Review

Fashionable Nonsense

Co-Author Alan Sokal, a physics professor, is famous for a hoax he perpetrated in 1996. He wrote a deliberately meaningless article, consisting of pseudo-scientific quotes, from prominent "postmodernists," connected by strings of gibberish. With the appealing title of Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, the article was published in a prestigious postmodern journal. Afterward, Sokal published a disavowal, identifying his piece as a parody. (It is re-printed as an Epilogue to this book.)

This book takes up where Sokal's hoax left off. Postmodernism, Sokal and Bricmont state, has "atomized humankind into cultures and groups having their own conceptual universes." Fashionable Nonsense reveals, and repels, the postmodernist war on the exemplar of objectivity in our culture: science.

In some cases, the authors' scientific knowledge allows them to uncover the postmodernists' falsehoods and distortions. Most of the quotes selected, however, are so self-evidently bizarre that one needs no specialized knowledge to judge them.

Einstein's theory of relativity, for example, is – according to one critic – actually a social theory of power, representing "a struggle for the control of privileges, for the disciplining of docile bodies." Physics is said to be "sexist," because it explains the behavior of solids better than that of liquids. ("Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids.")

The most philosophically interesting part of the book, and the most philosophically mixed, is a 55-page "intermezzo," criticizing philosophical relativism – the notion that there are no objective truths, only "relative" truths. Although Sokal and Bricmont stand on shaky ground (claiming, for example, that the existence of an external world can be demonstrated only on the pragmatic grounds that science seems to "work"), they subtly analyze the verbal trickery employed by relativists such as Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.

More that just a lengthy "horror file" on postmodernism, Fashionable Nonsense is a powerful weapon in the battle to save science from its intellectual assailants.

(300 pages)

This review is courtesy of and copyright © by the Ayn Rand Bookstore.

Books

• Fashionable Nonsense, Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. A powerful exposé of the irrational means by which modern intellectuals attempt to undermine science and all objectivity.