How Things Have Changed

Tim Lambert blogs about my recent op-ed with Alan Sokal, and notes that Norman Levitt--co-author of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, another key contribution to the old "science wars"--also seems more concerned today about rightwing abuses than left wing attacks. As Levitt put it in an e-mail to Lambert: "The book was written in 1992-93, at the beginning of the Clinton administration, when Creationism in any form was pretty quiescent, and before most of the Republican bludgeoning of science that Mooney addresses had really begun." Levitt adds that today's right wing abuses are "anything but an academic matter." Some have suggested to me that it just reawakens bad feelings to bring up the whole 1990s "science wars" once again, but I disagree. This was an important historical moment for the whole politics-of-science issue. It is also clearly a past moment, and I think it's very illuminating to consider current problems in light of what had gone before. That's what Sokal and I were trying to do in our op-ed.