No more Mr. Nice Guy
Norman Levitt's defense of science
Archived article from Oct 8, 1999
By Douglas Frank
Norman Levitt has no mercy for pseudoscientists. That becomes apparent in the very first pages of his latest book, "Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture" (Rutgers University Press).
In his introduction, for example, Levitt, professor of mathematics at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences-New Brunswick, seconds science writer Timothy Ferris' call for a "No more Mr. Nice Guy" stance when encountering people promoting superstition and bogus science. "Whatever flaws this book turns out to have," writes Levitt pointedly, "a Mr. Nice Guy stance shall not be among them."
The 400-page volume then goes on, in language that pulls no punches, to examine the often strained relationship between science and contemporary society. The book is a follow-up to an earlier book Levitt co-authored about academic hostility to science.
What comes through clearly in the current work is that Levitt is a champion of what he regards as legiti-mate science -- "the actual scientific practice that has developed over 300 years and which is embodied in the work of millions of living scientists"-- and an unabashed opponent of "radical science studies, supernaturalism in any of its variegated forms, and faddishness and ideological obsessions."
The book has drawn praise from his colleagues including Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, who describes Levitt as a "new enlightenment hero, a post-postmodern Prometheus bringing fire to the bellies of scholars and students intimidated by obscurantist intellectual bullies and needing encouragement to fight back."
"I sensed that something was going on that was deeper than academic cat fights, and as I thought about how science is regarded in the culture as a whole, I became disheartened at what I found in the public sphere," Levitt says.
And so he writes: "As we idolize musicians and cheer on athletes, we view scientists with a mixture of awe and unease." And science, he adds, "meshes poorly, sometimes very poorly, with the rest of society's ideas, expectations and institutions."
"Science is one of the few aspects of our culture that still appears to command near-unanimous respect, but this respect is booby-trapped by the widespread incomprehension that lumps all sorts of dubious belief systems, from astrology to cancer quackery, together with legitimate science," he observes.
"While science remains one of the most honored and respected of human vocations, distrust of science is also at an unprecedented pitch. The paradox is that while science is native to this culture, it is also alien. It is a presence that shapes our social life in countless ways, yet appears ineluctably mysterious as it does so."
As a result, science "is an honored guest when it brings cheerful news, but the welcome curdles when it challenges wishful thinking." For instance, he asserts, "The public that is rapt to hear about the age of the universe from the Hubble space telescope is furious to learn of the age of the Shroud of Turin as revealed by radioisotopes." He points out that amity also turns to distrust in the controversies over cloning and over biotechnology in general.
Mathematics shares science's dubious distinctions. Levitt notes that while his field is "the skeleton of contemporary culture," it is fated to "repose in obscurity at the core of things while citizens ignore it even as they throng the edifice it sustains."
"Mathematics holds a place in the popular imagination as something simultaneously fearsome and ridiculous. In the memories of most adults, only its echoes remain. These speak of agonizing boredom and the frantic attempt to cram one's aching mind with rote procedures in the hope that they might bear up under the stress of an exam," he continues.
"The mathematical way of imagining how things are inhabits everything that we use or produce. Yet it is invisible except to a narrow class of specialists," he writes.
continued...
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