A Deconstructionist's Confession
The April issue of Harper's includes a striking auto-critique from a French practitioner of "science studies" named Bruno Latour. The whole piece is worth tracking down and reading, but the following passage gives the basic idea:
What has become of critique, I wonder, when an editorial in the New York Times contains the following quotation from Republican strategist Frank Luntz:
"Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue."
Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show "the lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not try to fool the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument -- or did I? I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objective facts. But was I mistaken? Have things changed so fast?
Perhaps the danger no longer stems from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact -- which we have learned to combat so efficiently -- but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases... Entire PhD programs are running to ensure that good American kids learn that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth... and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same arguments to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.
Those of us who consider ourselves to take a skeptical/intellectual/questioning view of the world can certainly identify a bit with this passage:
What has become of critique when my neighbor in my little Bourbonannais village looks down on me as hopelessly naive, because I believe that the United States was attacked by terrorists?... Things have changed, at least in my village. I am now the one who naively believes in some simple facts...
9:36:47 PM 
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