Tocqueville on the Post-Religious Moment

 

For Alexis de Tocqueville, religion is important for liberty as an extension of society. What keeps a government in check, particularly a democratically elected government that can plausibly claim to represent the "people," is the existence of a distinct social sphere. Religion protects the social sphere by granting a moral authority that the government lacks. The opposite is also true that government needs to keep religion hemmed in within the social sphere so that it evolves to focus on the non-physical and that clergymen learn to value the respect they gain precisely by not being tainted by politics more than the power they could gain through politics. From this perspective, religion and politics, while maintaining their separate spheres can have a positive influence on each other. Religion keeps government away from society and the government keeps religion out of politics. Hence government and religion render each other suitable for liberty.

Removing religion from the equation would start an avalanche that would eliminate reason and ultimately liberty. According to Tocqueville:

When religion is destroyed among a people, doubt takes hold of the highest portions of the intellect and half paralyzes all the others. Each person gets accustomed to having only confused and changing notions about the matters that most interest his fellows and himself. You defend your opinions badly or you abandon them, and, since you despair of being able, by yourself, to solve the greatest problems that human destiny presents, you are reduced like a coward to not thinking about them.

What I find fascinating about this passage is how well Tocqueville diagnosed the post-modern condition. Following Kant's famous dictum of sapere aude (dare to know), we tend to think of reason as something done by individuals without any reference to tradition. In truth, even as individuals are the only meaningful moral unit, reason is fundamentally a social activity that works across generations through the process of tradition.

The reason for this should be obvious to anyone familiar with the free-market tradition. Individuals by themselves are not capable of doing much beyond eking out a mere hunter-gatherer subsistence existence. Economic production and ultimately civilization is only possible through large-scale cooperation. If individuals are so lacking in economic wisdom, how much more so must it be when it comes to the higher truths of the world such as morality and the meaning of life.

Just as we cannot expect people to literally reinvent the wheel or the lightbulb (contrary to Ayn Rand's hero in Anthem), we should not expect people to construct their own philosophies from scratch without reference to tradition. For example, I can accept that Euclidean geometry is TRUE even as my understanding of mathematics is rather rudimentary. Whether or not Euclid or other mathematical claims can be considered objective facts at the end of the day, the critical issue is whether they have greater authority than my personal "lived experience" of oppression. I live my life under the assumption that there are things outside of me that are objectively TRUE and, unlike divine revelation, knowable to human beings regardless of their time, place, race, or religion. 

It is a fair question as to whether or not the truths of reason, such as mathematics, can offer transcendent meaning. My suspicion is that any attempt to do so is going to eventually start to look a lot like a religion. (One thinks of the example of the Pythagoreans.) What happens to someone stripped of transcendent meaning transmitted through society and ultimately tradition? They will have to retreat into their own heads, a place too small for either faith or reason.

This has implications for democratic government. Democracy is not a license for people to do whatever they want. On the contrary, democracy requires great personal discipline. This is possible if there exists an independent society outside of politics and backed by religion to train people to stand on their own feet. The moment a person starts to ask "who will feed me" they are already are slaves in their hearts even before any master shows up and one certainly will.

What happens when people lose their religion? Tocqueville anticipates Hannah Arendt in predicting that an atomized nihilistic society would be ripe for totalitarianism.  

Such a state cannot fail to enervate souls; it slackens the motivating forces of will and prepares citizens for servitude. Then not only does it happen that the latter allow their liberty to be taken, but they often give it up.

When authority no longer exists in religious matters, any more than in political matters, men are soon frightened by the sight of this limitless independence. This perpetual agitation and this continual mutation of all things disturbs and exhausts them. Since everything shifts in the intellectual world, they at least want everything to be firm and stable in the material order, and, no longer able to recapture their ancient beliefs, they give themselves a master.

For me, I doubt that man can ever bear complete religious independence and full political liberty at the same time; and I am led to think that, if he does not have faith, he must serve, and, if he is free, he must believe.

Just as reason requires a sense of being part of a larger tradition such as a religion, so does liberty. A person without religion who retreats into their own head without any sense that there are larger truths beyond his personal feelings will also not be able to justify standing up for liberty. If man cannot engage in higher truths such as reason, what does he need liberty for? If the truths of mathematics cannot stand against one's personal feelings then it will also fail to stand against the physical reality of the dictator in power. 

Who Owns Aslan, the Author or the Voice Actor?

There is a public furor shaping up over Liam Neeson, the actor who does the voice of Aslan in the recent Narnia movies, saying that Aslan could be any spiritual leader even Mohammad or Buddha. The Narnia books of course were written by C. S. Lewis as Christian allegories with Aslan intended to represent Jesus. Similarly, I recall back when the first film came out Tilda Swinton saying that she felt her white witch character represented Aryan supremacy as opposed to the Devil as Lewis intended. I would see this as an excellent example of the post-modern question of authorship. According to post-modern thought, a text is its interpretation. From this perspective there is really no such thing as authorship and an author has no special power over his own work. The author is simply the person who incidentally performed the labor of creating the text. He may have his own personal interpretation of his own work, but that interpretation is in no way more valid than the interpretation of any of his readers. Readers in turn are free to craft an interpretation from their own personal act of reading without concern as to original authorial intent.  

So who maintains interpretive control over Aslan, C. S. Lewis, who wrote the novels, or the millions of people who have read them, including Liam Neeson? Legally of course Neeson is free to craft any "false" or "heretical" interpretation he chooses and post-modernism says that he is on solid ground for doing so. I doubt Lewis would have really objected. My sense of the man was that he was not the sort to get worked up about anything. If Lewis had a Christian message to his work, he showed little concern to force that message to others. 

As a Jewish C. S Lewis fan, I feel no emotional qualms about accepting Aslan as Jesus. (I accept both of them equally as not my personal savior.) Part of this I think comes from my experience as a historian. Historians are unable to follow the post-modern path to its fullest extreme. We require texts to have hard meanings, otherwise the historical method would be just another form of subjective literary interpretation. We also do put a special value on authorial intent. Want to understand a text? Compare it to the author's other writing and then to ideas in general currency at the time. Under no circumstances are you to bring into play concepts that did not come about until later; that is an anachronism. That being said we historians do recognize that in practice texts do evolve. People do take texts and refashion them for their own purposes. So part of the story of any text is a "post-modern" defeat of authorial intent at the hands of public reception.

I accept as historical fact that Narnia is a Christian work and that Aslan represents Jesus. Even though I am Jewish, this does not have to get in the way or my enjoyment of Narnia or force me to fashion a Narnia to better suit my own personal beliefs. My pleasure is in trying to understand texts as the author might have and seeing how other people refashion it. If Aslan becomes Mohammad to suit our more ecumenical age, that too is a topic worthy of historical study.     


 

In Search of a Sense of Wonder in Fantasy: Some Thoughts on Lost and Not Found – Director’s Cut

Teel McClanahan III was kind enough to send me his novelette Lost and Not Found - Director's Cut. I read many novels and the occasional short story, but the hundred page novel is an experience in its own right that does not come around very often. This is certainly not an easy genre to work with. I can think of only one truly great short novel, Stephen King's Shawshank Redemption. The pitfall of writing at this length is that it is too long for the simple short story concept and not long enough to establish the character and plot of full length novels. This certainly applies to McClanahan's whimsical account of an unnamed former lost boy, who returns to Neverland as an adult and runs off with Tinkerbell. I was intrigued by the main character and some of the world's McClanahan describes, but there is no real plot or character development to allow for a meaningful story. While it might be acceptable to the world of post-modernism to eschew plot and character, as a reader of fantasy, I have distinctively old fashioned tastes and literary values. Most of all I desire from fantasy a sense of magic and wonder, something that establishment post-modernism can only look askance at.

McClanahan's attempt rethink the Peter Pan story has its parallel with the movie Hook and Dave Barry's Peter Pan prequels. His deconstruction of fantasy has its parallel in Neil Gaiman. Post-modernism and deconstructionism get a bad rap as a means for academic elites to sit on their thrones and arrogantly heap scorn over anything that does not fit in with their politically correct values and sense of what counts as literature. The thing that I admire so much about Gaiman, with his Sandman graphic novels and American Gods, is that while he is busy deconstructing mythology he does it from a perspective of love and admiration for it. One never gets the sense that he is talking down to his material. Rather it is his desire to find a way to make mythology meaningful in a post mythological age. I would contrast Gaiman with Gregory Maguire and his Wicked series. While I loved the musical version of Wicked, I find his books to be effused with this arrogant cynicism. His deconstruction of the Wicked Witch of the West seems to stem not just from an innocent desire to rethink the world of Oz, but as a put down to L. Frank Baum as a sexist male. To me, fantasy is about a sense of wonder. Even if we go into dark places; it should be as a sense of tragedy. If the hero is going to go down it should be in saving the world that he loves and that we the reader love in turn. A good example of this, again in a fantasy with a strong deconstructionist element, is Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series. Snarky moralist preaching of either the traditional or post-modern kind has no place in fantasy. While I love C. S. Lewis, this is the major weakness of the Narnia series. I think Lewis serves as a good lesson here, though, in that he can get you to overlook his Christian moralizing with the sheer sense of wonder he offers in Narnia. (That and a killer sense of satire that allows you to take his preaching with a wink and a nod.)

Lost and Not Found falls into the camp of Maguire. McClanahan walks into the world of Neverland not out of a childlike sense of wonder, but out of an adult's cynicism. I do not get this sense that he loves Neverland or Peter Pan. On the contrary, Peter is a contemptible child and Neverland, a child's world, is to be replaced by something more "adult" like Haven. The one thing about Neverland that he seems to like is Tinkerbell. If I were to sum up the novel it would be as his personal sexual fantasy with "Tink." (I assume it is not for nothing that the main character goes unnamed.) Not that McClanahan's love scenes, while numerous, are that graphic. That being said, they felt out of place and wrong and in that sense pornographic.

As a lover of fantasy literature, I look forward to the day when fantasy achieves the literary respect it deserves, when Lord of the Rings is seen as not just great fantasy, but one of the greatest works of twentieth century literature period. As much as I want this, I would not have it by selling out to post-modern deconstructionism. Fantasy should be the bastion to stand against such cynicism. If that means that we never get the respect of the "literary" types then so be it.

Historians in the Philosophy Department: A Response (Part IV)

(Part I, II, III)


I would like to say a few words about the issue of post-modernism and why I object to it.

This is a picture of me at the Museum of Modern Art in Los Angeles (MoMA). I am standing next to one of the exhibitions, which consisted of the New York Daily News covered in bird droppings. Now I am not opposed to the message of the work, namely that the Daily News is a load of bird droppings; I agree. I also agree that this work raises a valuable issue in that it challenges us to consider the nature of art; what is the difference between a work of art such as the Mona Lisa and a page of newspaper covered in bird droppings? The problem with this is that, while this is a great point, it is the enemy’s point. The conclusion to be drawn from being unable to distinguish between the Mona Lisa and a page of newspaper covered in bird droppings is not that the page of newspaper with bird droppings should go up in a museum and that we should have a museum of modern art devoted to such work but on the contrary, that we should not bother sticking up the Mona Lisa in a museum and that we should send the Mona Lisa and all the rest of the works housed in the Louvre in the trash bin along with the page of newspaper with bird droppings, thus allowing us to use the Louvre for something that actually benefits people.

At the Barcelona debate in 1263, Nachmonides was forced to respond to Christian charges that the Talmud confirms the truth of Christianity. At the beginning of the debate Nachmonides admitted to being puzzled by this; how it could be that the rabbis of the Talmud, living centuries after Jesus, could believe in Jesus and still reject Christianity? It seemed to be a matter of course for Nachmonides that, if the rabbis of the Talmud believed that Jesus was the Messiah and the Son of God, they would have done the intellectually honest thing and ceased practicing Judaism and converted to Christianity. Obviously, Nachmonides never met a post-modernist.

Post-modernism thrives on people undermining the legitimacy of their own work and still having the chutzpah to ask that society fund them in their endeavors. It is called deconstruction. If post-modernists really believed in what they were doing and were intellectually honest they would admit that the entire humanities field, including their own particular slice, was worthless and they would pack up their things and leave academia. Frank Donoghue wishes to blame our business-oriented society for killing off the humanities and he is right. What Donoghue does not ask is why the humanities have so utterly failed to defend themselves and make their case to society in the face of the business suits and number crunchers. For that, you need Allan Bloom. Bloom, in his Closing of the American Mind, blames the modern left, with its worship of cultural relativism and its deconstruction of values, for bringing about a situation where even the humanities have no value. If all values are relative and there are no ultimate questions let alone ultimate answers then why should someone spend years of their lives studying Plato and Aristotle; why not just go to law school and make as much money as you can. Bloom was a tenured professor at the University of Chicago so his main concern was attracting students. As a graduate student, who made the choice to study history instead of going pursuing law school, my concern is getting a job at the end of the day. If the humanities have no value then why should a university bother to make the investment in hiring me?

I have a suggestion for all post-modernists out there. If you do not believe that the humanities have intrinsic value and if you do not even believe in ultimate questions and in ultimate truths then please have the intellectual honesty to leave the university system; pack your bags and get a job in the real world. There are few enough jobs in the humanities as it is; the least you can do is leave those jobs to those who actually believe in what they are doing.

War and Peace: My First Conference Presentation and My Weekend at Purdue University (Part I)

For the weekend of April 3-4 I was in Lafayette IN for a conference at Purdue University, titled War and Peace: Discourse, Poetics, and Other Representations. This was my first conference presentation and I presented my paper on David Reubeni. The conference was for graduate students so this was certainly a minor league affair, but I am glad that I was able to attend as this summer I will be presenting at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds England, a major league affair. As one might expect from the title, this conference was pretty top heavy in terms of post modernism. Of the presentations I attended Cory Driver’s and mine were the only ones that were not open exercises in post modernism. There was also the issue of liberal politics; as one might expect there was a fair amount not so subtle Bush bashing with some shots at Israel thrown into the mix. All in all it was a wonderful conference, though, and I really would like to thank the people who helped put it together particularly John White and also Jessica Raffelson, who chaired my session.

I was in a bit of quandary in trying to find accommodations for Shabbos. I was in luck and was put in contact with the Aldrich family and was able to spend Shabbos with them. Dr. Daniel Aldrich is a professor in the political science department at Purdue. He and his wife are now on my list (somewhere near the Klappers) of things that are right with Orthodox Judaism. They are one of the few Orthodox people in Lafayette and Dr. Aldrich’s wife home schools their three adorable children. They have also lived in Japan for a number of years, during which time Dr. Aldrich wrote articles, on the side, for the Haredi newspaper Hamodia about living as a Jew in the Far East. I presented on Friday but was thinking of walking back to Purdue on Shabbos to sit in on at least some of the day’s presentations. In the end I did not; I was having too much fun at the Aldrich’s. I had a great discussion with Dr. Aldrich about my favorite polemical topic, Haredim. I was on the offensive, he was on the defensive. This ended up branching out into post modernism; it turns out that he is even more hostile to post modernism than I am. I had to defend my willingness to use such terms as “Imperial Haredism” or “Haredi creation of the Other.” I do recognize the value of certain post modern terms, questions, and concepts as long as they do not become ends in of themselves.

As to the conference itself. The first panel was on Theorizing War and was chaired by Sol Neely. Ethan Sproat of Purdue University spoke on “War and Its Purification.” It was an examination of Kenneth Burke’s views on war within the context of Friederich Nietzsche. According to Burke, war is an object of communication and as a means of communications. This is Burke’s attempt to look at the symbolism of war as a means of getting around the act of war itself. Burke was influenced by Nietzsche. Nietzsche viewed war as the actions of people who already lived condemned lives. Actual war is a disease; it is built around a cult of empire and relies on dissipation and fanaticism. This is a type of reasoning that desires to eliminate all forms of opposition; Nietzsche refers to this as a “diseased form of reasoning.” Burke notes that all organisms live by killing. Move from the hand to the fist. Nietzsche also recognized this need for violence.

Nietzsche felt comfortable only with Heraclitus who said that “things become through war.” Strife is required for cooperation; there is a value in having enemies. Nietzsche self consciously used “war” instead of “strife.” War is a onetime event instead of something continuous. He believed in attacking ideas that have been victorious where one stands alone in opposition. One attacks ideas and not people. To attack is proof of good will. One can only wage war against equals. Nietzsche believed that it was important in preserving the enemy even the Church so in a sense Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity was, from his perspective, a true act of love.

Burke employs Nietzsche’s use of war as a way of establishing community. There is an element of competition; we engage in communion through competition. A pure act is always symbolic. As applied to war this would mean war without actual war, just the symbols of war. Pure war preempts actual war and reverses the relationship between symbols and actions.

Sproat ended his presentation with a nod to those in attendance. This conference is an act of pure war. We engage and challenge others. Despite our differences we still see engagement as something of inherent value. The questions becomes how do we bring these values of pure war to those already engaged in actual war.

Despite the underlying liberal polemic and post modern discourse of this presentation I did enjoy this one. Particularly since I love Nietzsche and it was wonderful to see someone embrace Nietzsche whole heartedly without any concern for being labeled a racist a Nazi or, even worse, a sexist.

(To be continued …)

Can You Speak Post-Modern? Embedding Neoliberalism: Crisis, Sexuality and Social Reproduction

This comes from an abstract for a lecture to be given at Ohio State next week, sponsored by the Women’s Studies Department along with the Center for Latin American Studies and the Mershon Center for International Studies. The speaker is Dr. Kate Bedford of the University of Kent UK.

Embedding Neoliberalism: Crisis, Sexuality and Social Reproduction
The talk seeks to intervene in a vibrant and publicly prominent debate within development studies about the role of crisis in “postneoliberal,” or Post Washington Consensus, policymaking. Gender and, especially, sexuality are largely absent from that debate, Dr. Bedford asks: What do contemporary experiences of crisis reveal about the complex interconnections between rupture and shock on one hand, and gender and sexuality on the other? In concrete crisis conditions, which common sense groundworks of the present (re Nikolas Rose) get unsettled, which get re-entrenched, and what is the role of the development industry in this process?

The talk will address how possibilities for alternative regimes of gender and sexuality are affected by economic crisis, using a case study of the World Bank’s response to the 2001-2 Argentine crisis. Using interviews with NGOs and Bank policymakers and fieldwork on a family – strengthening loan entitled PROFAM, Dr. Bedford will argue that the denaturalization of free markets was articulated, in part, through the re-naturalization of monogamous heterosexual couplehood. Changes in the Bank’s agenda were articulated in part through discourses of restoring gender harmony disrupted by economic crisis and in part through a “civilizing” rhetoric that linked “better, more caring” development to the emergence of better, more caring couples. This raises crucial questions about the new regimes of gender and sexuality under construction in contemporary development practice.
Here is my attempted translation and commentary:

This talk is a response to an important debate (at least something that Dr. Bedford thinks is important) within the study of global capitalism’s use of crises now that we have moved past traditional Western thought and now that America is no longer that important (Cheer). Those in power and making policy decisions have not fully embraced radical leftist attempts to change how society views the relationship between men and women. Dr. Bedford asks: What do the experiences of crisis today tell us about the connection between change on one hand and about the relationship between men and women on the other? In specific crisis situations, in which the basic groundworks of today (re Nikolas Rose) are removed, what are the values (that we on the left were supposed to have eliminated) that have (unfortunately) managed to survive, and what is the role of global capitalism in all of this.

The talk will suggest how the economic crisis gets in the way of (leftist) attempts to redefine the relationship between men and women, using the specific case of the World Bank’s response to the 2001-2 Argentine crisis. Using interviews with NGOs and Bank policymakers and fieldwork on a family – strengthening loan entitled PROFAM, Dr. Bedford will argue that the destruction of society perpetuated by free markets has been helped along, in part, by the strengthening of traditional marriage. Changes in the Bank’s agenda were articulated in part by arguing for traditional relations between men and women, which had been affected by the economic crisis, and in part by arguing that caring families made for a caring society. This raises concerns whether those people making policy decisions in developing countries are fully on board with (leftist) attempts to change how men and women relate to each other.

In summary, the point of this piece seems to be that the World Bank is encouraging traditional family values in Argentina and we should not be happy about that.

Stanley Fish and the Wine Hoax

I consider Stanley Fish to be one of the great public intellectuals of our day. I may not always agree with him, but I have great respect for him. He is one of the world’s foremost scholars on John Milton and he also manages to be a highly coherent and readable political thinker. He might be one of the leading advocates of post modernism, but he is the sort of post modernist that I can accept. He is someone who uses post modernism as an analytical tool and not something to be worshipped for its own sake.

With all due respect to Fish, though, he suffers from an inability to get over the fact that he was connected, if only tangentially, to the Sokal Hoax. The Sokal Hoax has become a legend among critics of post modernism as the moment that post modernism was called out as an emperor with no cloths. Here is what happened. In 1996 Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at NYU, sent a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to Social Text, a journal published by Duke University and considered to be one of the main organs of post modern thought in America. This paper was full of post modernist jargon and not something that could be easily understood by members of the lay public. Apparently the editors of Social Text could not understand Sokal either or were just too lazy to bother so they simply published the article, relying on the fact that Sokal had a PHD and his article sounded good. Once the article was published Sokal revealed to the public what his article was actually about; it argued that the laws of physics and mathematics were cultural constructs, with no inherent validity. While it would seem that Fish was not involved with the publishing of Sokal’s essay, he taught at Duke at the time. Fish has never gotten over this embarrassment and has repeatedly inveighed against Sokal for the “unfairness” of it all and declaring that it proves nothing.

Recently Fish returned, once again, to this issue, responding to a similar hoax played on the magazine Wine Spectator by critic Robin Goldstein. Goldstein created a wine list for a completely fictitious restaurant, Osteria L’Intrepido, and managed to get a rating from the magazine. Fish brings down Wine Spectator’s Executive Editor Thomas Matthews’ response that yes his magazine was taken in by a hoax, but that it was a very elaborate hoax. Goldstein went through the trouble of providing them with an address and phone number and even went so far as to create a website for his nonexistent restaurant. As far as Matthews is concerned it is unreasonable that the readers of his magazine should expect them to actually go to the restaurant and see if they actually have the wines they claim to have.

Fish sees a parallel between what happened to Wine Spectator and what happened to Social Text. They both accepted submissions on good faith, which turned out to be hoaxes. For Fish this says nothing about the intellectual legitimacy of either institution. They operate on the assumption that those who submit things to them are acting on good faith. For support Fish refers to Simon Blackburn, who, in response to Sokal, argued that, as someone whose expertise is in philosophy, he could not be expected to judge the historical validity of articles submitted to him. The example he gives is of someone sending him an article arguing that Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy was influenced by his experience in Venice.

With all due respect for such eminent scholars as Fish and Blackburn, this is nothing less than an apology for intellectual laziness. Part of being an academic is that you are not inclined to take things on good faith. The whole point of academic publishing is that a book or article is to be peer reviewed and not simply one person’s opinion. When I, the reader, pick up a piece of published academic literature I am supposed to assume that not only is it the work of an accredited academic scholar but also that it was read by other accredited scholars, capable of judging the piece, and that these scholars, at the very least, found no reason to object to it. I, the reader, am the supposed to take what I am reading on good faith, but the only reason why I can do that is because I am taking it on good faith that those who screened what I am reading were not talking the author on good faith.

Off of the top of my head I would not be able to tell you if Hobbes was ever in Venice or not. I do know that he spent a significant amount of time on the continent after he fled England due to the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I. If a paper came across my desk, something maybe written by a student, with the thesis that Hobbes was influenced by his experience in Venice I would bother to actually check if Hobbes was ever actually there. If do not readily find such information and the student proves incapable of producing it then that student will fail.

I am about to take my general exams. The people on my committee will demand that I not only sound like I know what I am talking about but will also insist that I actually know what I am talking about and will call me on it if there is any hint that I am bluffing. When I write my dissertation I will have to defend what I write in the face of knowledgeable scholars, who will have no hesitation in taking what I have written, ripping it up in my face and telling me that my work is garbage. I do not claim to be perfect, but I do hold myself to a certain standards and there are people who will hold me to those standards.

This is what academic scholarship is about. We are supposed to demand a high standard of ourselves and if we are not qualified to comment on something we should excuse ourselves and remain silent. This is what separates us from the rest of society and this is what gives us our authority. While it may be perfectly acceptable for Rush Limbaugh or Matt Drudge to simply pass on any bit of information that supports their cause without careful investigation, academics, if they wish to claim greater legitimacy than Limbaugh and Drudge, must make it obvious to everyone that they operate on a higher standard. This is particularly true for those who are in the humanities. Since we do not deal in hard empirical facts our very legitimacy rests on the unchallengeable quality of our scholarship. People may disagree with our conclusions but they must never have the grounds to challenge the intellectual process that have gone into our conclusions. If we cannot live up to this goal than there is no point to our enterprise.

The people who read Sokal’s essay and agreed to publish it are a disgrace. They should have all been fired from their possessions and never allowed to work as academics again. Their incompetence endangers not only post modernism but all academic scholarship. Sending hoax articles to journals should be a common occurrence in order to keep people honest. Those in the lofty position of editing journals should have to be on their guard. Allow a hoax to be published on your watch and your reputation and your career will be at an end.