Virgin Mary in the Brain
Responses to Vul et al.’s article on fMRI abuse, which proved as much of a “bombshell” as first predicted, are now too numerous to list. Needless to say, several of the authors of studies Vul criticized quickly responded with a defense [pdf] of their work, to which Vul in turn replied with a rebuttal of his own. The point-for-point charges and counter-charges are largely statistical in nature, tedious, and best left to the experts to hash out. So, until the full defense is published, we’ll just have to suspend judgment.
However, relatively unrelated to the validity of Vul et al.’s charges, are the various uses to which their sinstudy has since been lent. The logics surrounding these appropriations are no doubt familiar, and involve, once again, the strategic confusion of poststructuralist perspectives on science, as an institution, with religious or spiritualist attempts to delimit the domain of science itself and reveal its mechanisms to be ideological through and through. To make matters more confusing, the latter group is increasingly less conservative than they are apolitical, less fundamentalist than ‘immaterialist’.
Though politically useful during the Bush years, the popular press’ image of Intelligent Design as the handiwork of a Republican, fundamentalist, anti-choice conspiracy severely underestimates the strains of Western thought on which ID depends. The argument for design over evolution, for instance, routinely invokes the ‘free will’ concept, a running theme of the flagship ID blog Uncommon Descent (–which, I should note, also linked to my recent post on Vul), and attitudes reminiscent of ‘vitalist’ philosophy are also drawn upon to masterful effect. For the first time, perhaps, free will and the soul are complementary, compatible features of the same theological model of the subject: both provide, through different means no doubt, an opening into what is perceived as a closed, deterministic image of the person, leaving no room for a morality anchored in God, on the one hand, and choice, on the other.
In this kind of intellectual environment, which is increasingly philosophical and decreasingly political, a more spiritualist, anti-deterministic contingent is stepping up to make use of the conceptual equipment the Intelligent Design community has so successfully prepared for appropriation. Thus, any significant challenge internal to a scientific domain is now able to be expressed, through a ready set of recognizable terms and concepts, as an external challenge to science ‘itself’. Every time a significant paradigm shift occurs ‘within’ science, the ID community will be ready and waiting to express that shift as a general collapse of, or symptomatic crack in, the edifice of science.
A number of references to my previous post on Vul’s study are notable in this regard. For example, a blog called Mindful Hack, which is run by the well-known Denyse O’Leary, co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul, recently paraphrased and linked to a passage of mine that listed-off a couple gender-related studies that misused fMRI to the effect of confirming otherwise inappropriate stereotypes. However, instead of treating Vul’s critique as one of specific methodological biases that can be identified (and potentially eliminated), O’Leary seems to regard the study as one more nail in the coffin of Neuroscience, which can “only tell us what we already [know]“.
“Neuroscience shows why women love shopping, why gay guys read maps like women, why jealous guys … come to think of it, why does neuroscience only tell us what we already heard from that high school drop-out cousin, shooting pool down in the rec room between his split shifts at the loading dock?”
Though openly Christian in sentiment and clearly inspired by religious doctrines, O’Leary’s writings are nonetheless not explicitly religious per se. Her columns are often written for a wider, if generally Christian, audience, she’s frequently described as an ID apologist (rather than dogmatic promoter), and she always makes a point to distinguish ID, a ’scientific’ concept, from creationism, a religious one. Her books likewise characteristically walk a fine line between Christian doctrine and a secular-spiritualist ’skepticism’ of the explanatory power of a strictly empirical framework. One need only take a glance at the titles of her books — The Spiritual Brain, Faith@Science, Design or By Chance? — to see that an important corner has been turned in the mainstreaming of Intelligent Design. It is friendlier, ‘contemporary’, more scientific sounding, and now thoroughly adept at shrouding its radicalism in an innocence or inclusiveness that can seem, to the willing listener, the mark of objectivity and scientific legitimacy.
All of this makes for some interesting alliances. Quoting a Newsweek blog post by Sharon Begley, which quotes my previous post on Vul, O’Leary seems to take up, if to pervert, a perspective otherwise proper to a leftist cultural studies methodology (such as my own). For her, Vul’s critique reveals neuroscience in toto to be but a sophisticated cultural instrument for applying a “’science’ spin” to whichever idea of the day demands legitimacy.
“Suspiciously, social neuroscience tells us what we already believe to be true, and puts a “science” spin on it. As Sharon Begley points out, quoting mutuallyoccluded, the skewered studies “vindicate the crudest of stereotypes.” Real science, by contrast, often challenges popular ideas and forces us to think harder than we normally would.”
Whether or not O’Leary would be happy to vindicate the same crude stereotypes through other means, as she does when defending religion’s right to discriminate against specific ’sexual orientations’, for the purposes of delegitimizing neuroscience just enough to make room for the soul, the kind of critique I put forth above is apparently sufficient.
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because we have been here before. In the Winter of 2004, when the Bush administration’s ’skepticism’ of global warming was at the height of its public success, the philosopher of science and anthropology Bruno Latour published a timely article [Critical Inquiry abstract, full copy, and pdf] on the strategic confusion between his own career interrogation of scientific epistemologies and the Right’s Luntz-led PR campaign that stressed a perpetual lack of sufficient evidence:
“Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show “‘the lack of scientific certainty‘” inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a “‘primary issue.’” But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument - or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I’d like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?”
Though Latour is being a little too hard on himself — misappropriations are inevitable and cannot be controlled — the greater question stands: namely, how, in an intellectual climate that includes writers like O’Leary and PR strategists like Luntz, can cultural critiques distinguish their own constructive, ‘interested’ perspective from the more disinterested, ideological ones?
Obviously, there is no simple solution. Honest, rigorous scholarship will always be a balancing-act on shifting terrain: which is to say, the force of Vul’s critique must be situated properly and accurately, with respect to the knowledges it makes use of and disrupts. If Vul’s paper has proved so controversial and far-reaching, it’s because it touches on something fundamental to the field without disturbing its contours, and without disturbing the discipline itself. Contrary to O’Leary’s perspective, which finds Vul’s work to be evidence of a more or less purely ideological disposition at the heart of neuroscience, it would perhaps be more accurate to describe the force of Vul et al.’s paper as unfolding at the edge of the field: their research may overturn enough assumptions to be considered ‘fundamental’ but it also affirms the basic principles of fMRI research and in this way ‘revitalizes’, rather than discredits, the field as a whole. It is in this regard that deep, cultural critiques of a scientific practice are in fact constitutive of it, seeking to correct or reorient (rather than dismantle) a given methodology — which cannot so easily be said of O’Leary’s article.
On the other hand, there will always be those who staunchly defend science as ‘essentially’ non-ideological — in which case Vul’s report would concern only headline pop-studies and have little bearing on ‘neuroscience proper’, — and they will most likely see little difference between the linking of specific fMRI studies to specific ideological effects, and O’Leary’s blanket dismissal of all neuroscience as an elaborate institutional production of “neuroscience effects” (that serve only to obscure the existence of the soul, God, and his immaterial design). It is to these staunch defenders that an anthropological, critical discourse must first be directed, if only to show that ideology and bias are not as confined to the margins of scientific practice as they would like to think, but neither are they some wholly secret, imaginary dogma producing fixed results. The truth, no doubt, lies somewhere in between–
