The Flight from Science and Reason.
edited by paul r. gross, norman levitt, and martin w. lewis.
new york academy of sciences/johns hopkins university press. 593 pages, $19.95 paper.
This book contains the proceedings of a conference of the same title sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, and includes forty-two essays by a distinguished group of scholars in the sciences and humanities. Its purpose, like that of Gross and Levitt’s earlier book, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, is to counter the trend towards unreason represented by such movements as social constructivism, feminist epistemology, eco-feminism, radical environmental philosophy, deconstructionism, and afrocentrism. The essays are with few exceptions excellent, and in some cases brilliant. Several contributors virtually identify reason, science, and Enlightenment rationalism, and regard the present crisis as being due to an abandonment of Enlightenment ideals. Given virtually no consideration in this book is the alternative view that what we are witnessing is not so much an attack on the Enlightenment as a decadent phase of it. Two questions are left largely unexplored: why this flight from reason is happening now, and why it is happening almost entirely on the political left. A blot on an otherwise fine book is its brief section on religion (presumably included to console the left), which treats all religion, except the most desiccated modernism, as a form of right-wing irrationality.
