The Social Construction Blues

Sanford Pinsker

The Social Construction of What?
By Ian Hacking.
Harvard University Press.
$29.95.

Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction?
By Michael Ruse.
Harvard University Press.
$27.50.

Let me begin with a confession: I am one of those old-fashioned sorts who associates the scientific method with scrupulously objective observation, the rigorous testing of hypotheses, and explanations of the natural world that are as precise (and, yes, true) as they are often poetic. No doubt my admiration for scientists who engage in the slow, demanding work of laboratory experimentation springs from a sense (confirmed by a wide range of teachers) that I possessed a world-class math block, and that I would not likely push the scientific envelope one smidgen. Add the unhappy fact that I happen to be a diabetic and you can easily see how it is that I cheer, positively cheer, any researcher hard at work on a cure for what ails me.

I take a measure of solace, however, in reminding myself that many combatants in the science wars know even less about hands-on science than I do. Small wonder, then, that genuine scientists, the ones who work with Bunsen burners and chalk up on the blackboards, often regard the culture studies crowd with such contempt. That’s where I may have something of an advantage because the same attacks now being mounted on scientific authority are old hat to those of us in literary studies who watched our discipline become systematically destabilized. Bashing Shakespeare, either as Exhibit A in the hegemony of dead, white, European writers or, more recently, as an apologist of empire, became a way to ask, again and again, questions beginning with whose: Whose greatness? Whose excellence? And most important of all, whose interest is being served? Dressed up in the impenetrable language that may well be postmodernism’s defining feature, the agendas of identity politics rolled over those who talked about novels and poems (rather than "texts") and who believed, on aesthetic grounds, that some books were better than others. Such innocents often found themselves contemptuously dismissed as under-theorized, or worse.

As someone who has suffered these slings, these arrows, I know full well how cultural warfare works–and also how a spongy term such as "social construction" can easily be applied to everything from authorship to Zulu nationalism. That’s why Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? is such a gratifying book. It covers a wide range of clashes about everything from how best to treat mental illness, child abuse, or anorexia, to the current research being done in sedimentary geology–and always with an eye on the specific "what" in question. My hunch is that Hacking has little patience with much that currently travels under the wide umbrella of social construction ("both obscure and overused," he snorts), but also that he recognizes useful thinking when he sees it:

Social construction has in many contexts been a truly liberating idea, but that which on first hearing has liberated some has made all too many others smug, comfortable, and trendy in ways that have become merely orthodox. The phrase has become a code. If you use it favorably, you deem yourself rather radical. If you trash the phrase, you declare that you are rational, reasonable, and respectable.

Given the vitriol on both sides of the science wars, Hacking serves a valuable function by explaining, in language as clear as it is smart, what noncombatants in the science wars need to know. Here, for example, is what he has to say about socially constructed anorexia:

Unfortunately, social construction analyses do not always liberate. Take anorexia, the disorder of adolescent girls and young women who seem to value being thin above all else. They simply will not eat. Although anorexia has been known in the past, and even the name is a couple of hundred years old, it surfaced in the modern world in the early 1960s. The young women who are seriously affected [their exact numbers are currently a subject of hot debate] resist treatment. Any number of fashionable and often horrible cures have been tried, and none works reliably. In any intuitive understanding of "social construction," anorexia must in part be some sort of social construction. It is at any rate a transient mental illness, flourishing only in some places at some times. But that does not help the girls and young women who are suffering. Social construction theses are liberating chiefly for those who are on the way to being liberated–mothers whose consciousness has already been raised, for example.

Since Peter L. Berber and Thomas Luck Mann published the first study to use "social construction" in its title (The Social Construction of Reality, 1966), we have been awash with imitators. Most of them concentrate on the "how it is" that our consciousness has been changed, and always, we are told, for the good. By contrast, the what that so interests Hacking hardly matters. Even fundamental physics is not immune in an age when some argue that scientific results, like everything else, are social constructs rather than discoveries about our world that hold independently of society.

We think of this fundamental debate separating social constructivists from objectively grounded scientists as yet another aggravating feature of postmodernism, but in fact it is quite old. In 1898, long before the term "social construction" was coined, Edwin J. Goodwin, an Indiana legislator, proposed a bill that would make ¹ = 3.2–and furthermore, that people using his "New Mathematical Truth" be required to cough up royalties. The scheme, part of other misguided efforts at the time to "square the circle," was eventually defeated. But it’s not hard to imagine other, equally daffy efforts to have a social tail wag the scientific dog. Who, after all, would be surprised if a contemporary version of Goodwin proposed that ¹ get rounded off to 3.0 rather than its more cumbersome 3.14 °? My imaginary politician might argue that, with enough votes, the natural order could be changed–and in ways that would certainly please the lazier students of his state.

Unfortunately, there would be other, unforeseen consequences as well. Many more scientifically minded folk were quick to point out that nobody would want to stand near buildings designed by an architect who used a 3.0 ¹ (or a 3.2 one, for that matter) in his calculations–and this is especially true for structures sporting domed roofs. Unfortunately, the sort of fuzzy thinking that once turned charlatans into objects of derision is now taken very seriously indeed.

Flash forward to Alan D. Sokal’s wickedly delicious 1996 parody of theory-heavy science. His essay was a torpedo below the water line, a deadpanned way of holding pretentious lingo and vacuous ideas up to ridicule. It demonstrated, as no "straight" account ever could, just how much nonsense was passing itself off as cutting-edge thought. Sokal’s jawbreaking title, "Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," should have been enough to tip off the editors of Social Text, but given their preference for airy postmodernist theorizing, it is hardly surprising that they accepted his tangled arguments about the social construction of gravity. Peel away phrases such as "privileged epistemological status" or "oppositional discourse," and copious footnotes to the likes of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, or Luce Irigaray, and what one discovers is that gravity has a strong social component. Indeed, what Sokal proposes (with tongue lodged firmly in his cheek) is that gravity can operate quite differently in New York City than it does in San Francisco–depending, of course, on how the respective citizens decided this matter at the ballot box.

Sokal, you will remember, brought his 1996 hoax to the attention of Lingua Franca, a journal that enjoys nothing more than a juicy academic scoop, and the rest, as they say, is history. The wire services jumped on the story and in short order Social Text became a national laughingstock. Not even the intellectually playful Stanley Fish was able to provide effective damage control–although he made a pinch-faced effort in a New York Times op-ed piece that scolded Sokal for "bad faith" and other crimes against the scientific community. But Fish’s sophistry didn’t wash–not for scientists pursuing the truth about how our world works, and certainly not for those who had long regarded postmodernist theorists as self-proclaimed emperors parading around without clothes.

I mention the much-aired Sokal hoax not only because Ian Hacking and Michael Ruse give it significant attention in their respective books but also because the flap itself sets the framework for what might be called "Social Construction: Round II." For Hacking, what matters most in the talk, pro and con, about social construction is the what at the immediate issue. Is it facts or gender, quarks or reality? Is it a person, an object, or an idea? Ruse puts it a slightly different way when he proposes that we may have been asking the wrong questions all along, and that, rightly seen, what we have is a situation in which both camps can mount strong arguments:

Our ultimate concern [Ruse argues] is surely with the issue of realism. Does an objective "real world" exist "out there" that can be known through the methods of science, or is science a subjective construction corresponding to shifting contingencies of culture and history, with nothing "real" beneath it? Are the epistemic norms of science guaranteed to lead us to a knowledge of this world, and if so why? Or are the epistemic norms also simply part of culture in the end, on a par with the metaphors of science? I worry about these questions [which Ruse obviously feels are the right ones], and now candor forces me to admit that–on the evidence we have–one could reasonably argue for either realism or nonrealism!

That is, one can make a case for Karl Popper who believes that there is indeed a "real world" out there. We may never know it exactly, but (in Ruse’s words) "‘truth’ is the correspondence of our ideas with this world, and the aim and method of science is to approach such truth, if only asymptotically"; or one can make an equally compelling case for Thomas Kuhn who believes that "there is no reality other than that seen through and created by the paradigm." His fair-mindedness (if that is what Ruse’s waffling comes to) reminds me of the Yiddish joke about the rabbi who listens to a couple seeking a divorce. The husband begins first, outlining his grievances (she is a lousy cook, a sloppy housekeeper, etc.). The rabbi gazes thoughtfully at the ceiling and proclaims, "You’re right!" He then goes on to hear what the maligned wife has to say (her husband is a lazy bum, and beats her to boot), and after giving the ceiling another look, announces: "You’re right!" "But rabbi," a witness interjects, "how can they both be right?" Stroking his beard, the rabbi sidesteps the contradiction with this playful retort: "Nu, so you’re also right!"

If Hacking takes up the pros and cons of socially constructing damn near everything, Ruse at least has the advantage of focusing squarely on evolution. Mystery of Mysteries not only follows the twists and turns of the long debate about evolution, but it also provides lively portraits of the major participants. Here, for example, is a snippet from the section devoted to Charles Darwin:

Start with religion. . . .The young Darwin moved from Christianity to deism, and evolution was for him, as for his grandfather, a confirmation of his religious position rather than an anomaly. This was the philosophy of the Origin: "Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual." Later in life, particularly under the influence of Huxley, Darwin’s beliefs faded into agnosticism. Even then, however, he did not go through the Origin systematically removing references to God.

Ruse provides equally compelling (and balanced) portraits of contemporaries such as Stephen Jay Gould and Edward O. Wilson. The result is a study that charts the progress of thinking about evolution and that shows how what was once a debate became a bitter dispute. Here it might be helpful to think of evolution as a kaleidoscope. Turn the cylinder one way and its shapes arrange themselves into one pattern; give it a quarter twist and you end up with something else, equally plausible so far as Ruse is concerned. My hunch is that Hacking would feel much the same way–that is, if we substituted one social construction of x for another.

Both Hacking and Ruse provide insider information delivered from a vantage point well above the fray that the science wars have produced. My hunch is that those on either side of the aisle will be unhappy with at least some of their observations–that is not only to be expected, but applauded. The consequences of science are simply too important for scientists and nonscientists alike to settle for tunnel vision, half-truths, and gobbledygook.