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So these days, when I talk to my scientist friends, I offer them a deal. I say: I’ll admit that you were right about the potential for science studie… - Michael Bérubé
" "So these days, when I talk to my scientist friends, I offer them a deal. I say: I’ll admit that you were right about the potential for science studies to go horribly wrong and give fuel to deeply ignorant and/or reactionary people. And in return, you’ll admit that I was right about the culture wars, and right that the natural sciences would not be held harmless from the right-wing noise machine. And if you’ll go further, and acknowledge that some circumspect, well-informed critiques of actually existing science have merit (such as the criticism that the postwar medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth had some ill effects), I’ll go further too, and acknowledge that many humanists’ critiques of science and reason are neither circumspect nor well-informed. Then perhaps we can get down to the business of how to develop safe, sustainable energy and other social practices that will keep the planet habitable.
Fifteen years ago, it seemed to me that the Sokal Hoax was making that kind of deal impossible, deepening the “two cultures” divide and further estranging humanists from scientists. Now, I think it may have helped set the terms for an eventual rapprochement, leading both humanists and scientists to realize that the shared enemies of their enterprises are the religious fundamentalists who reject all knowledge that challenges their faith and the free-market fundamentalists whose policies will surely scorch the earth. On my side, perhaps humanists are beginning to realize that there is a project even more vital than that of the relentless critique of everything existing, a project to which they can contribute as much as any scientist–the project of making the world a more humane and livable place. Is it still possible? I don’t know, and I’m not sanguine. Some scientific questions now seem to be a matter of tribal identity: A vast majority of elected Republicans have expressed doubts about the science behind anthropogenic climate change, and as someone once remarked, it is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his tribal identity depends on his not understanding it. But there are few tasks so urgent. About that, even Heisenberg himself would be certain.
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About Michael Bérubé
Michael Bérubé (born 1961) is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches American literature, disability studies, and cultural studies. He is the author of several books on cultural studies, disability rights, liberal and conservative politics, and debates in higher education.
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Michael Berube
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Additional quotes by Michael Bérubé
I’m not suggesting that every aspect of popular culture has the pedagogical potential of Antigone or the Aeneid, and I’m not suggesting that “classic” popular culture can do all of the intellectual work of core courses in Western Civ. The advent of “classic” popular culture means, among other things, that the cultural dreck of your childhood has somehow survived to become the cultural dreck of your children’s childhood. But it also means that popular culture is not necessarily ephemeral after all, and that the saga of Star Wars and the faux funk of KC and the Sunshine Band may in fact unite the past two generations more effectively than any number of Great Books and Western Civ courses. The curious thing about teaching popular culture these days, then, is really this: while so much of it is transitory and ephemeral, so much of it, surprisingly enough, seems to be here to stay.
In an important sense, then, the discourse of affiliation is both more and less pernicious than the discourse of professionalism. For the problem with the rhetoric of professionalism, as it pertains to professors of English, is that the conditions of employment in the humanities are not professional enough; we see ourselves as analogous to doctors and attorneys but have no professional apparatus comparable to the AMA or ABA and accordingly far less control over our working conditions.
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In foreign affairs, both left and right claim to speak for the conscience of America, but on Iraq the right has no moral clarity and the left has lost its moral compass. This is not a problem for the masters of realpolitik, who have long since inured themselves to the task of doing terrible things to human beings in the course of pursuing the national interest, but it is utterly devastating to those few souls who still dream that the course of human events should be judged — and guided — by principles common to many nations rather than by policies concocted by one. The emergence of the antiwar right, however, may yet hold a lesson for the left, insofar as the antiwar right relies on Brent Scowcroft’s internationalism rather than Pat Buchanan’s isolationism: the challenge clearly is to learn how to be strenuously anti-imperialist without being indiscriminately antiwar. It is a lesson the American left has never had to learn — until now.
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