Po-Mo, Neo-Lib...And Shoddiness

For the on-going debate, please see the RHS bar under Also See

I can't speak for Wendy Doniger, Paul Courtright or others whom Rajiv mentions in his last piece (ThePeer-ReviewCartel). I don't know them personally or professionally and I don't want to answer his charges laid atthem. I'm not a participant in the world of Hinduism Studies, and I don't know the specific details aboutJeffry Kripal's thesis or other such matters.

What I do know is that I do not agree with the view that academics should not have an open dialogue with thosewho are not academics. Indeed, many Leftists with whom I walk in step take it as obvious that we must not onlybreach the academy's wall of privilege, that we should not only investigate processes outside the canon of theacademy, but also that we should take its hoarded knowledge to those who cannot access it as well as havediscussion about its knowledge in a broader context. The purpose of the non-university based schools that arethe legacy of "radical pedagogy" (some of it learnt from the Brazilian Paolo Friere) is just thelatter point. So I am not sympathetic to the refusal to engage. All those who work within the academy are notof a piece with regard to status and prestige.

It may be that scholars have other reasons not to engage in a debate, so I can't speak for them. If indeedtheir principle objection is that the academic can only speak to an academic, then that is plainly wrong.Rajiv does not cite any specific statement, but only offers a summary of what he says they said: it's not thatI don't trust you, Rajiv, but I would like to hear their reasons for non-participation in their own words (ifthey give you permission to post them). On citations (and again, please remember this is not the same as"name-dropping"), it would be useful to know who the "some academicians" are who"raised the red flag of censorship" or else what is the name of the "guide" that you quoteso often. I can't take this on faith: I would like to have something concrete upon which to base your remarks,and then to discuss them.

I seem to have taken up the following role in our own dialogue: Rajiv makes exaggerated denunciations aboutthe academy, while I come in and offer a structural analysis of the specific problems within the academy. Mineis certainly not a defense of the academy (indeed, it is at times much more sharply critical than Rajiv, asfor instance, on peer-review, as you shall see). What I offer is an approach that is empathetic andtransformative rather than Rajiv's scorched earth admonitions. I am utterly in line with Rajiv's frustrationswith the racism and the elitism of the US academy - although I think that his analysis misses the wood fromthe trees. In that spirit, here are my modifications and elaborations on the themes raised by Rajiv.

(1) Alan Sokal and the Scientific Temper.

For a reader who has no prior experience with the "Sokal hoax," Rajiv's summary must be quiteconfusing. Rajiv uses Sokal to do this work: to show that the peer-review system is bunk, "a famousinstance of exposure of the lack of quality controls in liberal arts scholarship," indeed, that Sokal'shoax shows "the fallibility of the peer-review system," that it shows "serious weaknesses inthe peer-review process," and that it angered the "whole liberal arts establishment because heexposed its pretentiousness."

Then, Rajiv quotes Sokal saying, "After all, I'm a leftist too." Why "too"? Who else is aLeftist? The "whole liberal arts establishment"? The editors of Social Text?

What Rajiv does not do for us is to offer the context of Sokal's hoax, indeed to show why a well-known Marxistphysicist would take on an intellectually fashionable journal edited by other Marxists (and severalnon-Marxists); nor does he tell us what the relationship this journal has with the "liberal artsestablishment" which is hardly Marxist or even sympathetic to the tradition. Context is one of thecrucial elements in the social science method, and Rajiv's lack of context muddies the original Sokal debate,which had nothing at all to do with the peer-review cartel.

Social Text, after all, is not a peer-reviewed journal.

In the July-August 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, after Sokal had exposed the hoax in the May-June 1996issue, Social Text editors Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins explained the status of their journal,

"As a non-refereed journal of political opinion and cultural analysis produced by an editorial collective(and entirely self- published until its adoption four years ago by Duke University Press), Social Texthas always seen its lineage in the 'little magazine' tradition of the independent left as much as in theacademic domain, and so we often balance diverse editorial criteria when discussing the worth of submissions,whether they be works of fiction, interviews with sex workers, or essays about anti-colonialism. In otherwords, this is an editorial milieu with criteria and aims quite remote from that of a professional scientificjournal. Whether Sokal's article would have been declared substandard by a physicist peer reviewer isdebatable (it is not, after all, a scholarly contribution to the discipline of physics) but not finallyrelevant to us, at least not according to the criteria we employed."

Peer-reviewed journals include the Journal of Asian Studies, American Historical Review,American Quarterly, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and other such journals. Adiscussion of their practice would better serve Rajiv's point.

Sokal was not interested in the problems of peer-review. He has bigger fish to fry, as he, along with JeanBricmont, shows in the title of their 1998 book, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse ofScience. Sokal's problem is not with the "peer review system," but with post-modernism. In apaper given at the Socialist Scholars Conference in March 1997 (published on April 18, 1998, in Mumbai'sEconomic and Political Weekly), Sokal wrote, "The debate is principally about the nature oftruth, reason and objectivity, and its implications for progressive political action." He went on,

"My aim isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit or sociology. I know perfectly wellthat the main threats to science nowadays come from budget cutting politicians and corporate executives, notfrom a handful of postmodern academics. Rather, my goal is to defend what one might call a scientificworldview - defined broadly as a respect for evidence and logic, and for the incessant confrontation oftheories with the real world; in short, for reasoned argument over wishful thinking, superstition anddemagoguery. And my motives for trying to defend these old-fashioned ideas are basically political. Iidentify politically with the Left, understood broadly as the political current that denounces the injusticesand inequalities of capitalist society and that seeks more egalitarian and democratic social and economicarrangements. And I'm worried about trends in the American Left - particularly in academia - that at a minimumdivert us from the task of formulating a progressive social critique, by leading smart and committedpeople into trendy but ultimately empty intellectual fashions; and that can in fact undermine theprospects for such a critique, by promoting subjectivist and relativist philosophies that in my view areinconsistent with producing a realistic analysis of society that we and our fellow citizens will findcompelling. It seems to me that truth, reason, and objectivity are values worth defending no matter what one'spolitical views; but for those of us on the Left, they are crucial - without them, our critique loses all itsforce."

On the panel with Sokal that day was the late great biologist Stephen Jay Gould and the Indian scientist,Meera Nanda. Nanda's work is now well-known through her articles in Frontline, and I also recommend herbook from Three Essays Press, Breaking the Spell of Dharma. Both Sokal and Nanda (and Gould), from theLeft, have engaged with post-modern thought to defend truth, reason and objectivity, or what Nanda calls,"the scientific temper."

One of the cheapest critiques of this "temper" has been to name it "Western" and toassociate it with the "instrumental reason" of imperialism (such as in Claude Alvares' 1992Science, Development and Violence, and in Shiv Vishwanathan's 1997 A Carnival of Science)."Eastern" thought, in contrast, is seen as inherently non-violent and holistic. Such a division ofthe world into East and West is not only utterly simplistic, but it also disguises the violent traditionswithin the "East" and the non-violent traditions in the "West," and it renders the"East" without reason and science. Science and superstition, reason and un-reason are common to allhuman societies: Caraka's medical treatise, for instance, must by necessity produce verifiable knowledge andproceed by rational investigation because if it failed to heal, it would be worthless (applied science in theancient world has to be instrumental). Similarly, because of the lack of understanding of germs,early modern Europeans trucked the superstition that disease traveled through "miasma";accidentally, the clearing of bogs or the moving away from stagnant water did help decrease disease, but forsuperstitious not scientific reasons (only after Pasteur was there a cogent explanation for disease).

India, as elsewhere, produced both astrology and astronomy, and we should marvel at the ability of ancients tomake deductions about the skies with the naked eye. The current return of the study of astrology to thepost-graduate institutions of India makes a mockery of the wonderful ancient traditions developed in India. Byemphasizing astrology over astronomy, and by rejecting the scientific temper, we are only retarding theability of our youth to live scientifically in the modern world. Swami Vivekananda put it best, 

"You willfind that astrology and all these mystical things are generally signs of a weak mind; therefore as soon asthey are becoming prominent in our minds, we should see a physician, take good food and rest" 

(but with alack of health care infrastructure, hunger rates on the rise, and overwork, Vivekananda's prescription cannotbe filled by most contemporary Indians). There are some scientific problems with astrology that bear notice:it uses a geocentric model (the earth is still at the center of the universe), it makes charts based on thebelief that there are only five planets (our ancestors did not know that Uranus, Neptune and Pluto existed),it relies upon two planets whose existence is not known to astronomers (Rahu and Ketu), and astrologers haveno professional consensus (one horoscope can tell you will die young, another that you will live till 100). (Ihave written critically about this elsewhere).We are a long way from Jai Singh's 1734 Zij-i Muhammadshahi.

There is no "western" theory (Rajiv uses the term as well - it is too general and its inverse isOrientalist). There are many scientific traditions within South Asia, some of them that derive from therationalism of very ancient schools of thought, but others that benefited from the efflorescence of Arabic andPersian scholarship that fortunately had a mark on our scholars. All this predated the colonial interactionwith Europe. These scientific traditions have been in contest with superstitions, both imported andindigenous.

Of course the main body of what is known as "scientific thought" was reformulated within Europe inthe 18th Century, drawing however on the wisdom from the Arabs and from elsewhere in Asia, at the very least.Denis Diderot, who complied the famous Encyclopedia, noted of the Enlightenment, "The purpose isnot only to supply a certain body of knowledge, but also to bring about a change in the mode ofthinking." Meera Nanda explains that this change is "from a contemplative, deductive reasoning fromintuitively-grasped, god and tradition sanctioned a priori beliefs to an insistence on deriving anyclaim regarding nature's order from the data of experience alone." 

South Asia, too, benefited from theArabic corpus of Graeco-Islamic philosophy, the tradition that brought Arastatlis (Aristotle) to early modernEuropean thought. Alberuni's Kitab-i Hind is a central text of the bridge between traditions. Bahwa, inthe 16th century, not only mined that tradition, but he also delved into Ayurveda to produce his medical text,Ma'dan-ush Shifa a-i Sikandar Shahi. But, as Abul-I Fazl wrote in 1595, the great scientific breakthroughdid not occur within India, as the "heavy wind of tradition [taqlid]" dimmed the "lampof wisdom," as "questioning and enquiry have been deemed fruitless and the act of a pagan [kufr]."In historian Irfan Habib's assessment, the practical sciences did not develop because the elites turned toscience for amusement and not to develop science for agriculture or manufacture, to push the forces ofproduction. The main scientific temper comes to South Asia despite the barbarity of colonialism, as the 19thcentury thinkers wedded the best of the Enlightenment to their own traditions and values.

In the world of dharma, the pursuits of Rammohan Roy, Dayananda, Vivekananda, and Gandhi opened thedoor to making Hinduism modern. What they did not do, however, was to test Hinduism and its great traditionswith the potential of science. In the world of Islam, we have one contemporary figure, the Iranianintellectual Abdolkarim Soroush (written about by Nanda), who argues that Islam must be reinterpretedaccording to the protocols of modern science. He does not deny the transcendental divinity of the prophecy ofIslam, but he does deny the human interpretation of it. No human can know the Transcendental, inJudeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, without mediation (what in Christianity is known as hermeneutics). The needfor human mediation or interpretation means that human beings need to update their ability to interpret, andtherefore must constantly update and challenge their doctrines of mediation or interpretation. There is noIslamization of science for Soroush, only a scientization or rationalization of Islamic doctrine (