Intellectual integrity and education in the modern age.

One of the great delights of blogging is to be able to contribute one's personal insights on the events of the day. We find it hugely interesting to scrutinize what others say and write, first because we are curious about whether others have a minimal grasp of their mother tongue and, second, because it is first rate intellectual stimulation to make an individual judgment about the factual assumptions, logical abilities, political allegiances, psychological problems, or ethical standards of those others.

Though our blog is not streaking to the stratospheric heights of worldwide readership, we greatly enjoy contributing in some small way to this wonderful new medium, the blogosphere, which permits many, many obscure but intelligent people to publish corrections and exposés. Needless to say, in the days of the dinosaur media, as Laura Ingraham calls them, we were lucky to get even an edited letter to the editor published.

This is now changed, as is obvious to anyone not at this moment undergoing electrocunvolsive therapy.

On top of which we have a chance at discovering our community of souls or kindred spirits in the most unlikely and faraway places without having to write and publish a book or engage in some Herculean effort.

The single most influential college course we ever took was taught by Thomas Hall at Washington University in St. Louis, The History of Zoological Ideas. It was nothing more than a thinly disguised course in remedial reading but it proved to offer up the most powerful intellectual tool we have ever encountered, namely, the injunction that one focus on what the text before one's eyeballs actually says and that one make an active determination how that text relates to the next, and the next to the next, etc.

This seems obvious and oh so simple, but it was exacting in requiring that the reader actively think about each building block of a written argument rather than taking an Evelyn Woods Speed Reading approach. This latter approach placed great emphasis on whizzing through text in a shallow winnowing process lest one drown in a sea of words, 98% assumed to be fluff.

So, with that underpinning to our education, it is amazing to contemplate that Prof. Alan Sokal was able to put words before the editorial eyeballs of a certain publication and have them fail utterly to detect error one in what was a deeply flawed document. He was able to have an article that was essentially gibberish published in Social Text, which parody was undetected by its editors.

In his "Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword," the professor writes:

Like the genre it is meant to satirize -- myriad exemplars of which can be found in my reference list -- my article is a mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever. (Sadly, there are only a handful of the latter: I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack.) I also employed some other strategies that are well-established (albeit sometimes inadvertently) in the genre: appeals to authority in lieu of logic; speculative theories passed off as established science; strained and even absurd analogies; rhetoric that sounds good but whose meaning is ambiguous; and confusion between the technical and everyday senses of English words.2 (N.B. All works cited in my article are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented.)

The implications of this accomplishment are profound if one accepts that such analytical weakness is pervasive not just a solitary exception to the norm. Prof. Sokal's quote of C.P. Snow in his Afterword also makes clear that even highly educated people are ignorant of the most basic facts of science. In our own time, the questionable conclusions of "global warming is caused by human activity" partisans and the adulation of seemingly educated persons for Michael Moore and his pathetic sophistries suggest that logic competence and fidelity to the facts are not Job One for a goodly number of people.

The Colonel is contemplating a book about American society whose title, loosely stated, would call to mind the fable of the emperor's new clothing and the prominent role played in our public life by sheer delusion.

We would no doubt discuss the energetic, committed unwillingness of our political elites to confront the imminent danger of Islam and the erosion of the national identity as a result of illegal immigration. These are evidence of a gigantic disconnect between fact and policy choice.

And we would dwell lovingly on the wholesale failure of all Americans to appreciate the extent to which the Constitution of the American Republic of 1789 has been all but completely abrogated by the Supreme Court.

Good luck finding many schools that will teach on even one of these topics.

Larry Laudan has this delicious thought about low intellectual standards in America (though the blogosphere has significant redoubts of logic and integrity, praise be to God):

The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.

-- Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism (1990, p. x)

Quoted in Afterword, above.

Prof. Sokal revealed significant failure at the supposed top of American intellectual life. Jay Leno in his Man on the Street interviews reveals significant failings amongst the superficially educated.

The role played by exacting analysis in these circles is not readily discernible. We can only hope that other nations are similarly afflicted by hypotrophic critical faculties.