Hysterical Feminists, Hard Line Scientists

William Blake; left, The Ancient of Days (1794), right, Newton (1795).

… cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.
     ~from Jerusalem, William Blake

… a clear moral vision implies simplifications and, with them, acts of cruelty and injustice.
     ~from Killing Time, Paul Feyerabend

Got myself embroiled in a fierce debate in an egroup recently when a member cross-posted entries from another egroup about the progress of women’s inclusion in the sciences. What irked me the most about the weepy accounts were the usual feminist pieties about patriarchal oppression, and an elitist condescension towards the “typical” American as anti-intellectual and brutish, specifically with regards to the issue of teaching creationism in schools. I reprint below my side of the debate which escalated faster than a California wildfire. It got really nasty on the other side–despite my attempts at civility and humor to diffuse the tension–but I must admit that I myself can be extremely polemic and excoriating in my sarcasm.

I reprint my replies as is–constipated language and all, including my share of nastiness–with minimal editing, such as removing any references to persons. This is therefore a biased account of the debate with heaps of spur-of-the-moment madness.

Reply No. 1:

The observation below of America being anti-scientific and anti-intellectual goes against the fact that it is still leading in science and technology. Most Nobel winners in the sciences in the past 50 years are Americans, as opposed to Germans and British in the early 20th century. This would not have been possible had science and technology not permeated American society and its institutions. I would even go as far as to say that Protestantism has in fact something to do with this; the “protestant ethic” played a big role in the advance of American capitalism that also drove (and is driven by) science and technology.

Science is in fact the dominant discourse. Attempts by its practitioners to eradicate creationism by de-legitimizing it based on its own true/false criterion is really a form of epistemological dogmatism. There is an underlying conceit in the claim that the scientific criteria is the only legitimate form of knowledge. I can empathize how a creation account of origins can be more meaningful to people than some esoteric account of reality based on particle physics. The “meanings” these religious accounts generate can be more ethically powerful and productive in society than the dry, dispirited accounts of obsessive compulsive scientists.

As for women in science, the accounts below are out of date by 2-3 decades of affirmative action. Feminists need to stop undermining women by promoting this ideology of victimization. So where are the women in science? I know for a fact that chemistry is dominated by women in the Philippines. It must be a cultural thing, not necessarily “patriarchal oppression”. I contend that middle class women in the Philippines are more liberated than their American counterparts largely because of their maids and nannies. (Yet another form of oppression?)

Reply No. 2:

Tyranny of experts! Scientists, intellectuals, and academics do not constitute a privileged class over and above those who did not go to college or read a lot of books. Everyone has their function; when my toilet backs up, I call the plumber. Average Joe may not be a card carrying member of the ivory tower, but I would not dismiss him as stupid and brutish; besides, higher education is not a guarantee of enlightenment (e.g., James Watson).

The diaspora of scientists during and after WW2 is not fortuitous; they were escaping the brutal fascism in Europe. The high civilizations that produced Michaelangelo, Beethoven, and the Enlightenment, also produced the crematoriums of Auschwitz. American capitalism and democracy provided opportunities and freedom. Let us not quickly dismiss as anti-intellectual and “distrustful of science” the society that continues to welcome scientific talent fleeing repressive regimes and poverty.

The neat account of science as falsification of theory is a Popperian fantasy that is contradicted by history. The development of science is fraught with theoretical dogmatism, irrational procedures, overlooking of anomalies, and ad hoc adjustments of models. (C’mon let’s keep it honest!) New paradigms emerge, Kuhn observes, usually not from the process of falsification, but simply from the old guards dying out. Not that the new paradigm is “more rational” but only that it leads to more interesting research. The line between legitimate science and “pseudo”-science is therefore thin and may just be a matter of cultural practice.

It is not my intention to trivialize the struggles of the women’s movement–the fight for equal opportunity–only to point out the hysterical witch-hunt for “patriarchal oppression” in every nook and cranny of society’s power structures. If women truly want equal standing they should not demand special protections, grievance committees, PC speech codes, which, I agree with my feminist idol (and lesbian) Camille Paglia, is reactionary and paternalistic.

Reply No. 3:

What is my agenda? Nothing less than displacing the privileged status of science as a form of knowledge based on positivist claims of “objectivity”, especially if this positivism is deployed to gawk at, belittle, coerce alternative or “illegitimate” forms of knowledge. I do not lose sleep if somewhere creationism or intelligent design is taught in a science class, because I trust that people everywhere KNOW what is good for them and their children. They do not need experts and “intellectual elites” to tell them THAT, and there is no need to deride them as “anti-intellectuals”.

Kuhn was not apologizing for the “shortcomings of science” he was describing its state of affairs. A paradigm shift is not merely accelerated progress but a profound break that requires a suspension of belief in what you know to be rational, even factual; a new paradigm is adopted not because the old guard were eventually swayed to accept the new one, but simply because they died out. This resistance to conversion is due to the incommensurability of paradigms–the terms are different, the methods are different, even what are considered to be “facts” are different.

If anything, Kuhn depicts scientists as CONSERVATIVES, and scientific progress only made possible by their disciplinary commitment to theory. This is why it’s incompatible with the heroic account of scientific progress, and with Popper’s idealist fantasy of scientists constantly undermining themselves and their theories by refutation. There is no “objective” meta-method of refutation that is free from contamination by the new paradigm; in other words, refutation is a priori from a biased perspective. Feyerabend even goes as far as to say that anything goes in science, there is no method, there is change but no “progress” (oops, sounds like Obama?).

Yes, I do like Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism (hello!) because it is destabilizing–it knocks off science from its privileged status above “illegitimate” (heretical?) knowledges. He also has a sense of humor. Creationism and intelligent design has every right to fight for its place in scientific discourse, and the public has every right to say it does not give a s**t about our pet theories. It is quite sobering to consider these, as Ernst Mach did, as simply convenient fictions (rather than “inconvenient truths”?).

Reply No. 4:

Puzzle-solving is an activity of normal science, i.e., within the field of view of a paradigm. It happens under conditions of lexical stability, and does not deal with complications of revolutionary change. Within the paradigm there is strong commitment to shared beliefs, values, metaphysics, and, may I add, delusions. Practitioners thus use the “set criteria” to assess what constitutes acceptable knowledge within the paradigm.

Underneath, science also appeals to extra-scientific knowledge, i.e., what it deems as “irrational”, e.g., the speculative unity of knowledge. (There is no rational basis, for example, for simplicity in theories; it is an aesthetic preference.) Lyotard calls this the recurrence of the narrative in the scientific. These undermine its claims to pure “objectivity” and its privileged status over what it deems as “irrational” and “illegitimate”.

Kuhn is actually not radical enough for me. I actually prefer Feyerabend because he is funny, and he does not mystify science.

Reply No. 5:

Anything goes! No non-negotiables. I don’t have a problem with heterogeneous practices at all, and of the neck of science put under the boot of the public. I think it becomes more human by saving it from the obsessiveness of puzzle-solving which often becomes an end in itself. I do not wish to assume the heroic role of “protector” of the integrity of science, as I don’t believe in an antiseptic, monolithic, totalitarian vision of “Science” that needs to be preserved. It’s more interesting to have messy and porous borders. Misconceptions go away if there are no preconceptions–ossified, enshrined ideas that feed fundamentalism. Yes, I accuse big “Science” of the very thing it levels against religious fundamentalists, and that scientists can be as coercive because of their disciplinary commitment to theory. (Bellarmine may actually have been acting more rationally than Galileo.)

Anomalies are regularly overlooked (or worse ignored) because of this commitment and the need to make progress in puzzle-solving. How can Newton’s account of force-at-a-distance which was unexplained be “more rational” than Ptolemy’s crystalline spheres? I’m not suggesting a return to Ptolemaic cosmology, only that what are problematic in new paradigms may not have been at all in supplanted ones. They are only absurd from a post-mortem perspective, and only within a small group of specialists who think about those things, and who have delusions about the import of their theories.

Incidentally [after I was accused of reading only Wikipedia], there is also nothing wrong with Wikipedia; I like it precisely because it is unofficial, error-prone, and vulnerable–a good sign of democratic procedures–and it’s free!

Epilogue:

What a bag of hot air! Debates expose hysterics and hard liners in all of us, especially if we are argued into a corner; we tend to freeze into extreme positions, as evidenced above. I do love the rhetorical energy, though, that is released by the urgency of argumentation. I got this from my father, a polemic to the core, who in his youth often got in trouble by argumentation, even afterward, when he became a Christian and a Sunday School teacher.

Sources and Related Links (Including Wikipedia!):

• Thomas Kuhn at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Paul Feyerabend at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Karl Popper at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• William Blake at Wikipedia

 

A Little Art On The Prairie

Follow the typical signs, the hand-painted lines, down prairie roads.
Pass the lone church spire.
Pass the talking wire from where to who knows?
There’s no way to divide the beauty of the sky from the wild western plains.
Where a man could drift, in legendary myth, by roaming over spaces.
The land was free and the price was right.
      ~ from Gold Rush Brides by 10,000 Maniacs

The bike ride south of Race Street takes you directly to Meadowbrook Park, which has preserved 60 acres of native Illinois prairie, now all but mowed down and turned into the endless soybean and corn fields of the Midwest. But here, in this oasis of tall grass, turned golden in the dessicated air, one can still get a sense of the “legendary myth of the wild western plains” that Natalie Merchant evoked in the album Out of Eden. This tenacious enclave of rural land serves as an interesting space for the modernist sculptures that are displayed along its pathways. The ample size of the pieces are dwarfed nonetheless by the vast openness of the terrain. The pastoral setting ostensibly serves as counterpoint to the curated artifice, but is itself ironically, ultimately, also contrived. There is a heightened nostalgia for pure, unadulterated Nature by the presence of decadent bourgeois art in this patch of prairie preserve.

 

The Leaves Are Falling

Leaves have finally turned color! I had been waiting for this all summer, not having lived north enough before to see the four-season cycle. The streets are covered in opulent gold and red, and gleam in late afternoon light. Color changes first at the fringes. It is not so much the production of yellow, as the retreat of green–the disappearance of chlorophyll–that light-harvesting molecule that transforms air into the trees’ very substance. Now, it is shutting down operations, one-by-one dismantling its photosynthetic accoutrements, until a mere black skeleton remains of a once dazzling fullness–a naked stick to stand up to winter.

Reds and purples also appear, at the right conditions, as excess sugars of winter hoarding are transformed by light into color. An occult conjunction of moisture and weather, the onset of spring, the end of summer. No two autumns are thus ever alike.

Autumn to me was, for a long time, merely evoked by Rilke’s poems in The Book of Images. Ostensibly religious, these perhaps belong more properly to his earlier monastic and meditative work, The Book of Hours.

 

Through the Touch-Screen, and What I Found There

My new MacBook Pro came with a free iPod Touch with the academic discount. (Well, what amounts to the value of an 8GB model anyway–I had to fork out the difference to upgrade to 32GB.) The much touted unibody indeed looks sleek: the edges seem precariously razor-sharp, I get goosebumps when I run my fingers over them; the microphone and LED lights that indicate battery life are mere pinhole perforations, they’re almost invisible; the ON/OFF switch fits snug and flat in its hole, it looks like it was drawn there with a draftsman’s pencil. It looks as clean and keen as IM Pei’s National Gallery (East Wing) at Washington, DC.

Source: Ezra Stoller, The Architect’s Newspaper

This attention to design, perhaps more than its OS X operating system, is the main reason I lean towards Mac. I loved my old 12” Powerbook G4, and did not understand why Apple dropped the size, when, for a time, only 15” and 17” were offered. I did not want to lug a tray around, and almost considered getting the black MacBook. It was a good thing I hung on–the 13” MacBook Pro is exactly what I wanted: sleek, silver, and slim. For a short time, this body type and size was offered as a MacBook. Why Apple did that again boggled me; it only confused/diluted the Pro (Powerbook) brand, and would only alienate customers who bought it before it was upgraded to Pro.

Knock on wood that I don’t dent this unibody. I’m sure Apple would ask a pound of flesh for its repair. This is the problem I have with Apple: when you buy their products, you sign away your soul to the Corporation. They are fiercely proprietary and exclusive, exerting control over the product even after your purchase. I spent $400 to replace the optical drive on my G4 that can only be repaired with original parts in an Apple-certified shop. Customer service wanted me to spend “a bit more” to buy instead a new computer. (This was the time they phased out the 12” model.) No thanks. I didn’t like being bullied into buying. When I wanted to buy the iSight for the G4, they just so happen to have discontinued it to pave way for newer models with built-in camera. Customer service dismissed my complaint by saying that Apple “can’t keep on supporting older models”. My G4 was barely 2-years old at the time. There were no third-party Firewire cameras around, and the prices on used iSight cameras soared at eBay. Appealing to Apple is like talking to a brick wall, the Corporation is as veiled and draconian as a politburo, as self-contained and monolithic as the products they sell.

 

In The American West In The Dumpster

This is how these portraits were made. I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long that is secured to a wall, a building, sometimes the side of a trailer. I work in the shade because sunshine creates shadows, highlights accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look. I want the source of light to be invisible so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things.

…

A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

…

These disciplines, these strategies, this silent theater, attempt to achieve an illusion: that everything embodied in the photograph simply happened, that the person in the portrait was always there, was never told to stand there, was never encouraged to hide his hands, and in the end was not even in the presence of the photographer.

(Richard Avedon, Foreword, In the American West, New York, Harry N. Abrahams, 2005)