Thursday, March 06, 2008

Alan Sokal On Faith-Based Schools

Alan Sokal is best known for the Sokal Affair. In 1996, Mr. Sokal sent a paper containing mostly
gibberish to the journal Social Text in an attempt to demonstrate the general sloppiness of Post-Modern thinking. The journal published "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", and all hell broke loose.

As someone who spent too many of my University years studying the likes of Lyotard, Derrida, and etc., it was a point well made. Though one of my favorite Literary Critics, Stanley Fish, wrote an eloquent response to Sokal here , it was generally ignored.

In any case, if anyone is wondering what Sokal is up to these days, he is still pounding away at what he perceives to be irrationalism and Pseudo-Science, and recently published "Taking Evidence Seriously", which turns out to be quite apropos in light of the recent Ontario Election. He writes:


Here's another example: The Government under former Prime Minister Tony Blair assiduously promoted state subsidies for "faith-based schools". Of course, "faith" is here being used as an ecumenical-sounding euphemism for "religion", but the word is still revealing. For what is "faith", if not the pseudo-justi cation that some people trot out when they want to make claims without adequate evidence?

After it was reported that a publicly funded Christian school in Gateshead had been teaching creationism, Blair was asked in Parliament whether he was "happy to allow the teaching of reationism alongside Darwin's theory of evolution in state schools". Blair (always the consummate politician) avoided a direct answer, but defended the school in question and said that "in the end, a more diverse school system will deliver better results for our children." Shall we also, in the name of "diversity", subsidize schools teaching that the moon is made of green cheese?


Of course, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Jewish Britons can rightly complain that the state has long funded Church of England and Roman Catholic schools. But the proper remedy is not to extend state patronage from Christianity to other superstitions; rather, it is to implement a complete separation of church from state, and more generally to insist that taxpayer-funded institutions have no business propagating dogmas unsupported by evidence.

Moreover, segregating children of Muslim parents from children of Christian parents
for separate indoctrination is woefully misguided. Instead, why not bring together students of both backgrounds in a high-school history class to examine the historical evidence bearing on the composition of the New Testament and the Qur'an?


Good stuff up until the end. But seriously, he wants to get Muslims and Christians together in one room and teach them that their holy books are merely historical documents? What if they team up the way Dinesh DaSouza suggests? They might nail him to a cross and fly an plane into it.

Much of "Taking Evidence Seriously" appears in this longer piece by Sokal: "What is Science and Why Should We Care".

8 comments:

Ti-Guy said...

I remember why Stanley Fish's response was generally ignored...re-reading it now made me recall that I had to stop reading here...

"Distinguishing fact from fiction is surely the business of science, but the means of doing so are not perspicuous in nature."

...to look up the word "perspicuous." I don't think I returned to the article.

Language was something the post-modernists should really have thought of first when they embarked on a discussion of how we come to know what we know, and how we decide what's true, particularly with a demographic that no longer understood the structure of their own native tongue, no longer had to think critically and too afraid to look stupid.

I managed to escape post-modernism in university by sheer luck, I think; I was in an inter-disciplinary, combined majors program in undergrad, so I had lot of core courses that were not elective and were taught by senior faculty not yet distracted by the confusion between an epistemological discussion and actual learning. I was spared it completely in graduate studies, since I was in a professional program.

I remember a lot of mystifying discussions with other students though. I really just thought at the time that people must be smoking a hell of a lot more pot than I was.

Anonymous said...

Post Modernism? No wonder your perception of reality and ability to think logically is so screwed up.

David Galbraith said...

A small correction: Fish wasn't an editor of Social Text (and wasn't / isn't) particularly close to the orientation of the journal. His op-ed was published in the New York Times after the controversy broke.

Ti-Guy said...

Post Modernism? No wonder your perception of reality and ability to think logically is so screwed up.

Case in point.

Whose thinking actually appears more ravaged by the post-modernism than movement Conservatives?

The essential problem with them is that they've confused liberalism and social democracy with post modernism(and did right from the start) and are continually pandered to and manipulated by the worst of that tradition...Jonah Golberg's Liberal Fascism being about the worst example of that, although there's no shortage of this on what calls itself the Right.

I don't fault the unlettered ones for that, but those who went to school and have lived in the real world a bit really have no excuse.

Anonymous said...

Can you explain how a postmodernist - who believes science is a myth, a construct, and that you can't know anything - can put so much faith in the 'science' behind global warming?

Ti-Guy said...

Can you explain how a postmodernist - who believes science is a myth, a construct, and that you can't know anything - can put so much faith in the 'science' behind global warming?

Which post-modernist are you referring to?

Alvin Nanda Setiawan said...

Good post. I learn something totally new and challenging on websites I stumbleupon everyday. It will always be interesting to read articles from other writers and practice something from other websites. Please Visit out website PTS Terbaik

Alvin Nanda Setiawan said...

I am so grateful for your article.Really thank you! Will read on…