Toward the end of our previous thread, Lev took me to task for “lumping together” examples from three disparate fields, history, global warming and evolution, to show the propensity of certain present day conservatives to advocate positions that are fundamentally at odds with reality. Regarding history, Lev writes: “Interpretation of history, the way I see it, (please correct me if I am completely off the mark here) is unavoidably ideological. I remember our discussions of Orientalism, and how you pointed out the great role of ideology in interpretations of the relationship between West and East.” But while history cannot, in Lev’s view, be separated from ideology, global warming and evolution, “belong to domain of empirical science, which is much less prone to ideological influences.” Still, Lev notes a significant difference between these two fields: Darwinian evolution has been around for 150 years and is a well established element of modern biology. On the other hand, the science behind the model of global warming particularly as it relates to human causality is much less developed and remains a matter of legitimate scientific debate. Unfortunately, Lev writes, “both sides of the debate have vested economical interest in its outcome, and, therefore, something that should be a purely scientific matter has turned into a political circus.” Lev puts most of the blame for this on the “alarmist” side which has prematurely advanced preliminary and not fully confirmed results. Lev considers it naïve to attribute humanitarian motives to the “alarmists” and feels that they have “set a very bad precedent from the point of view of the integrity of scientific discourse. While I am not a climatologist,” he writes, “I have enough training to understand the complexity of the problem they try to model and the unreliability of any results in this area."
I would like to respond both to the general point about lumping things together and also to Lev's suggestion that history is always intertwined with ideology.
Lev writes that American history, Darwinian evolution and global warning are very different things and shouldn't be lumped together. Fair enough. I certainly wouldn't deny the differences. But above and beyond the fact that practitioners of all these fields find themselves under attack by right-wingers, there are some points in common.
ReplyDeleteAmerican History, Darwinian biology and the climate science behind the idea of global warming all represent fields at the stage that Thomas Kuhn calls "normal science." At this stage a broad consensus has been attained regarding the basic premises underlying the field--a workable paradigm is in place. The consensus, I would note, does not have to be total--there will always be people on the fridges who disagree to a greater or lesser extent. Nor does the consensus mean that all the problems have been solved. Quite to the contrary a paradigm at the stage of normal science opens up an enormous array of research problems and unresolved questions. But for the time being, the weight of opinion is that the paradigm is sufficient to explain the available evidence.
Of course, paradigms can and do change--this is the whole point of Kuhn's book. But it is incumbent on anyone who would challenge the governing consensus to produce anomalies--new evidence that the paradigm can not explain. In short, everything centers of how well a given model can explain the available evidence.
We can argue about this extent to which this Kuhnian model is applicable to our three fields. Lev's point that evolution has been around for 150 years and global warning much less is well taken. Still, a clear consensus has emerged among climate scientists on two points: 1) Climate change is occurring; and 2) Human activity is at least partially responsible. Every national academy of science that has taken a position on the matter has endorsed these points. As far as the science is concerned, the debate is over.
So why are we still talking about this (as opposed to doing something)? What has happened is that various right wing organizations, with generous funding from energy companies that directly stand to lose from a reduction in fossil fuel consumption, have emitted a slew of misinformation intended to create the appearance of an on-going scientific debate. For example, they have produced lists of "scientists" who purportedly question the idea of global warming. On closer examination, many of these signatories turn out either not to be scientists at all or to be in fields totally unrelated to climatology. The few legitimate scientists who actually did sign often didn't realize what they were endorsing. Several of these scientists have actually asked that their names be removed from one such list recently released by Republicans in Congress. Meanwhile, the evidence for global warming keeps piling up.
My point is that in all three of these cases, we see a clear scientific consensus based on overwhelming evidence rejected by people with little or no expertise, on the basis of preconceived ideological convictions. Who needs reality when you've got Fox News?
Moving on to Lev's point that history is inevitably ideological, I would only note that he has, in fact, taken the classic Marxist position. I believe it was Mikhail Pokrovsky, the dean of the Soviet historical profession in the 1920s and early 30s, who put it best: "History is politics spilled over into the past." Like all intellectual production, history, the Marxist argument goes, is part of the ideological superstructure arising out of the class struggle over the means of production. Historical truth can not exist as objective fact--it can only exist in relation to the class interest that it serves.
ReplyDeleteNeedless to say this is not a position for which I have a lot of sympathy. In fact, much of my participation in the discussions of orientalism that Lev mentions, was aimed at rejecting this sort of determinism. Perhaps, I'm an idealist at heart, but I firmly believe that historians and scholars in general can act independently of their economic, social and political interests in search of truth. Of course, I'm quite aware of all the complexity surrounding the notion of historical truth. I'm even prepared to admit that there can never be absolute certainty in reconstructing the past. Nor would I deny that our present day perspective inevitably colors our view of the past. What I object to is the notion that scholars have no agency or independent volition--all they can do is act out, like puppets, scripts prepared for them by ideological forces beyond their control.