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chemists and physicists.... Narcotics and horoscopes, little men with
pointed ears and margarine-gurus, the pitiful bullying of encounter
groups and the trek to Katmandu, the orgone box and the nauseous,
million-dollar industry of Satanism in the movies, on television and in
magazines - all breathe and feed the same hunger, the same solitude, the
same bewildem1ents."
The triumph of "the reenchantment industry" went increasingly up–
scale in the 1970s, winning numerous adherents even in academia.
Mysticism was holding its own, Roszak noted, even in the universities,
where numerous Zen and Tibetan "spiritual masters" had found their
most fertile recruiting ground.
In
the more high-flown renderings, the
late writings of the enigmatic Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
and the theories of the historian-philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn
were invoked to explain why knowledge is inevitably subjective and
group-bound.
In Wittgenstein's version of linguistic romanticism, it is community,
"togetherness, not intellectual penetration of the nature of things that
constitutes the life of the mind - truth neither individual nor universal is
at the mercy of contingent, unpredictable communa l custom."
Intellectual consensus was said to be a matter of social compulsion. And
a new consensus, it was argued, in a misappropriation of Kuhn's concept
of paradigmatic leaps, became a matter of new groups seizing academic
power.
In
effect, the new epistemology held out "hope" for a new
revolutionary seizure of the means of producing meaning.
What does this all have to do with PC? The norm of objectivity
had until the mid-70s served as a regulatory ideal for academic life.
Difficult though it was to obtain, it served as a kind of guiding principle.
But, concludes Ernest Gellner, "because all knowledge is dubious, being
theory-satu rated/ ethnocentric/paradigm-domiluted/ interest-Ii nked (please
choose your own preferred variant... ), the anguish-ridden author ...
can put forward whatever he pleases." In practical terms, the upshot on
the campus was that a mixture of a bullying moralism and interest-group
politics organized as competing claims to victimization came to domi–
nate campus life. Reality was to be rewritten and reinforced by a new
form of coerced consensus.
This all involved a fundamental misunderstanding of both Kuhn and
the history of science. All judgement is theory-saturated. But if science
can advance despite the fact that its observations are theory-saturated, it
suggests that we can gain tentative knowledge in the social realm as well.
This is because science depends not on the objectivity of the individual
researcher but on the process of verification in which researchers are
forced to defend their arguments against constant criticism. "The genius
of liberal science," writes Jonathan Rauch, "lies not in doing away with
