Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science.

• Author: Storey, Robert

SOMETIMES I GO OFF MY HEAD and teach a graduate course in world literature from the standpoint of evolutionary biology. Admittedly, this is an odd couple on the face of it, but such interdisciplinary marriages are quite common these days in literary studies. So when I tell my students that they are not going to like what they're about to hear--that my ideas run counter to prevailing orthodoxies--they are at first all knowing smiles. If grad students know nothing else, about either literature or biology, they know that all properly progressive courses should be "subversive" of the status quo.

But the smiles soon fade, the glints in their eyes become hard and accusing; some of their restless number grow surly, others start to scream in my face. How could I possibly believe that behavioral differences between the sexes are biologically disposed when everyone else knows that such so-called differences are merely culturally contrived? Don't I know that capitalism is the source of all hierarchy and competition, that the latter have nothing to do with "natural selection"? Am I not aware that my "science" is simply an arbitrary construct, one that perpetuates not only white male bias but also the bourgeois values of an oppressive social order that seeks to dominate, not understand, the natural world? "Truth," my students scold me in terms that brook no dissension, is nothing but a culturally specific phenomenon, and the "totalizing" tendencies of "scientistic" thought have been exploded completely by those postmodern thinkers who have deconstructed its self-aggrandizing pretensions.

This jumble of earnest ignorance, dogmatic arrogance, naive utopianism, unabashed political special pleading, and uncritical faith in what has come to be known in the humanities and many of the social sciences as "postmodern theory" constitutes the platform of the "academic left" mentioned in the subtitle of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. The authors have adopted the label, they concede, with "great misgivings," since the "academic left is not completely defined by the spectrum of issues that form the benchmarks for the left/right dichotomy in American and world politics."

What defines the term more generally is "a commitment to the idea that fundamental political change is urgently needed and can be achieved only through revolutionary processes rooted in a wholesale revision of cultural categories." Those categories include the assumptions, methodologies, and conclusions of modern science, all of which have been supposedly...