WASHINGTON
The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is a window on the sometimes weird world of academia, recently revisited a hilarious intellectual hoax from 20 years ago. Reading the recollections of the perpetrator and of some who swallowed his gibberish is sobering.
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist and self-described “academic leftist,” composed an essay that was a word salad of solemn academic jargon. He said he strove to be “especially egregious,” by maundering on about “the dialectical emphases” of “catastrophe theory” becoming a “concrete tool of progressive political praxis.” His essay's gaudy title was: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”
He sent it to the left-leaning “cultural studies” journal Social Text, which swooned, perhaps in part because Sokal larded his nonsense with political tropes that are catnip to lettered leftists. Soon after Social Text published his faux scholarship, Sokal revealed in another journal, Lingua Franca, that it was a parody.
This would have been obvious to anyone whose intelligence had not been anesthetized by the patois of “deconstructionist” and “poststructuralist” professors.
Today, Bruce Robbins, a Columbia University humanities professor who was a co-editor of Social Text, tells The Chronicle that Sokal's essay appealed because he seemed to be a scientist “kind of on ‘our side.'” Robbins and another Social Text editor promptly claimed victim status, saying that “the deceptive means by which Sokal chose to make his point” will injure “the openness of intellectual inquiry.”
Sokal's point, however, was that intellectual inquiry in the humanities often is not open. The humanities, he today tells The Chronicle, had become a “subculture” that was “ingrained and self-referential and mostly disdained critiques from outsiders, so that an ordinary type of intellectual critique was precluded.”
Today, Robbins says Sokal was not unethical, but he should not have regarded those whom Social Text spoke for as “enemies.” Says Robbins, “I mean, there were epistemological differences, but so what?”
Epistemology is the field of philosophy concerning the theory of knowledge, of the methods of arriving at certainty.
What Sokal exposed was — and remains — radical relativism that asserts the impossibility of serious science and scholarship.
Sokal, who seems eager to make amends for his good deed, claims “a small amount of credit” for what he says is diminished ardor for radical epistemological relativism. But he says “the main credit” belongs to — wait for it — George W. Bush, who discredited “science bashing.” Sokal and kindred spirits — he seems to be safely back in the bubble — tell The Chronicle that the real problem is “anti-intellectualism” off campus: “academic expertise” is under attack, “epistemological skepticism” by “the right” is abetting climate change, etc.
Twenty years on, one lesson of Sokal's hoax is that many educators are uneducable. Another is that although wonderful sendups have been written about academia (e.g., Randall Jarrell's “Pictures from an Institution”), it now might be beyond satire.
George F. Will is a columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post.
