Slouching Towards Gomorrah (43 page)

It is impossible to imagine that academic inquiry flourishes where thought police abound. Indeed, the intellectual apparatus
of the Sixties radicals now dominating the universities is built for intellectual repression and not for inquiry. “The ‘sixties’ culture had tried to reinterpret history in terms of race, class, and gender.”
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These categories played little part in recent history, including such momentous developments as the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and its satellites. The important factors there were ones the New Left had ignored or derided—nationalism, religion, and the struggle for freedom and democracy through a free-market economy. Their analysis failed when applied to the United States as well. “The [race-class-gender] model, however, was flawed because it did not make adequate allowance for those multiple loyalties that transcended those of mere race and ethnicity.” Race, class, and gender are not adequate tools of analysis; they are expressions of resentment, claims of oppression. They are thus better suited to attack than to analysis.

Intellect is in decline in other ways, however. One is the refusal of many Americans to apply reasoning to their beliefs.
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Another is the rejection of the very idea of rationality. As to the first, we have become so accustomed to the astrology column in the daily paper that we no longer reflect on just how preposterous it is that people in a highly scientific and rational culture should pay any attention at all to astrology, a subject that should have died with pre-scientific ages. Yet a psychiatrist told me he estimated that about 25 percent of his colleagues believed in astrology. Important people, like a First Lady of the United States, arrange their affairs according to astrologers’ advice. There are, in fact, ten times as many astrologers as astronomers in this country.

I remember laughing out loud when on the cab ride from LaGuardia airport to Manhattan I saw a billboard offering psychic counseling over a 900 telephone number. Who could be foolish enough to pay to listen to a psychic? Lots of people, apparently. Now the psychics advertise on television. Television, in apparently respectable programs, hosted by men with deep authoritative voices, informs us of the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, the mystic powers of Egyptian pyramids, the landings of extraterrestrial spacemen among primitive peoples millennia ago, the lost continent of Atlantis, the
enigma of crop circles, sightings of Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster.
^†

That all of this is nonsense is never allowed to intrude upon the flow of misinformation. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that Americans believe so much that simply is not so. That might not be a problem, except that many of them arrange their personal lives in accordance with these myths and probably form their opinions of public policies on the same basis.

Quite another form of irrationality afflicts portions of our intelligentsia: the astounding claim that rationality itself is neither possible nor legitimate. We have seen that some radical feminists make this claim, as do some racial essentialists; in both cases they claim that what counts as rationality is socially constructed, that there are different ways of knowing, which means that reality has no stable content, not even in principle. The denial that rationality, now routinely derided as “logocentrism,” is legitimate or perhaps even possible is closely related to the politicization of intellectual fields.

In the universities, as John R. Searle notes, there are challenges “not just to the content of the curriculum but to the very conceptions of rationality, truth, objectivity, and reality that have been taken for granted in higher education, as they have been taken for granted in our civilization at large.” These qualities are rejected
“even as ideals
”
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This did not occur because a large number of people recently had the insight that these ideals were false or impossible of achievement. This rejection occurred, rather, because the more advanced modern liberals saw that their political and cultural agendas were vulnerable to rational thought. That was the reason the European fascists rejected rationality as a prop to the
old, corrupt order—-just as our American fascists, the New Left, decried objectivity for that reason. Those issuing such challenges today are the emotional—one hesitates to say intellectual—heirs of the New Left, and in many cases are not the heirs but the same people.

This is anti-intellectualism carried as far as it can possibly go. Hofstadter assumed, as was conventional among academics of his time, that anti-intellectualism was a right-wing phenomenon. If that was ever true, it is certainly not the case today. In an excellent book,
Higher Superstition
,
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Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt profess a certain puzzlement that the attacks on science and indeed on rationality should now come not just from within the universities but from the academic left. “What defines [that left], as much as anything else, is a deep concern with cultural issues, and, in particular, a commitment to the idea that fundamental political change is urgently needed and can be achieved only through revolutionary processes rooted in the wholesale revision of cultural categories.”
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The academic left does not offer a consistent body of doctrine but rather a variety of doctrines, many of them in conflict with one another. “What enables them to coexist congenially, in spite of gross logical inconsistencies, is a shared sense of injury, resentment, and indignation against modern science.”
²³

That sense of injury, resentment, and indignation attaches to much else besides science. The attack on the natural sciences is but part of a larger rejection of the culture of the West, one more continuation of the Sixties: “[M]any of the academics who are most actively hostile toward standard science are affiliated, formally or informally, with areas of study that first arose during the sixties—women’s studies, ethnic studies, environmental studies, and so forth.”
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These studies are, almost by definition, anti-intellectual. With respect to science as with respect to the other objects of their hostility, the Left, and not least its academic branch, is ill-informed and illogical.

Gross and Levitt argue that scientific skepticism, its insistence on internal logical consistency and empirical verification, has been an invaluable weapon against intellectual authoritarianisms that sustained social systems based on exploitation, domination, and absolutism. Thus, the scientific enterprise was egalitarian and seen as a leading feature of the progress of liberalism. They then remark
that our era is singular in that this understanding 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.”
²⁵

It is necessary here to protest a bit. It is not at all clear that the “natural heirs” of the scientific enterprise would perceive material injustices or false assumptions that perpetuate injustices in the existing social system. This sounds like a call for the massive restructuring of society without making the point explicit. A minor annoyance of the book is that the authors repeatedly strain so hard to distance themselves from anything that might sound conservative that they are in danger of throwing their backs out. It is typical that in a footnote, they offhandedly deplore multinational corporations. The authors assume an equivalence in bad faith between the “academic left” and the “academic right.” What academic right? There is no academic right. The academic world is not symmetrical. The Left is fundamentally hostile to American culture and the economy. It would like to overthrow basic institutions and remake the world. This Left has been that way since the Sixties. There is no comparable group on “the right.” There are a few academic conservatives, but they do not propose any attack upon our culture, polity, and economy with the object of drastic restructuring. Today’s academic conservatives attempt to preserve what is left of a culture the Sixties virtually destroyed or, at their most ambitious, to reconstitute such parts of that culture that seem valuable. They hardly deserve to be equated with the dishonest and destructive academic Left.

The explanation for the Left’s new hostility to science—or, more broadly, to rationality—may not be as mysterious as the authors think. The scientific temper may have been an invaluable ally to egalitarians when there were powerful intellectual authoritarianisms (or hierarchies) to be battled, but of what use is that temper to egalitarians when the authoritarianisms have been routed? It is even somewhat difficult to think of authoritarianisms that needed opposition in recent memory. There is, of course, an increasingly authoritarian federal government, but the scientific
temper has been no threat to the incursions of government, nor would egalitarians wish government power to be opposed. They need governments coercive power to impose their (so far) mini-tyrannies. The only other institution to presume to speak authoritatively in this century in America has been religion. And science, or a dogmatic and inflated version of the scientific outlook, has certainly diminished the authority of religion. So scientific skepticism and rationality, having finished their work (so far as egalitarians are concerned), are now superfluous or, worse, dangerous.

They are dangerous to the Left because radical individualism and radical egalitarianism are pernicious points of view that cannot withstand empirical investigation and rational analysis. Most women’s studies, racial and ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies are intellectual hoaxes, programs of propaganda and mutual support. It is hardly surprising that denials of the possibility of rationality should come from groups whose excuse for existence is threatened by rational inquiry. The knowledge that science produces, moreover, often results in a picture of the world that is anathema to the more rabid egalitarians, for that knowledge may demonstrate that there is a hard, concrete reality blocking the egalitarians’ path forward. Radical feminism is put in peril by scientific proof that some sex-role differences are inherent and cannot be dismissed as mere social constructs. To multiculturalists, empirical investigation is dangerous because it will demonstrate that not all cultures are equal in their capacity to equip their members for success in the modern world. Contrary to the claims of the multiculturalists, there are not different ways of knowing. There is one way and, though it is accessible to people of all cultures, it had its origins, or at least was brought to its fullest development, in Europe.

For egalitarians, there is always lurking the nightmare that there may be genetic differences between ethnic groups that result in different average levels of performance in different activities. Only that fear can explain the explosive rage with which some commentators received
The Bell Curve
by the late Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which, as a small part of a much larger thesis, concluded that there are heritable differences in cognitive ability among the races.
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Some comments expressed respectful and thoughtful disagreement, some asked for careful reexamination
of the data and arguments, but some did little more than shout “Nazi.” Herrnstein and Murray are not racists but serious scholars. They may be right or they may not, but the episode indicates the degree to which the ideology of egalitarianism censors expression and thought in sensitive areas.

Then, too, science may be offensive to egalitarians because it is a difficult enterprise, reserved in its most important spheres for people of high intelligence who have put in years of arduous study and work. Scientific knowledge is increasingly arcane, beyond the understanding of most of us. This exposes scientists to envy and hence to the inevitable charge of elitism. Radical egalitarians enjoy nothing more than lowering or destroying the prestige of an elite class. This suggests that the scientific temper’s role in destroying the intellectual authoritarianisms of the past—religious and political—was not valued entirely, or perhaps even primarily, for the good supposedly done humanity but rather for the simple reason that elite classes were being brought down. Now it is the scientists’ turn.

This development can be seen in any number of academic, previously intellectual, fields. Sometimes called post-modernism or post-structuralism, this denial of truth is, as Gertrude Himmelfarb says, “best known as a school of literary theory. But it is becoming increasingly prominent in such other disciplines as history, philosophy, anthropology, law, and theology… “
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It is also becoming increasingly difficult to call some of those subjects “disciplines.” In every case—the attack on reason, on the concept of truth, and on the idea that there is an objective reality to which we must attempt to make our words and theories correspond—the impetus behind such assaults comes from the political left. Himmelfarb demonstrates that fact about history, Searle about curricular reform, Gross and Levitt about science, David Lehman about literary studies,
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and I have attempted to do so about academic constitutional theory.
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Nonsense these attacks may be, but, as the history of our century teaches, there is no guarantee that nonsense will not prevail, with dire results. In law, philosophy, literary studies, and history, among other subjects, we are raising generations of students who are taught by the “cutting edge” professors that traditional respect for logic, evidence, intellectual honesty, and the other requirements of discipline are not merely passe but totalitarian
and repressive, sustaining existing social, political, and economic arrangements to the benefit of white, heterosexual males. To change society in radical directions, it is said, it is necessary to be rid of the old apparatus.