Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture , Alan Sokal , Oxford U. Press, New York, 2008. $34.95 (465 pp.). ISBN 978-0-19-923920-7
Alan Sokal was once my hero. His brilliant parody of postmodern academic prose, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” appeared in 1996 in the cultural studies journal Social Text. The journal’s editor took the article seriously; I thought it was the funniest thing I had read in years. But a joke is easily ruined if you explain it too much, and Sokal has done just that—first in a long article in Lingua Franca announcing his hoax and then repeatedly in other publications.
Now, the superb parodist has become a parody of himself. His new book, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture, is anything but new. It consists almost entirely of reprints of previously published articles, including two pieces co-authored with theoretical physicist Jean Bricmont. Perhaps more troubling is that the reprinted articles say the same thing over and over again. Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, has in the past decade made a second career out of peddling just one idea.
It is perhaps unfair to say there is nothing new in his book. Sokal presents not only his original hoax article but also his own running commentary on it, including a whole new set of footnotes. In case you missed a joke in the original, he explains every single one of them at some length. He even tells readers which of his jokes are his favorites. Amply displayed in his volume is an intellectual mean-spiritedness that might surprise readers familiar only with the original hoax article. Sokal’s method relies on finding the most ridiculous possible passages—real quotations from scholars—to lampoon. He has not the slightest interest in finding any redeeming qualities in the academic works of those he quotes, because it would undermine his unshakeable belief that we scientists are surrounded by barbarians.
Perhaps most disappointing is Sokal’s turning a blind eye to the work of others who look with more subtlety at some of the issues he raises. He does not mention Mara Beller’s excellent article, “The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?” in Physics Today ( September 1998, page 29 ). Beller showed that much of the undeniable humor in “Transgressing the Boundaries” came from the quotes by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, which were crucial to setting up the equally silly remarks by Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. And if so, then, as her title asks, at whom are we laughing? What does it mean when famous physicists are responsible for convincing the world that physics can be used as a source of far-fetched analogies for speculation about the widest possible range of nonscientific subjects?
David Mermin’s work is also shamefully neglected in Sokal’s book. For example, in March (page 11) and April (page 11) of 1996, Mermin wrote two Reference Frame articles in Physics Today concerning the sociology of science. The April piece in particular raises serious questions about the account of the history of relativity in The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science (Cambridge University Press, 1993), a popular book by sociologists Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch. The dialog that later ensued in the Letters pages of the magazine (July 1996, page 11) was fascinating—a genuine exchange of views that, in the Mend, led to actual clarification and new insight on both sides.
Sokal might have mentioned his collaboration with Collins in The One Culture? A Conversation About Science (University of Chicago Press, (2001); Collins and Jay A. Labinger edited the book, to which Mermin and I also contributed articles. Yet there is nary a mention in Beyond the Hoax of Sokal’s three articles from that edition. Evidently, the constructive and respectful tone of the discussion in The One Culture did not fit with the tone of high dudgeon that characterizes Sokal’s new book. Nor did that earlier collaboration stop Sokal from repeatedly (three times by my count) quoting out of context a half-sentence of Collins’s from a 1981 article in the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences and holding it up to ridicule. Then, at each occurrence, with identically worded footnotes, he grudgingly mentions that perhaps Collins’s views were somewhat less reprehensible than first appeared. That is hardly collegial behavior.
Toward the end of Beyond the Hoax, two new essays attack religion, which Sokal considers the most dangerous form of pseudoscience because it plays the largest role in society. His us-against-the-barbarians attitude is again prominently on display but here it leads Sokal to tortured reflection. As a committed leftist, he would love to build a movement to help the working class, but he realizes that most of the people he’d like to help hold precisely the views that he considers both stupid and dangerous. In the concluding essay, Sokal struggles fruitlessly to suggest possible strategies for finding common ground; he reluctantly admits, for example, that mistaken religious beliefs have led people to moral (read “leftist”) actions. Thus the book ends, paradoxically, with just the slightest hint of intellectual humility and desire for dialog. Too bad that attitude isn’t more evident in the book.
