“Science Studies” - Narrative Replaces Reason.
The political and social left’s ongoing romance with moral relativism is drearily familiar to us all. How many times have we been told there is no ultimate right or wrong, just shades of perspective? What’s anathema to one person may be the daily pit-stop to another. Of course, this is only true up to a point. The left is just as capable (if not moreso) of creating their own moral absolutes as their foes on the right. “Choice’ becomes an ultimate imperative over “Life”, for example.
Remember when Al Gore redefined the so-called “Climate Change” crisis as a “moral issue”. Considering that the science is tanking rapidly as the planet appears to be cooling instead of warming, this might have been the most expedient move for him, because it shifts the spotlight. The advantage of moral absolutes are - not only are they immune to mundane facts, but those who disagree with them can be tarred (not as dissenters) but as literally bad people. And, while it’s hard to get any traction in a free society for the idea that people shouldn’t be allowed to disagree with an Idea, it’s easy enough to argue that people shouldn’t be allowed to be immoral. The debate changes from “How can the planet be warming when temperatures haven’t budged in a decade and the oceans have actually cooled?” to “No, I am not morally equivalent to those villagers who lived outside Auschwitz because I don’t buy the Climate Change narrative.”
The Left has had a thorny relationship with science for a while now. The Beast alluded to it in an earlier post in which he pointed out that researchers have come up with findings inimical to many cherished Feminist beliefs. But there are others.
Genetic research on the origins of Man in North America suggests a European source for many Native American Populations. This confounds the narrative that American Indians came exclusively from Asia and Europeans are invaders.
Exposure to hormones in Utero changes behavior in children flies in the face of the idea that gender-based traits (boys like guns - girls like EZ Bake Ovens) is an artifical social construct.
And so on…
So how do we reconcile these problems? Enter “Science Studies”.
The Volokh Conspiracy reprints with permission an excerpt from a Professor Levitt, coauthor of the highly recommended Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science. Professor Levitt criticizes the work of Palestinian Anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj, who published a book attempting to debunk Israeli Archaeological research into ancient Jewish communities in Israel. Obviously, if Jews never really lived in “Palestine”, then their claims to the territory are false. Levitt states:
My disquiet arises because I think Abu el Haj represents a pseudo-discipline that has gained some traction in universities despite its serious methodological and philosophical defects. The area is usually called “science studies” and its proponents can be found in anthropology and sociology departments, as well as in literary studies.
Abu el Haj tries to engage with archaeology on the basis of the assumptions and theories that are regnant in “science studies”, as her book plainly concedes.
These ideas are at the least heavily tinctured with what, for want of a better term, is usually called “postmodernism.” This incorporates the attitude that knowledge claims are, perforce, political claims, that “objective knowledge” is an oxymoron, and that modern science, in particular, is a repressive ideological edifice designed to bolster the hegemony of western capitalist patriarchal societies, not least by demeaning and displacing the “alternative ways of knowing” that are embedded in non-western cultures or are simply more appropriate to marginalized sub-populations (women for instance!)
Science isn’t really “science”. It’s politics and bias masquerading as truth - because we all know that there is no truth. Except our truth, of course.
The unifying theme of all these theorists is that the manifest content of scientific discoveries is not determined by the relevant physical facts of the universe but is “socially constructed” by some kind of murky alchemy that synthesizes the social and political interests of scientists into scientific theories.
Almost all scientists, as well as philosophers of science in the traditional sense, find this overarching theory of the nature of science to be highly unconvincing, to say the least. I cite some well-known critiques, to some of which I have contributed: “Levitt and Gross, “Higher Superstition,” Boghossian, “The Fear of Knowledge’, Haack, “Defending Science–Within Reason”, Sokal and Bricmont, “Fashionable Nonsense”, Koertge (ed.), “A House Built on Sand”, and Gross, Levitt and Lewis (ed.), “The Flight from Science and Reason.”
These critiques, however, have not dampened the enthusiasm of some would-be scholars, usually with blatant political motivations, to dedicate their academic careers to “science studies” in some context or other.
Not suprisingly, scientists disagree. One has to wonder what “Science Studies” acolytes think is happening when they flick a wall switch and an electric light goes on.
One clear advantage to this methodology, obviously, is that it gives its practitioners leave to dismiss scientific findings they find discomfiting without the necessity of developing significant scientific arguments against them. If science is a phantom constructed by a cabal with social interests opposed to yours, you have only to utter a few magic words from the science-studies canon and, poof!, the offending ideas go up in smoke.
In the grand ideological cathedral of leftist academe, all must serve the greater goal. Those Scientists whose work contradicts dogma must be brought to heel. “Moral relativism” served the left for decades as a tool to attack and replace the traditional moral structure of western society, so why not “Scientific Relativism”? They have their cake and they get to eat it too.
