' He and his fellow 'cultural studies' and 'science studies' barons are not harmless
eccentrics
at third-rate state colleges.
Richard-Dawkins-The-Devil-s-Chaplain
Think of them hovering in space, keeping their distance from each other and holding their precise angles, by means of forces that you can't see but which scientists fully understand.
But if this is a fish school, it is one that - to scale - would fill the Pacific Ocean.
In any decent-sized diamond, you are likely to be looking along arrays of atoms numbering hundreds of millions in any one straight line.
Carbon atoms can take up other crystal lattice formations. To revert to the military analogy, they can adopt alternative drill conventions.
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? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
Graphite (the 'lead' in pencils) is also carbon, but it's obviously nothing like diamond. In graphite, the atoms form sheets of hexagons, like chicken wire. Each sheet is loosely bonded to those above and below it, and when impurities are present the sheets slide easily against each other, which is why graphite is a good lubricant. Diamond is very much not a lubricant. Its legendary hardness abrades the toughest materials. The atoms in soft graphite and hard diamond are identical. If you could persuade the atoms in graphite crystals to adopt the drill rules of diamond crystals, you'd be rich. It can be done, but you need colossal pressures and high temperatures, presumably the conditions that naturally manufacture diamonds, deep in the earth.
If hexagons make a sheet of flat graphite, you can imagine that interspersing some pentagons among the hexagons could make the sheet buckle into a curve. Place exactly 12 pentagons strategically among 20 hexagons and the curve bends round into a complete sphere. Geometers call it a truncated icosahedron. This is exactly the pattern of the sewing seams on a football. The football is, therefore, theoretically a pattern into which carbon atoms might spontaneously fall.
Mirabile dictu, exactly this pattern has been discovered among carbon atoms. The team responsible, including Sir Harry Kroto of Sussex University, won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Called Buckminsterfullerene, it is an elegant sphere of 60 carbon atoms, linked up as 20 hexagons interspersed with 12 pentagons. The name honours the visionary American architect Buckminster Fuller (whom I was privileged to meet when he was a very old man*) and the spheres are affectionately known as buckyballs. They can combine together to make larger crystals. Like graphite sheets, buckyballs make good lubricants, probably because of their spherical shape: they presumably work like tiny ball bearings.
Since the buckyball's discovery, chemists have realized that it is just a special case of a large family of 'buckytubes' and other 'fullerenes'. Carbon atoms can theoretically join up to form an Aladdin's cave of fascinating crystalline forms - another aspect of the unique property that qualifies carbon to be the fundamental element of life.
Not every atom has carbon's talent for joining copies of itself. Other crystals contain more than one kind of 'soldier', alternating in some elegant pattern. In quartz crystals it is silicon and oxygen instead of carbon; in common salt it is electrically charged atoms of sodium and chlorine. Crystals naturally break along lines that betray the underlying
*He was billed to give us a short lecture but, unscripted, he held us spellbound for three hours.
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? CRYSTALLINE TRUTH AND CRYSTAL BALLS
regimental drill pattern. That is why salt crystals are square, why the honeycomb columns of the Giant's Causeway stand as they do, and why diamond crystals are, well, diamond-shaped.
All crystals 'self-assemble' under locally acting rules. Their component 'soldiers', floating in free solution in water, spontaneously plug themselves into 'gaps' on the surface of the existing crystal, where they exactly fit. So a crystal may grow in solution from a tiny 'seed' - perhaps an impurity like the sand grain at the heart of a pearl. There is no grand design of buckyballs, quartz crystals, diamonds or anything else. This principle of self-assembly runs right through living structure, too. DNA itself (the genetic molecule, the molecule at the centre of all life) can be regarded as a long, spiral crystal in which one half of the double helix self-assembles on a template provided by the other. Viruses self-assemble like elaborately complex crystal-clusters. The head of the T4 bacterio- phage (a virus that infects bacteria) actually looks like a single crystal.
Go into any museum and look at the collection of minerals. Even go into a New Age shop and look at the crystals on display, along with all the other apparatus of mumbo-jumbo and kitsch con-trickery. The crystals won't respond to your attempts to 'program' them for meditation, or 'dedicate' them with warm, loving thoughts. They won't cure you of anything, or fill the room with 'inner peace' or 'psychic energy'. But many of them are very beautiful, and it surely only adds to the beauty when we understand that the shapes of the crystals, the angles of their facets, the rainbow colours that flash from inside them, all have a precise explanation which lies deep in the patterns of atomic lattice-work.
Crystals don't vibrate with mystical, loving energy. But they do, in a much stricter and more interesting sense, vibrate. Some crystals have an electric charge across them, which changes when you physically deform the crystal. This 'piezo-electric' effect, discovered in 1880 by the Curie brothers (Marie's husband and his brother), is used in the styluses of record players (the 'deforming' is done by the groove of the turning record) and in some microphones (the deforming is done by sound waves in the air). The piezo effect works in reverse. When a suitable crystal is placed in an electric field it deforms itself rhythmically. Often the timing of this oscillation is extremely accurate. It serves as the equivalent of the pendulum or balance wheel in a quartz watch.
Let me tell you one last thing about crystals, and it may be the most fascinating of all. The military metaphor makes us think of each soldier as a metre or two from his neighbours. But actually almost all the interior of a crystal is empty space. My head is 18 centimetres in diameter. To
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? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
keep to scale, my nearest neighbours in the crystalline parade would have to be standing more than a kilometre away. No wonder the tiny particles called neutrinos (even smaller than electrons) pass right through the earth and come out the other side as if it wasn't there.
But if solid things are mostly empty space, why don't we see them as empty space? Why does a diamond feel hard and solid instead of crumbly and full of holes? The answer lies in our own evolution. Our sense organs, like all our bits, have been shaped by Darwinian natural selection over countless generations. You might think that our sense organs would be shaped to give us a 'true' picture of the world as it 'really' is. It is safer to assume that they have been shaped to give us a useful picture of the world, to help us to survive. In a way, what sense organs do is assist our brains to construct a useful model of the world, and it is this model that we move around in. It is a kind of 'virtual reality' simulation of the real world. Neutrinos can pass straight through a rock but we can't. If we try to, we hurt ourselves. When constructing its simulation of rock, the brain therefore represents it as hard and solid. It's almost as though our sense organs are telling us: 'You can't get through objects of this kind. ' That's what 'solid' means. That's why we perceive them as 'solid'.
In the same way we find much of the universe, as science discovers it, difficult to understand. Einstein's relativity, quantum uncertainty, black holes, the big bang, the expanding universe, the vast slow movement of geological time - all these are hard to grasp. No wonder science frightens some people. But science can even explain why these things are hard to understand, and why the effort frightens us. We are jumped- up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.
These are deep matters, and a short article is not the place to go into them. I shall have succeeded if I have persuaded you that a scientific approach to crystals is more illuminating, more uplifting, and also stranger, than anything imagined in the wildest dreams of New Age gurus or paranormal preachers. The blunt truth is that the dreams and visions of gurus and preachers are not nearly wild enough. By scientific standards, that is.
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? I ? '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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? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
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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? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
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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? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
'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.
54
? 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.
THE JOY OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
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? SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY
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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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.
Carbon atoms can take up other crystal lattice formations. To revert to the military analogy, they can adopt alternative drill conventions.
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Graphite (the 'lead' in pencils) is also carbon, but it's obviously nothing like diamond. In graphite, the atoms form sheets of hexagons, like chicken wire. Each sheet is loosely bonded to those above and below it, and when impurities are present the sheets slide easily against each other, which is why graphite is a good lubricant. Diamond is very much not a lubricant. Its legendary hardness abrades the toughest materials. The atoms in soft graphite and hard diamond are identical. If you could persuade the atoms in graphite crystals to adopt the drill rules of diamond crystals, you'd be rich. It can be done, but you need colossal pressures and high temperatures, presumably the conditions that naturally manufacture diamonds, deep in the earth.
If hexagons make a sheet of flat graphite, you can imagine that interspersing some pentagons among the hexagons could make the sheet buckle into a curve. Place exactly 12 pentagons strategically among 20 hexagons and the curve bends round into a complete sphere. Geometers call it a truncated icosahedron. This is exactly the pattern of the sewing seams on a football. The football is, therefore, theoretically a pattern into which carbon atoms might spontaneously fall.
Mirabile dictu, exactly this pattern has been discovered among carbon atoms. The team responsible, including Sir Harry Kroto of Sussex University, won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Called Buckminsterfullerene, it is an elegant sphere of 60 carbon atoms, linked up as 20 hexagons interspersed with 12 pentagons. The name honours the visionary American architect Buckminster Fuller (whom I was privileged to meet when he was a very old man*) and the spheres are affectionately known as buckyballs. They can combine together to make larger crystals. Like graphite sheets, buckyballs make good lubricants, probably because of their spherical shape: they presumably work like tiny ball bearings.
Since the buckyball's discovery, chemists have realized that it is just a special case of a large family of 'buckytubes' and other 'fullerenes'. Carbon atoms can theoretically join up to form an Aladdin's cave of fascinating crystalline forms - another aspect of the unique property that qualifies carbon to be the fundamental element of life.
Not every atom has carbon's talent for joining copies of itself. Other crystals contain more than one kind of 'soldier', alternating in some elegant pattern. In quartz crystals it is silicon and oxygen instead of carbon; in common salt it is electrically charged atoms of sodium and chlorine. Crystals naturally break along lines that betray the underlying
*He was billed to give us a short lecture but, unscripted, he held us spellbound for three hours.
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? CRYSTALLINE TRUTH AND CRYSTAL BALLS
regimental drill pattern. That is why salt crystals are square, why the honeycomb columns of the Giant's Causeway stand as they do, and why diamond crystals are, well, diamond-shaped.
All crystals 'self-assemble' under locally acting rules. Their component 'soldiers', floating in free solution in water, spontaneously plug themselves into 'gaps' on the surface of the existing crystal, where they exactly fit. So a crystal may grow in solution from a tiny 'seed' - perhaps an impurity like the sand grain at the heart of a pearl. There is no grand design of buckyballs, quartz crystals, diamonds or anything else. This principle of self-assembly runs right through living structure, too. DNA itself (the genetic molecule, the molecule at the centre of all life) can be regarded as a long, spiral crystal in which one half of the double helix self-assembles on a template provided by the other. Viruses self-assemble like elaborately complex crystal-clusters. The head of the T4 bacterio- phage (a virus that infects bacteria) actually looks like a single crystal.
Go into any museum and look at the collection of minerals. Even go into a New Age shop and look at the crystals on display, along with all the other apparatus of mumbo-jumbo and kitsch con-trickery. The crystals won't respond to your attempts to 'program' them for meditation, or 'dedicate' them with warm, loving thoughts. They won't cure you of anything, or fill the room with 'inner peace' or 'psychic energy'. But many of them are very beautiful, and it surely only adds to the beauty when we understand that the shapes of the crystals, the angles of their facets, the rainbow colours that flash from inside them, all have a precise explanation which lies deep in the patterns of atomic lattice-work.
Crystals don't vibrate with mystical, loving energy. But they do, in a much stricter and more interesting sense, vibrate. Some crystals have an electric charge across them, which changes when you physically deform the crystal. This 'piezo-electric' effect, discovered in 1880 by the Curie brothers (Marie's husband and his brother), is used in the styluses of record players (the 'deforming' is done by the groove of the turning record) and in some microphones (the deforming is done by sound waves in the air). The piezo effect works in reverse. When a suitable crystal is placed in an electric field it deforms itself rhythmically. Often the timing of this oscillation is extremely accurate. It serves as the equivalent of the pendulum or balance wheel in a quartz watch.
Let me tell you one last thing about crystals, and it may be the most fascinating of all. The military metaphor makes us think of each soldier as a metre or two from his neighbours. But actually almost all the interior of a crystal is empty space. My head is 18 centimetres in diameter. To
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keep to scale, my nearest neighbours in the crystalline parade would have to be standing more than a kilometre away. No wonder the tiny particles called neutrinos (even smaller than electrons) pass right through the earth and come out the other side as if it wasn't there.
But if solid things are mostly empty space, why don't we see them as empty space? Why does a diamond feel hard and solid instead of crumbly and full of holes? The answer lies in our own evolution. Our sense organs, like all our bits, have been shaped by Darwinian natural selection over countless generations. You might think that our sense organs would be shaped to give us a 'true' picture of the world as it 'really' is. It is safer to assume that they have been shaped to give us a useful picture of the world, to help us to survive. In a way, what sense organs do is assist our brains to construct a useful model of the world, and it is this model that we move around in. It is a kind of 'virtual reality' simulation of the real world. Neutrinos can pass straight through a rock but we can't. If we try to, we hurt ourselves. When constructing its simulation of rock, the brain therefore represents it as hard and solid. It's almost as though our sense organs are telling us: 'You can't get through objects of this kind. ' That's what 'solid' means. That's why we perceive them as 'solid'.
In the same way we find much of the universe, as science discovers it, difficult to understand. Einstein's relativity, quantum uncertainty, black holes, the big bang, the expanding universe, the vast slow movement of geological time - all these are hard to grasp. No wonder science frightens some people. But science can even explain why these things are hard to understand, and why the effort frightens us. We are jumped- up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.
These are deep matters, and a short article is not the place to go into them. I shall have succeeded if I have persuaded you that a scientific approach to crystals is more illuminating, more uplifting, and also stranger, than anything imagined in the wildest dreams of New Age gurus or paranormal preachers. The blunt truth is that the dreams and visions of gurus and preachers are not nearly wild enough. By scientific standards, that is.
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? I ? '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
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? 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
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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:
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? 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.
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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
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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
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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.
