Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science [Hardcover]

For a history of the science wars, cf. The One Culture? J. Labinger, ed

Gross and Levitt perform a valuable service in three parts. They take the time and trouble to wade through the more obviously idiotic postmodern anti-science drivel, they refute it, and they remind us that the purveyors of it are firmly ensconced in the faculties of major universities.

The authors of "Higher Superstition" are academics themselves, and write elegantly in prose laced with vocabulary-stretching words like hermeneutics, conspective, auspicating, tatterdemalian and weltanschauung. While not a particularly easy read, the book makes its main point clearly and simply enough: the postmodern science-bashers are aiming their largely spurious complaints at subjects they secretly resent and barely comprehend. Science has produced edifying, useful, beneficial results with more regularity and less ambiguity than any other field of human endeavor. To claim otherwise is deeply dopey. If academia tolerates a clique where such claims resonate, something is seriously out of whack and we must thank Gross and Levitt for providing fair and frightening warning. Self-styled progressives who berate science with politically correct non sequiturs are no less goofy than the religious zealots they so pointedly disdain.

After an excellent presentation of "postmodernist" concepts, the authors address the anti-science critics declarations. The authors offer us a rogues' gallery of misguided "spokespersons" who bend language, misinterpret what science discloses and the methods it uses, and who fail to comprehend the very topics they purport to critique. They accept that much of science seems obscure and eludes quick or superficial comprehension. Why then, they query, do these critics insist either on denouncing its methods or adopt the findings in an attempt to restructure society? In Gross and Levitt's view, the critics see attacks on science as a means of attaining intellectual power and guiding society along a revised path. Since these critics see corruption at every level, they mean to "purify" society by tearing out any and all roots supporting it. That they have been effective at this slashing exercise in many areas is the reason this book was written.

Gross and Levitt show that those condemning science as "patriarchal," environmentally destructive or racist, are almost universally devoid of knowledge of the workings of science. These attackers seek to replace traditional science with new "ways of knowing." Gross and Levitt offer some real howlers as examples of this genre. From the frivolous "Newton's Principia is a rape manual" to the bizarre notion of a "feminist algebra," Gross and Levitt expose the fallacies of these "anti-patriarchal" constructs. Given the long term campaign by feminists to rebuke science, they show remarkable restraint in their assessment of this aspect of post-modernist techniques. The chapter "Auspiciating Gender" is but seven pages longer than the next longest one. Still, as they remind us, those adherents to such grotesque notions are now firmly established in academic positions and making education policies.

Throughout the book, the authors remind us that science is "a reality-driven enterprise." Science achieves its results by constant attention to methods and results. Whatever impact "culture" has on science, it isn't in the methodology. No reputable scientist assumes his theories will go unchallenged, especially as new data emerge. The cycles of checks and confirmations or refutations has kept science moving forward since the Enlightenment. Gross and Levitt urge readers to remember that without the methods and results of science, countless human achievements from the elimination of smallpox to the computers viewing this page would never have occurred. In the words of Richard Dawkins, "show me a cultural relativist in a jet aircraft at 35 000 feet, and I'll show you a hypocrite." What more can be said?