Posted on 02/13/2007 3:44:41 PM PST by A. Pole
I admit to facetiousness. I also allow that facetiousness is the rhetoric of despair - in this case, despair over the dreadful pickle into which the academic community in the US - and I suppose elsewhere - has gotten itself over the last two decades or so. STS - at least in the most flamboyant and - to use a dreadful phrase - pathbreaking versions - is to me both example and symbol of the university’s growing inability to carry through one of its major intellectual functions, to wit, the filtering of new ideas and the winnowing out of those - most of them - that have small or ephemeral value. Why this function has atrophied to such a drastic degree is an interesting question - far more interesting than the interrogatives put to standard science by its would-be analysts in the STS community.
"Politics" - political attitudinizing, that is, and the kind of magical thinking that accompanies it - is one obvious reason. There are doubtless deeper sociological reasons as well, possibly correlated with socio-economic factors that I personally can’t begin to analyze. Suffice it, however, that intellectual celebrity in much of the humanities/social sciences wing of academia, has in large measure ceased to be correlated with precise thinking, or command of evidence, or even fundamental intellectual honesty. What remains? A certain glibness, together with an effectual strategy for presenting onesself as in passionate solidarity with the wretched of the earth, in various guises. To find a flock of examples native to STS, merely consult the bibliography of Sokal’s gag paper. Or, to take a fresher example uncontaminated by jocular intent, look at David Mermin’s paper in the current "Social Studies of Science." I call attention to this because Mermin (a very good physicist, by the way), for reasons that I infer to involve personal connections at least as much as philosophical stance, is determined to take a concilliatory tack, and to meet the STS community halfway, as it were. Nontheless, his analysis is as fully damning as anything I have seen written by an out-and-out "science warrior" on this side of the fence. One is left with the inescapable sense that some of the senior sages of STS are so philosophically naive, silly, and self-deluded that it’s plainly as pointless to think in terms of "dialog" with them as with a UFO cultist. The only difference - and who knows how long that will last? - is that the vagaries of academic fashion in the last few decades have endowed the former with university positions and professorial titles. As the Wizard says, who needs a brain when you have a diploma?
STS has very little of significance to say about how science and technology come to pass in society. You’d be much better off reading "Scientific American," "American Scientist," and "Business Week" if that’s what you’re interested in learning. STS has blown it completely, for the transient satisfactions of being transgressive, or whatever the favored phrase now may be. Gresham’s Law has had its vengeful way with the field, pretty much. On the intellectual level, if not the institutional one, the "science wars" were over shortly after the first shots were fired, and it is curiousity, rather than passionate concern about the outcome, that leads me to keep an eye on all the rather pointless scurrying.
Still, I brood about the larger fate of the university. The reason for my current disquiet may be found in the new book by Kors and Silverglate, "The Shadow University," which is a sort of catalogue raisonne of recent "PC" horror stories. They are all well-documented, and all very, very true and, in sum, a depiction of ghastly moral cowardice and the appalling eagaerness of the shallow and mediocre to assume, or, worse, to abet, inquisitorial pretensions.
The connection with STS? Somehow, I can’t escape the conclusion that the same intellectual atmosphere that turned the administrators of many major and minor universities into shamefully gutless and puerile apparatchiks had something to do with the pattern of seemingly inexplicable indulgence and preferment granted to the fatuous dogmatics of "orthodox" STS - and its expositors. (Latour at IAS? You can make a better case for Jerry Springer.) Of course, a the contamination extends to a spectrum of other fields - but I won’t go into that now.
Welcome to the end-times....
STS=?
What is STS?
Harvey Silverglate is (or at least was for quite some time) Jeffrey MacDonald's defense lawyer. I didn't know he was also an academic.
Science and Technology Section?
If you work in STS, you get paid serious money for writing things like this: While “science and technology studies” (STS) often remains a turf war between philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science, philosophy of science itself has become more pluralistic as a result of its contributions to STS and this interaction across disciplines.
Then you wonder why, oh why, do you feel so worthless? It would be better if you were paid for something like leaning on a shovel at the road construction site, which at least gives motorists something to curse. You feel worse than worthless. You think on it. You mull at it. You brood about it. And, decide it's Bush's fault.
That really is how liberals make their political decisions.
I am depressed that Harvard yielded to extortion and has named women's studies prof its new president. The citadel of higher ed in Am has yielded to the PC police.
pinging
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