Norman Levitt

Scientists leading the March of Progress!

One of the 'born again' American 'Science Defenders', Norman Levitt (Mathematics Prof. at the Conservative US university, Rutgers ) is (or perhaps we should say 'was', as he died last year...) a self-proclaimed socialist and "unabashed Whig". Actually, he's something rather different, but we can pass on that... Anyway, his writings outlive him, at least slightly, and these say that history is "a march of progress, leading steadily to a more enlightened social order and to an increasingly accurate grasp of the principles underlying the natural world", as he puts it in terms uncannily similar to ["paradigms#toc0 | Karl Popper] writing on ‘historicism’ - only Popper was against it. Not so Levitt who has plodded through several books on his ‘science good, modernity bad’ theme. But let his books speak for themselves:

“science must automatically be declared the outright winner whenever it comes into conflict with contradictory belief systems”

and “Science "has no room for human values, purposes, ethics, or hopes". Science "cannot sustain moral judgments". ¹

Kenan Malik’s sympathetic review ² of ‘Prometheus Bedeviled’ (Yes, him again, see ["British Science Fascists], and Hitler's quote) in the little-read London newspaper, The Independent on Sunday gives the flavour too:

“Science, Levitt argues, is by far the best means we have invented for understanding our world. It is not simply one way of knowing the world, on par with other forms of knowledge. It is the crowning glory of human intellectual endeavour and the only means of obtaining reliable, accurate and objective knowledge about the world around us. The privileged access to truth that science provides should ensure that it has a privileged place in society. Social institutions from schools to law courts to legislatures should prioritise scientific evidence above any other forms of knowledge.

Such a view, Levitt acknowledges, inevitably creates unease and resentment. Much of this is because science is an elitist calling.”

Levitt and Gross explain how their Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science should be read:

This is a book about politics and its curious offspring, not about epistemology or the philosophy of science; we cannot therefore refute, in abstracto, the constructionist view.... Nor are we obliged to do so: serious philosophers have been at it for decades.

The most interesting thing about Levitt is that this book apparently inspired Alan Sokal to conduct his "experiment" into sending deliberate ‘pseudoscientific’ nonsense to the respected literary journal ‘Social Text’ who were pleased to have received anything from a ‘real scientist’.

Richard Lewontin, co-author, of The Dialectical Biologist, writes:

"What Gross and Levitt have done is to turn their back on, or deny the existence of, some of the most important questions in the formation of scientific knowledge."

According to Louis Proyect of the ‘Marxism mailing list’ (which describes itself as a worldwide moderated forum for activists and scholars in the Marxist tradition who favor a non-sectarian and non-dogmatic approach):

“It is painfully obvious that Levitt has morphed into a reactionary slug of the kind that is making life difficult for radicals in the teaching profession. There has been a well-orchestrated campaign afoot for a number of years to silence pro-Palestinian professors, people such as Ward Churchill, etc. All this is taking place in the name of “restoring balance”, creating higher academic standards, etc. But make no mistake, the ultimate goal is to purge the university of reds and pinkos, whether they are classical Marxists or trendy followers of postmodernist fashion.

[...] The last time I saw Sokal was at a conference at the New School in October 2001 on “Science, Knowledge, and Humanity: Debating the future of progress” that was organized jointly by Norman Levitt, spiked-online and Virginia Postrel, the editor of Reason, a libertarian magazine, and an occasional contributor to the NY Times business pages.”

Don’t read: Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture (1999) or The Flight from Science and Reason (1997)