Gross and Levitt go too far, however, when they go after scientists who take alarmist stances. If this were a book on strategies for communication, I would probably agree with most of what they say against alarmism. However, this is a book on anti-scientific attitudes, not un-scientific attitudes. A scientist who exaggerates his or her findings is not doing good science, but they certainly aren't acting with animus toward science. If anything, they are making the pedestal too high, not toppling it. There are any number of valid criticisms to make against alarmists, but the alarmist is NOT rejecting scientific data. There's a difference between rejecting science and abusing it with fanatical excess. Environmental alarmism by scientists does not belong in a book on postmodernist and sociological critiques of science. Alarmists are NOT saying "Science is just, like, your opinion, man." Quite the opposite.
Also, the Gaia types lost. Public pitches for environmentalism in America today are overwhelmingly dominated by appeals to science. Somebody somewhere might be saying "Technological society is just a damaging Western construct based on scientific knowledge that poses as objective while in fact being a produce of heteropatriarchy..." but that person has no influence outside of their book club.
Chapter 7 covers a number of miscellaneous topics, among them AIDS and Afro-centric science. I won't defend every statement made by every AIDS activist ever, but to my knowledge most of them criticized science from a place of frustration with the slow pace of good science, not from a place of rejecting scientific knowledge. Even if some individuals adopted some anti-science rhetoric, it clearly was coming from a desire to speed up science, not replace it. I would not have placed them alongside the postmodernists or the gender essentialists.
Afro-centric curricular with false historical claims about the scientific feats of African civilizations are a different matter, and tend to also blend in much of the same cultural relativism ("Science is just a Western way of looking at the world...") as many of the other targets of Gross and Levitt, albeit with appeals to different texts. Gross and Levitt were fair here, and perhaps the best evidence that they were fair is that they also singled out a place where Afrocentric curricula are correct: The first known example of steel production was in Tanzania 2,000 years ago. It's worth noting the paradox of asserting, on the one hand, that ancient civilizations accomplished amazing innovations in science and technology, and on the other hand that science and technology are just arbitrary Western constructs.
Chapters 8 is on why people believed in the various sociological and philosophical critiques of science. The basic conclusion of Gross and Levitt is restlessness with a Western society that failed to fix the problems people hoped it would fix. I think that restlessness is indeed at work, and is also the source of many edufads. People want a fix, and they want to rebel against whatever isn't delivering it.
Chapter 9 is on whether any of thtis matters. They believed that it did. They contended that it would lead to a schism between STEM and humanities (with social science probably being torn in two), with the revolt being led by STEM faculty. That's not what happened, however. Administrators put STEM on the pedestal because of grant money, but also pushed on us to deliver it (making many tenure-track jobs effectively into grant-writing jobs) and to take in more students rather than weeding out students. We didn't tell the humanities faculty to shove it, the administrators did. And they didn't do it in response to the postmodernists. They would have just as easily pushed aside conservative defenders of the traditional Western Canon, and probably faster (in the name of diversity).
They argued that this will lead to the debasement of science education, but the people who have done the most to weaken science education are the people pushing edufads at the highest levels, and the people who have declared it a political imperative to get every available warm body into STEM. Keynes was right about practical men being slaves of defunct intellectuals, but it doesn't follow that every defunct intellectual will enslave a generation of practical men.
They argued that it will debase public discourse, but ultimately it's not the left that did the most to weaken science in public discourse. The left has much to answer for in the politics of the outside world, including misunderstanding and misusing science in certain cases, but the left has NOT tried to dethrone science. If anything, lefty technocrats have elevated science above its station, ignoring the is/ought distinction.
Why were they wrong? I think they were wrong because they over-estimated the power that humanities professors have over the next generation. As I said above, one must not over-state Keynes' observation on the power of intellectuals. Dethroning science was never an interesting project for Gen X, coming of age as the internet did. Science kept improving things for us; why would we take up torches and pitchforks at the behest of our comparative lit profs? Instead, we made the mistake of listening to the other idea-pushers, the ones insisting that we'd soon face a STEM shortage. And the final result of that was to make traditionalists like me so pissed off that I've spent two and a half years reading and blogging about humanities and social science.
The real enemy we face now is a technocratic class that somehow rejects meritocracy. Hey, I don't get it either. But they see stubborn social problems and believe that we can fix it by defining away merit in STEM education.
Strange times.
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