The culture wars reach the heavens

By Sheilla Jones

The Globe and Mail

Saturday, February 9, 2002
Page D4

Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries

By Steven Weinberg, Harvard University Press,

283 pages

Who Rules in Science: A Guide to the Wars

By James Robert Brown, Harvard University Press,

236 pages

We've become quite familiar with the current weapons of military conflict, from Scud missiles to Kalashnikovs. The weapons in the science wars are very different. From the battlements of ivory towers, the intellectual elites on either side are busy hurling glyphs and obscurantist phraseology across the abyss that divides them.

Ordinary folk suffer little risk of being clobbered by a stray pi or fragment of ironic facetiousness, as long as they stay out of the direct line of fire. I expect most of them are oblivious to the ongoing battle between scientists and philosophers of science. I mean, who really cares if a bunch of self-involved professors want to indulge themselves in a war of words?

In Who Rules in Science, James Brown cares, and he warns that there's much more at stake here than people realize. This is not just a battle between postmodernist philosophers and working scientists over whether an electron is real or merely a social construction. It's about who gets to define reality, truth and rationality.

"The stakes are political," the University of Toronto philosophy professor and author of several books on science and philosophy, says. "Social issues are constantly lurking in the background. How we structure and organize our society is the consequence. Whoever wins the science wars will have an unprecedented influence on how we are governed." The book asks who gets to set the rules and therefore has the most power.

The science wars are often characterized as a battle between the anti-science left and the pro-science right. This, Brown says, is not at all an accurate picture of the combatants. The right, for instance, has its biblical literalists who are, at times, belligerently anti-science. The left has those (Noam Chomsky, the Vienna Circle, Stephen J. Gould, Alan Sokal) who see science as a powerful tool in advancing the well-being of all people.

The anti-science left is best described by philosopher Andrew Ross, one of the leading proponents of social constructivism. He sees the battle against mainstream science as "holy Culture Wars. Seeking explanations for their loss in standing in the public eye and the decline in funding from the public purse, conservatives in science have joined the backlash against the usual suspects -- pinkos, feminists, and multiculturalists of all types."

For those who admire science, Brown says, "social constructivists are not merely wrong -- they are philistines and vandals scribbling graffiti on the temple of Athena".

These two solitudes have long had great difficulty in communicating with each other. They speak in different tongues. To the uninitiated, the language of science might just as well be Sanskrit or Swahili. Social constructivists, on the other hand, use ordinary language but bend and twist it in abnormal ways. Deliberate obscurity, irony and metaphor are intended to discomfit the reader.

Enter Alan Sokal. In 1996, the U.S. physicist submitted a phony article to the cultural studies journal Social Text (edited by Andrew Ross). After it was published, unquestioned, Sokal announced that it was a sham article, "liberally salted with nonsense," and intended to mock academic babble and the pretentious use of obfuscation by postmodernists and social constructivists. The prank served to escalate the rhetoric on both sides and further polarize the factions at war.

Brown should have declared his allegiance up front. But throughout the book it becomes apparent that he is a moderate and has as much disdain for some of the silliness that is supposed to pass for academic critique as any conservative scientist. Brown is looking for some way to bridge the two solitudes, not by trying to force conciliation, but by defusing the battle for power by returning it to ordinary folk. He, like many scientists, would like the public to make informed choices and decisions about what best serves the public interest.

Working scientists can barely stay abreast of what's going on in their own specialized fields, so it's hardly feasible to expect bus drivers and pianists to be even better informed. Rather than having people study quantum mechanics and microbiology, Brown would prefer to see the public better informed about the social and political relations into which scientists enter. People can better evaluate the credibility of the latest big scientific discovery if they know who was paying for it. The American Medical Association, for instance, is advocating the full disclosure of financial interests by those who submit papers for peer review. It does make a difference if you know that the latest discovery being promoted by Dr. X was paid for by a drug manufacturer who stands to make a great deal of money based on that discovery. Or that Dr. X is the patent-holder or sits on the board of said drug company.

Critics of traditional science are justifiably irritated by scientists who hold themselves answerable only to their peers, and then only those in their particular specialties. The problem, Brown says, is that authority in science is heavily skewed toward white males from upper-middle-class backgrounds living in wealthy countries, with their particular prejudices and agendas. He advocates a more democratic method of conducting science through the inclusion of as many different viewpoints as possible.

"We can organize the pursuit of knowledge so that a great variety of different prejudices are at work in the production of theories. We can then select the best theory from among the rivals. The way to ensure the optimal diversity of rival theories is to make sure we have a wide variety of theorists."

This is where Brown runs afoul of physicist Steven Weinberg. The Nobel laureate is often seen as the champion of conservative science against the sillier nonsense being spouted by the social constructivists, and he doesn't see that there's anything wrong with the way science is being done.

Weinberg's book, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries, is a collection of his columns and speeches from over the past 15 years. Weinberg is an entertaining writer, but some of this material is . . . well, 15 years old. He's at his best when he's got the bit in his teeth, in particular when he's taking on anti-science social constructivists. Unfortunately, only about a third of the book actually deals with the science wars.

Weinberg is a happy man. He counts himself in the top 99.99 percentile of happy people, which makes him most fortunate. He has done well in physics, and the profession has done well by him. So perhaps it's not surprising then that he should by quite satisfied with how physics is done. He believes the laws of physics are objectively real and "have no legitimate implications whatever for culture or politics or philosophy." He argues that any cultural influences that might have been there in the early stages of a theory are refined away, "like slag from ore," despite what social constructivists might think.

"Some philosophers and sociologists," Weinberg says, "have gone so far as to claim that scientific principles are, on the whole or part, social constructions, like the rules of contract law or contract bridge. Most working scientists find this 'social constructivist' point of view inconsistent with their own experience. Still, there is no doubt that the social context of science has become increasingly important to scientists, as we need to ask society to provide us with more and more expensive tools: accelerators, space vehicles, neutron sources, genome projects, and so on."

Better public relations is not going to satisfy critics from the left who feel that too many people are shut out of any discussion about the direction of scientific research. Weinberg thinks that science -- physics in particular -- is a description of reality, "and that's just the way the world is." He doesn't see how different viewpoints would have any effect on that.

"According to one version of the feminist criticism of science, modern science is intrinsically masculine, particularly because of its insistence on objective truth and its insistence that some scientific theories are simply wrong. Proponents of this feminist view maintain that this androcentric, Western-oriented, reductionist science should be replaced with something that is feminist, Eastern-oriented, and holistic. Someone who took that position seriously might consider it a good reason for keeping women out of science -- but I don't take it seriously, and I am glad to observe that there is no perceptible difference in the way that men and women do physics."

The deep flaw in that argument is that there are still very few women in physics (some Canadian universities have yet to hire their first female physicist), and there is enormous pressure on both men and women to conform to the mainstream. For the most part, only those physicists who are well-established in their careers (and have tenure) dare to advance unorthodox theories.

Not too long ago, I was chatting with a physics instructor and wondered if there was such a thing as feminist physics. His reaction was telling. He reared back, his fingers outstretched in front of him to form the shape of a cross, as if to ward off a demon. He was only half joking. If women are repeatedly reminded that their ideas about physics are unwelcome and even dangerous, it will be some time before anyone sees if women really will do physics differently from men.

Weinberg returns several times to the point that "as the number of women and Asians in physics has increased, the nature of our understanding of physics has not changed." Because physics as it is has worked so well for Weinberg, he doesn't seem to see any problems with science as a monoculture. Weinberg is a thoughtful man, but in a lesser intellect, his attitude might be interpreted as smug and self-satisfied.

Brown warns against leaving it to academia's intellectual elites to define winners and losers in this war. "Since much of the science wars is about how we live, the outcome will affect huge numbers of people who are not intellectually directly involved in the debate itself. Whether a handful of participating academics feel victorious, humiliated, or just manage to save face is of no real importance. This is not like working out a compromise on parking privileges."

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