Controlling the Truth

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The G-File. You can read Jonah’s full newsletter by becoming a member here.

The greatest exposé of postmodern asininity appeared, in 1996, in the pages of a respected postmodern magazine called Social Text. The editors of Social Text, as part of their long campaign against facts-without-quotation-marks, dedicated an entire issue to the problem of “science.” For obvious reasons, PoMos hate science more than dogs hate vacuum cleaners, and they bark at it about as much. You see, scientists work on precisely the opposite assumptions as PoMos; they actually think that facts exist outside of clever word games. You can say all you like that physics is phallocentric, but it’s not going to change the rules of thermodynamics. This really pisses off PoMos, because scientists keep making really cool gadgets that work while, to date, Duke’s English department hasn’t been able to make an airplane run on metaphors or to illuminate a football stadium with the adverbs from James Joyce’s Dubliners.

I went on to discuss the “Social Text Controversy” or “Sokal Hoax.” In short: A physicist named Alan Sokal submitted a paper to Social Text titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The money conclusion: “physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.” 

The journal published it. Then, Sokal revealed it was a put-on. 

(I’d call it an “eminence front” in homage to Pete Townshend, but “eminence front” isn’t a real phrase, and the truth is whenever I hear “it’s a put-on” that song comes to mind, and I have a weird compulsion to infect people with my ear worms.)

One of the fun things about the ensuing controversy was how some defenders of Social Text insisted that it didn’t matter if Sokal’s essay was untrue. What is truth, anyway? 

Others were angry at Sokal’s ethical lapse. Stanley Fish, easily the best writer of the postmodern crowd, wrote a brilliant, and almost persuasive, critique of Sokal’s prank for the New York Times. He claimed that Sokal completely misunderstood what postmodern scholars of the history of science are up to. I highly recommend it, if only for the skill of the effort. 

But here’s the bit I want to talk about. Fish wrote:

When Professor Sokal declares [in an essay for Lingua Franca revealing the stunt] that ‘theorizing about ‘the social construction of reality’’won’t help us find an effective treatment for AIDS,’ he is at once right and wrong. He is right that sociologists will never do the job assigned properly to scientists. He is wrong to imply that the failure of the sociology of science to do something it never set out to do is a mark against it.

My point is finally a simple one: A research project that takes the practice of science as an object of study is not a threat to that practice because, committed as it is to its own goals and protocols, it doesn’t reach into, and therefore doesn’t pose a danger to, the goals and protocols it studies. Just as the criteria of an enterprise will be internal to its own history, so will the threat to its integrity be internal, posed not by presumptuous outsiders but by insiders who decide not to play by the rules or to put the rules in the service of a devious purpose.

In other words, don’t pick on the postmodernists because postmodernists aren’t coming for science, you ninny. I wasn’t persuaded then, but I thought it was a plausible and interesting defense of the PoMo project.

Nearly three decades later, it’s just obviously false. 

Forget words like “postmodern,” “deconstruction,” and all of those terms that come with a pack of Gauloises cigarettes. The broader project of “decentering” traditional narratives and claiming that objective truths are merely social constructs or dominating paradigms, blah blah blah, has had remarkable success outside its lane. This is obviously true in the humanities. But it’s also true in the sciences. 

Yesterday I recorded an episode of The Remnant with Carole Hooven, formerly a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard (and now, among other things, a colleague at AEI). Hooven is a very controversial figure because she insists that science recognizes male and female as biological facts, at least in mammals and other relevant organisms, including, you know, humans. 

Now, I’m going to level with you. I wrote a whole bunch of stuff on this topic but, just this moment, I’ve decided to put it to one side until the Hooven episode drops. So, consider that a teaser both for the podcast and for a future “news”letter. 

PoMos for science.

Instead, I want to make a point that occurred to me while talking to Hooven and after reading Kevin’s piece. I don’t think it’s exactly true that postmodernism, and related movements, are “anti-science” or “anti-truth” in the way we on the right talked about it a few decades ago. And I don’t think the postmodern new right is quite as anti-science and anti-truth in the way that many critics (including me) sometimes suggest. 

This will require some table-setting. 

Some readers may recall that I have an extremely nerdy antipathy for philosophical pragmatism. After existentialism and before postmodernism, pragmatism was the new hotness in intellectual circles. The term was coined by Charles Sanders Peirce, but he abandoned the label once William James and John Dewey got their hands on it. For James, Dewey, and a host of Progressive Era intellectuals, pragmatism was a way to dethrone capital T truth, too. Very, very, briefly: Truth was whatever works. If believing something was true had “cash value,” in James’ famous phrase, then that’s good enough. What determined whether something was true was how much you wanted it to be true. If you had enough of what James called “the will to believe” that was good enough. The largely forgotten Italian pragmatist philosopher Giovanni Papini—admired by James and the Italian fascists—explained that pragmatism is “less a philosophy than a method for doing without philosophy.”

This points to what I consider the real agenda of pragmatism: to tear down other notions of metaphysical truth the pragmatists didn’t like or found inconvenient. Whatever pragmatism was on the page of a book or in a lecture hall, in the real world it was used to clear the field of philosophical competition.

This has long been my view of postmodernism, too. As I wrote in Liberal Fascism:

In a seminar there may be important distinctions to be made between, say, Foucault’s “enterprise of Unreason,” Derrida’s tyrannical logocentrism, and Hitler’s “revolt against reason.” But such distinctions rarely translate beyond ivy-covered walls—and they are particularly meaningless to a movement that believes action is more important than ideas. Deconstruction, existentialism, postmodernism, Pragmatism, relativism: all of these ideas had the same purpose—to erode the iron chains of tradition, dissolve the concrete foundations of truth, and firebomb the bunkers where the defenders of the ancien régime still fought and persevered. These were ideologies of the “movement.” The late Richard Rorty admitted as much, conflating Nietzsche and Heidegger with James and Dewey as part of the same grand project.

I still believe this. But what I think gets lost is that this is a snapshot perspective. What I mean is that when we freeze a fluid political movement—or really anything at all—at a specific moment in time we learn a lot, but we miss a lot, too. A snapshot of the Titanic leaving port conveys a lot of information: what the ship looked like, its size, how excited the passengers were, etc. But the story of the Titanic is more like a film, with a beginning, middle, and rather famous end. 

Some scholars of fascism, communism, and other illiberal movements will often make a sharp distinction between such movements seeking power and such movements in power. The Iranian Islamist revolutionaries seeking power made common cause with Marxists and sucked up to Western intellectuals – until they got into power. Then, they hung or exiled the Marxists and told the Western intellectuals to stuff it., Fidel Castro as revolutionary bandito said all sorts of stuff about democracy he abandoned once in power. Take a snapshot of Castro charming Herbert Matthews in the Cuban hills, and Castroism looks a lot like the Titanic leaving port. All of that talk about Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, et al “betraying the spirit of the revolution” is really a lament that the pre-victory snapshot was not predictive of where the revolution would lead.

I don’t want to rehearse all the ways in which the new right has gone postmodern. But the mockery of “norms” as mere partisan tools of oppression, the contempt for experts, the preference for beneficial headlines over actual improvements on the ground, the assumption that any news that reflects poorly on Trump must be fake, biased, or somehow rigged, the love of conspiracy theories as monocausal explanations, are just a taste. 

But here’s the thing: The great benefit of the new right’s postmodern turn is that, save for a handful of postliberal intellectuals, most of them are utterly devoid of the vocabulary of postmodernism. They don’t know any of the tricks. Think about it. The MAGA lingo about the system being rigged, the Deep State, wokeness, etc. is just a more proletarian way of talking about institutional this and hegemonic that. The argument is basically the same. “They” control stuff and “they” get to police my language. 

This makes it much easier to see the new right’s postmodern turn for what it is: a power grab. And that’s what all of these -isms were: arguments for toppling those in power and replacing them with “our” guys. 

But that’s not all. What happens when the kinds of revolutionary or radical intellectuals who like to argue against objective truth or any kind of orthodoxy or tradition—the sorts of folks who claim that “the system” is really some kind of conspiracy against the masses—win? Do they keep speaking truth to power? Do they maintain their edgy skepticism of metaphysical or historical certainty? Do they keep their minds open to the idea that their preferred narratives are merely socially constructed fictions? 

No. No, they don’t. 

Once in power, the Jacobins, ayatollahs, Leninists, Stalinists, Nazis, Maoists, et al become ruthless enforcers of orthodoxy. This is not just true of classical revolutionary political movements. When the postmodernists take over an English department, they lock the door behind them. When the social justice types conquer a foundation or charity, they become orthodoxy factories. 

This is the point that popped into my head while talking to Hooven. The people who claim that traditional medical or scientific approaches are shot through with heteronormative biases and structures of white supremacy aren’t so much anti-science as they are thirsty to have the power that comes with getting to define what science says. 

For most people, “science” is a shorthand for “truth” or “the method of exploring what is real.” And they want the authority and validation that comes with having science on their side. This, after all, is why Marx insisted that his conspiracy theory about history and economics was in fact “science.” Many of the same people who say they don’t believe the scientists who claim there are only two sexes are perfectly happy to say “follow the science” on climate issues. More to the point, what they want is to be able to say “follow the science” on sex and gender, which is why they constantly try to get the scientific evidence to back up their claims. 

For all the talk about how Trump and Trumpists are “anti-truth,” “post-truth” or at war with facts—talk I largely agree with—this commentary is all a snapshot. Trumpist PoMos are just like all the PoMos who came before them. They don’t want to destroy the truth, they want to define it. 

This fact is really pretty obvious once you look for it. Trump issues executive orders with titles like “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” and “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” 

If “information”—true or false—makes him look good, then it’s true. If it doesn’t, it’s “fake news.” 

Among the postliberal eggheads there’s a refreshing honesty about this. Their indictment of the liberal regime is that it tolerates too many definitions of the truth—metaphysical, political, religious—and they want to enthrone their own one-size-fits-all orthodoxy.

And that’s the irony. The best and most defensible things about postmodernism, but also pragmatism and many other radical -isms, are already achieved by liberal democratic capitalism. The (republican) liberalism of the Founders takes into account the small truths and fair points used by the radicals to make their agendas sound defensible and reasonable. People do have different understandings of the truth. Because human nature is flawed, institutions and factions made up of humans will have flaws, too. Self-interest and self-dealing can be a problem in every sphere of life, whether it’s in business, education, religion, or politics. 

Our system deals with these facts with a whole slew of mechanisms and procedures like the rule of law, the Constitution, free speech, free inquiry, freedom of religion, property rights, and checks and balances at every layer of government. People have the right to be wrong. And people have the right to pursue happiness as they define it, not how you define it. The purpose of this system is to foster fruitful disagreement. This disagreement plays itself out in elections, in the press, in myriad competing experiments in living, worship, commerce, etc. I’ve been saying for decades now that the single most fascist thing Americans say on a regular basis is “The time for debate is over.” In America, there’s always time for a debate, even if a decision needs to be made before it’s over. 

There are metaphysical fundamentals, philosophical guardrails, and traditional guideposts that bind, circumscribe, and define this American experiment. Dig deep enough—or really just scratch the surface—and you’ll find that laws against theft, murder, rape, discrimination, etc. have long and strong theological, moral, and metaphysical underpinnings. Our system is not “neutral” as the postliberals often claim, nor is it irredeemably racist, sexist, or even capitalist, as the PoMos often insist.   

But our system is free. Again, our freedom is not absolute, nor should it be. Ordered liberty requires order. But it is freer than many would like because freedom allows for the success of those we think are wrong. And that’s why the war on truth—regardless of what flag it comes under—is never really about destroying truth. It’s about gaining power in large part by trying to claim a monopoly on the truth. Truth gets hurt in the process. But the great thing about truth is that it can always make a comeback.