USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011020.1106 (On Screen): It's amazing where you can end up when you choose an axiom incorrectly. John Calvin began with the axiom "God is omniscient and omnipotent." His religion didn't admit any other alternative; the Bible said that God was all knowing and all powerful and Calvin believed in biblical inerrancy. If God is omnipotent, then God controlled every aspect of the fate of the universe at the moment it was created. If God is omniscient, then at the moment He created it he knew everything that would take place within it to the end of time. But that, in turn, meant that He knew everyone who would be born, what they would do during their lives, when they would die, and most important of all, whether they would go to heaven or hell. But if God knew those things, then it means that they are predetermined. There is nothing any of us can do about it. Some of us will reside in heavenly bliss, some will burn in eternal agony, and nothing whatever that we do while we live will change it. That became known as the "doctrine of predestination", and the creed of "Calvinism" was based on it; several major modern Protestant faiths (such as the Methodist Church in which I was raised) are derived from it. But logically, this means that none of us have free will (because God predetermined what we would all do when He created the universe), and therefore in one sense there can be no sin. "Sin" generally means to act in a way which contradicts God's will for us -- but under predestination that is logically impossible. There is no justice in the unverse; some will be rewarded and some punished, but not for anything that they themselves actually do. And indeed, Calvinism states forthrightly that there is nothing that a person who is condemned to hell can do in their life to change that.

In academia today, there exists in some segments of the humanities a new "postmodernist" theory which eschews such concepts as objective reality, logic, right and wrong and instead adopts a universal concept of relativism. I believe I know where this started: the axiom is, in fact, political correctness: No-one should ever be offended. Never hurt anyone else's feelings, never tell them they're wrong about something. But what if two people actually do fundamentally disagree about something? If neither of them is wrong, then it must be possible for contradictions to exist. Logic says that can't happen, so logic must be wrong. If they make contradictory statements about the real world, then they must both be right, which means that reality is entirely subjective, never objective. (If reality was objective, then at least one of them must be wrong, and no-one is ever wrong, for then it would be necessary to tell them so, which would offend them, and axiomatically we may never offend anyone.) In defense of that axiom, the result is a tower of babble.

A professor of physics at NYU named Alan Sokal observed this process and was bemused, and progressively more and more disgusted by it. Five years ago he decided to try an experiment:

For some years I've been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities. But I'm a mere physicist: if I find myself unable to make head or tail of jouissance and différance, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy.

So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?

The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Interested readers can find my article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,'' in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text. It appears in a special number of the magazine devoted to the ``Science Wars.''

What's going on here? Could the editors really not have realized that my article was written as a parody?

His paper is a masterpiece of double talk, including puns masquerading as argument, non sequiters, unsupported and outrageous statements, and sheer nonsense. They published it. The first paragraph is typical:

There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in "eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to