology
   and a bogus political morality’ (‘Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism’,
   p. 369).
2. In Steven Rose, Leon Kamin and Richard Lewontin’s claim that
   ‘Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology’
   (Not In Our Genes); and their argument that ‘…universities
   serve as creators, propagators and legitimators of the ideology
   of biological determinism. If biological determinism is a weapon
   in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons
   factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the
   engineers, designers, and the production workers.’ (Not In
   Our Genes).
3. In Hilary Rose’s claims, in Red Pepper, that fundamental
   Darwinists, ‘with their talk of biological universals on matters
   of social difference are a political and cultural menace to
   feminists and others who care for justice and freedom’; that
   they are ‘obsessed by the desire to reduce organisms (including
   humans) to one determining entity – the gene’; and that sociobiology
   ‘has a history which varies from the dodgy to the disgusting
   on sexual difference’. (Red Pepper, Sept 1997, p. 23).
4. In the furious reaction that greeted the publication of Edward
   O. Wilson’s 1975 book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,
   which saw: the American Anthropological Association debating
   a motion to censure sociobiology; a group of Boston scientists
   – including Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin – forming
   ‘The Sociobiology Study Group’, and noting in The New York
   Review of Books that theories that attempted to establish
   a biological foundation to social behaviour provided an ‘important
   basis…for the eugenic policies which led to the establishment
   of Gas chambers in Nazi Germany’; and Wilson himself being drenched
   with water by protestors at a meeting of the American Association
   for the Advancement of Science in early 1978.

Conclusion

Richard Dawkins’s ideas, and those of other sociobiologists,
then, provoke extreme reactions and misunderstanding because their
critics believe them to be in conflict with the moral and political
commitments that they hold. This fact stands independently of
any considerations about the merit of the kind of science that
Dawkins, and his colleagues, are doing. Of course, it is not unusual
for ideology to affect the judgements that people make about scientific
theories, and where these theories have implications for understanding
human beings it is especially commonplace.[5]
But what it has meant in the case of sociobiology is that the
public space for the debate about evolutionary ideas has
become polluted by the hyperbole that almost inevitably occurs
when the politically engaged feel their baseline commitments to
be under threat.

However, for those people who prefer their science to be driven
by a desire to uncover the fundamental nature of things, and not
by a desire to find spurious support for political and moral values,
there is still some hope. For, according to Edward O. Wilson,
the controversy surrounding sociobiology is essentially over.
‘The contrarians are ageing,’ he told Ed Douglas, in a recent
Guardian interview. ‘No young scientists are joining. They
are not handing on the torch but passing it around a smaller and
smaller circle.’ If Wilson is right, perhaps there is hope for
a future where articles like Mary Midgley’s ‘Gene Juggling’ don’t
get published in reputable journals.

 ********************************

Endnotes

1 This is echoed by J. L. Mackie, whose original
article in Philosophy, ‘The Law of the Jungle’, had motivated
Midgley to write ‘Gene Juggling’. In a follow-up article he wrote:
‘Mary Midgley’s article is not merely intemperate but misconceived.
Its errors must be corrected if readers of Philosophy are
not to be left with false impressions, for it rests on a complete
misunderstanding both of Dr Dawkins’s position and of mine.’ (‘Genes
and Egoism’, p. 553).

2 It should be noted that Dawkins is on record
as saying that he doesn’t much like the term ‘Sociobiologist’
(but he has also said that he is willing to stand up and be counted
as one).

3 Social Darwinsim is something of a contested
concept. Consequently, there will be those who disagree with the
way in which I use the term in this article. There is also disagreement
about the history of social Darwinism. For an alternative treatment
of this phenomenon, see Robert Bannister’s Social Darwinism:
Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought.

4 Mary Midgley makes the same point in her article
‘Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism’ (pp. 366-367).

5 In this regard, the whole Lysenkoism affair
in the Soviet Union is instructive.

 

References

Bannister, R., Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American
Social Thought, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979).
Brown, A., The Darwin Wars, (London: Touchstone, 2000).
Carnegie, A., The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1976).
Dawkins, R., The Selfish Gene, 2^nd Edition,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 [1976]).
Dawkins, R., ‘In Defence of Selfish Genes’, Philosophy,
vol. 56, no. 218 (1981), pp. 556-573.
Dawkins, R., The Extended Phenotype, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1982).
Mackie, J. L., ‘The Law of the Jungle’, Philosophy, vol.
53, no. 206 (1978), pp. 455-464.
Mackie, J. L., ‘Genes and Egoism’, Philosophy, vol. 56,
no. 218 (1981), pp. 553-555.
Midgley, M., ‘Gene Juggling’, Philosophy, vol. 54, no.
210 (1979), pp. 439-458.
Midgley, M., ‘Social Genes and Social Darwinism’, Philosophy,
vol. 58, no. 225, pp. 365-377.
Rose, S., Kamin, L. & Lewontin, R., Not In Our Genes,
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
Wilson, E., Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978).

Dennis Healey once compared a verbal attack by one of his parliamentary
colleagues to "being savaged by a dead sheep." I was reminded
of this remark when I met the physicist Alan Sokal, the man who,
along with mathematician Jean Bricmont, has caused outrage and indignation
among the French intelligentsia first with his spoof post-modern
article published in the journal Social Text, and then for
his and Bricmont’s book Intellectual Impostures, which
combines a catalogue of misuses of scientific terms by predominantly
French thinkers with a stinging attack on what they call "sloppy
relativism"

Given this history, you’d expect Sokal to be more lupine than lamb-like,
but in fact, he is a friendly, chatty, effusive figure more interested
in offering his guests his favourite blackcurrant tea from New York
than character assassinations. You would have thought he and Healey’s
sheep would be just about level in terms of terrifyingness, so how
did this gentle man come to be the scourge of the rive gauche?

"My original motivation had to do with epistemic relativism," explains
Sokal, "and what I saw as a rise in sloppily thought-out relativism,
being the kind of unexamined zeitgeist of large areas of
the American humanities and some parts of the social sciences. In
particular I had political motivations because I was worried about
the extent to which that relativism was identified with certain
parts of the academic left and I also consider myself on the left
and consider that to be a suicidal attitude for the American left."

Sokal’s intention was to write a parody of this kind of relativism and to
see if an academic journal would publish it. The end result was
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics
of Quantum Gravity", which was published in the journal Social
Text in 1996. With extensive quotations from the thinkers Sokal
was targeting, such as Lacan, Irigaray and Baudrillard, the article
pulls off the powerful trick of constructing the parody almost entirely
out of the parodied (something which, ironically, some of the post-modernists
Sokal attacks would surely appreciate).

"It’s important not to exaggerate what the parody shows," stresses
Sokal. "As an experiment it doesn’t prove very much. It
just proves that one journal was very sloppy in its standards. I
don’t know what other journals would have done. I suspect that
a lot of other journals would have rejected it. As for the content
of the parody, in some ways it’s a lot worse than a lot of
stuff which is published, in some ways it’s a lot less bad.
Steve Weinberg in his article in the New York Review of Books
made, I think, a perceptive observation, that ‘contrary to
what some people have said, I don’t think that Sokal’s
article is incomprehensible. I find some of the views in it daffy.
But I think that most of the time he expresses himself clearly and
indeed I have the distinct impression that Sokal finds it difficult
to write unclearly,’ which is absolutely true. I had to go
through many revisions before the article reached the desired level
of unclarity.

"It was a parody, intended to be extreme. It comes out in the first
two paragraphs, and says, without any evidence or argument –
of course it says it in high-faluting language, but translated into
English it basically says – ‘Most western intellectuals
used to believe that there exists a real world, but now we know
better.’"

By the time the parody had been published and Sokal had revealed the
hoax, provoking a storm that became big news in the quality press
in France, Britain and America, the original target had been extended.

"As I did the research for the parody, I came up against the other issue,
namely, the gross abuse of terminology from the natural sciences
in the writings of French, American and British authors, but
the French ones are the more prominent, they’re the big stars."

The parody was thus to spawn a book, Intellectual Impostures,
covering both relativism and the abuses of science. "It was
the second aspect that became the most sensational aspect of the
book, but it was the question of relativism that motivated me."

However, the coverage of the two themes in one book has perhaps back-fired,
in that readers have confused the two issues.

"One thing that I have to emphasise over and over and over again, and
which we emphasise in the preface to the English edition, but somehow
it doesn’t seem to sink in, is that there are really essentially
two books under one cover, which are only weakly related. There
is the critique of the gross abuses of scientific concepts by certain
French philosophical literary intellectuals – they’re
not all philosophers in the strict sense. Then, on the other hand,
there’s various versions of epistemic relativism which we criticise
and in that case the targets are mainly British and American, not
French, and the two debates are on very different planes. They have
to be evaluated completely separately, the targets are different.
We do not accuse the authors of the imposture of relativism. In
some cases it’s not clear what their philosophy is and we don’t
make any attempt to judge their philosophy. On the other hand the
authors of relativism, we don’t accuse them of imposture, we
accuse them of ambiguous writing or sloppy thinking, but certainly
not of trying to misrepresent things. So they’re completely
separate and the link between them is primarily sociological. There’s
only a very weak logical link between them."

Sokal’s frustration that people don’t notice this separation, when
it is so clearly stated in the preface, tells you all you need to
know about what motivates him: he just can’t stand it when
people fail to notice clear, logical distinctions, and having to
repeat them until people do get it just irritates him more. Critics
have claimed that this scientific insistence on clear, neat distinctions
just isn’t relevant to the texts he lampoons. Sokal is not
impressed by the objection, voiced most explicitly by John Sturrocks
in the London Review of Books. "Sokal and Bricmont,"
wrote Sturrocks, "apply criteria of rigour and univocity fundamental
to their own practice which are beside the point once transferred
to this alien context."

"What criteria of rigour are we talking about?" asks a frankly baffled
Sokal. "Are we talking about criteria that a sentence should
mean something relatively determinate; that the words in it should
mean something and have some relevance to the subject in hand; that
there ought to be a logical argument from one sentence to another;
that when you’re talking about some external phenomena, the
facts about those phenomena are relevant – I mean, we’re
upholding the minimal standards of evidence and logic that I would
have thought would be taken for granted by anybody in any field."

What of the idea that there’s a certain value to be had simply in
a kind of liberal attitude to ideas? Sturrocks goes on to say, "Far
better wild and contentious theses of this sort [Irigaray’s]
than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately demanded by Sokal
and Bricmont."

"But," retorts Sokal, "he doesn’t say what is stultifying about
the idea that the sentences should mean something and that there
should be some logical connection. If he thinks it is important
for crazy ideas to be out there and not suppressed, then fair enough.
But these crazy ideas are out there, so the question is, ‘should
they be out there and criticised, or out there and uncriticised?’
He seems to be saying that they should be out there and uncriticised,
that it’s unfair to point out that these wild and contentious
theses are in fact crazy."

What if we take an extreme defence and say that vagueness and ambiguity
are actually great virtues in writing because they open up possibilities,
which, again, Sturrocks suggests. Sokal will have none of it.

"Well in poetry it’s a great virtue, in novels it might be a great
virtue. But I do think that in analytical writing, whether it’s
about physics or biology or history or sociology, the goal should
be to remove ambiguity when possible. Of course, natural language
is unavoidably ambiguous, but we should do our best. If we’re
trying to talk about some external objects then we should try to
make as clear as possible what external objects we are talking about
and what we’re saying about them.

"When the book came out in France, Jean-François Lyotard agreed to be
on a television programme with Bricmont and me and we had a kind
of debate. Unfortunately it wasn’t a very serious programme.
Also, unfortunately the fifteen minute debate consisted of a ten-minute
monologue by Lyotard in very flowery French, in which, if I understood
him correctly, he was saying that physicists don’t understand
that words are used in a different way in poetry and novels than
they are in physics books. When we finally got to the floor, we
said, ‘Well, we know that, but to our knowledge the books of
Lacan and Deleuze are not sold in the poetry section of bookstores,
they are sold in psychology and philosophy, so they should be judge
by the standards of psychology and philosophy – those are cognitive
discourses, they are purporting to say something about something,
let’s judge them that way. If you want to re-classify them
as poetry, then we can judge them on whether they’re good poetry
or not.’ My personal feeling would be most of these people
don’t write good poetry either. Lacan, I don’t think writes
good poetry."

However, there were times reading the book when I felt a bit uncomfortable
in the sense that it felt like, in the first part of the book, we
were just having a laugh at these foolish people. Where was the
sincere attempt at trying to see what the interpretations are? I
read passage upon passage where I thought, "Well, someone,
presumably, would be able to come in and interpret this in a way
which might make sense."

"Let’s not leave this as an abstract question in the air," insists
Sokal. "This is an open challenge to defenders of all these
people. We would love for people to pick one or more passages in
the book where we criticise particular texts and explain first of
all what they mean, justify the references to mathematics and physics
and explain why it’s valid. So far, no-one has taken up our
challenge. There was one article in La Recherche where two
Lacanians tried – rather vainly I thought – to defend
Lacan’s square-root of minus-one and the erectile organ. But
aside from that, the whole debate has just been abstract defences
of the right to metaphor – which we grant, explicitly –
but without trying defend any specific one of the texts."

So in this whole affair no one has shed light on any of those passages?

"Not only shed light. Aside from that one article [in La Recherche],
I don’t know if anyone has even selected a passage from the
text that we’ve criticised and tried to explain what it means.
Not a single one. It’s all in some ethereal plane, the discussion.
Our goal is limited. We did not try to understand or to discuss
in the book the role of topology within Lacan’s psychoanalysis
– that would be far beyond our competence. We’d almost
certainly get it wrong, we’d certainly be accused of getting
it wrong. We’re already stepping far enough out of our field
to write the book. You can imagine if we’d tried to explain
how mathematics functions within Lacan’s psychoanalysis, within
Kristeva’s theory of poetic language and so on – we’d
have our heads cut off. That’s not the purpose of the book.
I think we’ve given good evidence that whatever Lacan may be
trying to do in psychoanalysis, the mathematical theory of compact
sets or imaginary numbers is irrelevant to it, or at the very least
that he hasn’t explained the relevance."

Although Sokal is not interested in attacking the Philosophy of Science in
general, in Intellectual Impostures, Sokal says, "Science
is a rational enterprise, but difficult to codify." This remark,
coupled with his repeated defence of the rationality of science
without reference to any overarching theory of science, made me
wonder if there were any philosophers of science with whom he could
find some agreement.

"I have respect for a lot of philosophers of science," says Sokal,
but admits "I don’t think I agree with the systems of
any of them. For example, we criticise Popper on various grounds,
although we respect him in other ways. We criticise some of the
more extreme formulations of Kuhn and so on, but agree with him in
other ways. The same with Feyerabend. Maybe our view is somewhat
closer to Lakatos, I don’t know.

"I don’t have anything against philosophers who try to specify
it [the scientific method], and I think John Worrall was critical
because he thought we had underestimated the extent to which it
can be codified, and to which some philosophers – he mentioned
Lakatos – had succeeded in codifying it. That’s a more
subtle question that I’d love to discus with him. But our dispute
is not primarily with philosophers of science. We’re more worried
about the gross abuses and gross exaggerations of these ideas which
originated in philosophy of science but which have trickled down
in vulgarised form to anthropology and cultural studies. People
just talk about the incommensurability of paradigms as if it were
an established fact."

Sokal tries to maintain a tricky equilibrium between his strongly-held
views about relativism and his avowed disinterest in getting drawn
into subtler philosophical debates. Whether this is tenable is unclear.
Very few people are crude relativists, as Sokal acknowledges. So
then doesn’t he have to get involved in the subtler philosophical
issues if he wants his case to stick?

This perhaps came out in a lengthy exchange I had with Sokal about the
differences between idealism, relativism and instrumentalism. Idealists
believe that there is no such thing as a mind-independent reality,
but it doesn’t follow from this that science is not objective.
Relativists believe that there is no one truth about reality. Instrumentalist
believe that science is not about discovering the nature of reality,
but a means of predicting and manipulating the world. These positions
can all be classified as non-realist, in that they deny either the
existence of a world independent of minds, or at least deny that
such a world can be known. Sokal, who sees himself as a moderate
realist, is strongly opposed to relativism and less stridently opposed
to instrumentalism. But if a broad idealism is behind a lot of the
thinkers he criticises, and that is distinct from instrumentalism
and relativism, then he’s not only missed his target, he’s
also not really in the right ball-park.

I say this, not to criticise the limits of Sokal’s philosophical
knowledge (it’s abundantly clear that Sokal is much clearer
in his understanding of philosophy than some of his targets are
about the science they appropriate), nor because I am sure that
idealism is behind a lot of what Sokal criticises, but rather
to illustrate the perils of Sokal’s enterprise. He wants to
avoid the subtle distinctions and stick to the gross errors. But
is it not possible that some of these only appear as gross errors
because of a lack of understanding of the subtler ideas underlying
them?

Sokal insists that, "The debate I was trying to raise was much cruder.
We give the example of the anthropologist and two theories of the
origin of native American populations, One that they came from Asia,
which is the archaeological consensus, the other the traditional
native American creation myths, so that their ancestors always lived
in the Americas, and the anthropologists said, ‘Science is just
one of many ways of knowing the world. The Zuni world-view is just
as valid as the archaeological viewpoint of what prehistory is all
about.’ So we go through and try and disentangle what he means
by ‘just as valid’. There are certain interpretations
of that which are unobjectionable but don’t say much, there
are other versions that do say something significant which we think
are grossly false. Jean and I were in Brazil in April and there
was two-day seminar at the University of Sao Paolo about our book
and things related to it, and we had long discussions with anthropologists
who really refused to admit that a culture’s cosmology could
be objectively true or false. Their beliefs about the origin of
the universe, or the movements of the planets or whatever, could
only be judged true or false relative to a culture. Not just questions
of cosmology, questions of history. And we asked, ‘Does that
mean that the fact that millions of native Americans died in the
wake of the European invasion, is that not an objective fact, that
it’s merely a belief that’s held to be true in some cultures?’
We never got a straightforward answer from them."

Whether or not Sokal is right in his accusations, his methods, particularly
the parody, have been criticised on some fronts for undermining
certain important things, such as trust. Does perhaps the ridiculing
of an area of academia bring the whole intellectual community into
disrepute?

"There’s certainly a danger. I have to emphasise that I didn’t expect
that this would ever reach the man on the street. It certainly wasn’t
intended to reach the front page of the New York Times or
the front page of the Observer or the front page of Le
Monde. It happened that way. A month before it came out in Social
Text, I was discussing with my friends, ‘How big is this
likely to be?’ My prediction was that it would be a significant
scandal within a small academic community. It would be page ten
of the Chronicle of Higher Education [The American equivalent
of The Times Higher] and maybe a 50-50 chance of a brief
mention on the New York Times education page. So I certainly
didn’t expect that it would make the popular press and, indeed,
when it did, some of the articles in the popular press, even in
the so-called serious press like the New York Times gave
off a whiff of anti-intellectualism, which I’ve tried to criticise
in my writings since then. We criticise the political twist that
the New York Times gave it, for example.

"So yes, it was briefly used. It dropped out of the popular press pretty
fast, which is fine by me. I intended it to cause a debate in academia
and that’s what I think it has done. But, yes, in the popular
press it had briefly two negative effects. It was used to bash intellectuals
in general and it was used to bash the political left in general.
At every opportunity I’ve had I’ve argued against both
of those two misuses. It’s not an attack on intellectuals in
general. It’s a critique by some intellectuals of other intellectuals.
And it’s not an attack on the left in general, it’s a
critique by someone on the left against others on the left."

As a physicist criticising people in the humanities, I wonder if Sokal
has ever felt like an impostor.

"No. I’ve felt lots of times that perhaps I’m getting in over
my head, which is a totally different thing. We emphasise in the
introduction that everybody has the right to express their ideas
about anything, regardless of whatever their professional credentials
are, and the value of the intervention has to be determined by its
contents, not by the presence or absence of professional credentials.
So physicists can say perfectly stupid things about physics or the
philosophy of physics and non-physicists can say perfectly smart
things about physics, it depends upon what’s being said. So,
of course, sometimes I’m a little scared because I know I’m
venturing outside of the area of my primary competence. A lot of
the book is on our area of primary competence, namely mathematics
and physics, but one chapter is on philosophy of science, which
is a little bit out of our area, so, of course I’m a little
worried that perhaps I’ve made some stupid mistake and the
philosophers are going to take us to task for it. If we made some
stupid mistakes I want to be taken to task for it. If we’ve
made gross errors or even subtle errors in the philosophy of science
I want to be criticised, but not because I’m a physicist or
because I lack a degree in philosophy. That’s irrelevant."

As Sokal prepares to return to his "first love", physics,
how have his perceptions of the humanities and social sciences been
changed by the experience of writing the parody and book?

"The best thing about this whole affair for me, which has now taken about
three years of my life, has been that I’ve been able to meet
and sometimes become good friends with really interesting people
in history, philosophy and sociology that I wouldn’t have otherwise
met. From them I’ve found out both that things were worse than
I thought, in the sense that some of the sloppy thinking was spread
more widely than I thought, and also that things were better than
I thought in that there were a lot of people within the humanities and
social sciences who had been arguing against sloppy thinking for
years and often were not being heard. After the parody and again
after the book I got an incredible amount of email from people in
the humanities and social sciences and people on the political left
as well, who were saying, ‘Thank you. We’ve been trying
to say this for years without getting through, and maybe it was
necessary for an outsider to come in and shake up our field and
say that our local emperor is running naked.’"

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

Julian Baggini has a web site here.

Intellectual Impostures is published by Profile Books and is available in
paperback at £9.99

Recently I have been feeling like a visitor on an alien planet: ordinary people
around me have started to communicate in a new, esoteric language. Let’s call
it Energyspeak. It uses the same vocabulary as Oldspeak (my native language),
but many of its words have been stripped of their usual meanings. Its speakers
also seem to inhabit a radically different metaphysical universe. They inform
me that there is a bioenergetic field flowing through and around us; and that
disturbances in it have dire consequences for our health. Those fluent in Energyspeak
pay regular visits to energy therapists (acupuncturists; homeopaths; reflexologists;
reiki healers) who are able to treat all kinds of physical and emotional problems
by correcting energy imbalances. I myself have never been to see an energy therapist;
until recently I didn’t even realise that there were such things as energy blockages.
I must by now be a walking, talking energy knot; in fact, it is a miracle I’m
still alive.

I’ve realised that I can no longer function in modern society unless I teach
myself Energyspeak, which is why I’ve spent a lot of time wading through alternative
health magazines and books, and surfed up and down the Internet in search of
enlightenment. Getting to grips with the basics is easy: it didn’t take me long
to learn to perform simple translations between Energyspeak and Oldspeak:

Energyspeak	Oldspeak
I felt chi flowing through my body when I was practising T’ai Chi.	I felt great after my T’ai Chi class because the exercise improved my circulation and relaxed my muscles.
Negative emotions produce blockages in the energy flow, which results in illness.	Chronic depression can suppress the immune function, which can be a co-factor in illness.
The healer relieved my emotional distress by clearing my energy channels.	I felt less depressed after spending an hour with a kind and caring person who made a fuss of me.

It could be then that Energyspeak simply provides a language for spouting
New Age poetry. Maybe phrases like ‘experiencing chi’ and ‘clearing energy
channels’ are not meant to refer to concrete, material things, but are used
metaphorically to describe such abstract notions as vitality and well-being.
(After all, I myself often talk about something being good for my ‘soul’, although
I do not believe in the existence of an immaterial, immortal Soul.) Or maybe
words like ‘life force’ and ‘energy fields’ should be understood as referring
to a supernatural or mystical phenomenon – some kind of immaterial bio-spiritual
force, which can be felt by believers, but is not detected by our gross material
instruments, let alone by gross materialists like myself, and will always remain
beyond the ken of science.

It is, however, clear that most practitioners and consumers of energy medicine
believe that this mysterious energy is just as real as viruses and hormones;
that there really exists such a thing as a Bioenergetic Field. In other words,
the claims made by energy scientists are meant to be taken entirely literally;
they are testable, scientific claims about the natural world. Some of them concede
that the force itself may be too subtle to be measured, but are nevertheless
adamant that its effects are eminently measurable. In fact, most serious energy
enthusiasts are keen to distance themselves from those wacky New Age types who
drone on about our energy fields being affected by karmic laws.

I have been trying to teach myself energy science and energy medicine, but
it hasn’t been easy as the experts themselves appear to be almost as confused
as I am about the nature of bioenergy – or chi, universal life force,
human energy, vibrating energy, as it is variously called. I think they
are all talking about some special type of field (bioenergetic field, vibrating
energy field, human energy field; electro-dynamic energy field), which may be
related to electromagnetic fields and has something to do with quantum physics.
It courses through the body, travelling between energy centres (aka chakras
or vortexes ) via a system a channels (aka meridians). This bioenergy creates
an aura (aka Energy Body) that surrounds our physical bodies. It is part of
the harmonious life force permeating the cosmos, but at the same time each individual’s
energy emanations are as unique as their fingerprints.

Bioenergy is said to play a crucial role in illness, although energy theorists
are not altogether sure as to how the Energy Body interacts with the physical
body. One group assert that bioenergy anomalies (blockages, imbalances, weaknesses
and disharmonies) indicate sickness in the physical body. Others (the majority
it seems) argue that it is the imbalances and perturbations that cause
physical or mental illness, and that these anomalies themselves result from
stress, accidents, trauma, or negative thinking. What they all agree about is
that energy therapy, which involves removing energy blockages, or balancing
and strengthening the ’disharmonic’ or depleted energy fields, is beneficial
for all kinds of medical conditions. Apparently, we need to keep the Energy
Body nice and strong and clear of blocks because its function is to stimulate
the physical body’s own healing ability.

Now I suffer from the same handicap as most other people: I am woefully ignorant
of science, especially of physics, so I find it hard to assess the validity
of many of the claims made by energy scientists. One can score cheap points
by mocking the kind of person who manages to keep a straight face when saying
things like ‘negative emotions are stored as negative energy in the etheric
body’. But it is more difficult to disregard those energy experts who radiate
a scientific aura and whose articles are peppered with complex diagrams and
impressive-sounding jargon. ‘Alpha and theta frequencies’? ‘vector potentials’?
‘colloidal stability’? – I must admit I have no idea what they are talking about.
Fortunately for me, they often give the game away by insisting that Kirlian
photography shows the bioenergetic field surrounding the human body or by praising
William Reich’s Orgone Therapy. But then these people take pride in being ‘alternative’
physicists who are working at the cutting edge of energy science, leaving behind
all those narrow-minded traditionalists who refuse to experience the joys of
vibrating energy fields.

There are two facts I’ve learnt about energy, as the term is understood in
conventional physics. First, it doesn’t refer to a substance or a thing, but
to an abstract idea and is defined prosaically as ‘the capacity to do work’.
The problem is that we humans have a tendency to reduce abstract concepts to
concrete things; hence, it’s natural for us to think of energy as something
substantial that can get blocked, or be manipulated and stored in a specific
location – and even be described as ‘negative’ or ‘positive’. Second, we are
made of the same atoms as the rocks, water and air around us; in modern physics,
there is no energy field that is unique to living organisms, let alone to humans.
All objects, including human bodies, emit electromagnetic radiation: chairs
and tables, too, have ‘auras’ whose characteristics depend not on their bio-spiritual
health, but on such mundane physical properties as moisture and temperature.

Alternative energy scientists denounce such a reductionist view of human life.
They subscribe to the doctrine of vitalism – the belief that there is a separate,
non-physical life force animating all living things and defying mechanistic
explanations. Indeed, most cultures have believed in the existence of a vital
force: the Chinese call it chi; the Hindus know it as prana; the
ancient Greeks used to call it pneuma or psyche, while the Romans
talked about three kinds of spirits .It is similarly an ancient intuition
that disease results from the imbalance of natural and supernatural forces and
that healing consists in restoring balance within the body. Two centuries ago
scientists rejected the notion of a vital life force, and it is now assumed
that life emerges from the complexity and organisation of an organism. Having
gained a better understanding of human anatomy and physiology, medical scientists
began to concern themselves with such earthly matters as hormonal and metabolic
balance; and, consequently, spirits, souls, and other ethereal entities gradually
disappeared from the scene – only to reappear as ‘bioenergetic fields’ and ‘electromagnetic
bodies’. Energy medics concede that conventional scientists know a thing or
two about the physical body and its functions, but claim that there is little
point in trying to treat it if the Energy Body remains out of kilter. Thus,
far from being radical thinkers, they actually cling to an ancient belief system.
They may have translated the archaic terms into scientific-sounding language,
but it’s the same old vitalism, dressed up as quantum physics.

If energy enthusiasts wish to embrace vitalism, who are we sceptics to snatch
it away from them? We are merely asking them not to confuse science and metaphysics.
People have the right to ignore the scientific method; however, if they claim
they are being scientific, but fail to obey the rules of the game, then they
can’t expect to be taken seriously. The reason scientists reject vitalism is
that there is no evidence for it: no special ‘vital’ ingredient has ever been
isolated; so far our most sophisticated instruments have failed to detect this
mysterious life force. Contrary to popular belief, spiritual insights and personal
experiences (‘I can feel the force’) do not constitute valid scientific evidence.
Of course, there is a lot we don’t know about Life, the Universe and Energy,
but it seems unfair to criticise scientists for not introducing into their model
an entity or a principle which has no empirical basis and is not required by
their theories.

It is equally unfair to label critics of vitalistic science as evil materialists
and crude mechanists who wilfully trample on other people’s need for Wonder
and Mystery. Sceptics don’t deny mystery, nor do they expect scientists to explain
anything in a ‘deep’ sense. Who knows: maybe there is a Purpose in Nature. However,
energy theorists and other vitalists are no closer to uncovering the truth behind
our existence than the rest of us. Energybabble is both bad poetry and bad science;
instead of deepening the mystery, it serves to extinguish it.

What is curious is that no one seems to be a full-time resident on Planet Energy.
When we are injured in a car crash, or our child develops meningitis, we don’t
worry about the state of our energy bodies, or ask if there is an energy therapist
in the house; we insist on being rushed to the nearest conventional hospital.
When the stakes are high, practically everyone reverts to Oldspeak. Life is
indeed mysterious.  

References
Guy Brown: The Energy of Life, (HarperCollins, 1999).
Victor J Stenger: ‘Bioenergetic Fields’ http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/alt/Biofield.html.