Joanne Faulkner of What Sorts of People has a post up on what ought to now be known as the Gould affair, in reference to the well-known Sokal hoax — which continues to haunt the postmodern left more than ten years after its perpetration. Faulkner summarizes the turn of events thus far:
Keith Windschuttle, editor of Australian Right magazine Quadrant, and prominent culture warrior, has been hoaxed — publishing an article arguing essentially that genetic scientists should be allowed to do anything they want without the scrutiny of the public or media, because scientists know best.
The hoaxer outed themselves to another online magaine, Crikey, and has chronicled their misdeed in the blog ‘Diary of a Hoax.’ This is delicious. Windschuttle was something of an ‘official historian’ for Australia’s previous Howard Government, presenting their preferred version of Aboriginal history (that there was no stolen generation, that reports of massacres were overblown) by picking at the footnotes of academic historians such as Henry Reynolds, of the University of Tasmania.
Windschuttle positioned himself as the voice of reason against the tyranny of postmodernism in history research. That’s what makes this so sweet. As Crikey’s Margaret Simons writes:
The Gould hoax is designed to be a companion and a counter to the famous Sokal hoax, in which the physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper to a postmodern cultural studies journal to show that post modernists would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”
Windschuttle’s positioning of himself on the side of realism, and his opponents on the side of sophistry, is undone by this hoax — which, as distinct from the Sokal hoax, was not even perpetrated by a known and respected scientist (which at least had lent a certain credence to Sokal’s article in the minds of Social Text’s editors).
In the comments, Faulkner notes the interesting turn the scandal has recently taken. “[As] it turns out, Windschuttle has simply decided to deny the article’s status as a hoax altogether”:
He had published “Scare campaigns and science reporting” without checking what he called the “nitty gritty” of its facts, and he had put it in the magazine without showing it to anyone familiar with its subject, genetic engineering. But in two busy hours yesterday he was able to satisfy himself the article was “only 10 to 15 per cent invented. When I discovered that my gloom and embarrassment changed completely.”
[...]
Windschuttle didn’t check the paper or ring the CSIRO. He says: “We’re not a science journal.” But in any case, he doesn’t believe Quadrant has to check the facts in its articles. Though he has flayed historians for small errors in obscure footnotes in the past, he doesn’t believe his handling of the article falls short of his own standards. “I am not the author in this case. I’m the editor.”
Sadly, Gould’s hoax (probably) won’t get as much airtime as Sokal’s, even though what it reveals is much more important. Nevertheless, one can’t help but see this event as part of a larger trend intent on unveiling the more powerful, and dangerous, ideological forces at work in the sciences. Indeed, it is telling of the times, and surely a sign that we have moved past the problems Sokal revealed, that Chris Mooney (who, like “Gould”, has done much to expose right-wing attacks on science) and Sokal himself recently (in February 2007) co-authored an op-ed in the L.A. Times, which, in the words of Gristmill’s David Roberts, made the simple point:
whatever threat postmodernism once posed to science, it has been eclipsed by a more direct and ham-handed attack on science by the Republican Party. It’s just not sufficient to say that “both sides do it.” Turns out one side does it way, way more.
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