“It was, in retrospect, a festival of side-taking.”

I came across this book, “The Critical Pulse.” From the back:

This unprecedented anthology asks thirty-six leading literary and cultural critics to elaborate on their profession, reasserting its widespread relevance and purpose. These credos boldly defend the function of criticism in contemporary society . . .

I’m a big fan of literary criticism, so this book seemed like the thing for me.

The book was mostly a disappointment—for one thing, I was picturing a wide range of literary and cultural critics, but actually almost all of them are professors of English, with the few exceptions being something very close (graduate students in English, professors of performance studies and cultural analysis, etc.). I have nothing against college professors—indeed, the authors of all the chapters of our forthcoming second edition of the Handbook of Markov Chain Monte Carlo are statistics professors or something close to that; specialization can have a useful purpose—it’s just not quite what I was thinking from the subtitle, “Thirty-six credos by contemporary critics.” I was expecting some contributions from journalists, also not just literary criticism but also some discussion of the criticism of art, music, film, sports, politics, and culture more generally.

That’s fine—it’s not the job of the editors to target this book to me—it just didn’t quite fit my interests. A few chapters on the economic and political aspects of the department English and comparative literature would be fine, but I didn’t need 36 of them.

That said, I got one useful thing out of the book, which actually isn’t bad as far as books go! It was from a chapter by Michael Bérubé, where he points to “the existence of an academic subculture in which pledges of allegiance take precedence over intellectual rigor.” He was referring in particular to the aftermath of Alan Sokal’s notorious hoax paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” that was published in 1996 in the postmodernist journal Social Text. As Sokal put it at the time, “The editors of Social Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion . . . They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion.” Bérubé points out that this side-taking took place on the other side too: “many people pledged allegiance to Sokal not because they knew anything about science or science studies but because they believed he had confirmed their darkest suspicions about cultural studies, theory, theory, postmodernism, jargon, the academic left, or whatever was most bugging them at the time. It was, in retrospect, a festival of side-taking.”

Good point!

And this made me think more generally about the problem of side-taking. It’s not just a problem with the “academic subculture” of literary criticism. It’s happening all over.

This is not new. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, George Orwell wrote about conservative critics and Marxist critics as valuing or devaluing literary work based on its political message, along with political writers on the left and right who, even when they weren’t lapsing into straight-up propaganda, celebrated writing that was on their side and denigrated writing on the other side—or which was perceived to be not enough on their side (“You are either with us or against us,” etc.).

Where I’ve been seeing a lot of this recently is in science writing by journalists and also by scientists themselves. And, just as Bérubé was particularly upset when this sort of side-taking was happening in his house, as it were, so I feel about science, particularly social science.

We’ve seen so many examples of this over the years, perhaps most notoriously with Lancet, Freakonomics, and Nudge (who, you might recall, characterized as “masterpieces” the work of discredited food-behavior researcher Brian Wansink). It happens all over in academia, and it’s not just political: someone writes a paper that supports some position you have, so you say how great the paper is.

This sort of side-taking creates three problems:

1. Most directly, bad papers get wide circulation because they are promoted by people who should know better.

2. Bad work is also propped up by people who should know better but join in attacks on critics, because . . . side-taking, as for example with those fake MIT journalists, the tone police, and ironically enough, the editors of Criminology.

3. Indirectly, the culture of side-taking promotes bad work, or, more precisely, it promotes the practice of making big splashy claims from bad work. The idea is that if you can hook your work into some existing political framework (where, by “political,” I’m not just talking about politics; I’m also talking about politics within science, where researchers are promoting their pet theories and trying to disparage those of others), you can get those sweet, sweet citations along with appreciation.

And, annoyingly, some of the worst work out there can be spun to support both leftist and rightist ideologies.

When bigshots such as the Nudgelords and the Freakonomics people and editors of Lancet and Proceedings of the National Academy of Science promote terrible work (himmicanes, air rage, ages ending in 9, etc.) because it aligns with the political or science stories they want to tell, that motivates more researchers to move into the junk-science-pushing-dominant-theory space.

Everyone has long been aware of this problem in economics—there’s an endless supply of resources to support work that justifies the wealth and power of the rich and powerful—I’ve just been seeing it a lot in science. So when I read that bit by Bérubé, it rang a bell.

Also of course there’s all the side-taking in politics, which one might say is to be expected, but it hasn’t always been this way, and people do it to a greater or lesser extent.

P.S. One more thing. The introduction to the book states: “The idea for this collection was prompted by a set of credos from a very different time. In 1950 and 1951, the Kenyon Review ran a series of essays under the heading, ‘My Credo: A Symposium of Critics.'” Then why on the back cover is the book described as an “unprecedented” anthology? It’s not unprecedented at all—indeed, its very existence is based on a precedent.

No big deal; it’s just funny that whoever wrote the back cover copy didn’t even go to the trouble of reading the book’s introductory chapter!

Publishing isn’t what it used to be.