To summarize briefly for those too lazy to click the link, in 1996 Alan Sokal, an NYU physicist, submitted an outright silly paper to the journal Social Text, purporting that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. There are some allegations that this was not done in good faith (I should hope not!), but the fact that Social Text ran it was pretty alarming even so. Sokal contends that this an example of a larger trend in academia, particularly the liberal arts and humanities, to ignore the fundamental teachings of hard science in favor of their own pet
This raises larger questions about the Academic Left (their terms, not mine), particularly about their understanding of reality (or lack thereof). When the "intellectuals" who have significant influence in the formative years of a large segment of the electorate can't distinguish between fact and fantasy, it makes one sit up and notice. In particular, the left-leaning academics who can make the distinction (scientists in particular) were quite vocal in their concern.
On this issue, at least, I agree with them. At risk of sounding pedantic, there is a large segment of academia verily seeped in mysticism. Postmodernists, linguistic analysts, and whatever other groups advocating half-baked pseudo-theories are almost always quite literally beyond the reach reason. Their beliefs, based in feeling rather than fact, are almost religiously sacrosanct, and cannot be refuted by scientific or logical argument. Individually they are harmless, but the madness of the 1960s and 1970s suggests that together they have the potential to wreak incredible havoc.
I could argue that this is to be expected of leftism, and to an extent it is, but that overlooks the reasonable leftists, such as Sokal. While they are largely mistaken in their political beliefs, their implicit acceptance of reason means they are at least potentially salvageable. I think there is a major divide in leftist thought, soothed over but still there, between the thinking leftists and the feeling ones. And I think this divide is eventually going to break.
Ultimately, the thinking leftists are going to have to make a choice: do they accept the facts (that socialism has proven itself a failure, that free markets work better than mixed markets, that personal freedom also requires personal responsibility) or follow others' feelings, back into the world of violent revolution, pseudoscientific mysticism, and the eventual collapse into looting thuggery? Which is it going to be? We'll have to wait to find out.
