Quatsch!

Minnesota Law Review

Volumn 83, Issue 6, 1999, Pages 1681-1706

  Finkin, Matthew W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

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EID: 0347945140     PISSN: 00265535     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (110)

1. DANIEL A. FARBER & SUZANNA SHERRY, BEYOND ALL REASON: THE RADICAL ASSAULT ON TRUTH IN AMERICAN LAW 3 (1997) (quoting Salman Rushdie).
2. See generally id.
3. Daria Roithmayr, Guerillas in Our Midst: The Assault on Radicals in American Law, 96 MICH. L. REV. 1658, 1662 (1998).
4. Id.
5. The term banal means that which is "open to the use of the entire community" as well as the more common usage, as something trivial. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life, in 36 THEORY AND HISTORY OF LITERATURE 43 (1986).
6. KARL MARX & FRIEDRICH ENGELS, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in BASIC WRITINGS ON POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY 26 (Lewis S. Feuer ed., 1959). This was, perhaps, explained by Marx and Engels a bit earlier, in 1846: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.
7. KARL MARX & FRIEDRICH ENGELS, THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY: PARTS I & III, at 39 (R. Pascal ed., 1947).
8. Cf. GEORGE M. MARSDEN, THE SOUL OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: FROM PROTESTANT ESTABLISHMENT TO ESTABLISHED NONBELIEF 434 (1994) (reference omitted): Today, however, the idea of such objective science no longer seems viable and many critics have pointed out the community-relative character of moral ideals, including those that limit academic freedom. In the present context it seems much more plausible to view all ideals for the social good as sectarian and the sciences that serve those ideals as equally so. There is little basis for sustaining the illusion that "academic freedom" is part and parcel of an open-minded scientific search for truth that ought to exclude the substantial influence of all religious viewpoints. Marsden is no radical multiculturalist. He recites their relativism in order to plead a place in the academy for religiously-determined truth.
9. FARBER & SHERRY, supra note 1, at 26 (quoting Neil W. Hamilton).
10. Id. (quoting Gary Peller).
11. Id. at 31 (quoting Thomas Ross).
12. Id. at 96 (quoting Patricia J. Williams).
13. Farber and Sherry observe that inasmuch as the radicals measure scholarship by political tests, scholars have been browbeaten by the radicals because of political differences. See id. at 103. They point inter alia to "[t]he vilification of Julius Lester, drummed out of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts for essentially refusing to stand silent while other blacks made anti-Semitic remarks." Id. at 104. This fails to capture the full meaning of the episode. In 1988, Lester wrote critically of James Baldwin whom he alleged to have remained silent some four years earlier while anti-Semitic remarks were delivered. Lester's allegations only capped a long process of estrangement with the Department resulting in the publication of a pamphlet signed by fifteen members of the department, including its Chairman, calling Lester an "anti-Negro Negro." W. E. B. DUBOIS DEP'T OF AFRO-AM. STUDIES, JAMES BALDWIN ON BLACKS AND JEWS 26 (1988).
14. One member of the department was quoted in the press asserting Lester's "flight from blackness." Jonathan Kaufman, At U Mass, Comrades Have Become Combatants, BOSTON GLOBE, July 25, 1988, at 1. In sum, the members of the Department of Afro-American Studies reserved to themselves the prerogative to define what authentic blackness spoke. By mutual agreement, Lester transferred to the Department of Jewish Studies. See id. at 21.
15. Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness As Property, 106 HARV. L. REV. 1707, 1710, n.3 (1993) (citation omitted).
16. See JOYCE APPLEBY ET AL., TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT HISTORY (1994) (stating a powerful extended argument for the incorporation of new critical insights while rejecting the excesses of postmodernism).
17. Id. at 203 (italics added).
18. FARBER & SHERRY, supra note 1, at 26 (quoting Gary Peller).
19. With appreciation the late Sir Peter Medawar, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1960, stated: When the word is used in a scientific context, truth means, of course, correspondence with reality. Something is true which is "actually true, is indeed the case. This is empirical truth - truth in the sense in which it is true to say that I am at this moment delivering the Romanes Lecture and not standing on my head on an ice floe in the North Atlantic; and you know that correspondence with reality in just this sense is the test that all scientific theories must be put to, no matter how lofty or how trivial they may be. PETER MEDAWAR, Science and Literature, in PLUTO'S REPUBLIC 42, 52 (1982).
20. Though it would seem that the determination of whether or not the opinion of the readership is that the writer is indeed on an ice floe has to turn on an objective reference point, i.e., in the counting of the replies, else it be a matter of opinion what the opinion is in an infinite regression of opinions.
21. Gary Peller, Reason and the Mob: The Politics of Representation, in TIKKUN . . . To HEAL, REPAIR AND TRANSFORM THE WORLD 163, 165 (Michael Lerner ed., 1992).
22. Gary Peller, Reason and the Mob: The Politics of Representation, in TIKKUN . . . To HEAL, REPAIR AND TRANSFORM THE WORLD 163 (1992), Id. (emphases added).
23. Gary Peller, Reason and the Mob: The Politics of Representation, in TIKKUN . . . To HEAL, REPAIR AND TRANSFORM THE WORLD 163 (1992), Id. The passage is worth noting: [T]he deconstructive approach puts at issue what have been the traditional mainstays of our liberal and progressive commitment to Enlightenment culture. . . . The new critical approaches suggest that what has been presented in our social-political and our intellectual traditions as knowledge, truth, objectivity, and reason are actually merely the effects of a particular form of social power, the victory of a particular way of representing the world that then presents itself as beyond mere interpretation, as truth itself.
24. Gary Peller, Reason and the Mob: The Politics of Representation, in TIKKUN . . . To HEAL, REPAIR AND TRANSFORM THE WORLD 163 (1992), Id. (emphases added).
25. See MEDAWAR, supra note 17, at 52-53: We must at once dismiss the idea that empirical or factual truth as scientists use it (or lawyers or historians) is an elementary or primitive notion of which everyone must have an intuitive or inborn understanding. On the contrary, it is very advanced, very grown-up, something we learn to appreciate, not something that comes to us naturally.
26. The historian, Eric Hobsbawm, has drawn attention to the rise of "postmodernist" intellectual fashions in Western universities, particularly in departments of literature and anthropology, which imply that all "facts" claiming objective existence are simply intellectual constructions - in short, that there is no clear difference between fact and fiction. But there is, and for historians, even for the most militantly anti-positivist ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely fundamental. We cannot invent our facts. Either Elvis Presley is dead or he isn't. ERIC HOBSBAWM, ON HISTORY 6 (1997).
27. Cf. ALAN SOKAL & JEAN BRICMONT, FASHIONABLE NONSENSE: POSTMODERN INTELLECTUALS' ABUSE OF SCIENCE 91-92 (1998): [W]e do not see any fundamental difference between the epistemology of science and the rational attitude in everyday life: the former is nothing but the extension and refinement of the latter. Any philosophy of science - or methodology for sociologists - that is so blatantly wrong when applied to the epistemology of everyday life must be severely flawed at its core.
28. Issue is implicitly taken with this by a literary critic who has distinguished the existence of facts as we confront them in everyday life from facts as the stuff out of which scientific and other systematic knowledge is built, which she calls "epistemological units." MARY POOVEY, A HISTORY OF THE MODERN FACT: PROBLEMS OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE SCIENCES OF WEALTH AND SOCIETY 9 (1998). She argues that such "facts seem (and can be said) to exist . . . only when they constitute evidence for some theory - only, that is, when there is a theoretical reason to notice these particulars and name them as facts." Id. (emphases added). She later issues a reminder on point: "I place 'fact' and 'facts' in imaginary question marks to signal their socially constructed nature." Id. at 336. This rather wonderfully confuses the question of whether a fact exists at all with its relevance to a system of knowledge. According to Professor Poovey, that I might be starving (even until death) is not a "fact" until it is made relevant to a theory of nutrition, whereupon the fact that I have starved to death becomes a "social construct." Professor Poovey is correct: we can think of facts as existing only this way; but we don't, and there is no good reason why we should.
29. Judith Jarvis Thomson & Matthew Finkin, Academic Freedom and Church-Related Higher Education: A Reply to Professor McConnell, in FREEDOM AND TENURE IN THE ACADEMY 419, 428 (William W. Van Alstyne ed., 1993).
30. SOKAL & BRICMONT, supra note 24, at 54 (emphasis omitted).
31. Thomas L. Haskell, Justifying the Rights of Academic Freedom in the Era of "Power/Knowledge", in THE FUTURE OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 43, 71 (Louis Menand ed., 1996).
32. SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET, AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD 151 (1996).
33. See Deborah C. Malamud, The Jew Taboo: Jewish Difference and the Affirmative Action Debate, 59 OHIO ST. L.J. 915 (1998). (I am indebted to Daria Roithmayr for bringing this reference to my attention.) Professor Malamud speaks of the topic as a "Jew Taboo," id. at 968; but, as she acknowledges at the outset - and as her extensive references indicate - one subject Jewish social scientists have not been reticent about is the fact of and reasons for the success of Jews in America. The "taboo" part is her claim that success flowed from advantages the Jews "reaped . . . from the fact that another group - blacks - occupied the lowest rung on America's racialized social ladder." Id. at 969. Whatever the soundness of that claim, it proceeds from a socioeconomic explanation, not an ideological one.
34. See id. at 965-68.
35. One "critical race" proponent has addressed Farber and Sherry's argument in a review of the instant book: It is possible that dominant groups historically constructed merit standards that naturally favored their own cultural performances, but that after formal discrimination was outlawed, groups like Jews and some Asian groups in some professions began to outperform them on the measures they constructed. In contrast, other groups like Latino/as or African Americans, who had entirely different social, political, and cultural histories, continued to be excluded by those standards. This alternative explanation, completely ignored by the authors, is perfectly consistent with the radical critique of merit. Roithmayr, supra note 3, at 1669 (emphases added). Alas, this simply won't do. The first sentence assumes that the standards were in fact objective. Jews weren't excluded by the standards; they were excluded by overt discrimination, a refusal to abide by the standards, which refusal could not be continued in the face of anti-discrimination law. Such was a common explanation of why many large law firms began to hire Jewish associates after World War II; but, as the leading study of these firms in the 60s observed, that was not the main reason. See ERWIN O. SMIGEL, THE WALL STREET LAWYER 65 (1964). The strong bias of the major New York law firms against the hiring of Jews was breaking down under the sheer weight of "academically superior" Jewish lawyers being produced by Ivy League law schools. Id. at 45. By either account, however, the standards of merit were objective; and once they had to be consistently applied - either because the law required it or because it would have been economically foolhardy for firms to deny themselves such high quality talent - the Jews could not be kept out. The second sentence explains that other groups that have had "different . . . histories" (or had different "cultural performances") than the Jews were still excluded. Fair enough; but why were they still excluded? There are two possible explanations. The first is sociological - that for social, cultural, economic, and historical reasons, these groups find it harder to achieve than Jews and Asians. This seems the fair implication of Professor Malamud's treatment of the Jewish condition. But this is only to say that, with effort and over time, these groups can and will get there. That is, that the standards of academic merit are objective and adaptive for these groups just as for Jews and Asians. This would explain the situation; but it would be perfectly inconsistent with the radical critique of merit. The second explanation would maintain that the rules are still rigged - but now to favor Jews (and some Asians) over African-Americans. This explanation is perfectly consistent with the radicals' critique of merit; but, if the necessary next question - of why the rules are that way - is not to be answered in historical and sociological terms, then the answers necessarily implicate the anti-Semitic consequences that our "critical race" proponent inartfully dodges.
36. See Ruth Ginzberg, Feminism, Rationality and Logic, APA NEWSLETTER ON FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY, Mar. 1989, at 34, 37. The modus ponens in the inferential form: if P, then Q; P, therefore Q. See id.
37. See SOKAL & BRICMONT, supra note 24, at 109 (quoting Luce Irigaray). "To privilege" is to confer a special right or advantage, usually on a person or class. Postmodernists commonly employ the term in conjunction with their concept of hegemony; thus, a "privileged" equation, as a "sexed" equation, connotes a male equation, just as the modus ponens is said to embody a male system of rationality. A postmodern literary critic has extended the term beyond physics, beyond logic, to all of what she calls "numerical representation." POOVEY, supra note 24, at 4. Professor Poovey writes, "to assign numbers to observed particulars is to make them amenable to the kind of knowledge system that privileges quantity over quality and equivalence over difference." Id. (emphasis added). But we commonly represent ineffable qualities numerically, as in judging the beauty and form of competitive figure skating and gymnastics. More to the point, the sciences, quintessential "knowledge systems," do numerically represent the qualities of observed particulars and of the differences in them: Mohs' Scale numerically represents the relative difference in the hardness of minerals; the thermometer numerically represents the relative warmth or coolness of an object; et cetera. To say that Mohs' Scale privileges hardness (the particular it observes) over beauty (which it does not), or that the thermometer privileges the quantity of heat over its quality is gibberish; but so, too, is the attribution of sex to the constant for the speed of light.
38. See also FARBER & SHERRY, supra note 1, at 127-29 (discussing the intellectually closed aspect of radical multiculturalism).
39. ALFRED W. CROSBY, THE MEASURE OF REALITY: QUANTIFICATION AND WESTERN SOCIETY, 1250-1600, at 112 (1997) (references omitted). The words algorithm and algorism come down to us from the English corruption of Al-Khwarizmi.
40. THE OXFORD-DUDEN GERMAN DICTIONARY 585 (rev. ed. 1997) (colloquial) (Literally, "Quatsch with sauce."). Nor does this argument obviate the anti-Semitic and anti-Asian implications discussed above, for it has to explain why Jews and Asians were so willing to betray their ethnic essence.
41. FARBER & SHERRY, supra note 1, at 102.
42. Id. (quoting Robert Chang).
43. Id. at 106 (italics added).
44. Id. at 29 (quoting Richard Delgado).
45. Id. at 107.
46. ZEEV STERNHELL ET AL., THE BIRTH OF FASCIST IDEOLOGY 3 (David Maisel trans., 1994).
47. Id. at 7.
48. Id. at 10.
49. Id.
50. Id. at 24.
51. See GEORGE L. MOSSE, THE NATIONALIZATION OF THE MASSES: POLITICAL SYMBOLISM AND MASS MOVEMENTS IN GERMANY FROM THE NAPOLEONIC WARS THROUGH THE THIRD REICH (1975), for a fuller exploration of the role of myth and its expression by the use of symbols as an element of Fascism. Mosse argues that forms of expression utilized by German national socialism, its cultic and liturgic, even "magical" elements, have been neglected by historians who have looked largely to economic and social factors to explain the attraction of Fascism: "Millions saw in the traditions of which Mussolini spoke an expression of political participation more vital and meaningful than the "bourgeois" idea of parliamentary democracy." Id. at 4.
52. NORBERT ELIAS, THE GERMANS 360 (Eric Dunning & Stephen Mennell trans., Michael Schröter ed., Columbia Univ. Press 1996).
53. MAX WEINREICH, HITLER'S PROFESSORS: THE PART OF SCHOLARSHIP IN GERMANY'S CRIMES AGAINST THE JEWISH PEOPLE 21 (1946)
54. (quoting REICHSMINISTER RUST & ERNST KRIECH, DAS NATIONALSOZIALISTISCHE DEUTSCHLAND UND DIE WISSENSCHAFT 31 (1936)).
55. Id. (italics added).
56. Id. at 23
57. (quoting ALFRED BAEUMLER, ALFRED ROSENBERG UND DER MYTHUS DES 20. JAHRHUNDERTS 97 (1943)).
58. Carl Schmitt, Nationalsozialismus und Rechtsstaat, 63 JURISTISCHE WOCHENSCHRIFT 713 (1934) (translation by the author).
59. See JOSEPH W. BENDERSKY, CARL SCHMITT: THEORIST FOR THE REICH (1983).
60. Schmitt, supra note 51, at 714 (translation by the author) ("Das Wort Rechtsstaat ist kein jungfräuliches Wort mehr. Es ist liberaler Herkunft undwie Freiheit, Gleichheit, Fortschritt, Verfassungsstaat und ähnliche, an sich sehr schöne Worte-im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts ganz von liberalem Geiste imprägniert.").
61. Id. at 717 (translation by the author) ("Wir Deutschen sind stets in größter Gefahr gewesen, fremden Rechtsbegriffen widerstandslos zu unterliegen. . . . Wir haben im 19. Jahrhundert das sogenannte 'konstitutionelle,' d.h. liberal-rechtsstaatliche Verfassungsdenken rezipiert und uns den liberal-demokratischen Staats- und Rechtsidealen des Westens unterworfen. . . . Die politische Gefahr der geistigen Unterwerfung unter fremde Rechts- und Staatsbegriffe ist also groß und die Sorge um begriffliche Klarstellungen wohl begründet.").
62. Id. at 715 (translation by the author). "The unconditional premise," Schmitt concludes, is that each person who uses the word will "henceforth speak not of a national, or socialist, or nationalsocialist, but unreversedly of a national socialist German Rechtsstaat." Id. (translation by the author) ("Unter dieser Bedingung allerdings kann man das Wort gelten lassen. Unbedingte Voraussetzung ist jedoch, daß jeder, der sich des Wortes Rechtsstaat bedient, nun auch das erforderliche Beiwort hinzufügt und nicht mehr nur vorsichtig von einem nationalen, oder sozialen, oder nationalsozialen, sondern vorbehaltlos von dem einen nationalsozialistischen deutschen Rechtsstaat spricht.").
63. See generally Heinrich Lange, Generalklauseln und neues Recht, 62 JURISTISCHE WOCHENSCHRIFT 2858 (1933) (arguing that these general clauses failed to fulfill their real functions (ihre eigentlichen Aufgaben) in the liberal state).
64. Only later did Schmitt's anti-Semitic expressions grow more frequent, in part because of the use his enemies made of his prior association with Jewish colleagues. See BENDERSKY, supra note 52, at 227-29.
65. Erik Wolf, Das Rechtsideal des nationalsozialistischen Staates, 28 ARCHIV FÜR RECHTS-UND SOZIALPHILOSOPHIE 348 (1934/35).
66. Id. at 357.
67. See Eduard Kern, Zur Unabhängigkeit des Richters, 28 ARCHIV FÜR RECHTS-UND SOZIALPHILOSOPHIE 424, 425 (1934/35).
68. Id. at 426 (translation by the author) ("Der nationalsozialistische Richter sei zweifach gebunden: einmal an das Gesetz, sodann aber in seiner Ermessensfreiheit an die Ziele der Staatsführung. Die innere Verbundenheit mit der Staatsführung sei die Voraussetzung für die richterliche Unabhängigkeit.").
69. See Wolf, supra note 58, at 362. See generally DIEMUT MAJER, GRUNDLAGEN DES NATIONALSOZIALISTISCHEN RECHTSSYSTEMS: FÜHRERPRINZIP, SONDERRECHT, EINHEITSPARTEI (1987).
70. See EDITH ROPER & CLARA LEISER, SKELETON OF JUSTICE 140 (1941).
71. See id.
72. Id. The SS newspaper, the Schwarze Korps, which had approved of the decision, acknowledged receiving a protest letter, which asserted that under this theory, no one could be punished for killing a Jew: "Yes . . . no Jew who killed another Jew ought to be punished." Id.
73. See Von Arthur Kaufmann, Rechtsphilosophie und Nationalsozialismus, 18 ARCHIV FÜR RECHTS-UND SOZIALPHILOSOPHIE 1 (New Series) (1983).
74. This number of the journal is devoted to a symposium, Recht, Rechtsphilosophie und Nationalsozialismus, containing several insightful papers.
75. See id. at 16.
76. Id (quoting Ernst Forsthoff, Zur Problematik der Rechtserneuerung, in 19 ZEITWENDE 684 (1948) (translation by the author).
77. Forsthoff, a student of Carl Schmitt, was appointed to a professorship in 1933, at a very young age, upon the removal of all Jewish law professors from German law schools. Apropos of his then view of language, he wrote in a book review in 1934: "Every politically-spirited epoch develops a distinctive language in accordance with its thought. The superiority of a particular political way of thinking proves its success when its terminology is generally accepted and is taken as self-evident as a matter of course." Ernst Forsthoff, Otto Koellreutter: Der deutsche Fährerstaat, 63 JURISTISCHE WOCHENSCHRIFT 538 (1934) (translation by the author) ("Jede geistig-politische Epoche entwickelt eine ihrem Denken gemäße Sprache. Die Überlegenheit einer politischen Denkweise erweist sich am sichersten darin, daß es ihr gelingt, ihre Terminologie als die allgemein geltende und mit Selbstverständlichkeit aufgenommene durchzusetzen.").
78. Id. (translation by the author).
79. WEINREICH, supra note 48, at 37 (quoting PAUL RITTERBUSCH, IDEE UND AUFGABE DER REICHSUNIVERSITÄT 29 (1935)).
80. SEE RICHARD GRUNBERGER, THE 12-YEAR REICH: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF NAZI GERMANY 1933-1945 ch. 20 (Da Capo Press 1995). Nor was the politicization of scholarship limited to the social sciences and humanities.
81. See, e.g., ALAN D. BEYERCHEN, SCIENTISTS UNDER HITLER: POLITICS AND THE PHYSICS COMMUNITY IN THE THIRD REICH (1977).
82. See supra text accompanying note 13.
83. See JOACHIM PETSCH, KUNST IM DRITTEN REICH 76 (1994) (noting that the typestyle was invented by Otto Eckmann in 1901). Though George Mosse does not discuss this particular episode, it is a useful illustration of what he terms the "aesthetics of politics." MOSSE, supra note 46, at 21.
84. Sokal and Bricmont ruminate on the fact that the anti-rationalist tradition is usually associated with the political right, but that "what is new and curious about postmodernism is that it is an anti-rationalist form of thought that has seduced part of the left." SOKAL & BRICMONT, supra note 24, at 198. They essay some thoughts on why this has come about; and they make a cogent plea, from the left, for the abandonment of key features of postmodernism: If all discourses are merely "stories" or "narrations", and none is more objective or truthful than another, then one must concede that the worst sexist or racist prejudices and the most reactionary socioeconomic theories are "equally valid", at least as descriptions or analyses of the real world (assuming that one admits the existence of a real world). Clearly, relativism is an extremely weak foundation on which to build a criticism of the existing social order. Id. at 209.
85. See INGO MÜLLER, HITLER'S JUSTICE: THE COURTS OF THE THIRD REICH 162 (Deborah Lucas Schneider trans., 1991).
86. See id.
87. Id. at 161.
88. See id. at 162.
89. See id.
90. See id.
91. See FARBER & SHERRY, supra note 1, at 40-45.
92. ALAN CHARLES KORS & HARVEY A. SILVERGLATE, THE SHADOW UNIVERSITY: THE BETRAYAL OF LIBERTY ON AMERICA'S CAMPUSES 80-81 (1998).
93. Id. at 93.
94. Jacobowitz is of Israeli parentage and had studied in a Hebrew-language high school. In modern Hebrew, "water buffalo" is a slang term of mild derision meaning a loutish person or an idiot and is used commonly as such. See id. at 15, 24-25.
95. See generally id. at 9-33.
96. This aspect of the legal academy has rendered non-U.S. academics incredulous. See generally Reinhard Zimmermann, Law Reviews: A Foray Through a Strange World, 47 EMORY L.J. 559 (1998).
97. See generally David M. Rabban, Can Academic Freedom Survive Postmodernism?, 86 CAL. L. REV. 1377 (1998);
98. Edward Shils, Do We Still Need Academic Freedom?, 62 AM. SCHOLAR 187 (1993).
99. SOKAL & BRICMONT, supra note 24, at 206. After this was written, William Van Alstyne drew my attention to Thomas Nagel's The Last Word, which is less an attack on postmodernism than an incisive and elegant defense of reason. See THOMAS NAGEL, THE LAST WORD (1997). Suffice it to say here, Nagel points out that statements of the kind that all truth is "socially constructed," POOVEY, supra note 24, at 336, or there is "'no objective reference point[ ] separate from culture . . . to distinguish . . . fact from opinion,'" FARBER & SHERRY, supra note 1, at 26 (quoting Gary Peller), - that is, that all truth is conditional - are themselves unconditional, statements of a universal truth. See NAGEL, supra, at 15. Thus, they must be false. See id. That consequence might be avoided by changing the assertion from a universal to a conditional. But, being then only a conditional, it cannot deny the possibility of a universal. "To put it schematically," Nagel observes, "the claim "Everything is subjective' must be nonsense." Id.
100. See generally SOKAL & BRICMONT, supra note 24.
101. See HOBSBAWM, supra note 23.
102. See MARY LEFKOWITZ, NOT OUT OF AFRICA: HOW AFROCENTRISM BECAME AN EXCUSE To TEACH MYTH As HISTORY (1996).
103. See Martha Nussbaum, Feminists and Philosophy, N.Y. REV. BOOKS, Oct. 20, 1994, at 59.
104. See generally JOHN M. ELLIS, LITERATURE LOST: SOCIAL AGENDAS AND THE CORRUPTION OF THE HUMANITIES (1997).
105. (I am indebted to Benjamin Aaron for bringing this work to my attention.) Postmodernism's critique of science has drawn some of the most spirited responses, perhaps because the sciences have achieved a degree of precision that the social sciences and humanities have failed to achieve and which makes the claim of nonobjectivity (or relativity) of "truth" in the scientific setting especially hard to swallow. See generally A HOUSE BUILT ON SAND: EXPOSING POSTMODERNIST MYTHS ABOUT SCIENCE (Noretta Koertge ed., 1998);
106. PAUL R. GROSS & NORMAN LEVITT, HIGHER SUPERSTITION: THE ACADEMIC LEFT AND ITS QUARRELS WITH SCIENCE (1994).
107. See Reed Way Dasenbrock, Slouching Toward Berlin: Life in a Postfascist Culture, in FASCISM'S RETURN: SCANDAL, REVISION, AND IDEOLOGY SINCE 1980, at 244, 255 (Richard J. Goslan ed., 1998): [I]t is fascism as well as poststructuralism that urges us to move beyond the individualism and subjectivism of the humanist tradition, to see human beings as subjects produced by a larger collectivity . . . . [I]t is fascism as well as poststructuralism that tells us that there is no truth, but rather that truth has to be relativized to the occasion and to the speaker. It is fascism as well as poststructuralism that celebrates the dissolution of the human individual into his or her collectivity.
108. Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Noble Ideal of Rationalism in Nazi Dresden, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 29, 1998, § 4, at 8 (commenting on the recently published diary of Victor Klemperer who, it should be noted, assigned a higher blame to professors than to other intellectuals for the abandonment of reason).
109. STERNHELL ET AL., supra note 42, at 250.
110. Id.