Problematic Interests: Progress, Equality, and Objectivity

Although I’ve spent the last few days trying my best not to do think about anything philosophical — partly, I’m inclined to believe, because I need a fallow period; or, at the very least, I need a stretch of time where I’m not pushing myself to write something on Hegel (again!) — I can’t help but throw together a few thoughts on Christina Hoff Sommer’s article “Why can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?”, since its stance, its air of unbiased objectivity, strikes me as so utterly problematic that I really need to say something about it. Avoiding Hegel, it seems, has its own pittfalls. And I suppose what follows is one of them.

Before discussing the article itself, however, perhaps I should say a few words in order to give an overview of her article. Now, for those of you who haven’t skimmed the article yet, Sommer tackles the problem of (the supposed) gender equality in the Sciences (both pure and applied). In particular, she focuses on the proposed application of the USA’s Title IX to Science education. “Title IX,” Sommer reminds us,

is the celebrated gender equity provision of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, [which] has so far mainly been applied to college sports. But the measure is not limited to sports. It provides, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex…be denied the benefits of…any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Now, to put the matter bluntly, Sommer thinks that this proposal is due to purely political Interests (I’ll return to the consequences of such a proposal a bit later). She may be right, but her fundamental criticism is that this ‘politicization’ is not grounded on any objective facts demonstrating an actual inequality between men and women. The only fact she acknowledges is that there are fewer female bodies in, say, mathematics classes than male ones. Acknowledging this, however, if I may offer an analogy on her behalf, is no more a sign of inequality than a dead body in my apartment is a sign that I am a murderer. Her strategy, in other words, is precisely what one would expect from a defense attorney: to raise a reasonable doubt about the veracity of a prosecutor’s case, claim by claim. Interspersing anecdotes with citations to work in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, which inquire into the biological differences between male and female brains, she moves from case study to case study in order to object to their methodological practices and to raise doubt about their factual grounds, Sommers calmly — ‘objectively’, one might be tempted to say — proceeds to criticize the ‘politicization of science.’

A few things need to be noted here: first, Sommer’s criticisms are aimed at a few studies that purport to demonstrate the existence of ineqality, which manifests itself according to unequal lab space, lower salaries, and more generally as a lack of opportunity, the kind of critique Sommer employs doesn’t (necessarily) guarantee the truth of the position she tacitly champions (i.e. the status quo). Showing that your opponent’s case is weak, simply doesn’t show the falsity of it any more than it shows the truth of your own. Moreover, since her argument is largely about methodology and the way specific claims are picked up in political discourse, she actually makes it impossible to discuss Gender Inequality as such. Second, precisely because she opts for a juridical form of defense (which, as we know, demands that the prosecution has a stronger case than the defense), Sommer forsakes any investigation into the ‘truth’ of claims of gender inequality. If it weren’t for the fact that the research she calls into question does appear to be methodologically problematic, I would be tempted to say that here she actually exemplifies one of the major complaints of advocates of gender equality in the sciences: Women must be better — offer better arguments — than men in order to be seen as equals. Her defense against gender inequality, in sum, is simply to say that the jury is still out on matters of — albeit leaning heavily towards affirming — biological differences that would manifest themselves in one sex’s preference for pure and applied science. And that this key piece of ‘objective, scientific fact’ is the decisive element when it comes to arbitrating claims of inequality.

Her criticisms, which nevertheless purport to offer a counterargument against the ‘politicization of science,’ and which therefore takes aim at methodological practices in order to ‘falisify’ any claim concerning inequality, isn’t so much a calm, objective ’scientific’ evaluation of a line of argument as it is an equally Interest-laden polemic that subtly frees itself from making any positive contribution. It neither offers an alternative account — even if it nebulously hints at one by gesturing towards a promisory literature ripe with its own methodological conundra — nor argues against one. To repeat: her criticism is that arguments purporting to demonstrate inequality are methodologically unsound — not that inequality doesn’t exist — and hence the application of Title IX is unwarranted. But what makes me uncomfortable is that Sommer takes her argument to show that no such inequality is present in the sciences, even as she admits that the ethos of institutionalized scientific practice is anathema to most women. This bait and switch troubles me greatly. For not only does she draw an illegitimate inference (lack of justification for something is evidence against it), but she equivocates on the rational grounds of her own argument (she makes a politico-economic argument): She intimates that Science ought to be interest free, even as she argues from a specific set of interests.

So what accounts for Sommer’s argument, and its underlying ideology (which masquerades as non-ideological because it is concerned with ‘objectivity’)? What accounts for the fact that, on a cursory reading, one — by which I mean me — is deeply tempted to agree with her? Is it of a piece with what Kieran Healy labels, journalism that ‘Plays against Type‘? Or is it part of something bigger? My intuition is to go for the latter: it would seem that our nearly mythological conception of scientific innovation, and of human progress more generally, demand some form of self-deception. Cribbing from Benjamin, progress can only appear where the ideology of progress remains hidden. Because Science inquires into the basic, ‘objective’ stuff of the world (and not our world), so the deception seem to run, what appears to be an inequality is actually a difference in aptitude, a difference in orientation, and it cannot be accommodated; objective differences, in short, cannot be understood as inequalities. But this sounds an awful lot like Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis concerning the Dialectic of Enlightenment: differences are liquidated for the sake of technical mastery over nature. Here, within the sphere of gender (in)equality in the sciences (and humanities), the difference that makes a difference is the architecture of the brain, which, unfortunately, also correlates with one’s sex and potential.

Perhaps a swerve in this discussion is now necessary. I hold a set of contradictory beliefs about the Academe, and institutionalized knowledge practices in general. In the first instance, I would love to see the University as a meritocracy. I would love to see the best rewarded, great thinkers brought together in order to exponentially increase their productiveness and innovation. I would love to teach only brilliant students, who push me as much as I push them. I would love to interact with thinkers, not necessarily help make one into a thinker. This wish-image of a university, then, has fewer but significantly better students, has more brilliant professors — all of whom continue to research and publish groundbreaking work at breakneck speed throughout their career, etc. My Wish-image is, however, just that: a deformed comprehension and projection of the current state of things. For, at the very least, the understanding of ‘merit’ it employs simplifies the relationship between an individual’s potential, his or her previous education or actualization of that potential, and the opportunities that were available to him or her. Only with the metaphysical (i.e. ideological) posit of Lockean or Rousseauan proportions concerning the goodness and capacity of the human soul, which is further supplemented by the vision of a utopian society in which every opportunity can be actualized by any individual, can my wish-image of a meritocracy be an image at all. The fact remains that not every opportunity is available to any (qualified) individual. Not everyone has the same potential. And potential itself is not obviously — if at all — coextensive with ‘innate talent.’ My wish-image, like most conservative propositions, asserts that, metaphysically speaking (and nothing else but metaphysics — ‘what is’ or the ‘Being of Being’ — matters), equality generates the need for progress, and those who fall behind, who are now-unequal, are either necessary casualities of a ‘better tomorrow,’ (akin, I suppose, to the Terror of the French Revolution) or have fallen behind of their own accord (each and every rags-to-riches story, each sporting superstar seems to further ingrain this). As much as I might abstractly daydream about the university as a meritocracy (which ultimately amounts to this: it would better suit me — I, after all, merit it!), I am all too aware of the structural deformations that, even more than making it an impossibility, transform the very idea into a pernicious force for maintaining the status quo.

The Myth, then, which my wish-image of the university as meritocracy and Sommer’s piece share, is that the Sciences (or institutionalized knowledge practices as such) are impartial, objective pursuits of knowledge for knowledge’s sake that should be undertaken by only the ‘fittest’. But there’s the rub. What initially appeared as knowledge for knowledge’s sake now shows itself to be fraught with an evolutionary imperative. It’s not knowledge as such that we’re after, but knowledge that “betters.” We want progress. But this “progressive knowledge” requires another criterion. And this criterion is nothing other than interest. Only what matches my interest is progressive, and any other criterion is political, Ideological, and non-objective. This transformation of knowledge into technical mastery for the sake of interest can be summed up in two words: economic progress. As Sommer puts it at the end of her piece,

American scientific excellence is a precious national resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation’s health and safety. Norman Augustine, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin, and Burton Richter, Nobel laureate in physics, once pointed out that MIT alone—its faculty, alumni, and staff—started more than 5,000 companies in the past 50 years. Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results? So far, no one in Congress has even thought to ask.

Here’s the self-deception, the contradiction. Like God and Iustia, Science is supposedly blind to interest. But all the same it relies upon an interest in order to justify itself and its practices. With respect to research on gender (in)equality, I’m tempted to say the the major implication of Sommer’s piece, which is all but explicitly drawn out, is that researchers on Gender inequality would do better work if they didn’t have a vested interest in the outcome. But I’m hard pressed to think of one example in science for which this claim can be made. Moreover, the link between Objectivity and Impartiality seems so strong that it’s hard to think otherwise. And the juridical tone of the argument seems to convince us of this; for what else is a judge but an impartial, objective arbiter over the methods of trying a case? Again, however, two things tell against this mode of argument and its connotations: judges do not determine truth. The public does. and the public is never neutral.