GORMAN BEAUCHAMP
Orwell, the Lysenko Affair, and the Politics of
Social Construction
A
YEAR OR SO AGO
The New York Times
included in its Metro–
politan Diary the following anecdote, a dialogue between a
father, driving, and his three-year-old son sitting beside him:
Son: Look, Daddy, I just saw a black Mazda.
Dad: That wasn't black.
It
was dark blue.
Son,
indignant:
If
you was me, sitting in my seat, you would have
seen a black Mazda.
Dad,
with a sigh:
Okay, it was a black Mazda.
Son,
emphatically, after a pause:
No, it was red.
If
current academic trends hold and the child sticks
to
his guns, he will
no doubt find a tenured spot waiting for him in one of our elite univer–
sities and a place on the editorial board of
Social Text,
for he has
grasped precisely-from his infant seat, so
to
speak-the ethos and
modus of postmodernism. As the academy's increasingly shopworn
"discourse," postmodernism effaces, as Christopher Norris puts it, "all
sense of difference between truth and falsehood, reality and illusion,
serious and non-serious discourse." Or as one of its proponents Zyg–
munt Bauman strenuously observes, the postmodern "braces itself for a
life without truths, standards, ideals." And, he might have added,
largely without facts . A British writer, for instance, outlined in
The
Guardian
what the postmodern university is to look like: "'Facts' are a
much despised, lower order munitions, as out of date as the rifles of the
Crimean War. The arsenals of facts should be kept discreetly in the
background and the University should not 'impose' these facts upon stu–
dents if they don't want to be told about them." Similarly, the new his–
tory to be taught in our high schools, if the California-based National
Center for History (NCH) has its way, will not be much burdened by
facticity. Defending its agenda for curricular reform,
National Stan–
dards-United States History,
one NCH member proposed on the
McNeil/Lehrer Newshour:
"Let's let the kids out of the prison of facts,
