There is a war on science, but not the one the nudniks think

Nathan Oseroff-Spicer expertly dissects the reactionary arguments and demonstrates the true war on science (and academia generally) is the opposite of what the contributors to the book claim.

Friend of the blog Nathan Oseroff-Spicer has written what I think is potentially the most important piece of writing in the recent cultural wars, a review/takedown of the gadfly fiction The War on Science over at Liberal Currents.

Two men perform what I think is probably science — “You see here, this test tube proves that Hayekian economics is the only proper structure for political economy, despite the profoundly negative effects it has in the real world!”

I won’t belabor Nathan’s points; he makes the far better and with more rigor than I ever could. I think the greater problem here my other friend Popehat touched on with his recent polemic about “free speech culture.”

In both instances, ostensibly “free thinking” academics are claiming to be the victim of adverse actions and wrapping themselves in free speech/academic freedom, when in fact it is they who are the ones who are the threat to academic freedom and free speech.

This is a commonly-understood tactic of abusers in interpersonal psychology called “DARVOing,” or Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. I don’t think people like Krause or Dawkins are as stupid as they pretend to be, so the only explanation is that they knowingly do these things to create controversy, put their names in the press, and generate attention to themselves. Either that or they truly believe that the attack on biology comes from a nuanced understanding of intersex conditions instead of, and I can’t believe a doctorate-level biologist said this, “size of gametes.” That is the kind of pop science that would get, should get, someone laughed out of an high school AP science class. That is right up there with “radiocarbon dating isn’t accurate, therefore mankind coexisted with dinosaurs.” It is the sort of thing late-90s Dawkins would have mocked mercilessly as unscientific pablum.

An infrographic explaining DARVO — See fig. 1, otherwise known as the Larry Krause Shuffle.

But because of audience capture and intellectual frailty, the pendulum has swung the other way, and now folks like Dawkins act as reactionary gadflies against the nebulous “left,” the same sort of idiocy I have confronted in the past with the post-Sokal reaction to any philosophy that does not adhere to the scientistic, positivistic notion championed by Dawkins in his contribution. For some reason, this notion persists, despite the softening of philosophy departments in the past twenty years towards viewpoints once derided as “continental” or “postmodern.”

The prejudice persists, however, in the right-wing fever swamps and reactionary idea factories of the Internet (see “Wokal Distance” supra), but thank the heavens the are smart folks out there like Nathan willing to take these people to task utilizing their own criteria (logic and evidence). All that remains to be seen is whether the thirty-nine contributors to The War on Science acknowledge and admit defeat, or stick to their ideological guns despite being so thoroughly run down. Kudos, Mr. Oseroff-Spicer, you do the Academy credit.