(5) Preface to the 1998 Edition

"The writing of Higher Superstition was undertaken only when it became clear to us, from separate but remarkably similar experiences at our respective universities, that something new and unwelcome had found its way into the academic bloodstream and thence into lecture rooms, journals, books, and faculty chit-chat: the systematic disparagement of modern science. A public response was clearly needed. Even the silliest criticisms of science, dressed up as social analysis, hermeneutics, or emancipatory politics, were going largely unanswered. Neither scientists as individuals, nor scientific organizations, nor scholars within the disciplines whence issued the disparagement, showed any inclination (might it have been any courage?) to rebut the kinds of antiscientific nonsense and flawed scholarship we were encountering in the academy." [mijn nadruk] (7)

"It was lauded in some conservative journals of opinion despite our disclaimer of any wish to advance conservative political causes — or indeed any political program. Most of the indignant huffing and puffing came from the circled wagons of what we called, with repeated misgivings, the “academic left,” which tried to encourage the perception that we are deep-dyed conservatives (closeted or otherwise) pursuing reactionary agenda, and protecting our fat research grants.
As it happened, the instinctive dislike of science that lurks historically in the conservative woodwork was mostly dormant when we wrote the book. Since then it seems to have begun scratching again, in the form of new denunciations of “Darwinism” (which is not to suggest that there is no anti-Darwinism on the left). If, therefore, we were writing this book ab ovo, the “academic right” would have to join the academic left in its subtitle and there would have to be a chapter on “Intelligent Design Theory.”" [mijn nadruk] (8)

[Dat is in ieder geval iets. Dat je niet bewust politieke doelen wil steunen die conservatief zijn, betekent trouwens nog niet dat je die in de praktijk niet toch steunt door wat je doet. Wat mensen zeggen en wat mensen doen ... De 'science wars' ontstonden door een nepartikel van Sokal dat door de redactie maar al te graag werd opgenomen in een speciale aflevering van hun gerenommeerd 'links' academisch tijdschrift Social Text:]

"The intention was to vindicate assorted poststructuralist, multicultural, and feminist critiques of science and to denounce their critics, most notably the depraved Gross and Levitt. Sokal’s piece, with its seconding and fulsome praise of such intentions, was snapped up by the editors."(10)

"Sokal’s hoax brought into the open a widespread reaction, years in the making, against the sesquipedalian posturings of postmodern theory and the futility of the identity politics that so often travels with it. Cutting-edge celebrities, long used to dictating the tone of political discussion in “progressive” circles, suddenly found themselves on the hot seat. As of this writing, the recriminations continue with no sign of abatement." [mijn nadruk] (10)

"Interest stirred up by our book convinced us to try to extend the discussion by organizing a conference under the sponsorship of the New York Academy of Sciences. This conference, held in New York in the spring of 1995, was called “The Flight from Science and Reason”; several dozen scholars and writers — whom we do not blush to call distinguished — contributed to it. It had at least the virtue of demonstrating that misgivings about the spread of relativism and antirationalism, or, more broadly, the increasing loss of nerve within an intellectual community faced with the need to defend logic, evidence, and rational thought, are not the parochial concern of self-interested scientists." [mijn nadruk] (12)

" ... more and more scientists became aware of the breadth and depth of the misconceptions about science being propagated by constructivist historians, sociologists of scientific knowledge, and feminist epistemologists, among others." [mijn nadruk]

[Wat er tot nu toe gezegd wordt spreekt me wel aan. Toch vraag ik me af hier weer eens een pleidooi gaat volgen vóór wiskunde en exacte wetenschappen en tégen mens- en maatschappijwetenschappen. We zullen zien. ]

(20) Chapter one - The Academic Left and Science

"Muddleheadedness has always been the sovereign force in human affairs—a force far more potent than malevolence or nobility."(21)

"Our subject is the peculiarly troubled relationship between the natural sciences and a large and influential segment of the American academic community which, for convenience but with great misgiving, we call here “the academic left.” The academic left cannot be said to have a well-defined theoretical position with respect to science — it is far too diverse and internally contentious for that — but there is a noteworthy uniformity of tone, and that tone is unambiguously hostile. To put it bluntly, the academic left dislikes science. Naturally enough, it dislikes some of the uses to which science is put by the political and economic forces controlling our society, especially in such areas as military hardware, surveillance of dissidents, destructive and environmentally unsound industrial processes, and the manipulation of mass consciousness through the technologies of popular culture." [mijn nadruk] (24)

[Hm, toch daarover dus. Het vervelende is het gebruik van het woord 'science' hier, wat zowel kan staan voor 'wetenschap' in het algemeen als voor 'natuurwetenschap' in het bijzonder. ]

"This is hardly surprising: such dislikes are widespread, and scientists themselves display them as much as anyone. Within the academic left, however, hostility extends to the social structures through which science is institutionalized, to the system of education by which professional scientists are produced, and to a mentality that is taken, rightly or wrongly, as characteristic of scientists. Most surprisingly, there is open hostility toward the actual content of scientific knowledge and toward the assumption, which one might have supposed universal among educated people, that scientific knowledge is reasonably reliable and rests on a sound methodology."(24)

[Dat lijkt me helemaal niet zo vreemd. Je hoeft niet van Foucault of 'queer theory' te houden om desondanks kritiek te hebben op genoemde zaken, en ja: ook op de gehanteerde methoden, daar waar het bijvoorbeeld gaat om onderzoek naar mensen.]

"We try to use the troubling term academic left with reasonable precision. This category is comprised, in the main, of humanists and social scientists; rarely do working natural scientists (who may nevertheless associate themselves with liberal or leftist ideas) show up within its ranks." [mijn nadruk] (26)

"This apocalyptic break with things-as-they-are is supposed to displace a vast array of received cultural values and substitute an entirely novel ethos. From this perspective feminism, for example, means more than full juridical equality for women, more than income parity and equal access to careers, more than irrevocable “reproductive rights.” It means, in fact, a complete overthrow of traditional gender categories, with all their conscious and unconscious postulates. By the same token, racial justice, on this view, does not mean peaceful assimilation of blacks into the dominant culture, but the forging of an entirely new culture, in which “black” (or “African”) values — in social relations, economics, aesthetics, personal sensibilities — will have at least equal standing with “white” values. Similarly, environmentalism, as understood and preached on the academic left, extends far beyond concrete measures to eliminate pollution, or to avoid extinction of species and elimination of habitats. Rather, it envisions a transcendence of the values of Western industrial society and the restoration of an imagined prelapsarian harmony to humanity’s relations with nature." [mijn nadruk] (27)

Much of this critique is informed or inspired by what is usually called “postmodern” thought and its concomitant value system.2

NOOT 2: One fine distinction we do not want to make is that between postmodernism and poststructuralism. The former is the more inclusive term, implying as it does a range of stylistic attitudes and judgments that reject “modernism” (including much of the Enlightenment), as well as the specifically philosophical positions associated with “structuralism” and its presumably triumphant successor, “poststructuralism.”

In turn, postmodernism is embedded and elaborated in the scholarly work of the academic left, notably in fields such as literary criticism, social history, and a new hybrid called “cultural studies.” Postmodernism is grounded in the assumption that the ideological system sustaining the cultural and material practices of Western European civilization is bankrupt and on the point of collapse. It claims that the intellectual schemata of the Enlightenment have been abraded by history to the point that nothing but a skeleton remains, held together by unreflective habit, incapable of accommodating the creative impulses of the future.
Postmodernism, however, is but one of the strands from which the academic left weaves its indictment. Other notions both new and old enter into the cloth. The traditional Marxist view that what we think of as science is really “bourgeois” science, a superstructural manifestation of the capitalist order, recurs with predictable regularity, in its own right or refurbished as the doctrine of “cultural constructivism.” The radical feminist view that science, like every other intellectual structure of modern society, is poisoned and corrupted by an ineradicable gender bias, is another vitally important element. An analogous accusation comes from multiculturalists, who view “Western” science as inherently inaccurate and incomplete by virtue of its failure to incorporate the full range of cultural perspectives. A certain strain of radical environmentalism condemns science as embodying the instrumentalism and alienation from direct experience of nature which are the twin sources of an eventual (or imminent) ecological doomsday."(30)

[Ik houd ook niet van postmoderne opvattingen en evenmin van het verwerpen van idealen van de Verlichting. Toch vraag ik me af of hier niet al te gemakkelijk allerlei zinvolle kritiek op het wetenschapsbedrijf opzij wordt geschoven. Maar dat moet dus nog uitgewerkt worden.]

"Natural science is one of the last major features of Western life and thought to come systematically under the critical gaze of the academic left. The reason is obvious. In order to think critically about science, one must understand it at a reasonably deep level. This task, if honestly approached, requires much time and labor. In fact it is best started when one is young. It is scarcely compatible with the style of education and training that nurtures the average humanist, irrespective of his or her political inclinations.(...) It would seem to follow, then, that the last eight or ten years should have seen a flock of earnest humanists and social critics crowding into science and mathematics lecture rooms, the better to arm themselves for the fateful confrontation. This has not happened."(32)

[Dat is een flauw argument. Alleen 'natural science' mensen kunnen 'natural science' bekritiseren, zeg je dan. Alleen negers snappen negers, alleen vrouwen snappen vrouwen, het is een erg postmodern standpunt moet ik zeggen. Maar het is principieel onjuist. Je kunt naar bepaalde vooronderstellingen en uitgangspunten en keuzes kijken, je kunt kijken naar toepassingen en gevolgen.]

"Thus we encounter books that pontificate about the intellectual crisis of contemporary physics, whose authors have never troubled themselves with a simple problem in statics; essays that make knowing reference to chaos theory, from writers who could not recognize, much less solve, a first-order linear differential equation; tirades about the semiotic tyranny of DNA and molecular biology, from scholars who have never been inside a real laboratory, or asked how the drug they take lowers their blood pressure."(33)

[Voorlopig wordt er erg veel op de man en vrouw gespeeld en zie ik geen discussie van standpunten. Dat is erg typisch voor conservatief denkende mensen. ]

"We recognize that it is necessary for science patiently to abide social scrutiny, since science and its uses affect the prospects of the entire society. That kind of scrutiny is a serious enterprise, requiring painstaking attention to fact and a disinclination to extrapolate beyond the bounds of reasonable inference. In the current climate, such sane and indispensable scrutiny threatens to be displaced by myth-making of the most fanciful sort. The key function of these myths is to gratify the resentment and self-righteousness of those who propose them, and to serve as symbolic wish-fulfillment in a world that is notably indifferent to their politics." [mijn nadruk] (36)

[Kritiek mag wel en is belangrijk maar dan wel op onze manier ...]

"The academic left’s critiques of science have come to exert a remarkable influence. The primary reason for their success is not that they put forward sound arguments, but rather that they resort constantly and shamelessly to moral one-upmanship."(38)

[Dat verwijt kom even hard terug.]

"It would be idle of us to lay claim to a prim neutrality. Nonetheless, we are not happy to be classed as reflex partisans of the right on any issue. There has been plenty of bad faith, dissimulation, sanctimony, and hypocrisy from all quarters. The academic right is all too eager to use the grotesqueries of the academic left as an excuse for walking away from deep and intractable problems. For its part, the left is ready, at the slightest hint of challenge, to play the martyr and to find fascism, racism, or “denial” in it, no matter how judicious and well reasoned the challenge may be." [mijn nadruk] (38)

"We refuse on principle to take sides in the dispute over the literary canon, in the fights over affirmative action, in the question of whether it is well to have “studies” departments for subpopulations with a history of victimhood. It’s not that we don’t have opinions on those questions: we do; but they are simply not what this book is about. What we have to say is narrowly concerned with science and with misconceived attacks on science that grow out of a doctrinaire political position. The left has to take the blame, because that’s where most (but certainly not all) of the silliness is coming from on this issue, at this time, although there has been an abundance of it in the past from the other side.4 The campus right has had the good tactical sense to leave the matter alone, except to comment on the foibles of the left." [mijn nadruk] (40)

[Het is nogal arrogant wanneer je denkt dat je onpartijdig bent. Alsof jij niet vertrekt vanuit allerlei waarden en normen en waardenvrij kunt rondlopen in dat debat. Het is opvallend dat 'links' een heel boek over zich heen krijgt, terwijl 'rechts' niet uitgewerkt wordt - wat gemakkelijk had gekund voor deze tweede editie. Maar rechts - afgezien van religieuze fundamentalisten - heeft niet zo veel bezwaar tegen de natuurwetenschappen, is dat het? Ook de behoefte aan een samenhangende visie / systeem / methode bij de linkse critici is typisch en al weer een smoes om kritiek van die kant niet serieus te nemen. ]

"Although there is no true center, no foundational axiomatics, to the left-wing critiques of science, a few broad perspectives may be identified. Sociologists and social theorists, including quite a few Marxists, tend to produce what may be called “cultural constructivist” analyses, viewing scientific knowledge as historically and socially situated and encoding, in unacknowledged ways, prevailing social prejudices. The strongest and most aggressive versions of these theories view science as a wholly social product, a mere set of conventions generated by social practice. The critics whom, for convenience, we label as postmodern, attempt to exploit the linguistic and psychological theories grouped under that cognomen. A radical epistemological skepticism informs their commentaries on science, though rarely is it seen to impeach their own researches." [mijn nadruk] (45)

[Wat is er mis met dat standpunt? Dat horen we hier in ieder geval niet.]

"The rule of thumb has been that the hard scientists produce reliable knowledge, assembled into coherent theories. Historians, it is conceded, generate reliable factual knowledge (as long as they keep their methodological noses clean); but this is often contaminated by unprovable and bootless speculation. Economics has rigor of method; but its assumptions are serious, often fatal, oversimplifications of the real world. In the other social sciences impressionistic description and subjective hermeneutics rule, though they may come dressed in elaborate statistical costumes. The more theoretical the social scientists are, the less respect they get. Literary criticism, finally, has been looked upon as a species of highly elaborated connoisseurship, interesting and valuable, perhaps, but subjective beyond hope of redemption, and thus out of the running in the epistemological sweepstakes." [mijn nadruk] (47)

(54) Chapter two - Some History and Politics: Natural Science and Its Natural Enemies

"The true scientific revolution instituted by Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Halley, Harvey, Boyle, Leibniz, and others is to be found, not in their particular discoveries about the world, stupendous as these were, but rather in the creation, almost in passing, of a methodology and a worldview capable of expanding, modifying and generalizing these discoveries indefinitely. It was, moreover, a methodology that almost unwittingly set aside the metaphysical assumptions of a dozen centuries, under which a description of the physical world would have been incomprehensible had it stood apart from a vision of transcendent divine order on the Christian model." [mijn nadruk] (56)

"It is, however, certain that science — in particular Newtonian physics and its related mathematics — held sway as a privileged model and inspiration, the very emblem of the power of the human intellect to probe beneath surface appearances, to rectify vulgar prejudices, and to exile habits of thought more ancient than accurate."(59)

[Ik begin te vermoeden dat de natuurwetenschappen in dit boek zwaar overschat gaan worden. ]

"In the sphere of social thought, the success of physics inspired emulation in the form of analyses of society seeking general principles that might be made to yield a deep understanding of the dynamics of history, politics, and economic activity. The urge to prescribe, as well as to describe and predict, ran strong in these attempts, in a manner quite uncharacteristic of physics itself; but the boldness, indeed the arrogance, required to set forth schemes for the radical improvement of the human condition and for the rapid cure of its ancient ills reflects an intellectual self-assurance that derives largely from contemplation of the well-confirmed triumphs of eighteenth-century mathematical science."(61)

[Maar daar zit de domheid: onderzoek naar de natuur is niet hetzelfde als historisch onderzoek of onderzoek naar mens en samenleving.]

"The obligations of hindsight impel us to look on most of these attempts as failures variously fatuous, quixotic, or disastrous, whose culmination is to be found in the self-defeating utopianism of the French Revolution."(61)

"It is fair to say, in short, that by the time of the French Revolution a certain suite of ideas had become regnant in European (and North American) political philosophy. The empiricism and rigor of the sciences were emulated in the analytic strategies of political thought; and this, in turn, was for the most part linked to an emancipatory project for the renovation or reconstitution of existing social systems."(64)

"Nonetheless, at least to the extent that the political aspects come up against the authority of religion as well as the mythic power of other traditional rationalizations of the established order, science is a weapon to be wielded both specifically and emblematically."(65)

"The disastrous failure of the French Revolution and the aftermath of that failure is, of course, perhaps the most ringing example of the triumph of inadvertence over intention in human history. It instilled in Western thinkers a full measure of skepticism concerning utopian systems and schemes for universal reform. (...) It is in literature and poetry that we first begin to encounter a reaction against Enlightenment values that reveals a specific distrust of science, as well as a strong reluctance to believe that mankind can be reformed along “scientific” lines. (...) Each distrusts the narrowly empirical and the strictly rational, each celebrates the vital importance of the intuitive, the irreproducible moment of insight and of direct access to truth in its unmediated essence. Each accuses science, especially in its schematic, mathematicized form, of blindness, or worse, stubborn refusal to see. Each fears a world in which scientific thought has become the sovereign mode, and recoils from the spiritual degradation and servility that, in his opinion, must inevitably come to characterize such a world. (...) But beneath these divergent visions, we find an underlying distrust of straightforward, impersonal reasoning. The belief in direct, revelatory, intuitive truth to be had from communion with nature is the obverse of a deep epistemological skepticism about the kind of “systematic” truth that is the core of scientific knowledge. In this aspect, Romantic thought, even at its most revolutionary, is allied to the caustic, all-encompassing skepticism of that relentless reactionary Joseph de Maistre, whose most brilliant exercises in logic and empirical inference are expressly designed to demonstrate the unreliability and futility of logic and empirical inference." [mijn nadruk] (67)

[Die eerste stelling lijkt me wat te simpel. Die reactie vanuit de Romantiek tegen wetenschappelijke rationaliteit is wel juist.]

"We cannot resist the temptation to take note, in passing, of the fact that the Romantic exaltation of intuitive “Understanding” above merely cerebral “Reason” foreshadows the celebration of “holism” and “organicism” by contemporary critics of science, who are impatient with the disciplined analysis and methodological exactness of serious scientific work. Likewise, Maistre, in his counterrevolutionary ferocity, is the true spiritual ancestor of the “postmodern” skepticism so dear to the hearts of the academic left."(68)

[Dit soort suggestieve opmerkingen zijn dus onnodig en vervelend.]

"There are many reasonably well read people to whom the growing antagonism toward science on the part of a large number of left-wing intellectuals will come as something of a surprise. There is a tendency, mostly justified, as we have seen, to think of political “progessivism” as naturally linked to a struggle against obscurantism, superstition, and the dead weight of religious and social dogma. In this effort, the obvious ally and chief resource is scientific knowledge of the world and the systematic methodology that supports it, as these have developed over the past few centuries, chiefly in Western culture. (...) The dissecting blade of scientific skepticism, with its insistence that theories are worthy of respect only to the extent that their assertions pass the twin tests of internal logical consistency and empirical verification, has been an invaluable weapon against intellectual authoritarianisms of all sorts, not least those that sustain social systems based on exploitation, domination, and absolutism. The notion that human liberation ought to be the chief project of the intellectual community is, it seems to us, coeval with the idea that superstition and credulity are among the most powerful foes of liberation, and that science, in particular, holds out the best hope for cutting through their fogs of error and confusion. Towering figures of political and ethical thought over the last three or four centuries make this point; one thinks, in this regard, of Galileo, Spinoza, Locke, Voltaire, Diderot, Lessing, Hume, Kant, Mill, Herzen, Turgenev, Russell, Einstein — the list could be extended endlessly. And, of course, one thinks of Marx, albeit with a sad irony that dwells on weaknesses in his mode of thinking, whose consequences and echoes will, to a great extent, comprise the focus of this argument." [mijn nadruk] (74-75)

[Dat juist Marx er steeds van langs krijgt van deze auteurs is ook zo zwak. Waarom niet Adam Smith bijvoorbeeld? ]

"Our era is singular, in that the commonplace wisdom cited in the last paragraph (wisdom we hold to be as valid as any generalization can be) has come under strident and increasingly scornful attack, not from reactionaries and traditionalists, who have always feared science, but from its natural heirs — the community of thinkers, theoreticians, and activists who challenge both the material injustices of the existing social system and the underlying assumptions and prejudices that perpetuate them. As Timothy Ferris observes in his appropriately skeptical review of a recent and popular anti-scientific polemic, “The scientific community today, for all its faults, remains generally open and unsecretive, international and egalitarian: It is no accident that scientists are to be found at the forefront among those who call for global ecological responsibility, racial and sexual equality, better education, an end to hunger, a fair break for indigenous peoples, and other enlightened values.” Yet the alliance, so historically familiar that one is tempted to call it “natural,” between the scientific worldview and the tradition of egalitarian social criticism, is not only under challenge but, from some points of view, may be said already to have dissolved. This has to be understood not as a hazy generality about the zeitgeist, but rather as an observation about a specific community, a particular, if rather limited, contemporary social formation: that of self-conscious left-wing political intellectuals and those who follow their work with attention and approval, and take a measure of inspiration from it.
We are particularly interested in the American left, although its pugnacity toward science is certainly echoed by left-wing intellectuals in Western Europe. Some of the key ideas, now common currency on American campuses—the “strong programme” in sociology of science associated with the Edinburgh school, the compendium of “postmodern” attitudes transcribed from Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard et alii, to take a few obvious examples—are, in fact, imports. Nonetheless, the antiscientism of the American academic left has its own idiosyncratic resonances, if only because it is integral to a much broader array of challenges to received wisdom and settled ideas." [mijn nadruk] (76)

"American society and the global capitalism of which the United States is still the epicenter go their own way without taking much notice of left-wing thought. The problem of race in this country seems to be more intractable than ever. The changing demography of the American population seems to promise not an amiable and beneficent polyculturalism, but rather an increasingly venomous tribalism and nativism. Feminists see themselves as driven into a defensive circle, and the agitation for equitable treatment of homosexuals seems often to be answered by paranoia and violence. The hope, which was never quite absent from the heart of even the most disillusioned leftist, that “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe might finally be able to escape the horrors of its Stalinist past and take on the task of building a worthy alternative to capitalism, is irredeemably dead. There may be a resurgence of political liberalism in this country, but, if so, it will be, at best, a pallid and compromised liberalism, unlikely to accommodate very much in the way of redemptive social design." [mijn nadruk] (78)

"Nevertheless, the aroma of sour grapes is in the air. The urge to redeem slides easily into an eagerness to debunk for the sake of debunking. New candidates for veneration — writers, artists, musicians, philosophers, historical figures, non-Western “ways of knowing” — are put forward not for what they are but for what they are not — white, European, male."

"It is impossible to understand fully the academic left’s attack on science without taking into account how much resentment is embodied in it."(81)

[Een ergerlijke herhaling van zetten waarbij nog steeds suggestief op personen gespeeld wordt en geen posities met argumenten worden weerlegd. Het gebruik van dat label 'left' s hoe dan ook ergerlijk oppervlakkig en suggestief. Hier krijgen die mensen weer de verwijten dat ze alleen maar jaloers zijn op ... ja op wat eigenlijk? De gevestigde kapitalistische orde? De geweldige status quo? En dit alles is geen conservatieve reactie? Daar lijkt het anders best op.]

"Neither of us is a professional historian; yet we have undertaken a study that has important historical dimensions. We cannot ignore them or dismiss them with the currently fashionable glibness. The left’s flirtation with irrationalism, its reactionary rejection of the scientific worldview, is deplorable and contradicts its own deepest traditions. It is a kind of self-defeating apostasy. But it is not the result of a sudden whim or of spontaneous mass hysteria. It has a history. We owe the reader some sense of our understanding of that history, non-professional as it may be, before proceeding to the details of our critique." [mijn nadruk] (82)

Een korte geschiedenis van het Amerikaanse 'links' wordt gegeven.

"But it was the Vietnam War, with its clear record of governmental blundering and deceit, its lack of justification either by history or as genuine realpolitik, and its disproportion of means to ends, that truly revivified the American left and gave it the sense that a mass constituency receptive to its views was about to coalesce.
This phenomenon was especially strong on college campuses, particularly at elite schools where a tradition of intellectual independence had always been encouraged. Indeed, apart from the university, it is hard to think of social loci wherein the newly revived leftist dream of a mass movement ever moved beyond wishful thinking or outright self-delusion. Even in the black communities, where support for the civil rights movement, as well as far more intransigent forms of militancy, was ubiquitous, the endorsement of a specifically socialist vision of social and economic change was rare and at best equivocal. Only among students (and a substantial number of sympathetic faculty) did a more or less coherent radicalism exist, a movement that combined concern about theoretical issues with a genuine awareness of its own historical roots. Sectlets that had limped along for decades suddenly discovered a new generation of recruits. Even more important, organizations that had come into existence as mildly social democratic lobbying groups found themselves transformed, after a few short years, into foci of the most apocalyptic and intransigent radicalism. The most obvious example is Students for a Democratic Society, whose trajectory from cautious reformism to a fullblown Maoism was bewilderingly swift.
As the war continued in Asia and the civil rights struggle raged amidst rhetorical and real violence, the student left gathered strength and sympathy; and it acquired new causes. Wide-ranging discontent with contemporary capitalism and its dislocations was in the air. Environmentalism, as a radical and transformative view of the world, began to stir. The tactics and rhetoric of the black civil rights activists began to infuse the thinking of other minorities—American Indians and Latinos. By the end of the decade, feminism, in its modern incarnation, had taken shape and had become yet another article of faith for campus radicals. The concerns of lesbians and homosexuals, long trivialized and regarded as “apolitical,” were quickly made part of the overall radical agenda. In terms of constituency, the left seemed to be constructing a wide base."(89-90)

"Within an astonishingly few years all those hopes were substantially dead. A dozen reasons can now be given for the disappearance of a “mass” left, even within the hothouse venue of higher education. The left’s perennial predilection for factionalism and internal bickering certainly had something to do with it, as did the overeager migration of the most ardent “theoreticians” within the movement to the far shores of doctrinal extremism."(92)

[De beschrijvingen van 'links' zijn koud, zonder enige sympathie, zonder enig begrip, en erg rancuneus. Dat moet ergens vandaan komen. Je vraagt je af waarmee de auteurs in de beschreven periode bezig waren. Met in de kerk zitten samen met hun rijke ouders die goed voor hun toekomst konden zorgen? Laat ik ook eens op de man spelen.]

"The scholarly community was the inevitable refuge to which activism retreated as its concrete political possibilities melted away."(94)

"The reputation of the campus as the place to be for radical action seeded higher education with a substantial population of militants during the sixties; and this seems to have started the ball of exponential growth rolling."(101)

"The indignant conservative who denounces the supposed ideological monoculture of the “radical” universities has a point; but it is a modest one. Why should the doctrinal narrowness of black or women’s studies departments be more objectionable than that of some schools of business administration, quite a few military science departments, or even athletic departments? No fire-breathing feminist zealot has ever had the power over the lives and minds of her charges that is exercised routinely by the football or basketball coach at a school with a major “program,” that is, one aspiring to be a significant NFL or NBA farm team. So far as the average student is concerned, degrees are pursued in marketing or chemical engineering or pre-med much as they have always been, with little input from the cryptic rituals of the postmodern, cutting-edge critical theorists. For such a student, an encounter in an expository writing course with a graduate teaching assistant who is, shall we say, a little too hyped on Foucault, Lyotard, and a gaggle of post-everything feminists, will probably do no lasting harm and might, possibly, do some good." [mijn nadruk] (105)

"It is a test of the maturity of the academic left whether it can deal with such criticism without imputing dire political motivations to the critics."(105)

[Dat is een rare opmerking. De ander verwijten op de man te spelen als je dat zelf de hele tijd ook doet is arrogant. Het blijft ook de hele tijd onduidelijk waarom de term "left" steeds gebruikt wordt.]

"It seems to us that the central tenet of the various schools of thought that make up the academic left is one that may be labeled “perspectivist.” The basic thrust is that various bodies of ideas that have been favored and championed by Western culture over the centuries must be stripped of their claims to universality and timeless, uncontextual validity. They are at best the expression of local “truths” or “structures” that make sense only within a certain context of social experience and a certain political symbology. On the other hand, they may be justificatory myths meant to uphold authority and hierarchy. In either event, they are always deeply marked by the power relations that govern the societies in which they arose.
By the same token, perspectivism is highly sympathetic to the claim that the heretofore disempowered have the right to have their own “narratives,” their own particular accounts of the world, taken as seriously as those of the standard culture, notwithstanding differences and outright contradictions. The intellectual apparatus of the post-Enlightenment West, it is held, affords no special leverage for deciding among competing versions of the story of the world. Such methodologies have been deferred to in the past, but that is because they have been arbitrarily “privileged” by the historical ascendancy of Euro-American capitalism, a merely contingent circumstance. They occupy no firmer epistemological ground than the accounts produced by women, descendants of black slaves, Third World revolutionaries, or even a reified and personalized Nature. The latter thus become immune from criticism by the reigning Western paradigm—and from white European males, dead or alive." [mijn nadruk] (107)

[Het is weer een herhaling. Het wordt alleen tijd dat de auteurs dat perspectivisme met argumenten gaan weerleggen. Maar, inderdaad, hier draait het om. Jammer genoeg denken de auteurs dat postmodernisme / structuralisme en perspectivisme hetzelfde is. Fenomenologie, hermeneutiek, kennissociologie, bepaalde wetenschapsfilosofen als Feyerabend stellen belangrijke vragen bij het instituut van wetenschappelijke kennisverwerving. Waarden en normen en maatschappelijke inbedding spelen ook daar een grote rol. De ergernis van de auteurs ligt voornamelijk bij het geklets van de postmodernen, waardoor ze niet meer zien dat er meer is dan dat geklets.]

"We are obliged to observe, however, that leftists have a long history of weaving philosophical phantoms into fantasies of universal redemption. We are convinced that the academic left's recent attempts to theorize “science and society” are further instances of the same thing."(115)

(115) Chapter three - The Cultural Construction of Cultural Constructivism

"Pieties aside, however, we can accept many of the views that historians and sociologists of science promulgate by way of asserting that science is, in some sense, a cultural construct. It would be idle to pretend that the projects taken on by science, the questions that it asks at any given period, do not reflect the interests, beliefs, and even the prejudices of the ambient culture. Clearly, certain kinds of research get the strongest encouragement—funding, recognition, celebrity, and so forth—in response to the recognized needs of society." [mijn nadruk] (119)

[Dat is een belangrijk uitgangspunt, ja. ]

"Naturally, some social theorists would extend the analysis to suggest that the topics scientists focus upon are determined by socially derived attitudes, aspirations, and biases less forthrightly instrumental, and that there are negative aspects as well—certain areas of potential research are avoided in obedience to assumptions that are rarely articulated in undisguised form. While this is not incontestable, it has some plausibility, and we would not deny it out of hand."(120)

[Ook een belangrijk punt. ]

"Nevertheless, we are obliged to listen with interest to historical and sociological accounts of the effect. Thus we accede in principle to what might be called the “weak” version of cultural constructivism."(121)

"Good work and bad can be done in its name. A further danger, frequently in evidence in the writings we consider below, is that analyses and case histories counting as reasonable instances of weak cultural construction are slyly adduced as justifying a far more radical and dubious theory, a version of philosophical relativism and conventionalism that merits the name “strong cultural constructivism.” This is another part of the theoretical woods entirely—although many historians, sociologists, and even philosophers of science are insufficiently vigilant in maintaining the distinction." [mijn nadruk] (122)

"In strong form, cultural constructivism (sometimes, another phrase such as “social constructionism” may be used, depending on the terminological preferences of the expositor) holds to the following epistemological position: science is a highly elaborated set of conventions brought forth by one particular culture (our own) in the circumstances of one particular historical period; thus it is not, as the standard view would have it, a body of knowledge and testable conjecture concerning the “real” world. It is a discourse, devised by and for one specialized “interpretive community,” under terms created by the complex net of social circumstance, political opinion, economic incentive, and ideological climate that constitutes the ineluctable human environment of the scientist. Thus, orthodox science is but one discursive community among the many that now exist and that have existed historically. Consequently its truth claims are irreducibly self-referential, in that they can be upheld only by appeal to the standards that define the “scientific community” and distinguish it from other social formations."(123)

[De postmoderne opvatting over waarheid waaraan ook ik een hekel heb. Het geeft allerlei groepen als religieuze groepen een handvat om te zeggen: zie je wel, wij hebben ook een waarheid en die is net zo veel waard als de wetenschappelijke waarheid. Er wordt dan geen onderscheid meer gemaakt tussen verschillende manieren om beweringen te toetsen en controleerbaar te maken.]

"The attentive reader will have noted that this point of view rigorously applied leaves no ground whatsoever for distinguishing reliable knowledge from superstition. Indeed, there are various contexts in which that would seem to be exactly the point of the exercise. Given the long history of progressive Western thought in which science has been linked, by and large, with the efforts of human liberation, it will seem surprising if not positively bewildering that this complex of ideas has for the most part been developed and embraced by self-identified left-wing intellectuals." [mijn nadruk] (124)

[Het eerste klopt. Jammer dat de auteurs weer het woord "left" moeten gebruiken. Je kunt net zo goed zeggen dat al die mensen die Verlichtingsidealen onderuit willen halen "rechts" zijn. Wat ze ook vaak zijn. Het is een zinloos etiketje. Het bederft de sfeer en de onderbouwing. Zoals het - verderop - ook ergerlijk is dat dit postmoderne gezever op één lijn gezet wordt met marxisme.]

"Here we consider strong cultural constructivism as it is practiced by historians, sociologists, and other students of natural science as a social phenomenon. Most of these are committed to a leftist political position; they regard their study of science as part of an overall program of radical analysis and demystification of bourgeois sacred cows.
They are highly unwilling to view science as an activity of the autonomous and unfettered intellect. It is easy to see their point. Science is, after all, well integrated into the technological, industrial, and military machinery of the capitalist system; in turn it relies on that system for the material basis of its continuing progress, at least in those fields where a substantial investment of money is necessary for fruitful research. For working scientists in the belly of the beast, of course, the situation seems far more subtle than that. In fact, from a variety of perspectives, scientists and intellectuals in general might honestly (and correctly) view the present culture as a historical paragon, to the degree that it fosters and encourages autonomy of thought and freedom of ideas. On the other hand, the social critic who identifies with a long tradition of militant intransigence, and for whom positive social change invariably requires discontinuity, remains unmoved by such considerations. This critic views the scientist’s claims to independence as part of the constructed ideology that imprisons and in the end directs him. To the analyst of cultural constructivist bent, matters of scientific truth are “always and everywhere matters of social authority.”" [mijn nadruk] (128)

[Het is gek. De auteurs beschrijven zelf de inbedding van wetenschap in het kapitalisme en de financiële afhankelijkheidsrelaties en zeggen vervolgens dat wetenschappers en intellectuelen binnen dat systeem terecht het idee hebben dat ze onafhankelijk zijn en leven in een omgeving waarin autonoom denken en vrijheid van gedachten mogelijk zijn. Dat is of erg naïef of niet te goeder trouw. ]

"This is a book about politics and its curious offspring, not about epistemology or the philosophy of science; we cannot therefore refute, in abstracto, the constructivist view either in the strong form outlined above or in some of its more qualified but still erroneous versions. Nor are we obligated to do so: serious philosophers of science have been at it for decades." [mijn nadruk] (130)

[Wat een zwaktebod. Daarmee hoef je dus niet in te gaan op allerlei feiten en argumenten die laten zien dat wetenschap niet vrij is van allerlei vooronderstellingen en niet zo autonoom is als ze denkt. Nee, we doen aan "politiek" zodat we allerlei waardeoordelen over "links" de wereld in mogen gooien zonder enige goede onderbouwing.]

"If they are to demonstrate that their arguments contra science are anything but sheer bluff, then clearly they must play on the scientists’ court."(133)

[Waarom? Het gaat om vooronderstellingen en grondslagen, niet om de empirische resultaten en logische bewijskracht. ]

"To put the matter brutally, science works."(134)

[Dat zegt dus echt helemaal niets. Werkt hoe? voor wie? in wiens belang? bij welk onderwerp?]

"The state of affairs is best summarized, probably, by the philosopher Paul Feyerabend, one of the thinkers directly responsible for initiating the chain of ideas leading to the cultural constructivist view of science (and, next to Thomas Kuhn, the most often cited), who now expresses deep reservations about the outcomes of this line of thought." [mijn nadruk] (134)

[je kon er op wachten ... Feyerabend is niet iemand die sociaal constructivisme zonder meer onderschrijft en toch heeft hij uitgebreide kritiek op het wetenschapsbedrijf. Hier wordt hij neergezet en gebruikt als spijtoptant: zie je wel, zelfs Feyerabend bla bla. ]

Over Stanley Aronowitz:

"His interest in science is relatively new but characteristically sweeping and ambitious, despite the fact that he has little formal training or technical facility in any branch of it. He is a professed admirer of Feyerabend, which makes it all the more ironic that Feyerabend’s strictures fit him so well.
Aronowitz’s major work on science is a turgid and opaque tract entitled Science as Power. It constitutes a major attempt to justify the cultural (or social) constructivist viewpoint and is clearly motivated by the belief that since science and technology are key elements in the substructure of modern capitalism, it is one of the duties of the oppositional social critic to demystify science and topple it from its position of reliability and objectivity."(136)

[Ook hier wordt op de man gespeeld.]

"The argument, roughly but accurately paraphrased (and all too familiar from New Age tracts, among other things), is that since physics has discovered the uncertainty principle, it can no longer provide reliable information about the physical world, has lost its claim to objectivity, and is now embedded in the unstable hermeneutics of subject-object relations. This, alas, demonstrates depressingly well the connotative power of words when they are allowed to drift apart from their contextual meaning. If Heisenberg and company had chosen a less evocative term, an awful lot of nonsense of this sort might never have seen the light of day. Philosophical and pseudophilosophical posturing has dreadfully befuddled discussion of the issue addressed to nonspecialists." [mijn nadruk] (139)

"He naively echoes, for example, the view that the causal and deterministic view of things implicit in classical physics has been irrevocably banished. This is simply wrong."(140)

"In saying this, we are not trying to deny that social interests and nonscientific belief systems often enter into the very human business of doing creative science, sometimes to catalyze the process, more often to retard or deflect it. The work of Stephen J. Gould (who must be recognized as holding strong leftist views) is replete with incisive essays on examples of this, presented in minute detail. But Gould’s well-informed work is by no means comparable to the cultural constructivist program. Gould knows perfectly well that in the long run logic, empirical evidence, and explanatory parsimony are the masters (with apology to our feminist friends for the metaphor) in the house of science. In this he echoes Thomas Kuhn, whose work has so often been vulgarized and distorted by the cultural constructivist school.
Cultural constructivism, at least in the full-blooded version of ideologues like Aronowitz, is a relentlessly mechanistic and reductionistic way of thinking about things."(149)

Verder met Bruno Latour.

"In this respect we cannot avoid citing the work of Bruno Latour, a sociologist, anthropologist, and social philosopher whose work on science as social practice has been as much of an inspiration to the constructivist camp as that of Thomas Kuhn. In contrast to Kuhn, however, this does not reflect any inadvertence on Latour’s part. He clearly relishes his role as self-appointed heretic and gadfly. His reputation and the substance of his claims rest on his record as an “anthropologist” of science, who does fieldwork at research facilities rather than among the denizens of New Guinea. He is not loath to let it be known that he has brought back amazing tales from his sojourn among the troglodytes. He claims, with no particular modesty, to be the first modern thinker to discover what scientists actually do, as opposed to what they say they do or think they do."(151)

"Notwithstanding the specificity and locality of his direct investigations, Latour is eager to emerge with far-reaching generalizations and epistemological laws. These are embedded in an expository style as unconventional as the theses it propounds. His major work, Science in Action, is studded with aphorisms, diagrams, cartoons, and doodles, and is characterized by a mercurial, gnomic wit; but his purpose is seriously iconoclastic."(153)

"Latour is always ready to recast and, in effect, retract what he has previously said. In other contexts he will, with an apparently straight face, admit that there is a natural universe “out there” and that scientific theories are shaped by it in important ways. Simultaneously, he will censure rigorously the dogmatics of strict cultural constructivism. Just as he pictures (literally) the mind-set of science as a Janus-faced dualist, he too is constantly springing from one side of a dichotomy to the other."(156)

[Zou dat misschien komen omdat de auteurs Latour niet goed begrepen hebben? Ik heb genoemd boek gelezen en ondanks allerlei minder geweldige abstracties zit er een hoop zinvol materiaal in over het wetenschapsbedrijf en zijn beperkingen. Ook in deze weergave van Latour wordt de hele tijd op de man gespeeld:]

"He is, despite his proclaimed fascination with science and technology, a Panurgian imp, come to catch all those solemn scientists with their pants down, a project that delights his largely antiscientific audience."(159)

"Some of the glaring gaps in Latour’s analysis of the Aramis project are characteristic of his work as a whole. Mathematics is a symptomatic weak point of his. His discussion of Aramis avoids it completely, as we have seen, but, even worse, his discussion in Science in Action of the mathematical nature of scientific theories, and the invocation of formal mathematics in order to express them, is naive and obtuse—he has a tin ear for mathematics. His account completely fails to resonate with the thought of mathematical scientists—a term that goes well beyond those formally described as mathematicians—and is deaf to how they reason with and persuade each other."(163)

"Indeed, Latour fervently minimalizes and trivializes formalization, abstraction, and mathematization. His discussion of the matter is a series of flippancies, whose intended point is that the deep and surprising predictions about the real world that emerge from exacting logical analysis of abstract models are really no more than tautological parlor tricks. Here, Latour’s resentment of science seems to become overpowering. It should hardly need saying that this stubborn inability to deal accurately, comprehensively, and honestly with this central and most characteristic aspect of modern science effectively disbars the most grandiose claim of Latour’s book—that it instructs the sociologically sophisticated “how to follow scientists and engineers through society.”"(164)

Over naar Shapin en Schaffer.

"Cultural constructivist theories of science have lately infested the usually staid domain of the history of ideas. One well-known example is the work of Shapin and Schaffer, whose book Leviathan and the Air Pump has a wide circle of admirers. (...) What particularly concerns Shapin and Schaffer is the quarrel between some of the most prominent founders of the Royal Society—Boyle, Hooke, and their circle—and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan. This is the fulcrum upon which they attempt to push the case that, contrary to its flattering image as a uniquely wide-open and tolerant enterprise, welcoming of all new facts, information, and ideas that bear upon its investigations, modern science has been from the first the province of a tightly organized, well-insulated coterie, jealous of its prerogatives and hostile toward outsiders who intrude without the proper credentials. Moreover, this self-appointed scientific aristocracy is seen as organically connected to the ruling elite of Western society. Its views are derived, albeit subtly, from the dominant metaphors of that elite. By the same token, its prestige, authority, and epistemological monopoly are guaranteed by the power of the state and the social formations it principally serves." [mijn nadruk] (165-166)

[Gezien de voortdurende verwijten van de auteurs aan critici - ja, die hebben geen wiskunde in hun pakket, die werken niet in de fysica, dus die kunnen we niet serieus nemen - is dat helemaal niet zo'n raar idee. ]

"If we are to believe the Shapin-Schaffer thesis, worthiness to participate in learned discussion of experimental philosophy was closely correlated to rank, wealth, religious orthodoxy, and, in terms of Restoration doctrine, political reliability. This exclusivity was reinforced not only by the money, status, and political connections of many of the members of the Royal Society and their patrons, but in addition by their exclusive possession of the physical instruments of the new experimental method."(168)

[Ook niet slecht gezien door Shapin en Schaffer.]

"The analogies are clear. Modern orthodox science is also obsessed by “credentials” in the shape of formal training, academic degrees, and a long period of acclimation to the reigning “paradigms.” It polices dissidence and safeguards its monopoly by an elaborate educational system and a forbidding insistence on “peer review.” It flourishes with the connivance and support of the organized forces of wealth and authority as constituted in the state, in huge corporations, and in supposedly philanthropic foundations. It has exclusive control over the instruments of empirical investigation, some of which—like multibillion dollar particle accelerators and orbiting observatories—are far less accessible to the uninitiated than was Boyle’s air pump. And it has its heretics."(170)

"Politics and theology aside, Wallis was a superb, creative mathematician, in contrast to Hobbes, who was, to put it bluntly, incompetent—utterly out of his depth in dealing with subtle mathematical matters."(175)

"The relevance of these facts to the Shapin-Schaffer hypothesis is that this long and (to Hobbes’s admirers) lamentable history provides a concrete and substantive reason, in contrast to an ideological one, for Hobbes’s notoriety in scientific circles. So far as mathematics is concerned, Hobbes was simply dead wrong in these exchanges, as any competent mathematician would have seen. It is then no wonder that his authority to pass judgment on scientific matters was not well regarded, even if those matters had nothing directly to do with squaring the circle or the like."(176)

(181) Chapter four - The Realm of Idle Phrases: Postmodernism, Literary Theory, and Cultural Criticism

"Postmodernism flourishes chiefly in departments of English, comparative literature, art history, and the like; but anyone familiar with contemporary American universities is well aware of how far it has spread into such unlikely areas as sociology, history, political science, anthropology, and philosophy."(183)

"Perhaps the easiest entry into this body of ideas (and prejudices) is to understand it as a negation—particularly as the negation of themes that have reigned in liberal intellectual life of the West since the Enlightenment.(...) Contrasted to the Enlightenment ideal of a unified epistemology that discovers the foundational truths of physical and biological phenomena and unites them with an accurate understanding of humanity in its psychological, social, political, and aesthetic aspects, postmodern skepticism rejects the possibility of enduring universal knowledge in any area. It holds that all knowledge is local, or “situated,” the product of interaction of a social class, rigidly circumscribed by its interests and prejudices, with the historical conditions of its existence. There is no knowledge, then; there are merely stories, “narratives,” devised to satisfy the human need to make some sense of the world. In so doing, they track in unacknowledged ways the interests, prejudices, and conceits of their devisers. On this view, all knowledge projects are, like war, politics by other means." [mijn nadruk] (185)

[Dat klopt, maar is tegelijkertijd te simpel, er zijn wel meer stromingen die vraagtekens zetten bij de pretenties van absolute universele kennis zoals de hermeneutiek. Er moet dus ingegaan worden op het waarheidsprobleem. Maar nee, er wordt weer zwaar op de man gespeeld door van alles te suggereren met een hoop waardeoordelen. Maar wat er niet gebeurt is ingaan op de kernopvattingen van het poststructuralisme en postmodernisme, althans niet in de pagina's die hierop volgen:]

"As much as anything can be, postmodernism is the unifying doctrine of the academic left, having largely supplanted Marxism, except to the extent that the latter has been able to cover itself in postmodern dress. In a new and highly politicized area such as women’s studies, for instance, virtually every scholar and student pays tribute to the supposed depth of postmodernist insight and the richness of postmodernist methodology.(...) Some such scholars are at pains to make clear their doubts and reservations. Nevertheless, and however reluctantly, they almost inevitably find themselves aping the language and style of postmodernist prototypes, and drawing upon the manifestos of noted postmodernist thinkers, to lend authority to their own musings. (...) In embracing the brittle skepticism of postmodern thought, would-be leftists are never more than an inch away from passivity, ineffectuality, and cynical despair. A criticism frequently advanced by opponents of postmodernism—justifiably, in our view—is that the doctrine, at its most virulent, is hardly distinguishable from the moral blankness, the Viva la muerte!, upon which fascism was erected in the first half of this century.
Yet the seductions of the postmodern stance are also obvious. In an earlier day, Marxism, in the form of a disciplined Communist movement, lured intellectuals by offering them the illusion of membership in a priesthood, an inner circle of initiates privileged to understand, by means of esoteric doctrine, the secret inner workings of the world, a coven of hierophants signaling to each other in an arcane jargon impenetrable to outsiders. It was the promise of numinous power, inherent in arcane doctrine and obscure lexicon, that convinced instinctive radicals that Marxist communism alone had the potential to purge the world of its indwelling evils. The melancholy chronicle of Communism in America, and its horror-laden history in those parts of the world where it has at one time or another actually held power, have by now demolished its intellectual prestige beyond hope of resurrection." [mijn nadruk] (185-187)

[Ook weer dat gemakkelijke aan de kant schuiven van marxisme en communisme zonder ook maar enige aandacht te schenken aan de ellende die het kapitalisme veroorzaakt. Zoals de auteurs verder op ook gemakkelijk het etiketje 'humanistisch' plakken op alles wat hen niet bevalt.]

"If there is a prototype of postmodernism, a previous thinker whose sweep and ambition are mirrored in its swagger and whose corrosiveness is echoed in its skepticism, it is probably Nietzsche. Whatever one thinks of Nietzsche as philosopher and cultural critic, he is obviously a talismanic figure."(190)

[Maar waarom is dat zo? Wordt dat ook uitgelegd?]

"American postmodernism is often accused, with considerable justice, of being little more than mimicry of a few European thinkers, mostly French, who rose to prominence in the midst of the bewilderment afflicting intellectual life when the protorevolutionary struggles in the late sixties in France, Germany, and Italy fizzled out without having produced any real impact on bourgeois society. The most recurrent and inevitable names in postmodernist circles are those of two French philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault." [mijn nadruk] (193)

[Nou, die bewering wordt ook weer niet onderbouwd natuurlijk. Blijkbaar hebben ze nogal wat invloed gehad , anders zou dit boek niet geschreven zijn, nietwaar?]

"Derrida’s deep epistemological pessimism has infected his disciples as much as have his stylistic eccentricities. Deconstructionism holds that truly meaningful utterance is impossible, that language is ultimately impotent, as are the mental operations conditioned by linguistic habit. The verbal means by which we seek to represent the world are incapable, it is said, of doing any such thing. Strings of words, whether on the page or in our heads, have at best a shadowy and unstable relation to reality. In fact “reality” is itself a mere construct, the persistent but illusory remnant of the Western metaphysical tradition. There is no reality outside the text, but texts themselves are vertiginously unstable, inherently self-contradictory and self-canceling." [mijn nadruk] (194)

"At about the same time, new facts came to light concerning the enthusiasms of the influential philosopher Martin Heidegger for Nazi doctrine, enthusiasms that now appear to have been heartfelt, and that led Heidegger, as rector of his university during the thirties, to perpetrate unforgivable acts of repression. Since Derrida had always claimed derivation of his thought from Heidegger, his own credibility as a liberatory thinker came under challenge." [mijn nadruk] (195)

[Eindelijk eens wat inhoudelijker uitleg. Diggins wordt vaak geciteerd: The Rise and Fall of the American Left. Ik heb het helaas niet kunnen vinden. Dat Derrida denkt vanuit Heidegger is duidelijk. En dan neem je meteen de taal en vaagheid over natuurlijk.]

"To Foucault, life is built around language, but language itself is not neutral. Rather, it is structured and inflected by the relations of power and domination in a society. In fact, language itself creates power and social authority. We are irremediably trapped in a linguistic web that determines not only what we can say but what we can conceive. All systems of thought, then, are artifacts of the prison-house of language and thus stand in a questionable relation to the real world."(197)

"This style of philosophizing had been in eclipse during most of the twentieth century, abandoned in favor of a technical mode of analysis that focuses with precise intensity on narrow questions and fine distinctions. But with Derrida and Foucault, among others, we see the rebirth of the philosopher as comprehensive sage."(198)

"In the case of Foucault, skepticism is expressed in the form of doubts about the human importance of scientific truth, rather than on the possibility of achieving it. Nonetheless, his basic idea, that a mode of discourse is inevitably a code of power relations among the people who use it, has profoundly influenced other postmodern skeptics and has contributed importantly to the notion that science is simply a cultural construct which, in both form and content, and independently of any individual scientist’s wish, is deeply inscribed with assumptions about domination, mastery, and authority."(199)

"Even if we stick to mathematics alone, it is not hard to find other examples of postmodern thinkers whose urge to pontificate on science far outruns their competence to do so."(204)

[Maar het is natuurlijk geen probleem dat twee auteurs uit de natuurwetenschappen oordelen vellen over allerlei filosofische stromingen waarvoor ze ook niet gestudeerd hebben. Dat is net zo goed problematisch. ]

"How much has science itself been affected by these goings-on among the humanists? To this point, in the “hard” sciences—mathematics, physics, chemistry, and most of biology—the effects have been minimal or indiscernible. The same holds for applied science and engineering. Despite sweeping postmodernist claims of “paradigm shifts” and radical breaks in the reigning episteme, scientific practice in the more rigorous disciplines goes on as usual, driven for the most part by the internal logic of the subject and the unyielding contours of reality. The alarums and excursions that have shaken the halls of English and comparative literature departments have reached scientists, even those strictly within the academy, only as vague and amusing rumors. In the social sciences, however, the effects have been drastic." [mijn nadruk] (206)

"Cultural anthropologists, Fox reasons, were particularly susceptible to this invasion because “it makes a good excuse to dodge the rigors of science—the demand for verification and falsification—and promotes the relativism with which the social sciences have always sympathized.” Moreover, those whose politics inclined toward the left were all too happy to have a rationale for reconstituting their discipline as part of a social movement to champion the oppressed races, castes, genders, and sexual outcasts of the earth, freed of any need to analyze their situation “objectively.”"(207)

"First of all, postmodern philosophy, in its guise as literary theory, flatteringly concedes a high degree of power to the skills and habits of mind of literary critics. The practice of close, exegetical reading, of hermeneutics, is elevated and greatly ennobled by Derrida and his followers." [mijn nadruk] (214)

[Hermeneutiek is wel meer dan dat.]

"Once a postmodern critic has at hand a license to read every proposition as its opposite when it suits his convenience, analytic skills of the more traditional sort are expendable and logic is effaced in the swirling tide of rhetoric. Once it has been decided that determinate meaning is chimerical and not worthy of slightest deference from the well-honed poststructuralist postmodernist, the entire edifice of hard-won truth becomes a house of cards. Once it has been affirmed that one discursive community is as good as another, that the narrative of science holds no privileges over the narratives of superstition, the newly minted cultural critic can actually revel in his ignorance of deep scientific ideas. That this is a canny political act is accepted as an article of faith, no matter how much it seems to elevate wishful thinking over hard social fact."(217)

[Dat lijkt me inhoudelijk kloppen. En dan komt weer het gebazel:]

"The role of the skepticism and relativism of the deconstructionists is also clear; if no text is “privileged,” no narrative tradition closer to ethical, aesthetic, or historical truth than any other, then there are no grounds for regarding the traditional venues of humanist scholars—high literature and high art—as sacred ground."(218)

[Alsof die waarheid zo probleemloos is. En 'sacred ground'? Zo'n uitdrukking is erg typisch.]

"The propositions of science, by and large, escape humiliation [van de kant van de positivisten - GdG] , while those of the humanities, including such venerable philosophic areas as ethics and aesthetics, emphatically do not. Thus, while statements about the emission spectra of planetary nebulae are perfectly meaningful for the positivist, the assertion that Racine is superior to Corneille (or Schubert to Mendelssohn, or that the Napoleonic Code is ethically inferior to Anglo-Saxon common law) collapses into meaninglessness. The latter is understood as an example of “emotive” utterance, to which truth-value cannot properly be ascribed."(220)

"This sort of thing, while for the most part unimpressive to the scientists, tended to convince many humanists—and a good part of the social-science community as well—that a craving for methodological respectability—“scientism” or “physics envy” as it was sometimes called—must lead to a sterile (and politically reactionary) view of human affairs, denying ineluctable truths about the human situation.
Thus it probably came to pass that when the brutally skeptical views of the postmodernists began to gain currency some years later, many humanists, and many social scientists as well, were quick to lay hold of them as instruments of revenge." [mijn nadruk] (222)

[Alsof er op het positivisme geen kritiek mogelijk is. Ja hoor, de 'humanisten' zijn jaloers op de exacte wetenschappen die wel toetsbare beweringen kunnen doen en zijn uit op wraak. Wat een onzin. Met dit soort argumenta ad hominem zit het boek dus vol.]

"We probably don’t need to fear for the safety or intellectual freedom of the sciences on the basis of these bizarre lucubrations: but that is not the issue. What does concern us is that these intellectual misadventures are so well received in nonscientific academic circles, especially on the left, and that they provide the route to publication, tenure, reputation, and academic authority for a growing body of would-be scholars."(266)

(267) Chapter five - Auspicating Gender

"The natural sciences take their share of the heat. In point of opportunities for women, the traditional recruitment and apprenticeship system has been unfair and exclusionary. Strenuous pressure for change has been the predictable result, as women claim their right of equal access to any vocation, no matter how long tradition has regarded it as a province of the male intellect. Until recently, however, the substance and the cognitive style of science per se had not been the target of much feminist complaint. The main demand was for a fair chance at careers, in and out of academic life—a just claim, unproblematical in its philosophic standing if not immune to vexations. Aspiring women chemists and physicists were not insisting upon a female thermodynamics; women mathematicians did not struggle to relate the Mittag-Leffler theorem to gender. Lately, however, a new academic industry has sprung up: feminist criticism of science."(269)

"The new criticism is far more sweeping: it claims to go to the heart of the methodological, conceptual, and epistemological foundations of science. It claims to provide the basis for a reformulation of science that reaches deeply into its content, its ideas, and its findings. The key process of this critique is insistence that inasmuch as science has until now been a male enterprise, it is ipso facto biased by unacknowledged assumptions derived from the patriarchal values of Western society. On the other hand, the argument continues, a body of insights, attitudes, and sympathies corresponding to the suppressed female culture has been unable to penetrate official science, depriving it therefore of alternative points of view and condemning it to distortion."(270)

"The best-known critics are accepted as legitimate historians and philosophers of science, in circles far wider than their feminist peers. They receive generous academic emoluments, large grants, distinguished lectureships, well-subsidized visiting positions, and tenured professorships at leading universities. In at least one discipline, women scientists, inspired by these analysts, convened a conference from which men were excluded on the ground that the particular relevance of female life-histories needed to be brought to bear on their research, free of male interference."(271)

[Veel postmodernisme natuurlijk weer. Maar ik vraag me af of de auteurs kunnen onderscheiden tussen onzinnige en zinnige kritiek op het beoefenen van wetenschap.]

"The favorable reception these polemics get in universities is due in large part to their origins in a morally unobjectionable ambition: to recognize and rebuke misogynist practices that have plagued Western science as they have most Western (and, indeed, non-Western) institutions. The record of science, until recently, is—in its social aspect—tarnished by gender-based exclusions (and, as well, of course, by class snobbery, anti-Semitism, racialism, and vulgar nationalism). At times, baseless paradigms in medicine and the behavioral sciences have been pretexts for subordinating women. Pseudoscientific doctrines of innate inferiority and moral frailty have been used to discount female capacity for achievement and to confine women to subservient roles. All this is beyond dispute and generally recognized in intellectual circles, even those of the most conservative bent.(...) To put it bluntly, the reigning posture is that the weight of men’s historical misdeeds is so great that it is bad form, in fact indecent, for male academics to object, even to the most aggressive and speculative announcements of their feminist colleagues. As a result, “women’s studies” (like “multicultural” programs generally) has almost everywhere a sacrosanct status, an unprecedented immunity to the scrutiny and skepticism that are standard for other fields of inquiry."(274)

"What are the realities of discrimination against women in science today, at least in the American universities? We take a position that is not likely, in the climate described, to endear us to a majority of our colleagues in or out of the sciences, or to the political and administrative avant-garde. It is that sexist discrimination, while certainly not vanished into history, is largely vestigial in the universities; that the only widespread, obvious discrimination today is against white males."(275)

"Recent feminist theorizing about the sciences therefore contains heavy doses of dogma."(279)

"We can show, in a progress from light to heavy samples, why we think the products and the associated claims fail to stand up to honest evaluation."(281)

"Our next example, less blithely outrageous than “Toward a Feminist Algebra” but no less reliant, in the end, on metaphor mongering, comes from biology. No fewer than nine co-authors, calling themselves “The Biology and Gender Study Group,” have collaborated to show us “what feminist critique can do for biology."(291)

"We are supposed to conclude, then, that without the habits of thought provided us (and the Schattens) by feminist insight, we would still be mired in the thought of the egg as a fat, immovable female-vegetable of a cell, and of the sperm as a steely bearer of glad tidings, a swift warrior.
But—and we are aware that each time we say it we lose a few more friends—this is nonsense. Reproductive biologists of either gender who spoke that way would be considered by their colleagues, and doubtless by their mates, as overdue for deep psychoanalysis."(300)

"That the outpouring of feminist science criticism, a part of the larger genre of “science studies,” is revolutionary and of fundamental importance is a given for the academic and intellectual left. Such works as Harding’s The Science Question in Feminism have already attained the stature of classics; likewise their writers are widely acclaimed as members of a new wave in scientific epistemology. Nor are they reluctant to drape themselves in that mantle, as becomes evident to the reader of an interview given by Donna Haraway, one of the greats of the business. What is impossible to discover, unfortunately, is exactly what contribution to epistemology has been made, or is being made. The honored achievement seems to be not philosophy but cage rattling."(327)

"No serious thinker about science, least of all scientists themselves, doubts that personal and social factors influence problem choice and the acceptance of results by the scientific community. Few serious thinkers about science, however, outside the camps of feminists and social constructivists, argue that the stable results of science, those that have been subject to empirical test over time and have survived, are not written in nature! Most know that whatever the underlying calligraphy, self-correcting science is the best translation of it we have."(345)

(365) Chapter six - The Gates of Eden

Over Ursula Le Guin en haar boek Always Coming Home. Wat gekoppeld wordt aan 'radical environmentalism'.

"The academic left entertains millenarian hopes. Its vision of The Only Possible Future almost always includes an accommodation between humankind and nature, a harmonious resolution of the predicated incompatibility between contemporary society and the sanctity of the natural world. Since it is the sprawling left we are speaking of, explanatory differences arise. To a feminist, the roots of environmental degradation lie in “the hegemony of patriarchal values.” Marxists of a traditional stamp see the postulated ecological crisis as product of the more general “dialectical crisis of capitalism.” Postmodernists might blame something like “a discursive practice that objectifies the natural and robs it of agency”; while anarchists, who are still to be found in odd corners, urban and bucolic, are likely to finger—of course—the hierarchies of the state. As usual, however, ideological syncretism is the prevalent note. All doctrinal variants are simultaneously endorsed to some degree; differences are submerged in a broad tide of indignation over environmental outrages, the list of which is continuously lengthened by selection of appropriate results from scientific journals (and by ignoring inconvenient ones). The typical dire warnings and portents conform perfectly to a model constructed more than twenty years ago by George Steiner: “We are told, in tones of punitive hysteria, either that our culture is doomed ... or that it can be resuscitated only through a violent transfusion of those energies, of those styles of feeling, most representative of ‘third-world’ peoples.”"(370)

[En daar gaan we weer met het op de man spelen, uitlachen, niet serieus nemen. Waarschijnlijk vanuit het idee dat alles oplosbaar is met wetenschap en techniek. ]

"Clearly, Le Guin’s Kesh, with their insistence that “person” may refer to a bear, a deer, a tree, or even a rock, are fictional models of the sort of human beings Foreman would have us become. Nor are he and his followers the only devotees of such a vision; dozens of academic radicals proclaim it in their work and it is increasingly reflected in the casual language (e.g., “environmentally friendly,” “ecologically sane”) and attitudes of students. Morris Berman, a onetime orthodox historian of science of leftist bent, is a typical convert. His vision of the future echoes Le Guin’s fiction:
Human culture will come to be seen more as a category of natural history, “a semi-permeable membrane between man and nature.” Such a society will be pre-occupied with fitting into nature rather than attempting to master it … We will no longer depend on the technological fix, whether in medicine, agriculture or anything else … The economy, finally, will be steady-state, a mixture of small-scale socialism, capitalism, and direct barter. This will be a “conserver” society with nothing wasted and with a great emphasis, to the extent that it is possible, on regional self-sufficiency.
Berman’s ideological purpose is to supplant, with an approach conditioned by “spirituality” and “ecstasy,” the scientific vision that has reigned in Western intellectual life for three centuries. He is a latter-day disciple of William Blake (and Carlos Castañeda!), eager to reject “single vision and Newton’s sleep.” Like many contemporary radical intellectuals who yearn for a recrudescence of irrationalism, Berman, in the tradition of Blake, focuses much of his scorn on Newton and, especially, on his philosophical precursor Francis Bacon: “The overall framework of scientific experimentation, the technological notion of the questioning of nature under duress, is the major Baconian legacy.”"(374)

[Het citaat van Rifkin op p. 377 wordt als 'hysterisch' beschreven terwijl het de stand van zaken weergeeft en de manier waarop is typisch:]

"Hysterical as is Rifkin’s prose to anyone having detailed knowledge of these “assaults,” it is common currency in the environmental movement, and taken as unexceptionable wisdom by those whose environmentalism is linked to hopes for radical social transformation, whether along feminist, anti-capitalist, or racial lines. The particulars of the indictment seem to reflect the latest thinking of the environmental sciences, although the accuracy of that reflection, as we shall see, is very low.(...) The idea that industrial society, with its dirt and noise, its depersonalization and anomie, is an affront to the natural order, and that the proper course for humanity is a return to a life bound up with the cycles of nature and tied to blood and soil, has arisen in the West with great regularity. Political philosophies with which it has been associated have run the gamut. Blame for man’s alienation from natural virtue has been assigned to every possible malefactor."(377-378)

"Of course we, and we hope most thoughtful persons encountering edenic ecologism in explicit rather than poetic form, reject this tendentious and ignorant view of science. So deeply, however, are its tenets embedded in contemporary intellectual output, and so large is that output that, again, an entire volume would be needed to refute it. Here we can do little more than recall, following Bramwell, how much it has in common with other antirationalist posturings, including those of twentieth-century totalitarian movements and of religious zealots throughout history."(382)

[Waarmee dus gesuggereerd wordt dat het huidige wetenschapsbedrijf niet irrationeel of totalitair is. Dat is nog maar de vraag. Het is net alsof hier de hele tijd ontkend wordt dat er problemen zijn met het complex wetenschap - techniek - economie - kapitalisme - politiek - militarisme dat ten koste gaat van mens en milieu. De houding van 'Er is niets aan de hand, joh, we lossen het wel weer op'. Je hoeft het niet eens te zijn met allerlei milieuactivisten om dat wel erg naïef te vinden.]

"We believe that such an effect must follow from the fervent antiscientism now embraced by radical environmentalists, an antiscientism that, if broadly influential, cannot fail to reduce the chances of success in answering questions and solving problems that are quintessentially scientific."(382)

[Dat is dus naïef.]

"We are not partial to styrofoam cups, or to the spray-can “art” that disfigures our cities. Exactness of scientific thought, however, and an honest comprehensiveness in the cost/benefit analysis that should be done before any solution to any global problem is undertaken, are of incalculable importance. Apocalyptic movements don’t do honest and comprehensive cost/benefit analyses. They don’t want to and they don’t know how (again, see Fumento, Science under Siege). To the extent that science—the only reliable source of numbers for environmental cost/benefit analysis—is battered in the course of a primarily ideological crusade, so much greater will be the chance of making disastrous errors of policy."(388)

[De suggestie is dat wetenschappelijke cijfers altijd betrouwbaar en eerlijk zijn en dat je beslissingen daar op moet baseren. Ook dat is naïef. En mijn vertrouwen neemt niet toe als ik lees:]

"The case for treating biodiversity as a problem of the first importance has been made with great skill and appropriate conviction by E. O. Wilson: we endorse it unreservedly. (noot: E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life. We applaud the arguments of this distinguished and humane scientist, and await with curiosity the response to them of the academic left, some of whose members have accused him repeatedly of sexism and racism, among other, lesser crimes, for his role as a founder of sociobiology.)"(389)

[Weer op de man spelen met een hoop cynisme. Misschien is er wel echt sprake van seksisme en racisme bij Wilson en de sociobiologie, maar nee, dat wordt meteen uitgesloten. Deze geweldige wetenschapper kan niets fout doen in de ogen van de auteurs.]

"As we see it, radical environmental wrongheadedness is rooted in three interlinked attitudes. First of all, it is intensely moralistic. Among ecoradicals, there is a tendency for surmises to take on the character of articles of faith. Thus in any discussion of the greenhouse effect, alternatives to CO2-emitting energy technologies such as nuclear power or hydroelectric projects are immediately ruled out of court because these have previously been assigned a place by the environmental left in its fixed demonology." [mijn nadruk] (392)

[Zo'n verwijt slaat altijd ook op jezelf terug. Iedereen is moralistisch hoe hard ze dat ook ontkennen. Alsof er geen heel goede redenen zijn om bijzonder voorzichtig te zijn met kernenergie.]

"A related radical instinct is to reject any form of amelioration. The radical mentality is, almost by definition, emotionally committed to change that is sweeping and wholesale, change that rewrites the terms under which we live. It is committed to punishing the wicked and rewarding the pure. It follows, then, that ecoradicals are never satisfied with gradual adjustment. The idea that our culture should go on much as usual while incremental changes are made to insulate the environment from damage is an unpalatable one for them, even if it could be proven that in the end the cumulative effect of such changes would be to create a permanent barrier to ecological degradation." [mijn nadruk] (393)

[Maar dat kan nooit bewezen worden omdat er zo veel factoren zijn die een rol spelen. Niet in het minst is dat de inrichting van de economie. Geleidelijke veranderingen zijn binnen het kapitalisme vrijwel ondenkbaar als die niet in het belang van het bedrijfsleven (lees: de winst, de aandeelhouders, etc.) zijn. Regulatie zou noodzakelijk zijn, maar die regulatie wordt door alles wat neoliberaal is afgewezen. En in de VS nog meer dan elders. De auteurs zijn naïef.]

"In her latest work, Radical Ecology, Carolyn Merchant produces a taxonomy of the radical wing of the environmental movement. She examines the theories and dogmas of Deep Ecology, ecofeminism, social ecology, Marxist ecology, and a number of other variants, taking account of the similarities and inconsistencies that link and distinguish them. Predictably, her tone is that of cheerleader and evangelist." [mijn nadruk] (395)

"In short, environmentalism in its modern form, including the radical wing of it, is a reaction, occasionally appropriate, to specific discoveries of orthodox science. The problem with radical environmentalism is, therefore, that its relations with science, upon which it must be based, have become so ridiculously acidulous and so dishonest."(397)

"Examples could be multiplied. It is as erroneous to view “primitive” peoples as walking hand-in-hand, philosophically, with a benign “nature” as it is to think of them as unoffending pacifists without knowledge of scalping, slave-taking, and human sacrifice—or to identify the latter three as inventions of Francis Bacon. The irony is that such misconceptions have long been embedded in the imaginative mythology of Western culture, certainly from Montaigne, Diderot, and Rousseau onward."(403)

"Ecoradicalism is as opaque to such insights as it is to scientific findings that might plausibly temper some aspects of environmental alarm. Science, indeed rationality itself, appears, to the radical mindset, as a Janus-headed beast, to be used when it warns, but dismissed with contempt when it attempts to reassure."(403)

"The career and influence of the activist Jeremy Rifkin provide an instructive case study of the propensity of the academic left for persuasion by the worst kind of pseudoscientific alarmism. The case tells us how trustworthy are their judgments of scientific questions. Rifkin has long been a militant crusader against the supposed dangers of science and technology. In addition to producing his well-marketed books and articles, he continually organizes protests and, in many cases, lawsuits against what he professes to regard as urgent environmental threats, particularly those supposed to arise from biotechnology and genetic engineering."(415)

"Needless to say, Rifkin’s ideological enthusiasms, which Best, Aronowitz, and a host of other would-be critics of modern science heartily second, are cut from the same anti-Enlightenment cloth as those of Merchant, Berman, Keller, and the like. He professes a hearty detestation of “Baconian” science as an expression of the Western urge to dominate, tyrannize, and torture; and he decries the “dualism” that severs us from nature. He hews closely to cultural constructivist dogma, deriving all the proposed sins and errors of science from the inhumane values of capitalism." [mijn nadruk] (418)

[Maar ik zie geen weerlegging van wat Rifkin beweert. Ik zie wel een hoop emotie en cynisme.]

"To us, it is self-evident that a 1 percent improvement in the efficiency of photo-voltaic cells, say, is, in environmental terms, worth substantially more than all the utopian eco-babble ever published. In this sense, we are unabashed technocrats, unashamed of the instrumentalism behind such assertions. An accomplishment of this kind will almost certainly not come from the ranks of the ecoradicals, most of whom would, no doubt, denounce it with scorn as a “techno-fix.” Yet technology and the scientific thinking that stands behind it are, for all their vexed history, indispensable tools for providing humankind with a stable environment in which it can live on honorable terms with itself and with nature. The attempt to replace them with phantom visions of global consciousness change or cultural paradigm shifts are wrong-headed and, even worse, wronghearted."(432)

[Wat dus laat zien waarvoor ik al waarschuwde hierboven: de auteurs denken dat alle serieuze maatschappelijke problemen met wetenschap en techniek opgelost kunnen worden.]

(434) Chapter seven - The Schools of Indictment

"In this chapter we consider certain social and political responses to evils, real or perceived. In contrast to the arid disputes of the academy, these are matters that actively and continually roil our civil existence, and devastate the lives of thousands. Chiefly, we shall be concerned with the abiding problem of racial justice, and with the AIDS epidemic that has reawakened slumbering fears of plague and fatal contagion."(435)

[Laat ik die twee onderwerpen nu net niet interesant vinden. Ik sla dit hoofdstuk graag over. ]

(518) Chapter eight - Why Do the People Imagine a Vain Thing?

"How shall we read the Psalmist?"(519)

[Waarom zouden we de bijbel hoe dan ook willen lezen? ]

"As we examine the process by which the current hostility to science within the academic left was incubated and nurtured, we find ourselves naturally turning to the 1960s. Commentators such as Roger Kimball have placed heavy emphasis on the sixties as the breeding time for all sorts of malfeasance. He sees the confrontational style of campus multiculturalists, feminists, Marxists, and postmodernist advocates of nontraditional scholarship as having descended from the attitudes and tactics of the sixties student left, namely, Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and other activist groups that engaged in militant civil rights and anti—Vietnam War politics. There is some justice to this charge. The rude tactics of sixties campus militancy—picketing, sit-ins, a generalized rhetoric of suspicion and scorn toward the nominal academic hierarchy—are recycled in our day when questions of making the curriculum more “diverse” or initiating women’s studies programs become hot issues. Many veterans of the sixties are still on hand as leaders or advisors to radical undergraduates, and indeed, to those who know these folk well, the trace of nostalgia is strong and unmistakable."(533)

"This is not to accuse all modern scholars who describe themselves as Marxists of such simplistic and reductive attitudes. Nowadays, Marxism is a rather flexible conviction, and many versions avoid the occasional crudities and intellectual barbarities of Marx himself. Nonetheless, old habits die hard, and the notion that science is a fallible part of the cultural “superstructure” of bourgeois society is reborn as “social constructivism” among Marxist, quasi-Marxist, and purportedly non-Marxist intellectuals. Here too, however, behind this piece of doctrinal refurbishment, there stands the habit of totalizing thought. Sociologists qua sociologists are hardly immune to it. Who would not want to see his own particular discipline regarded as the “master science”?"(545)

[Weer veel herhaling dus.]

(561) Chapter nine - Does It Matter?

"A serious investigation of the interplay of cultural and social factors with the workings of scientific research in a given field is an enterprise that requires patience, subtlety, erudition, and a knowledge of human nature. Above all, however, it requires an intimate appreciation of the science in question, of its inner logic and of the store of data on which it relies, of its intellectual and experimental tools. In saying this, we are plainly aware that we are setting very high standards for the successful pursuit of such work. We are saying, in effect, that a scholar devoted to a project of this kind must be, inter alia, a scientist of professional competence, or nearly so."(564)

"Scientists—aside from a small cadre of ideologically motivated sympathizers—generally ignore these critiques, not out of blind defensiveness of their own turf, not out of snobbery, but because the critics simply sail so wide of the mark, and have so little to say about the actual ideas with which scientists contend every day of their working lives."(565)

[Dat is dus al tien keer gezegd. En het is arrogant en onjuist. Het is 'Als je mijn taal niet spreekt kun je me niet begrijpen.']

"Science as such—molecular biology, solid-state physics, polymer chemistry, nonlinear differential equations, and the thousands of other specialties—would have taken the same course over the last couple of decades had no feminist philosopher or postmodern social critic ever addressed a line to scientific matters. To put it bluntly, the probability that science will sooner or later take these critiques sufficiently to heart to change its fundamental way of knowing is vanishingly small."(566)

[De auteurs denken alleen maar aan de natuurwetenschappen.]

"Humanists and sociologists alike take a certain pleasure in the notion that the mighty principality of the exact sciences, with its arsenal of laboratories and observatories, its inexhaustible sources of funding, its imagined stentorian voice in public policy, its intimidating intellectual mystique, is now itself put on the bench for demystification. They are eager to find virtue in any analysis that claims to have accomplished this trick. Its novelty alone insulates it from severe questioning. Moreover, as many of those questions would themselves require a reasonably deep knowledge of scientific particulars, it is far from clear that humanists and sociologists are even able to frame them."(572)

[Ja, ze hebben die kritiek natuurlijk alleen maar uit jaloezie en wrok. De beschreven feiten alleen al zouden het logisch maken om de vraag te stellen: waarom is dat zo? waarom worden natuurwetenschappen zo bevoordeeld boven de mens- en maatschappijwetenschappen? En dan volgt in de bladzijden erna een reeks opmerkingen die duidelijke maken dat de auteurs vinden dat al die aanstellingen van mensen uit de vage humanistische hoek ten koste gaan van die hardwerkende natuurwetenschappers die zo veel moeite moeten doen om een loopbaan op te bouwen. ]

"In view of this, we can hardly be indifferent to the spectacle of major academic honors and emoluments accruing to work whose lack of substance and whose reliance on special pleading and appeals to political solidarity seem perfectly obvious. The situation is the more provoking in that, when all is said and done, the central appeal of such work is the pretext it provides to disparage the natural sciences—to dismiss their astounding achievements as so much legerdemain on the part of a ruling elite."(578)

[Waarna er nog meer verhalen volgen die sterk de sfeer hebben van 'vroeger was alles beter' en 'natuurwetenschappen zijn zo belangrijk' en zo verder. Met opnieuw vele herhalingen.]