Incidents like this led eventually, and not surprisingly, to the work- shops and
laboratories
again being locked when there was no adult supervision.
Richard-Dawkins-The-Devil-s-Chaplain
'U Postmodernism Disrobed
Review of Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you culti- vate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multi- referential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari, one of many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, which caused a sensation when published in French last year, and which is now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, 'the most brilliant melange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered'. Guattari's close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze had a similar talent for writing:
In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed . . . In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.
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It calls to mind Peter Medawar's earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawar's own elegant and clear prose):
Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance, elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought. . .
Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar says:
I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the 77mes Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden
in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose.
This is from Medawar's 1968 Lecture on 'Science and Literature', reprinted
23
in Pluto's Republic . Since Medawar's time, the whispering campaign has
raised its voice.
Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books described
by the celebrated Michel Foucault as 'among the greatest of the great. . . Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian. ' Sokal and Bricmont, however, remark that
These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences - sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous - and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge.
But it's tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French 'philosophy', whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans?
Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively, New
48
? York University and the University of Louvain. They have limited their critique to those books that have ventured to invoke concepts from physics and mathematics. Here they know what they are talking about, and their verdict is unequivocal: on Lacan, for example, whose name is revered by many in humanities departments throughout American and British universities, no doubt partly because he simulates a profound understanding of mathematics:
. . . although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish.
They go on to quote the following remarkable piece of reasoning by Lacan:
Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely:
S (signifier)
-=s (the statement)
s (signified)
With S=(-1), produces: s=V-1
You don't have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous. It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence of God by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the infinite. In a further piece of reasoning which is entirely typical of the genre, Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ
. . . is equivalent to the V-1 of the signification produced above, of the/ou/ssance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).
We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about.
The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who is given
whole chapter treatment by Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage
reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia 2
(a 'rape manual'), Irigaray argues that E=mc is a 'sexed equation'. Why? Because 'it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us' (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to
POSTMODERNISM DISROBED
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learn is an in-word). Just as typical of the school of thought under examination is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. 'Masculine physics' privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:
The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids . . . From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.
You don't have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem (the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve).
In similar manner, Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confu- sion of relativity with relativism, Lyotard's 'postmodern science', and the widespread and predictable misuses of Godel's Theorem, quantum theory and chaos theory. The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The following sentence, 'though constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view':
Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes.
I won't quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say, Baudrillard's text 'continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense'. They again call attention to 'the high density of scientific and pseudoscientific terminology - inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning'. Their summing up of Baudrillard could stand for any of the authors criticized here, and lionized throughout America:
50
? In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.
But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word-games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking around, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense? The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, and the stunning success of his coup was not greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might have hoped for after such a feat of deconstructive game playing. Apparently, when you've become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when somebody punctures the established bag of wind.
As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the American journal Social Text a paper called 'Transgressing the Boundaries: towards
a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity'. From start to finish
the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross and Norman
Levitt's Higher Superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science, an important book which deserves to become as well known in Britain
as it already is in America. Hardly able to believe what he read in this
book, Sokal followed up the references to postmodern literature, and
found that Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about it. In Gary Kamiya's words:
Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for 'advanced' thought in the humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords ('hermeneutics', 'transgressive', 'Lacanian',
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'hegemony', to name but a few) would write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal, and have it accepted . . . Sokal's piece uses all the right terms. It cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the 'real world'), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy) . . . And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit - a fact that somehow escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into their city.
Sokal's paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this was a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear, attacking the 'post-Enlightenment hegemony' and such uncool notions as the existence of the real world. They didn't know that Sokal had also crammed his paper with egregious scientific howlers, of a kind that any referee with an undergraduate degree in physics would instantly have
detected. It was sent to no such referee. The editors, Andrew Ross and others, were satisfied that its ideology conformed to their own, and were perhaps flattered by references to their own works. This ignominious piece of editing rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature.
Notwithstanding the egg all over their faces, and despite their feminist pretensions, these editors are dominant males in the academic lekking arena. Andrew Ross himself has the boorish, tenured confidence to say things like, 'I am glad to be rid of English Departments. I hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who love literature'; and the yahooish complacency to begin a book on 'science studies' with these words: 'This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them. ' He and his fellow 'cultural studies' and 'science studies' barons are not harmless eccentrics at third-rate state colleges. Many of them have tenured professorships at some of America's best univer- sities. Men of this kind sit on appointment committees, wielding power over young academics who might secretly aspire to an honest academic career in literary studies or, say, anthropology. I know - because many of them have told me - that there are sincere scholars out there who would speak out if they dared, but who are intimidated into silence. To them, Alan Sokal will appear as a hero, and nobody with a sense of humour or a sense of justice will disagree. It helps, by the way, although it is strictly irrelevant, that his own left-wing credentials are impeccable.
In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social Text but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere, Sokal
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? notes that, in addition to numerous half truths, falsehoods and non- sequiturs, his original article contained some 'syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever'. He regrets that there were not more of the latter: 'I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack. ' If he were writing his parody today, he'd surely have been helped by a virtuoso piece of computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of Melbourne: the Postmodernism Generator. Every time you visit it at http://www. elsewhere. org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ it will spontaneously generate for you, using faultless grammatical principles, a spanking new postmodern discourse, never before seen. I have just been there, and it produced for me a 6000-word article called 'Capitalist theory and the subtextual paradigm of context' by 'David I. L. Werther and Rudolf du Garbandier of the Department of English, Cambridge University' (poetic justice there, for it was Cambridge who saw fit to give Jacques Derrida an honorary degree). Here's a typical sentence from this impressively erudite work:
If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the collective unconscious.
Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for publication, complete with numbered endnotes. Manuscripts should be submitted to the 'Editorial Collective' of Social Text, double-spaced and in triplicate.
As for the harder task of reclaiming humanities and social studies departments for genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross and Levitt in giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of science. We must hope that it will be followed.
POSTMODERNISM DISROBED
53
? The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle24
My life has lately been dominated by education. Home life over-
shadowed by A-level* examination horrors, I escaped to London to
address a conference of schoolteachers. On the train, in preparation for
the inaugural 'Oundle Lecture' which 1 was nervously to give at my old
schoolf the following week, I read H. G. Wells's biography of its famous
Head: The Story ofa Great Schoolmaster: being a plain account ofthe life an 2
ideas of Sanderson ofOundle. * The book begins in terms which initially
seemed a little over the top: 'I think him beyond question the greatest
man I have ever known with any degree of intimacy' But it led me on
26
to read the official biography, Sanderson of Oundle, written by a large,
anonymous syndicate of his former pupils (Sanderson believed in cooperation instead of striving for individual recognition).
I now see what Wells meant. And I am sure that Frederick William Sanderson (1857-1922) would have been horrified to learn what I learned from the teachers I met at the London conference: about the stifling effects of exams, and the government obsession with measuring a school's performance by them. He would have been aghast at the anti- educational hoops that young people now have to jump through in order to get into university. He would have been openly contemptuous of the pussyfooting, lawyer-driven fastidiousness of 'Health and Safety', and the accountant-driven league tables that dominate modern education and actively encourage schools to put their own interests before those of their pupils. Quoting Bertrand Russell, he disliked competition and 'possessiveness' as a motive for anything in education.
Sanderson of Oundle ended up second only to Arnold of Rugby in
*Advanced-levels: school-leaving examinations, on which acceptance to British universities largely depends. A-levels notoriously traumatize teenagers, because so much hangs on the result. Schools vie with each other in nationally compiled tables of A-level performance, and ambitious schools have been known to discourage less able pupils from even trying, for fear of damaging the school's rank in the league table.
tOundle School, in Northamptonshire in central England, founded 1556.
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? fame, but Sanderson was not born to the world of public schools. Today, he would, I dare say, have headed a large, mixed Comprehensive. * His humble origins, northern accent and lack of Holy Orders gave him a rough ride with the classical 'dominies' whom he found on arrival at the small and run-down Oundle of 1892. So rebarbative were his first five years, Sanderson actually wrote out his letter of resignation. Fortunately, he never sent it. By the time of his death thirty years later, Oundle's numbers had increased from 100 to 500, it had become the foremost school for science and engineering in the country, and he was loved and respected by generations of grateful pupils and colleagues. More important, Sanderson developed a philosophy of education that we should urgently heed today.
He was said to lack fluency as a public speaker, but his sermons in the School Chapel could achieve Churchillian heights:
Mighty men of science and mighty deeds. A Newton who binds the universe together in uniform law; Lagrange, Laplace, Leibnitz with their wondrous mathematical harmonies; Coulomb measuring out electricity . . . Faraday, Ohm, Ampere, Joule, Maxwell, Hertz, Rontgen; and in another branch of science, Cavendish, Davy, Dalton, Dewar; and in another, Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Lister, Sir Ronald Ross. All these and many others, and some whose names have no memorial, form a great host of heroes, an army of soldiers - fit companions of those of whom the poets have sung . . . There is the great Newton at the head of this list comparing himself to a child playing on the seashore gathering pebbles, whilst he could see with prophetic vision the immense ocean of truth yet unexplored before him . . .
How often did you hear that sort of thing in a religious service? Or this, his gentle indictment of mindless patriotism, delivered on Empire Day at the close of the First World War? He went right through the Sermon on the Mount, concluding each Beatitude with a mocking 'Rule Britannia'.
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Rule Britannia! Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. Rule Britannia!
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Rule
Britannia!
Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness sake. Rule
Britannia!
Dear souls! My dear souls! I wouldn't lead you astray for anything.
*'Public schools' are, as you might imagine, private schools! Only relatively affluent parents can afford them, which puts them at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the government-run Comprehensive schools (not invented in Sanderson's time) where education is free.
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Sanderson's passionate desire to give the boys freedom to fulfil them- selves would have thrown Health and Safety into a hissy fit, and set today's lawyers licking their chops with anticipation. He directed that the laboratories should be left unlocked at all times, so that boys could go in and work at their own research projects, even if unsupervised. The more dangerous chemicals were locked up, 'but enough was left about to disturb the equanimity of other masters who had less faith than the Head in that providence which looks after the young. ' The same open door policy applied to the school workshops, the finest in the country, filled with advanced machine tools which were Sanderson's pride and joy. Under these conditions, one boy damaged a 'surface plate' by using it as an anvil against which to hammer a rivet. The culprit tells the story in Sanderson ofOundle:
That did disconcert the Head for a little when it was discovered. * But my punishment was quite Oundelian. I had to make a study of the manufacture and use of surface plates and bring a report and explain it all to him. And after that I found I had learnt to look twice at a fine piece of work before I used it ill.
Incidents like this led eventually, and not surprisingly, to the work- shops and laboratories again being locked when there was no adult supervision. But some boys felt the deprivation keenly and, in true Sandersonian fashion, they set out, in the workshops and the library (another of Sanderson's personal prides) to make an intensive study of locks.
In our enthusiasm we made skeleton keys for all Oundle, not only for the laboratories but for private rooms as well. For weeks we used the laboratories and workshops as we had grown accustomed to use them, but now with a keen care of the expensive apparatus and with precautions to leave nothing disorderly to betray our visits. It seemed that the Head saw nothing; he had a great gift for assuming blindness - until Speech Day came round, and then we were amazed to hear him, as he beamed upon the assembled parents, telling them the whole business, 'And what do you think my boys have been doing now? '
Sanderson's hatred of any locked door which might stand between a boy and some worthwhile enthusiasm symbolized his whole attitude to education. A certain boy was so keen on a project he was working on that he used to steal out of the dormitory at 2 a. m. to read in the (unlocked, of course) library. The Headmaster caught him there, and
*As well it might, for a 'surface plate' is a precisely machined plane surface, used for judging the flatness of objects.
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? roared his terrible wrath for this breach of discipline (he had a famous temper and one of his maxims was 'Never punish except in anger'). Again, the boy himself tells the story:
The thunderstorm passed. 'And what are you reading, my boy, at this hour? ' I told him of the work that had taken possession of me, work for which the day time was all too full. Yes, yes, he understood that. He looked over the notes I had been taking and they set his mind going. He sat down beside me to read them. They dealt with the development of metallurgical processes, and he began to talk to me of discovery and the values of discovery, the incessant reaching out of men towards knowledge and power, the significance of this desire to know and make and what we in the school were doing in that process. We talked, he talked for nearly an hour in that still nocturnal room. It was one of the greatest, most formative hours in my life . . . 'Go back to bed, my boy. We must find some time for you in the day for this. '
I don't know about you, but that story brings me close to tears.
Far from coveting garlands in league tables by indulging the high-
flyers,
Sanderson's most strenuous labours were on behalf of the average, and specially the 'dull' boys. He would never admit the word: if a boy was dull it was because he was being forced in the wrong direction, and he would make endless experiments to find how to get his interest . . . he knew every boy by name and had a complete mental picture of his ability and character. . . It was not enough that the majority should do well. 'I never like to fail with a boy. '
In spite of - perhaps because of - Sanderson's contempt for public examinations, Oundle did well in them. A faded, yellowing newspaper cutting dropped out of my second-hand copy of Wells's book:
In the higher certificates of the Oxford and Cambridge School examinations Oundle once again leads, having 76 successes. Shrewsbury and Marlborough tie for second place at 49 each.
Sanderson died in 1922, after struggling to finish a lecture to a gather- ing of scientists, at University College, London. The chairman, H. G. Wells himself, had just invited the first question from the floor when Sanderson dropped dead on the platform. The lecture had not been intended as a valediction, but the eye of sentiment can read the published text as Sanderson's educational testament, a summation of all he had learned in 30 years as a supremely successful and deeply loved headmaster.
My head ringing with the last words of this remarkable man, I closed
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the book and travelled on to University College, London, site of his swan song and my own modest speech to the conference of science teachers.
My subject, under the chairmanship of an enlightened clergyman, was evolution. I offered an analogy which teachers might use to bring home to their pupils the true antiquity of the universe. If a history were written at a rate of one century per page, how thick would the book of the universe be? In the view of a Young Earth Creationist, the whole history of the universe, on this scale, would fit comfortably into a slender paperback. And the scientific answer to the question? To accommodate all the volumes of history on the same scale, you'd need a bookshelf ten miles long. That gives the order of magnitude of the yawning gap between true science on the one hand, and the creationist teaching favoured by some schools on the other. This is not some disagreement of scientific detail. It is the difference between a single paperback and a library of a million books. What would have offended Sanderson about teaching the Young Earth view is not just that it is false but that it is petty, small-minded, parochial, unimaginative, unpoetic and downright boring compared to the staggering, mind-expanding truth.
After lunching with the teachers I was invited to join their afternoon deliberations. Almost to a man and woman, they were deeply worried about the A-level syllabus and the destructive effects of exam pressure on true education. One after another, they came up to me and confided that, much as they would like to, they didn't dare to do justice to evolution in their classes. This was not because of intimidation by fundamentalist parents (which would have been the reason in parts of America). It was simply because of the A-level syllabus. Evolution gets only a tiny mention, and then only at the end of the A-level course. This is preposterous, for, as one of the teachers said to me, quoting the great Russian American biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (a devout Christian, like Sanderson), 'Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. '
Without evolution, biology is a collection of miscellaneous facts. Before they learn to think in an evolutionary way, the facts that the children learn will just be facts, with no binding thread to hold them together, nothing to make them memorable or coherent. With evolu- tion, a great light breaks through into the deepest recesses, into every corner, of the science of life. You understand not only what is, but why. How can you possibly teach biology unless you begin with evolution? How, indeed, can you call yourself an educated person, if you know nothing of the Darwinian reason for your own existence? Yet, time and
58
? again, I heard the same story. Teachers had wanted to introduce their pupils to life's central theorem, only to be glottal-stopped dead in their tracks: 'Is that on my syllabus? Will it come up in my exam? ' Sadly, they had to admit that the answer was no, and returned to the rote learning of disconnected facts as required for A-level success.
Sanderson would have hit the roof:
I agree with Nietzsche that 'The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously. ' A joyful life is an active life - it is not a dull static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.
His spirit lived on at Oundle. His immediate successor, Kenneth Fisher, was chairing a staff meeting when there was a timid knock on the door and a small boy came in: 'Please, sir, there are Black Terns down by the river. ' 'This can wait,' said Fisher decisively to the assembled committee. He rose from the Chair, seized his binoculars from the door and cycled off in the company of the small ornithologist, and - one can't help imagining - with the benign, ruddy-faced ghost of Sanderson beaming in their wake. Now that's education - and to hell with your league table statistics, your fact-stuffed syllabuses and your endless roster of exams.
That story of Fisher was told by my own inspiring Zoology teacher, loan Thomas, who had applied for the job at Oundle specifically because he admired the long-dead Sanderson and wanted to teach in his tradition. Some 35 years after Sanderson's death, I recall a lesson about Hydra, a small denizen of still freshwater. Mr Thomas asked one of us, 'What animal eats Hydra? ' The boy made a guess. Non-committally, Mr Thomas turned to the next boy, asking him the same question. He went right round the entire class, with increasing excitement asking each one of us by name, 'What animal eats Hydra? What animal eats Hydra? ' And one by one we guessed. By the time he had reached the last boy, we were agog for the true answer. 'Sir, sir, what animal does eat Hydra? ' Mr Thomas waited until there was a pin-dropping silence. Then he spoke, slowly and distinctly, pausing between each word.
I don't know . . . (Crescendo) I don't know . . . (Molto crescendo) And I don't think Mr Coulson knows either. (Fortissimo) Mr Coulson! Mr Coulson!
He flung open the door to the next classroom and dramatically inter- rupted his senior colleague's lesson, bringing him into our room. 'Mr Coulson, do you know what animal eats Hydra? ' Whether some wink
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passed between them I don't know, but Mr Coulson played his part well: he didn't know. Again the fatherly shade of Sanderson chuckled in the corner, and none of us will have forgotten that lesson. What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today's assessment-mad exam culture.
Sanderson's tradition that the whole school, not just the choir, even the tone deaf, should rehearse and bellow a part in the annual oratorio, also survived him, and has been widely imitated by other schools. His most famous innovation, the Week in Workshops (a full week for every pupil in every term, with all other work suspended) has not survived, but it was still going during my time in the fifties. It was eventually killed by exam pressure - of course - but a wonderfully Sandersonian phoenix has risen from its ashes. The boys, and now girls I am delighted to say, work out of school hours to build sports cars (and off-road go- carts) to special Oundle designs. Each car is built by one pupil, with help of course, especially in advanced welding techniques. When I visited Oundle last week, I met two overalled young people, a boy and a girl, who had recently left the school but had been welcomed back from their separate universities to finish their cars. More than 15 cars have been driven home by their proud creators during the past three years.
So Mr Sanderson, dear soul, you have a stirring, a light breeze of immortality, in the only sense of immortality to which the man of reason can aspire. Now let's whip up a gale of reform through the country, blow away the assessment-freaks with their never-ending cycle of demoralizing, childhood-destroying examinations, and get back to true education.
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The title of this section - and of its first chapter - is a quotation from the Origin of Species. Darwin was talking about light being thrown on human origins and he made it come true in his Descent of Man, but I like to think of all the other light that his ideas have thrown in so many different fields. Indeed, it was our second choice for the title for the whole book. The first essay in the section, Light Will Be Thrown (2. 1), is the Foreword that I wrote very recently for a new student edition of The Descent, published by Gibson Square Books. In the course of writing it I discovered that Darwin was even more far-sighted than I had previously realized.
Darwin Triumphant (2. 2) was my contribution to the second Man and Beast symposium, in Washington DC, 1991, with the subtitle 'Darwinism as a Universal Truth'. The phrase Universal Darwinism was one that I had introduced at the 1982 Cambridge conference to commemorate the centenary of Darwin's death. Darwinism is not just something that happens to be the basis of life on this planet. A good case can be made that it is fundamental to life itself, as a universal phenomenon wherever life may be found. If this is right, Darwin's light is thrown farther than was ever dreamed by that gentle and modest man.
One place where light could be thrown with advantage is the murky underworld of creationist propaganda. Television producers have such obvious power in the editing suite and the cutting room, it is amazing how seldom they abuse it. Tony Benn, the veteran socialist Member of Parliament, is said to switch on his own tape recorder, as a witness of potential foul play, whenever he is interviewed. Surprisingly, I have seldom found this necessary, and the only time I have ever been deliberately deceived was by an Australian creationist. How this disreputable story prompted me to publish The 'Information Challenge' (2. 3) is explained in the piece itself.
'A devil, a born devil, on whose nature, Nurture can never stick. ' Gratified as Shakespeare might be to know how many of his lines have assumed household familiarity, I suspect that he might squirm at the modern over-
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exposure of the nature/nurture cliche. A flurry of publicity in 1993 for a so-called 'gay gene' on the X chromosome led to an invitation from the Daily Telegraph to expose the myths of 'genetic determinism'. The result was the piece reproduced here as Genes Aren't Us (2. 4).
My literary agent John Brockman has the charisma to persuade his clients and others to drop everything and contribute to books of his own editing, even in the teeth of the better commercial judgement he might normally advise them to deploy. The distinction of his guest list flatters them in through the door of his salon (http://www. edge. org/) and before they know where they are they are correcting the proofs for a printed spin- off. Son of Moore's Law (2. 5) was my futurological contribution to a typically fascinating on-line symposium, The Next Fifty Years.
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Foreword to a new Student Edition of Darwin's Descent of Man "
"!
Light Will Be Thrown
Humanity is the missing guest at the feast of The Origin of Species. The famous 'Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history' is a calculated understatement matched, in the annals of science, only by Watson and Crick's 'It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. ' By the time Darwin finally got around to throwing that light in 1871, others had been there before him. And the greater part of The Descent of Man is not about humans but about Darwin's 'other' theory, sexual selection.
The Descent of Man was conceived as a single book but ended up as three, two of them bound together under the same title, with the second topic signalled by the subtitle, Selection in Relation to Sex. The third was The Expression of the Emotions, not my concern here, but Darwin tells us that it grew out of the original Descent, and he began writing it immediately after finishing Descent. Given that the idea of splitting the book was in Darwin's mind, it is at first sight surprising that he didn't spin off sexual selection as well. It would have seemed natural to publish chapters 8 to 18 as Selection in Relation to Sex followed by a second book, The Descent of Man, consisting of the present Chapters 1 to 8, and 19 to 21. That's a neat split into eleven chapters
for each book, and many have wondered why he did not do this. I shall follow the same order - sexual selection followed by the descent of man - and then return at the end to the question of whether the two might have been split. In addition to discussing Darwin's book, I shall try to give some pointers to where the subject is moving today.
The ostensible connection between sexual selection and the descent of man is that Darwin believed the first was a key to understanding the second; especially to understanding human races, a topic which preoccupied Victorians more than it does us. But, as the historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse has remarked to me, there was a
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tighter thread binding the two topics. They were the only two sources
of disagreement between Darwin and his co-discoverer of natural
selection. Alfred Russel Wallace never took kindly to sexual selection, at
least in its full-blooded Darwinian form. And Wallace, though he
coined the word Darwinism and described himself as 'more Darwinian
than Darwin', stopped short of the materialism implied by Darwin's
view of the human mind. These disagreements with Wallace were all
the more important to Darwin because these two great men agreed on
almost everything else. Darwin himself said, in a letter to Wallace of
28 1867:
The reason of my being so much interested just at present about sexual selection is, that I have almost resolved to publish a little essay on the origin of Mankind, and I still strongly think (though I failed to convince you, and this, to me is the heaviest blow possible) that sexual selection has been the main agent in forming the races of man.
The Descent ofMan and Selection in Relation to Sex could be seen, then, as Darwin's two-pronged answer to Wallace. But it's also possible - and anyone who reads those chapters would forgive him - that he just got carried away by his enthusiasm for sexual selection.
The disagreements between Darwin and Wallace over sexual selection have been teased out by the Darwinian philosopher and historian
29
Helena Cronin in her stylish book The Ant and the Peacock.
follows the two threads to the present day, classifying later theorists of sexual selection as 'Wallaceans' and 'Darwinians'. Darwin rejoiced in sexual selection. The naturalist in him loved the extravagant ostenta- tion of stag beetles and pheasants, while the theorist and teacher knew that survival is only a means to the end of reproduction. Wallace could not stomach aesthetic whim as a sufficient explanation for the evolu- tion of bright colours and the other conspicuous features for which Darwin invoked female (or in a few species male) choice. Even when persuaded that certain male features have evolved as advertisements aimed at females, Wallace insisted that the qualities they advertise must be utilitarian qualities. Females choose males not because they are pretty but because they are good providers, or something equally
30
worthy. Modern Wallaceans such as William Hamilton and Amotz
31
Zahavi see bright colours and other sexually selected advertisements as
honest and uncheatable badges of true quality: health, for example, or resistance to parasites.
Darwin would have no problem with that, but he also was prepared to countenance pure aesthetic whim as a selective force in nature.
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She even
? Something about the female brain just likes bright coloured feathers, or whatever is the species equivalent, and that is a sufficient pressure for males to have evolved them, even if this is disadvantageous to the male's own survival. It was that leader among twentieth-century Darwinians, R. A. Fisher, who put the idea on a sound theoretical foundation by suggesting that female preference could be under genetic control and therefore subject to natural selection, in just the same way as the male
32
qualities preferred. The interaction between selection on female
preference genes (inherited by both sexes) and simultaneously on male advertisement genes (also inherited by both sexes) provides the coevolutionary driving force for the expansion of ever more extravagant sexual advertisements. I suspect that Fisher's elegant reasoning, supplemented by more recent theorists such as R. Lande, might have reconciled Wallace to Darwin, because Fisher did not leave female whim unexplained, as an arbitrary given. The key point is that female whims
33 of the future agree with those inherited from the past.
The divide between Darwinian and Wallacean sexual selection, then,
is one thing to bear in mind while reading the substantial middle section of The Descent of Man. Another is that Darwin made a clear distinction between sexual and natural selection, one which today is not always understood. Sexual selection is all about competition between members of the same sex for the opposite sex. It usually produces adaptations in males for outcompeting other males: either for fighting males or for attracting females. It does not include all the rest of the apparatus of sexual reproduction. A penis, in its capacity as an organ
of intromission, is a manifestation of natural selection, not sexual selection. A male needs a penis to reproduce, whether or not competing males are around. But male vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) have a bright red penis set off by a sky-blue scrotum, which together are shown off in dominance displays to other males. It is for their colours, not the organs themselves, that Darwin would invoke sexual selection.
To decide whether something is a sexually selected adaptation or not, do the following thought experiment. Imagine that all competitors of the same sex could somehow be magicked away. If the pressure for the adaptation now disappears, it was sexually selected.
Review of Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you culti- vate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multi- referential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari, one of many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, which caused a sensation when published in French last year, and which is now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, 'the most brilliant melange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered'. Guattari's close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze had a similar talent for writing:
In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed . . . In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.
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It calls to mind Peter Medawar's earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawar's own elegant and clear prose):
Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance, elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought. . .
Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar says:
I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the 77mes Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden
in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose.
This is from Medawar's 1968 Lecture on 'Science and Literature', reprinted
23
in Pluto's Republic . Since Medawar's time, the whispering campaign has
raised its voice.
Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books described
by the celebrated Michel Foucault as 'among the greatest of the great. . . Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian. ' Sokal and Bricmont, however, remark that
These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences - sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous - and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge.
But it's tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French 'philosophy', whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans?
Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively, New
48
? York University and the University of Louvain. They have limited their critique to those books that have ventured to invoke concepts from physics and mathematics. Here they know what they are talking about, and their verdict is unequivocal: on Lacan, for example, whose name is revered by many in humanities departments throughout American and British universities, no doubt partly because he simulates a profound understanding of mathematics:
. . . although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish.
They go on to quote the following remarkable piece of reasoning by Lacan:
Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely:
S (signifier)
-=s (the statement)
s (signified)
With S=(-1), produces: s=V-1
You don't have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous. It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence of God by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the infinite. In a further piece of reasoning which is entirely typical of the genre, Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ
. . . is equivalent to the V-1 of the signification produced above, of the/ou/ssance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).
We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about.
The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who is given
whole chapter treatment by Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage
reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia 2
(a 'rape manual'), Irigaray argues that E=mc is a 'sexed equation'. Why? Because 'it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us' (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to
POSTMODERNISM DISROBED
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learn is an in-word). Just as typical of the school of thought under examination is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. 'Masculine physics' privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:
The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids . . . From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.
You don't have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem (the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve).
In similar manner, Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confu- sion of relativity with relativism, Lyotard's 'postmodern science', and the widespread and predictable misuses of Godel's Theorem, quantum theory and chaos theory. The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The following sentence, 'though constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view':
Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes.
I won't quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say, Baudrillard's text 'continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense'. They again call attention to 'the high density of scientific and pseudoscientific terminology - inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning'. Their summing up of Baudrillard could stand for any of the authors criticized here, and lionized throughout America:
50
? In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.
But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word-games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking around, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense? The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, and the stunning success of his coup was not greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might have hoped for after such a feat of deconstructive game playing. Apparently, when you've become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when somebody punctures the established bag of wind.
As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the American journal Social Text a paper called 'Transgressing the Boundaries: towards
a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity'. From start to finish
the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross and Norman
Levitt's Higher Superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science, an important book which deserves to become as well known in Britain
as it already is in America. Hardly able to believe what he read in this
book, Sokal followed up the references to postmodern literature, and
found that Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about it. In Gary Kamiya's words:
Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for 'advanced' thought in the humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords ('hermeneutics', 'transgressive', 'Lacanian',
POSTMODERNISM DISROBED
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'hegemony', to name but a few) would write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal, and have it accepted . . . Sokal's piece uses all the right terms. It cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the 'real world'), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy) . . . And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit - a fact that somehow escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into their city.
Sokal's paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this was a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear, attacking the 'post-Enlightenment hegemony' and such uncool notions as the existence of the real world. They didn't know that Sokal had also crammed his paper with egregious scientific howlers, of a kind that any referee with an undergraduate degree in physics would instantly have
detected. It was sent to no such referee. The editors, Andrew Ross and others, were satisfied that its ideology conformed to their own, and were perhaps flattered by references to their own works. This ignominious piece of editing rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature.
Notwithstanding the egg all over their faces, and despite their feminist pretensions, these editors are dominant males in the academic lekking arena. Andrew Ross himself has the boorish, tenured confidence to say things like, 'I am glad to be rid of English Departments. I hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who love literature'; and the yahooish complacency to begin a book on 'science studies' with these words: 'This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them. ' He and his fellow 'cultural studies' and 'science studies' barons are not harmless eccentrics at third-rate state colleges. Many of them have tenured professorships at some of America's best univer- sities. Men of this kind sit on appointment committees, wielding power over young academics who might secretly aspire to an honest academic career in literary studies or, say, anthropology. I know - because many of them have told me - that there are sincere scholars out there who would speak out if they dared, but who are intimidated into silence. To them, Alan Sokal will appear as a hero, and nobody with a sense of humour or a sense of justice will disagree. It helps, by the way, although it is strictly irrelevant, that his own left-wing credentials are impeccable.
In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social Text but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere, Sokal
52
? notes that, in addition to numerous half truths, falsehoods and non- sequiturs, his original article contained some 'syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever'. He regrets that there were not more of the latter: 'I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack. ' If he were writing his parody today, he'd surely have been helped by a virtuoso piece of computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of Melbourne: the Postmodernism Generator. Every time you visit it at http://www. elsewhere. org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ it will spontaneously generate for you, using faultless grammatical principles, a spanking new postmodern discourse, never before seen. I have just been there, and it produced for me a 6000-word article called 'Capitalist theory and the subtextual paradigm of context' by 'David I. L. Werther and Rudolf du Garbandier of the Department of English, Cambridge University' (poetic justice there, for it was Cambridge who saw fit to give Jacques Derrida an honorary degree). Here's a typical sentence from this impressively erudite work:
If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the collective unconscious.
Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for publication, complete with numbered endnotes. Manuscripts should be submitted to the 'Editorial Collective' of Social Text, double-spaced and in triplicate.
As for the harder task of reclaiming humanities and social studies departments for genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross and Levitt in giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of science. We must hope that it will be followed.
POSTMODERNISM DISROBED
53
? The Joy of Living Dangerously: Sanderson of Oundle24
My life has lately been dominated by education. Home life over-
shadowed by A-level* examination horrors, I escaped to London to
address a conference of schoolteachers. On the train, in preparation for
the inaugural 'Oundle Lecture' which 1 was nervously to give at my old
schoolf the following week, I read H. G. Wells's biography of its famous
Head: The Story ofa Great Schoolmaster: being a plain account ofthe life an 2
ideas of Sanderson ofOundle. * The book begins in terms which initially
seemed a little over the top: 'I think him beyond question the greatest
man I have ever known with any degree of intimacy' But it led me on
26
to read the official biography, Sanderson of Oundle, written by a large,
anonymous syndicate of his former pupils (Sanderson believed in cooperation instead of striving for individual recognition).
I now see what Wells meant. And I am sure that Frederick William Sanderson (1857-1922) would have been horrified to learn what I learned from the teachers I met at the London conference: about the stifling effects of exams, and the government obsession with measuring a school's performance by them. He would have been aghast at the anti- educational hoops that young people now have to jump through in order to get into university. He would have been openly contemptuous of the pussyfooting, lawyer-driven fastidiousness of 'Health and Safety', and the accountant-driven league tables that dominate modern education and actively encourage schools to put their own interests before those of their pupils. Quoting Bertrand Russell, he disliked competition and 'possessiveness' as a motive for anything in education.
Sanderson of Oundle ended up second only to Arnold of Rugby in
*Advanced-levels: school-leaving examinations, on which acceptance to British universities largely depends. A-levels notoriously traumatize teenagers, because so much hangs on the result. Schools vie with each other in nationally compiled tables of A-level performance, and ambitious schools have been known to discourage less able pupils from even trying, for fear of damaging the school's rank in the league table.
tOundle School, in Northamptonshire in central England, founded 1556.
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? fame, but Sanderson was not born to the world of public schools. Today, he would, I dare say, have headed a large, mixed Comprehensive. * His humble origins, northern accent and lack of Holy Orders gave him a rough ride with the classical 'dominies' whom he found on arrival at the small and run-down Oundle of 1892. So rebarbative were his first five years, Sanderson actually wrote out his letter of resignation. Fortunately, he never sent it. By the time of his death thirty years later, Oundle's numbers had increased from 100 to 500, it had become the foremost school for science and engineering in the country, and he was loved and respected by generations of grateful pupils and colleagues. More important, Sanderson developed a philosophy of education that we should urgently heed today.
He was said to lack fluency as a public speaker, but his sermons in the School Chapel could achieve Churchillian heights:
Mighty men of science and mighty deeds. A Newton who binds the universe together in uniform law; Lagrange, Laplace, Leibnitz with their wondrous mathematical harmonies; Coulomb measuring out electricity . . . Faraday, Ohm, Ampere, Joule, Maxwell, Hertz, Rontgen; and in another branch of science, Cavendish, Davy, Dalton, Dewar; and in another, Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Lister, Sir Ronald Ross. All these and many others, and some whose names have no memorial, form a great host of heroes, an army of soldiers - fit companions of those of whom the poets have sung . . . There is the great Newton at the head of this list comparing himself to a child playing on the seashore gathering pebbles, whilst he could see with prophetic vision the immense ocean of truth yet unexplored before him . . .
How often did you hear that sort of thing in a religious service? Or this, his gentle indictment of mindless patriotism, delivered on Empire Day at the close of the First World War? He went right through the Sermon on the Mount, concluding each Beatitude with a mocking 'Rule Britannia'.
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Rule Britannia! Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. Rule Britannia!
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Rule
Britannia!
Blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness sake. Rule
Britannia!
Dear souls! My dear souls! I wouldn't lead you astray for anything.
*'Public schools' are, as you might imagine, private schools! Only relatively affluent parents can afford them, which puts them at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the government-run Comprehensive schools (not invented in Sanderson's time) where education is free.
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Sanderson's passionate desire to give the boys freedom to fulfil them- selves would have thrown Health and Safety into a hissy fit, and set today's lawyers licking their chops with anticipation. He directed that the laboratories should be left unlocked at all times, so that boys could go in and work at their own research projects, even if unsupervised. The more dangerous chemicals were locked up, 'but enough was left about to disturb the equanimity of other masters who had less faith than the Head in that providence which looks after the young. ' The same open door policy applied to the school workshops, the finest in the country, filled with advanced machine tools which were Sanderson's pride and joy. Under these conditions, one boy damaged a 'surface plate' by using it as an anvil against which to hammer a rivet. The culprit tells the story in Sanderson ofOundle:
That did disconcert the Head for a little when it was discovered. * But my punishment was quite Oundelian. I had to make a study of the manufacture and use of surface plates and bring a report and explain it all to him. And after that I found I had learnt to look twice at a fine piece of work before I used it ill.
Incidents like this led eventually, and not surprisingly, to the work- shops and laboratories again being locked when there was no adult supervision. But some boys felt the deprivation keenly and, in true Sandersonian fashion, they set out, in the workshops and the library (another of Sanderson's personal prides) to make an intensive study of locks.
In our enthusiasm we made skeleton keys for all Oundle, not only for the laboratories but for private rooms as well. For weeks we used the laboratories and workshops as we had grown accustomed to use them, but now with a keen care of the expensive apparatus and with precautions to leave nothing disorderly to betray our visits. It seemed that the Head saw nothing; he had a great gift for assuming blindness - until Speech Day came round, and then we were amazed to hear him, as he beamed upon the assembled parents, telling them the whole business, 'And what do you think my boys have been doing now? '
Sanderson's hatred of any locked door which might stand between a boy and some worthwhile enthusiasm symbolized his whole attitude to education. A certain boy was so keen on a project he was working on that he used to steal out of the dormitory at 2 a. m. to read in the (unlocked, of course) library. The Headmaster caught him there, and
*As well it might, for a 'surface plate' is a precisely machined plane surface, used for judging the flatness of objects.
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? roared his terrible wrath for this breach of discipline (he had a famous temper and one of his maxims was 'Never punish except in anger'). Again, the boy himself tells the story:
The thunderstorm passed. 'And what are you reading, my boy, at this hour? ' I told him of the work that had taken possession of me, work for which the day time was all too full. Yes, yes, he understood that. He looked over the notes I had been taking and they set his mind going. He sat down beside me to read them. They dealt with the development of metallurgical processes, and he began to talk to me of discovery and the values of discovery, the incessant reaching out of men towards knowledge and power, the significance of this desire to know and make and what we in the school were doing in that process. We talked, he talked for nearly an hour in that still nocturnal room. It was one of the greatest, most formative hours in my life . . . 'Go back to bed, my boy. We must find some time for you in the day for this. '
I don't know about you, but that story brings me close to tears.
Far from coveting garlands in league tables by indulging the high-
flyers,
Sanderson's most strenuous labours were on behalf of the average, and specially the 'dull' boys. He would never admit the word: if a boy was dull it was because he was being forced in the wrong direction, and he would make endless experiments to find how to get his interest . . . he knew every boy by name and had a complete mental picture of his ability and character. . . It was not enough that the majority should do well. 'I never like to fail with a boy. '
In spite of - perhaps because of - Sanderson's contempt for public examinations, Oundle did well in them. A faded, yellowing newspaper cutting dropped out of my second-hand copy of Wells's book:
In the higher certificates of the Oxford and Cambridge School examinations Oundle once again leads, having 76 successes. Shrewsbury and Marlborough tie for second place at 49 each.
Sanderson died in 1922, after struggling to finish a lecture to a gather- ing of scientists, at University College, London. The chairman, H. G. Wells himself, had just invited the first question from the floor when Sanderson dropped dead on the platform. The lecture had not been intended as a valediction, but the eye of sentiment can read the published text as Sanderson's educational testament, a summation of all he had learned in 30 years as a supremely successful and deeply loved headmaster.
My head ringing with the last words of this remarkable man, I closed
THE JOY OP LIVING DANGEROUSLY
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? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
the book and travelled on to University College, London, site of his swan song and my own modest speech to the conference of science teachers.
My subject, under the chairmanship of an enlightened clergyman, was evolution. I offered an analogy which teachers might use to bring home to their pupils the true antiquity of the universe. If a history were written at a rate of one century per page, how thick would the book of the universe be? In the view of a Young Earth Creationist, the whole history of the universe, on this scale, would fit comfortably into a slender paperback. And the scientific answer to the question? To accommodate all the volumes of history on the same scale, you'd need a bookshelf ten miles long. That gives the order of magnitude of the yawning gap between true science on the one hand, and the creationist teaching favoured by some schools on the other. This is not some disagreement of scientific detail. It is the difference between a single paperback and a library of a million books. What would have offended Sanderson about teaching the Young Earth view is not just that it is false but that it is petty, small-minded, parochial, unimaginative, unpoetic and downright boring compared to the staggering, mind-expanding truth.
After lunching with the teachers I was invited to join their afternoon deliberations. Almost to a man and woman, they were deeply worried about the A-level syllabus and the destructive effects of exam pressure on true education. One after another, they came up to me and confided that, much as they would like to, they didn't dare to do justice to evolution in their classes. This was not because of intimidation by fundamentalist parents (which would have been the reason in parts of America). It was simply because of the A-level syllabus. Evolution gets only a tiny mention, and then only at the end of the A-level course. This is preposterous, for, as one of the teachers said to me, quoting the great Russian American biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (a devout Christian, like Sanderson), 'Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. '
Without evolution, biology is a collection of miscellaneous facts. Before they learn to think in an evolutionary way, the facts that the children learn will just be facts, with no binding thread to hold them together, nothing to make them memorable or coherent. With evolu- tion, a great light breaks through into the deepest recesses, into every corner, of the science of life. You understand not only what is, but why. How can you possibly teach biology unless you begin with evolution? How, indeed, can you call yourself an educated person, if you know nothing of the Darwinian reason for your own existence? Yet, time and
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? again, I heard the same story. Teachers had wanted to introduce their pupils to life's central theorem, only to be glottal-stopped dead in their tracks: 'Is that on my syllabus? Will it come up in my exam? ' Sadly, they had to admit that the answer was no, and returned to the rote learning of disconnected facts as required for A-level success.
Sanderson would have hit the roof:
I agree with Nietzsche that 'The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously. ' A joyful life is an active life - it is not a dull static state of so-called happiness. Full of the burning fire of enthusiasm, anarchic, revolutionary, energetic, daemonic, Dionysian, filled to overflowing with the terrific urge to create - such is the life of the man who risks safety and happiness for the sake of growth and happiness.
His spirit lived on at Oundle. His immediate successor, Kenneth Fisher, was chairing a staff meeting when there was a timid knock on the door and a small boy came in: 'Please, sir, there are Black Terns down by the river. ' 'This can wait,' said Fisher decisively to the assembled committee. He rose from the Chair, seized his binoculars from the door and cycled off in the company of the small ornithologist, and - one can't help imagining - with the benign, ruddy-faced ghost of Sanderson beaming in their wake. Now that's education - and to hell with your league table statistics, your fact-stuffed syllabuses and your endless roster of exams.
That story of Fisher was told by my own inspiring Zoology teacher, loan Thomas, who had applied for the job at Oundle specifically because he admired the long-dead Sanderson and wanted to teach in his tradition. Some 35 years after Sanderson's death, I recall a lesson about Hydra, a small denizen of still freshwater. Mr Thomas asked one of us, 'What animal eats Hydra? ' The boy made a guess. Non-committally, Mr Thomas turned to the next boy, asking him the same question. He went right round the entire class, with increasing excitement asking each one of us by name, 'What animal eats Hydra? What animal eats Hydra? ' And one by one we guessed. By the time he had reached the last boy, we were agog for the true answer. 'Sir, sir, what animal does eat Hydra? ' Mr Thomas waited until there was a pin-dropping silence. Then he spoke, slowly and distinctly, pausing between each word.
I don't know . . . (Crescendo) I don't know . . . (Molto crescendo) And I don't think Mr Coulson knows either. (Fortissimo) Mr Coulson! Mr Coulson!
He flung open the door to the next classroom and dramatically inter- rupted his senior colleague's lesson, bringing him into our room. 'Mr Coulson, do you know what animal eats Hydra? ' Whether some wink
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passed between them I don't know, but Mr Coulson played his part well: he didn't know. Again the fatherly shade of Sanderson chuckled in the corner, and none of us will have forgotten that lesson. What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today's assessment-mad exam culture.
Sanderson's tradition that the whole school, not just the choir, even the tone deaf, should rehearse and bellow a part in the annual oratorio, also survived him, and has been widely imitated by other schools. His most famous innovation, the Week in Workshops (a full week for every pupil in every term, with all other work suspended) has not survived, but it was still going during my time in the fifties. It was eventually killed by exam pressure - of course - but a wonderfully Sandersonian phoenix has risen from its ashes. The boys, and now girls I am delighted to say, work out of school hours to build sports cars (and off-road go- carts) to special Oundle designs. Each car is built by one pupil, with help of course, especially in advanced welding techniques. When I visited Oundle last week, I met two overalled young people, a boy and a girl, who had recently left the school but had been welcomed back from their separate universities to finish their cars. More than 15 cars have been driven home by their proud creators during the past three years.
So Mr Sanderson, dear soul, you have a stirring, a light breeze of immortality, in the only sense of immortality to which the man of reason can aspire. Now let's whip up a gale of reform through the country, blow away the assessment-freaks with their never-ending cycle of demoralizing, childhood-destroying examinations, and get back to true education.
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? LIGHT WILL BE THROWN
The title of this section - and of its first chapter - is a quotation from the Origin of Species. Darwin was talking about light being thrown on human origins and he made it come true in his Descent of Man, but I like to think of all the other light that his ideas have thrown in so many different fields. Indeed, it was our second choice for the title for the whole book. The first essay in the section, Light Will Be Thrown (2. 1), is the Foreword that I wrote very recently for a new student edition of The Descent, published by Gibson Square Books. In the course of writing it I discovered that Darwin was even more far-sighted than I had previously realized.
Darwin Triumphant (2. 2) was my contribution to the second Man and Beast symposium, in Washington DC, 1991, with the subtitle 'Darwinism as a Universal Truth'. The phrase Universal Darwinism was one that I had introduced at the 1982 Cambridge conference to commemorate the centenary of Darwin's death. Darwinism is not just something that happens to be the basis of life on this planet. A good case can be made that it is fundamental to life itself, as a universal phenomenon wherever life may be found. If this is right, Darwin's light is thrown farther than was ever dreamed by that gentle and modest man.
One place where light could be thrown with advantage is the murky underworld of creationist propaganda. Television producers have such obvious power in the editing suite and the cutting room, it is amazing how seldom they abuse it. Tony Benn, the veteran socialist Member of Parliament, is said to switch on his own tape recorder, as a witness of potential foul play, whenever he is interviewed. Surprisingly, I have seldom found this necessary, and the only time I have ever been deliberately deceived was by an Australian creationist. How this disreputable story prompted me to publish The 'Information Challenge' (2. 3) is explained in the piece itself.
'A devil, a born devil, on whose nature, Nurture can never stick. ' Gratified as Shakespeare might be to know how many of his lines have assumed household familiarity, I suspect that he might squirm at the modern over-
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exposure of the nature/nurture cliche. A flurry of publicity in 1993 for a so-called 'gay gene' on the X chromosome led to an invitation from the Daily Telegraph to expose the myths of 'genetic determinism'. The result was the piece reproduced here as Genes Aren't Us (2. 4).
My literary agent John Brockman has the charisma to persuade his clients and others to drop everything and contribute to books of his own editing, even in the teeth of the better commercial judgement he might normally advise them to deploy. The distinction of his guest list flatters them in through the door of his salon (http://www. edge. org/) and before they know where they are they are correcting the proofs for a printed spin- off. Son of Moore's Law (2. 5) was my futurological contribution to a typically fascinating on-line symposium, The Next Fifty Years.
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? 2
Foreword to a new Student Edition of Darwin's Descent of Man "
"!
Light Will Be Thrown
Humanity is the missing guest at the feast of The Origin of Species. The famous 'Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history' is a calculated understatement matched, in the annals of science, only by Watson and Crick's 'It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. ' By the time Darwin finally got around to throwing that light in 1871, others had been there before him. And the greater part of The Descent of Man is not about humans but about Darwin's 'other' theory, sexual selection.
The Descent of Man was conceived as a single book but ended up as three, two of them bound together under the same title, with the second topic signalled by the subtitle, Selection in Relation to Sex. The third was The Expression of the Emotions, not my concern here, but Darwin tells us that it grew out of the original Descent, and he began writing it immediately after finishing Descent. Given that the idea of splitting the book was in Darwin's mind, it is at first sight surprising that he didn't spin off sexual selection as well. It would have seemed natural to publish chapters 8 to 18 as Selection in Relation to Sex followed by a second book, The Descent of Man, consisting of the present Chapters 1 to 8, and 19 to 21. That's a neat split into eleven chapters
for each book, and many have wondered why he did not do this. I shall follow the same order - sexual selection followed by the descent of man - and then return at the end to the question of whether the two might have been split. In addition to discussing Darwin's book, I shall try to give some pointers to where the subject is moving today.
The ostensible connection between sexual selection and the descent of man is that Darwin believed the first was a key to understanding the second; especially to understanding human races, a topic which preoccupied Victorians more than it does us. But, as the historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse has remarked to me, there was a
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tighter thread binding the two topics. They were the only two sources
of disagreement between Darwin and his co-discoverer of natural
selection. Alfred Russel Wallace never took kindly to sexual selection, at
least in its full-blooded Darwinian form. And Wallace, though he
coined the word Darwinism and described himself as 'more Darwinian
than Darwin', stopped short of the materialism implied by Darwin's
view of the human mind. These disagreements with Wallace were all
the more important to Darwin because these two great men agreed on
almost everything else. Darwin himself said, in a letter to Wallace of
28 1867:
The reason of my being so much interested just at present about sexual selection is, that I have almost resolved to publish a little essay on the origin of Mankind, and I still strongly think (though I failed to convince you, and this, to me is the heaviest blow possible) that sexual selection has been the main agent in forming the races of man.
The Descent ofMan and Selection in Relation to Sex could be seen, then, as Darwin's two-pronged answer to Wallace. But it's also possible - and anyone who reads those chapters would forgive him - that he just got carried away by his enthusiasm for sexual selection.
The disagreements between Darwin and Wallace over sexual selection have been teased out by the Darwinian philosopher and historian
29
Helena Cronin in her stylish book The Ant and the Peacock.
follows the two threads to the present day, classifying later theorists of sexual selection as 'Wallaceans' and 'Darwinians'. Darwin rejoiced in sexual selection. The naturalist in him loved the extravagant ostenta- tion of stag beetles and pheasants, while the theorist and teacher knew that survival is only a means to the end of reproduction. Wallace could not stomach aesthetic whim as a sufficient explanation for the evolu- tion of bright colours and the other conspicuous features for which Darwin invoked female (or in a few species male) choice. Even when persuaded that certain male features have evolved as advertisements aimed at females, Wallace insisted that the qualities they advertise must be utilitarian qualities. Females choose males not because they are pretty but because they are good providers, or something equally
30
worthy. Modern Wallaceans such as William Hamilton and Amotz
31
Zahavi see bright colours and other sexually selected advertisements as
honest and uncheatable badges of true quality: health, for example, or resistance to parasites.
Darwin would have no problem with that, but he also was prepared to countenance pure aesthetic whim as a selective force in nature.
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She even
? Something about the female brain just likes bright coloured feathers, or whatever is the species equivalent, and that is a sufficient pressure for males to have evolved them, even if this is disadvantageous to the male's own survival. It was that leader among twentieth-century Darwinians, R. A. Fisher, who put the idea on a sound theoretical foundation by suggesting that female preference could be under genetic control and therefore subject to natural selection, in just the same way as the male
32
qualities preferred. The interaction between selection on female
preference genes (inherited by both sexes) and simultaneously on male advertisement genes (also inherited by both sexes) provides the coevolutionary driving force for the expansion of ever more extravagant sexual advertisements. I suspect that Fisher's elegant reasoning, supplemented by more recent theorists such as R. Lande, might have reconciled Wallace to Darwin, because Fisher did not leave female whim unexplained, as an arbitrary given. The key point is that female whims
33 of the future agree with those inherited from the past.
The divide between Darwinian and Wallacean sexual selection, then,
is one thing to bear in mind while reading the substantial middle section of The Descent of Man. Another is that Darwin made a clear distinction between sexual and natural selection, one which today is not always understood. Sexual selection is all about competition between members of the same sex for the opposite sex. It usually produces adaptations in males for outcompeting other males: either for fighting males or for attracting females. It does not include all the rest of the apparatus of sexual reproduction. A penis, in its capacity as an organ
of intromission, is a manifestation of natural selection, not sexual selection. A male needs a penis to reproduce, whether or not competing males are around. But male vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) have a bright red penis set off by a sky-blue scrotum, which together are shown off in dominance displays to other males. It is for their colours, not the organs themselves, that Darwin would invoke sexual selection.
To decide whether something is a sexually selected adaptation or not, do the following thought experiment. Imagine that all competitors of the same sex could somehow be magicked away. If the pressure for the adaptation now disappears, it was sexually selected.
