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Sunday, 7 October 2018

Of post-Sokal hoaxes and the secular-ecumenical academy...

This post began as a reply to a fellow scholar's Facebook post. It got too long and it's well enough written that I didn't want to just throw it away...

Of The Humanities and the Academy, Dark Webs, and Interdisciplinarity

Perhaps because of my age and academic status I end up teaching broadly outside of my primary disciplinary areas (I started my academic career quite late, which in the discipline of philosophy is - err - non-ideal according to many accounts). There are in fact other reasons for this 'channeling' of my talents, a few of which have to do with the unfortunate nature of the academy and the still more unfortunate (and unethical) acceptability of the practice of de-endorsement due to personal distaste within the humanities.

Not liking an individual (or having 'besties' that do not like them) is not supposed to lead one to exclude or hamper them in their career, but this is unfortunately a deeply entrenched habit in the humanities. It's one which is broadly misconstrued and misidentified as something positive. It's variously relabeled, sold, and construed as cultural sophistication, intellectual and cultural guardianship, or some form of intellectual responsibility (this last one is hilarious). It's really just schoolyard-grade bullying, bastardisation, and blacklisting, and it's endemic and rife.

As I will discuss below, academia has its own snobbery and bullying, and thus the academy is not above any other walk of life in this respect. In academia, and especially philosophy, however, it carries with it an enhanced tone of hypocrisy and of the failure to uphold implied standards. It's an in-principle failure of at least some minimal standard of academic cultural and professional mandates: avoidance of inappropriate bias, adherence to appropriate fair-mindedness, and a commitment to anti-snobbery (this latter option is ironically almost anti-thetical to most of the working academy).

I think that it is fair to say that the hoaxing trio of Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay have all - in all likelihood - fallen afoul of the snobbery factor in the academy, and probably worse. Why? Because they're new-atheist-cum-intellectual-dark-web denizens of intelligentsia, and, as surprising as this may sound: that's not a good fit according to the (humanities) academy. It's a disposition not regarded as ecumenical or secular enough (where the definition of secular incorporates pro-religionism.)

Although I am no intellectual dark web enthusiast, the accusation that the hoax-trio and their ilk are extreme right-wing is probably particularly disingenuous and hypocritical, or at the very least paranoid and confused. They're either left-leaning moderates or liberal democrats as they claim, and although they snipe at the 'regressive left' (which is certainly part of the motivation for the hoax papers and their targets) - they're a long way from jack-booted right-wing anything. It's still more confusing to the novice than this, since it's the commercialist and pro-liberal and quasi-democratic (profits before voters) new capitalist-merchant patrons of the academy that are (profit-motivated) secular ecumenicalists extraordinaire. In other words - the humanities academy is sort of some kind of ecumenical left wing on the inside, but increasingly owned by commercial patrons and providers.

Merchants and business moguls cannot afford to be other than ecumenical and syncretic - until they are big enough to push their agendas. But you won't hear many serious commitments made to religious or irreligious ideology from most CEOs: it's considered bad business form and is bad for the portfolio and investors. They write the cheques and provide the grants in the academy, and so left-wing intellectuals who want to eat have to inherit the form somehow. Bashing new-atheists as Nazis is probably just one of many release valves for the awful tummy-turning pwessure - darlings. (That's when something close to psychopathy and self-interest aren't driving the career bus anyway.)

During the Middle Ages and up to the French Enlightenment (and beyond) lack of endorsement from the Church - or at minimum from moneyed elite that the Church wanted to keep in good faith - made it difficult or impossible to get any kind of posting (and certainly not tenure) in a British sandstone university. Famous 18th century empiricist philosopher David Hume was a well known victim of this long standing culture. Nowadays, increasingly, the new patrons, custodians, and overlords of the academy are corporate and (usually) liberal capitalists. Unless they're conservative capitalists like those who manage The Templeton Foundation. They're merchants and proponents of corporatisation first, and therefore generally otherwise ideologically unconcerned or uncommitted (except where they have a mandate and power like The Templeton Foundation does). Government subsidisation is still significant, but its perceived influence and authority is waning, and it is made subservient to corporate models.

Although I am probably more atheist than all three of the hoax-trio (granted, it's not really a competition) I am not particularly enamored of new-atheism or the 'Intellectual Dark Web'. However, I am just as little enamored of the 'sophisticated' and somewhat-sniping academy that denigrates them.

In my case, the wide interdisciplinarity in which I am somewhat automatically academically embedded is by no means a bad thing. Much the opposite. It stops me from getting bored, and some work in philosophy is better than no work in philosophy. It is the only thing I really like to do, and where my best abilities lie. Moreover, the vice chancellor of The University of Sydney, Dr Michael Spence (a trained Anglican Priest and lawyer) has been very big on interdisciplinarity for some time.

Perhaps most importantly in the context of the hoaxes, however: philosophers are famous for, and, according to certain tenets of the profession, supposed to be, intellectual  and sub-disciplinary omnivores. Sure - philosophers have areas of specialisation, but a broad skill set across disciplines and subdisciplines is generally not only regarded as meritorious, but is expected.

I am a heterosexual male and an atheist. I am somewhat scientistic (scientism is either a term of derogation, endorsement, or simple description - depending upon who one asks) and an evolutionary Darwinist. I am not even agnostic enough - and I am too physicalistic for - my own atheist supervisor (which erudite and patient soul admittedly has an affection of sorts for Buddhism and secular ecumenicalism, expressed largely scientistically).

Since 2014 I have tutored numerous courses at five Australian universities. These have included a course in Identity, race, and gender studies headed by a Japanese speaking Australian lesbian, a second year course in ethical theory at The University of Melbourne run by a feminist gay woman, a course at the University of Sydney that covered Christian (Protestant) Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary debunking argument (an argument which had the entire philosophy of science and cognitive science community scratching its collective head for some time and which took the not insignificant talents of my own supervisor Paul Griffiths and a coauthor to counter), and most recently a course focusing on the narrative theories of human nature and the self presented by radical Christian philosophers Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair MacIntyre, and the world-renowned and highly influential cross-disciplinary Rene Girard. I also taught a course called 'Logic and Reason' convened by a socialist academic at a regional university campus in country Victoria (the author of the course and the handbook was almost certainly highly sympathetic to the cultural dispositions of the hoaxer trio.)

The academy is a VERY broad church, and its central, and habitual, cultural commitments tend to be something like a horse designed by a secret committee, or perhaps a Frankenstein's monster designed by the same committee, or something.

Nonetheless, one doesn't have to be a philosopher to know the following:

1. Ideology - including religious belief - influences one's philosophical disposition. (Scientific Constructivist extraordinaire Bas Van Fraassen - a Catholic whose interpretation of scientific instrumentalism permanently keeps structural realist materialists on their toes - would probably agree.) This is okay, so long as, should one be doing philosophy, one is versed in, and willing to deploy, such principles as the principle of charity, and other tools for objective argumentation.

2. Academia - including the humanities - has a mandate for accuracy and high quality scholarship. Otherwise what are we here for? We're supposed to provide useful intellectual resources to people who are busy doing more applied tasks, and to help cultivate, develop, and preserve those resources on behalf of our entire society.

3. Of course the mandate of the humanities is also, ideally, and for practical purposes, one of forebearance, interdisciplinarity, debate, and - especially in philosophy (and Boghossian is a philosopher) argumentation. This ideal is all to frequently trammeled, but oddly enough - this is also partly mandated in the humanities. The recent hoaxes are possibly an expression of this latter meta-disciplinary exception.

The Naked Emperor We've Come to Know Well in The Humanities


Given that the entire debate about the epistemic and intellectual usefulness of postmodernism and its related disciplinary oeuvre is of significance in this hoax case, it's worth noting that like everything else in the humanities, these hoaxes have an intellectual heritage in much older debates and arguments. The debates and differences go back to the logical positivists of the early 20th century and beyond: to the intellectual debates between British Empiricist Hume and his intellectual quarry - Rationalist DesCartes, and to Immanuel Kant, who then went after Hume (and continuing probably all the way back to Aristotle Vs Plato regarding the forms).

One of my favourite on-line interviews is with the famous neo-Marxist post-structuralist Michel Foucault, conducted by contemporary analytic Anglo-American atheist-pragmatist philosopher John Searle (famous for the Chinese room linguistic-semantics thought experiment.) Searle asks Foucault - a French Continental left wing icon - what he thinks of the writings of Jacques Derrida (another neo-Marxist, but postmodernist, icon.) Foucault does not skip a beat when he deploys a neologism and accuses Derrida of obscurantisme terroriste (the terrorism of obfuscation/obscurantism.) Foucault complains that when challenged that his theory or hypothesis does not cohere, Derrida's writing and expression is so ambiguous and obscure, that the postmodernist simply replies 'You did not understand the argument to begin with.' In fairness to Derrida - this is somewhat in keeping with his principle of deconstruction of binaries.



I have nursed a personal affection for postmodernism myself due to a further affection for postmodern literature and science fiction. I have to keep this a secret from my scientistic philosophical pals and from the powerful old school neo-Marxists that still stalk the halls of the academy. Actually - they don't like me anyway - and so it's nothing from nothing. However, the theist department heads aren't too hot on it either! One thing that new-atheists and theistic traditionalists both have a hankering for is truth, or in the case of the former, facts, whatever they actually are (ask D.M. Armstrong - who will make an entrance shortly - if facts are straightforward things to understand and define. Hint: the answer is no).

Mostly I have to keep my love for postmodernism a secret from my atheist students! In the recent course on Identity I taught, I was nigh on lynched by a group of young twenty-something white male atheists who weren't having a bar of the idea that social construction might influence the development of a person's identity as significantly as biological determinism or genetics - by way of factors including, but not limited to, epigenetic psychological effects.

It's worth noting that - inside knowledge - Analytic Anglo-American and Continental left wing philosophy generally do not get along (there's the well-worn capitalist versus 'Reds under the bed' chestnut to account for: an anvil that seems set to wear out almost as many hammers as the Church). This binary opposition also tends to further the separation between Sokal-style-hoaxers and ecumenical academicians, but the interplay between left-right and religionist-atheist binary oppositions alone is immediately complex, and probably not understood well even by most participating intellectual combatants. If one adds the rift between Continental and Analytic Anglo-American thinkers, then Derrida's much loved binary deconstruction starts to look, perhaps, inherently meritorious. Then throw in some pragmatists (of which there are about a dozen kinds.) One has to be smart-ish just to track the alternatives, probably.

To provide some local (to my multiple alumni - The University of Sydney) colour and context: there was an internecine political and departmental war at The University of Sydney in the 1970s between the Anglo-American right wing headed by David Malet Armstrong, and the intellectual-left neo-Marxists. It happened at around the time that the Sydney Push of Clive James and Germaine Greer was in ascension. It was the neo-Marxists who succumbed. Former Australian PM (then a student activist) Tony Abbott was around - somewhere. Jobs and tenure were lost, great soaring egos were crushed, etc. (Politics and interpersonal sniping at USyd is famously bitter. It's a not-so-well kept secret that Popper drove a 'lesser' being there to suicide.)

Nevertheless, it is probably true that the cultural Frankenstein's monster is more like a vociferous many-headed hydra (Frankenstein's monster was far too friendly to deserve the metaphorical burden of connotation of academic warfare!) (I am allowed to mix metaphors here - because it's apropos to the cultural and political mess in the humanities anyway). The point is that both Anglo-American Academics - including analytic philosophers - and their moderate liberal left counterparts in the Humanities, still tend to be largely of a secular-ecumenical disposition that trucks no view that looks narrow (Yes - this is a narrow view too - but do NOT tell them that.) It's secular ecumenical pragmatism that holds sway in the academy, and it can get pretty fanatical.

Boghossian and his New-Atheist-cum-Intellectual-Dark-Web pals have got this against them: it's hard to be appropriately secular when you think - say - religion - is a complete anathema to the healthy development of both civilisation and human psychology. I am not saying they are wrong (or right). I am just saying that they are academically very unpopular with the academic-intellectual mainstream - which is itself an unruly and ideologically fluid beast with many heads, but one which, as already mentioned, is somewhat fixed in its grumpy old ad-hominem-ist (and fairly inappropriate) ways.

What does the above-mentioned interview between Searle and Foucault tell us? Many things. However, relative to the context of the current round of post-Sokal hoaxes - I think it reminds us that one humanities academic's truth is often another's joke-at-the-bar. This is, I suggest, largely healthy. At the very least it is, arguably, unavoidable in a healthy academy of humanities. The mandate of the humanities to truck very wide and varied intellectual opinions, arguments, and insights, all but guarantees such critical extreme-divergences will occur. I think that the 'will' is a 'should': it's meant to be a normative outcome according to the mandates of the humanities at both a meta-disciplinary and practical level.

Philosophers are supposed to argue. This hoax business is just more grist for the mill of cultural studies. Our Three Musketeers (or Three Stooges - depending perhaps upon which masters one serves) are in a very real way - doing their job. Sure, it's a raging, flaming salvo in the flame-war between postmodernist truth deniers and scientistic fact-fixers. However, it's also a fascinating element of, and contribution to, our contemporary intellectual culture. A sobering thought, perhaps, is that I don't think Diderot or Voltaire would be overmuch startled. Nor perhaps would Descartes with his deceiving demon - for that matter. (I did not know until informed by the inimitable Professor Eugenio Benitez that Descartes was regarded by many Catholic authorities as a rebel and heretic for his views and theology.)

I applaud these hoaxes as a positive contribution to humanities scholarship, and I will still regard the journal Hypatia as possessed of professional standing (as I think the hoaxers might also do).

The hoaxers are probably harbouring some resentment of the academic-egoist variety over being bruised repeatedly by the secular-ecumenical left-right beast of the proto-religionist secular academy (look what almost any tenured humanities academic has to say about their buddies Sam Harris and Jordan B Pedersen - for example). However, they're also making good on their commitment to generate debate and do daring intellectual envelope-pushing things. If nothing else - they have some cultural and intellectual spunk, and that has to be worthwhile for their students to learn.







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