GORMAN BEAUCHAMP
269
that it was a hoax, a variation on the confession of an Irish bishop that
he believed hardly a word of
Gulliver's Travels.
The Sokal hoax may have represented a temporary setback in the
postmodernist's campaign, like the Spartans in the pass at Thermopylae,
but the assault on scientific objectivity continues apace in a spate of
books and papers with titles like
Ethnomathematics
and "Queer Statis–
tics." Although, as Edward Rothstein notes, "no champion of ethno–
mathematics has provided examples of mathematical facts that are
culturally relative," still this lapse has not prevented postmodernists
from rehearsing their relativizing mantras. In such circles, as the
philosopher John Searle points out, "O'Brien is supposed to have tri–
umphed over Winston after all."
THE PROTOTYPE OF MOST twentieth-century dystopian fiction-in con–
tent, not form-is Dostoevsky's
Notes from Underground;
but students
of dystopia must be struck by the
I
80-degree turn that
Nineteen Eighty–
Four
takes from that seminal work, in which the Underground Man
argues precisely that, as a proof of human autonomy, two times two
should mean whatever we want it to mean at any given moment. For
Dostoevsky in the mid-nineteenth century the direst threat to human
dignity came from the crude scienticism that predicated all behavior as
rigidly deterministic, governed by inviolable laws. The radical
raznochintzy
or Nihilists (as Turgenev malaptly christened them) of
Russia in the 1860s worshipped at the altar of science: for through sci–
ence-and its sociological variant, positivism-the hated old order
would be destroyed, they believed, and the new, utopian order realized.
The millenarian schemes of such believers-captured in purest form
in the enormously influential, if enormously dull
tendenzroman
of
Nikolai Chernyshevsky,
What Is to Be Done?-provoked
Dostoevsky
to the writing of
Notes,
a riposte point by point of the mechanistic ·
determinism of Chernyshevsky, whose alter-ego in the novel declares,
for instance: "Your personality...is a fact. Your actions are necessary
conclusions from the fact....You are not responsible for them....You
acted as necessity dictated...and could not have made a different
choice." Confronted with such a conception of
fact
as this, with the
Nihilists' belief that human beings have no more autonomy than a
piano key that has been struck, the Underground Man opts for caprice,
for the indeterminate and unpredictable, even for the willfully irra–
tional.
