Book summary “Higher superstition”: summary

Introduction

You live in a culture where academic elites frequently treat natural science not as objective inquiry, but as a biased social construct. When you examine modern humanities and social sciences, you find a growing hostility toward scientific objectivity, empirical standards, and technological progress. This hostility undermines public trust in research and distorts education.

The contemporary academic left exhibits a systematic hostility toward modern natural science, substituting postmodern jargon and political ideology for genuine technical understanding.

Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt expose this intellectual rift by examining how cultural critics misinterpret scientific disciplines. The book traces the historical roots of antiscientism, analyzes feminist and postmodern critiques of science, and evaluates the impact of ideological pseudoscience on education and public policy.

• How did academic humanists abandon their historical alliance with scientific rationality?
• What mechanisms allow profound scientific illiteracy to masquerade as sophisticated critique?
• How does radical environmentalism and identity politics threaten empirical research?

1. The Academic Left and Science

A significant segment of the contemporary academic left exhibits a systematic disparagement and hostility toward modern natural science, avoiding technical substance while relying on moral one-upmanship.

Leftists traditionally allied with science against religious dogma and superstition. Now, the academic left attacks the internal methodology, educational systems, and even the reliability of scientific knowledge itself. You can observe how critics view science as an ideological prop of capitalist and patriarchal power structures.

A senior scholar in science studies defended the right of fundamentalist school boards to mandate the teaching of creationism in science classrooms. She found religion less troubling than the idea that science uncovers objective truths.

Methodological Flaws

Critics of science on the academic left systematically avoid learning the actual substance and technical details of the disciplines they critique. Protected by specialized new-age and postmodern tools, humanists pontificate about advanced physics or molecular biology without mastering basic mathematics or laboratory methods. You see them substitute moral authority and jargon for genuine technical understanding.

Scholars write tirades about the semiotic tyranny of DNA without ever having stepped inside a real laboratory or understanding basic pharmacology.

The success of left-wing critiques relies primarily on moral one-upmanship rather than logical arguments or empirical evidence. Critics deflect substantive scientific debate by accusing dissenters of corporate ties, old-boy networks, or white-male-European hegemony. When you challenge postmodernism, you are dismissed as a defender of a crumbling Western episteme rather than engaged on the merits.

The Sokal Affair

Physicist Alan Sokal exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of postmodern science critique by successfully publishing a deliberate parody in a prominent cultural studies journal. Inspired by Higher Superstition, Sokal composed his parody in Fall 1994. He blended poststructuralist jargon with absurd claims about quantum gravity and submitted it to the journal Social Text.

The editors published it as a serious piece in the tainted issue that appeared in May 1996. The hoax revealed the lack of editorial rigor and the reliance on pretentious posturing within the science-critique subculture.

2. Natural Science and Its Natural Enemies

Historical Roots

Historically, the scientific worldview has served as an essential ally to emancipatory and egalitarian social movements. From the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment onward, the empirical and skeptical methodology of science provided a powerful weapon against authoritarianism, superstition, and traditional hierarchies. You can see how this foundation supported causes like abolitionism, women's rights, and social reform.

Laplace famously explained the absence of God from his cosmology by stating he did not find the hypothesis necessary. This assertion served as a war cry of ideological defiance against dogmatic authority.

Contemporary antiscientific postmodernism shares its core philosophical roots with the Romantic revulsion against Enlightenment rationalism. Romantic poets and counterrevolutionary thinkers like Joseph de Maistre distrusted empirical reasoning. You find that they celebrated intuition and holism over exact analysis, and this same skepticism is coopted by modern cultural constructivists to undermine scientific objectivity.

Romantic poets like William Blake and Goethe distrusted strict mathematical rationalism. They feared a world dominated by impersonal scientific thought.

Cultural Constructivism

Cultural constructivism conflates the uncontroversial observation that science is a human activity with the extreme claim that scientific facts are mere social conventions. While weak constructivism rightly notes that cultural needs and funding influence which research topics are pursued, strong cultural constructivism asserts that scientific theories do not describe the real world. They are merely self-referential discourses dictated by ideology and power.

Cultural constructivism replaces empirical rigor with ideological assertions about power.

Sociologist Harvie Ferguson claimed that twentieth-century relativity theory was not a product of scientific advances. He argued that it was a direct reflection of the inner collapse of the bourgeois ego.

Sociological studies of science like those of Bruno Latour misrepresent empirical verification as mere social power struggles. Latour treats laboratories as anthropological field sites. He argues that scientific controversies are settled solely through network-building and social negotiation rather than correspondence with an objective natural reality.

Bruno Latour analyzed the failed Paris public transportation project Aramis, which continued under high-level funding for about a dozen years. He focused on semiotic metaphors and social representations while completely ignoring software algorithms and technical complexities.

Revisionist histories attempting to portray early experimental science as an exclusive tool of plutocrats ignore the substantive mathematical incompetence of its critics. In their study of Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes, Shapin and Schaffer argue that the Royal Society established an exclusionary club serving political elites. However, they ignore Hobbes's severe mathematical blunders and genuine scientific incompetence during his disputes.

Thomas Hobbes published incorrect solutions to the ancient problems of squaring the circle and duplicating the cube. These errors prompted mathematician John Wallis to demolish his pretensions. Such episodes demonstrate how historical revisionism often overlooks the reality of technical competence during the 1660s, when the air pump was a rare experimental device and the plague year of 1665 witnessed profound breakthroughs by Isaac Newton.

3. Postmodernism and Feminist Science Criticism

Postmodernism defines itself as the negation of the Enlightenment project, rejecting universal knowledge claims in favor of situated local stories. While the Enlightenment sought to discover foundational truths of physical and biological phenomena, postmodernism views such attempts as inherently futile and oppressive. It holds that all knowledge is local and produced by social classes, treating knowledge projects simply as politics by other means.

Scholars in English, comparative literature, and cultural studies have largely adopted postmodernism as a unifying doctrine, drawing upon poststructuralist theories to explain societal problems through discourse rather than production. Cultural anthropology and sociology have increasingly adopted postmodern jargon and relativism, allowing researchers to avoid the rigorous demands of empirical verification and falsification under the guise of political activism. Cultural anthropologist Robin Fox noted that academic departments of English are reconstituting themselves as cultural studies and drawing social science students away from objective science.

Postmodern cultural critics frequently misapply deep scientific and mathematical concepts, committing elementary errors while claiming to overturn established science.

Misuse of Science

Critics invoke advanced mathematics and physics concepts like Gödel's incompleteness theorem, topology, and the speed of light as metaphors validating postmodern relativism. However, they typically lack formal training in these fields, confusing technical terms with literary tropes and misunderstanding basic mathematical definitions.

Jacques Derrida referred to the approximate speed of light in vacuo denoted by the Einsteinian constant $c$ of 300 million meters per second as the concept of the game, and Steven Best claimed that Newtonian mechanics uses linear equations.

Feminist Epistemology

Feminist critique of mathematics attempts to introduce political and gender-based values into pedagogy through the rewriting of word problems. Critics argue that traditional algebra word problems reinforce sexist stereotypes through their narrative scenarios, proposing instead that problems feature female heroes and non-traditional domestic arrangements to make disempowered students comfortable.

Maryanne Campbell and Randall K. Campbell-Wright criticized standard algebra problems involving traditional couples or contractor workers while offering problems featuring characters like Sue and Debbie financing a home valued at $70,000.

Collaborative groups like the Biology and Gender Study Group analyze nineteenth- and twentieth-century biological literature to claim that descriptions of sperm-egg interactions reflect patriarchal values, substituting warrior metaphors for objective biological processes. The Biology and Gender Study Group critiqued a popular 1890 physiology book by Sir Patrick Geddes and John Arthur Thomson analysed by the BGSG for characterizing eggs as anabolic and vegetative and spermatozoa as catabolic and active.

Feminist philosophers of science like Sandra Harding argue that standard scientific methodology is inherently androcentric and must be reformed through standpoint epistemology. Harding contends that modern science is inextricably linked to patriarchal power structures and that objective knowledge can only be enhanced by incorporating marginalized perspectives and political struggles into the scientific process. Sandra Harding asserted in her book that traditional scientific worldviews exclude the history of physics from seeking causal explanations and require a total reinvention of theorizing itself, alongside 143 items listed on science and feminism in the undergraduate library reserve reading section of the authors' university during summer vacation.

Helen Longino argues that contextual social values inevitably influence scientific research because hypotheses contain assumptions outside direct empirical observation. Longino distinguishes between constitutive values of scientific method and contextual social values, asserting that because hypotheses include background assumptions, contextual values can play an active role in scientific reasoning without necessarily rendering the science invalid. Longino examined prenatal androgenization studies in behavioral endocrinology, arguing that researchers' interpretations of children's toy preferences and behaviors were influenced by contextual gender norms.

4. The Gates of Eden and Environmentalism

Radical environmentalism promotes an edenic ecologism and intellectual embargo against science, while postmodern theorists treat the AIDS epidemic as a mere semiological construct.

Radical Environmentalism

Radical environmentalism and the academic left promote an edenic ecologism that rejects modern technology, industrial civilization, and Western science in favor of a primitive, decentralized lifestyle. Activists and academic theorists argue that ecological degradation stems from Western values, capitalism, and patriarchal systems, proposing a return to tribalism and an end to technological intervention.

Novelist Ursula Le Guin's novel Always Coming Home portrays the Kesh, a fictional future tribe that rejects technology, abstract science, and ambition while living in harmony with nature.

Radical environmentalists operate an intellectual embargo, eagerly adopting alarmist hypotheses while systematically ignoring subsequent scientific findings that refute or moderate those doomsday predictions. When preliminary studies suggest a catastrophic threat, ecoradicals amplify the warnings; when later rigorous investigations correct or dismiss the initial fears, such as overblown toxicity claims, the radicals suppress or ignore the good news.

The initial panic over dioxin and the Alar apple scare caused massive public alarm and economic damage before being recognized as vastly overstated by subsequent scientific consensus. A July 17, 1992 Federal Register announcement removed large numbers of substances from the list of carcinogens based on updated toxicology.

Some distinguished scientists deliberately adopt alarmist public rhetoric and stress worst-case scenarios to capture public attention and secure funding, which inadvertently fuels radical environmental misinterpretations. Scientists face a double ethical bind where cautious, provisional statements fail to move the public or policymakers, leading some to amplify scary scenarios while downplaying their doubts sotto voce.

Atmospheric scientist Stephen Schneider candidly admitted that offering up scary scenarios and making simplified statements is necessary to get media coverage and public support. This sometimes involves illustrating the difficulty of communicating small-probability risks with a hypothetical two percent chance that the sky will fall.

Activist Jeremy Rifkin's popular critiques of technology and agriculture rely heavily on misinformation, hyperbole, and flawed scholarship while achieving guru status among academic radicals. Rifkin's books like Entropy, Algeny, and Beyond Beef combine unscholarly sources, creationist propaganda tracts, and misinterpretations of thermodynamics and evolution to attack modern science and capitalism.

In Beyond Beef, Rifkin attempts to link the 1980s agricultural crisis to a sweeping list of environmental ills, ignoring the actual political, banking, and climatic causes of local famines and farm problems.

The AIDS Epidemic

The postmodern academic left rejects empirical objectivity and logic as oppressive Western illusions, treating scientific facts merely as social constructs that can be dismissed when politically inconvenient. Postmodernists argue that science is not a process of discovering objective truths but a value-laden social construction, allowing them to accept science only when it predicts catastrophe and reject it when it offers reassurance.

Feminist philosopher Val Plumwood and ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant argue for a reconceptualization of the human-nature dualism that frees itself from rationalism and objective empirical validation.

The rapid identification of the AIDS pathogen and understanding of its etiology stand as a monumental triumph of modern molecular biology, cell immunology, and virology. Advanced biotechnology and genetic engineering techniques allowed researchers to pinpoint CD4+ T-cells as the primary target and identify the human immunodeficiency virus at an unprecedented speed.

Luc Montagnier's group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Robert Gallo in the United States independently identified HIV in 1984 as the causative lentivirus, following the 1981 publication of the first papers describing immunodeficiency in homosexual men and the 1982-1983 period when a catastrophic epidemic became clearly established in New York and San Francisco.

AIDS activists deployed two contradictory educational strategies: promoting the worst-case idea that everyone is equally at risk to maximize funding, and framing AIDS as a symptom of societal oppression against marginalized groups. While the universal threat message successfully enlisted broad public support and funding through celebrity figures, the narrative of systemic racism and capitalist oppression retreated to academic and fringe circles.

Media coverage frequently presented teen AIDS as a growing threat among white heterosexuals despite epidemiological data showing most cases were minority males and gay youths, even during the 1990 to 1991 period when the actual number of teen AIDS cases fell rather than grew.

5. Activism and Afrocentric Pseudoscience

Alternative medical hypotheses, animal rights extremism, and Afrocentric science pedagogy introduce flagrant historical falsifications into school curricula and threaten biomedical research.

Peter H. Duesberg, a distinguished Berkeley molecular biologist, led scientific criticisms questioning the communicable-disease hypothesis of HIV-AIDS. Critics of the standard model like Peter Duesberg and Robert Root-Bernstein argued that lifestyle factors and predisposing immunosuppressive agents rather than the virus are the primary determinants of AIDS. Robert Root-Bernstein compiled a list of predisposing immunosuppressive factors, including semen-induced autoimmunity, blood transfusions, multiple infections, and chronic drug use, arguing that healthy, drug-free people do not contract AIDS.

Larry Kramer founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT-UP, and published his polemical writings in Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist. He directed fierce polemics against the medical and government establishment, accusing them of genocide and indifference while simultaneously romanticizing the very sexual promiscuity that helped spread the epidemic. Postmodern theorists view science as just another cultural practice and power game. Cindy Patton described ACT-UP as using deconstructionist analysis and tactics, while Derrida characterized the social bond through the lens of AIDS.

Animal Rights

The animal rights movement, drawing on philosophical extensions of utilitarianism by Peter Singer and Tom Regan, poses a direct threat to biomedical research through harassment, sabotage, and demands to ban animal modeling. Driven by philosophical arguments against using sentient animals as instruments, animal rights activists have subjected researchers to severe harassment, threats, and laboratory raids.

Dr. Moossa at the University of California at San Diego was forced to stop a postgraduate surgery course after receiving an anonymous death threat from an animal rights activist. Animal modeling remains absolutely essential because complex physiological and molecular processes cannot be fully understood using cell cultures or computer simulations alone. A 1985 National Research Council summary volume on Models for Biomedical Research noted that 86 percent of the 139 Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine listed from 1901 through 1984 employed animals as experimental systems.

Afrocentrism

Promoted by figures like Ivan Van Sertima and Hunter H. Adams, Afrocentric science texts exaggerate minor historical curiosities into major technological breakthroughs. Academic leftists and postmodernists endorse these claims to avoid applying Western standards of objectivity.

Hunter H. Adams authored the Baseline Essay in Science for the Portland public schools, claiming early Africans understood quantum physics and mastered psi. These texts misinterpret artifacts such as Egyptian bird figurines as working gliders, and cite 3.16 as the Egyptian approximation of pi alongside Euclid's work in Alexandria from 300 B.C. and Adams's 1969-70 staff role at the University of Chicago.

The academic left's uncritical praise of postmodern critiques creates a dangerous intellectual climate that degrades public understanding of evidence and threatens educational integrity.

Because humanities scholars and social critics are reluctant to apply rigorous skepticism to work that aligns with their political sympathies, pseudoscience and relativism have gained institutional prestige. Bernard Ortiz de Montellano faced severe resistance and rejection from the American Anthropological Association when attempting to present critical evaluations of Afrocentric pseudoethnography.

6. The Role of Scientists

Public discourse is severely degraded by ideological quackery, requiring scientists to actively resist the intrusion of unscientific dogmas into curricula and peer review.

Public health officials struggle against strident denunciations of Western scientific paradigms by advocates offering cheap and fast alternative modes of healing. Environmental discourse is similarly hijacked by unrelenting ecobabble and misleading slogans like environment friendly that cover up practices that are neither sane nor friendly.

Defending Education

You must ensure that science courses possess substantive empirical content validated by legitimate modes of inference. Scrutinize non-departmental seminars and make your misgivings public when unscientific dogmas threaten institutional integrity.

Action Plan for Scientists

You can maintain professional standards by following concrete steps in institutional governance:

• Ensure that science courses have substantive scientific content validated by legitimate modes of inference.
• Scrutinize courses, seminars, and symposia addressing scientific matters outside official science departments.
• Make misgivings public and insist on being included in debates concerning science and culture.
• Exercise a voice in hiring, firing, and tenure decisions regarding humanist scholars making pronouncements on science.

Scientists must break away from traditional academic isolation and sit on evaluation committees when candidates publish work analyzing science as an ideological construct.

10 Key Ideas

1. The contemporary academic left exhibits a systematic hostility toward modern natural science, substituting postmodern jargon and political ideology for genuine technical understanding.
2. A significant segment of the contemporary academic left exhibits a systematic disparagement and hostility toward modern natural science, avoiding technical substance while relying on moral one-upmanship.
3. Cultural constructivism replaces empirical rigor with ideological assertions about power.
4. Postmodern cultural critics frequently misapply deep scientific and mathematical concepts, committing elementary errors while claiming to overturn established science.
5. Radical environmentalism promotes an edenic ecologism and intellectual embargo against science, while postmodern theorists treat the AIDS epidemic as a mere semiological construct.
6. Alternative medical hypotheses, animal rights extremism, and Afrocentric science pedagogy introduce flagrant historical falsifications into school curricula and threaten biomedical research.
7. The academic left's uncritical praise of postmodern critiques creates a dangerous intellectual climate that degrades public understanding of evidence and threatens educational integrity.
8. Public discourse is severely degraded by ideological quackery, requiring scientists to actively resist the intrusion of unscientific dogmas into curricula and peer review.
9. You must ensure that science courses possess substantive empirical content validated by legitimate modes of inference.
10. Scientists must break away from traditional academic isolation and sit on evaluation committees when candidates publish work analyzing science as an ideological construct.