When Astronomy Morphs Into Astrology
The 1996 “Sokal Hoax” attests to the longstanding decline of the humanities, and with them liberal education in America. Some 30 years later, higher education has begun to grapple with humanities professors’ propensity to abuse academic freedom – by repudiating rigor, stifling dissent, and abandoning dedication to understanding the world in favor of changing it. Yet even well-intentioned, reform-minded university administrators and faculty overlook how the academic establishment – that is, they themselves – allowed the humanities’ self-inflicted degradation to proceed unchecked for so long.
In “Science Wars,” the Spring-Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, New York University physics Professor Alan Sokal published “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” His absurdly titled article argued absurdly that “recent developments in quantum gravity” have “profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.” We know that the article was rubbish because Sokal revealed its provenance and highlighted its stupidity in “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” published in May 1996 in Lingua Franca.
In his self-exposé, Sokal explained that he had “been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities.” He tested his concerns by running “a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?”
Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies published by Duke University Press, showed that the answer was yes.
In Lingua Franca, Sokal stated that his Social Text parody of postmodern-progressive pretentiousness and intellectual shoddiness employed “scientific and mathematical concepts in ways that few scientists or mathematicians could possibly take seriously.”
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