Just before the pandemic, when our country seems to have gone tits up, there was a studied effort to equate any emphasis on scientific method, and the valuation of “[o]bjective, rational linear thinking; “[c]ause and effect relationships”; and “[q]uantitative emphasis,” with white privilege and microaggression against non-white people.
I am not making up this claim; I am not creative enough. Indeed, for a while, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture featured a graphic that included “emphasis on scientific method” as aspect of white culture, and implied it was an unsavory aspect of “white privilege.”[1]
Well, as it turns out, scientific method is not only racist, but fascist as well.
With pretentious citations to Deleuze,[2] Foucault,[3] and Lyotard,[4] a group of Canadian authors[5] set out to decolonize science and medicine from the fascist grip of scientific methodology and organizations such as the Cochrane Group. The grand insight is that the health sciences have been “colonized” by a scientific research “paradigm” that is “outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge.” By excluding “alternative forms of knowledge,” evidence-based medicine acts as a “fascist structure.” The Cochcrane Group in particular is singled out for having created an exclusionary and non-egalitarian hierarchy of evidence. Intolerance for non-approved modes of inference and thinking are, in these authors’ view, “manifestations of fascism,” which are more “pernicious,” even if less brutal than the fascism practiced by Hitler and Mussolini.[6]
Clutch the pearls!
Never mind that “deconstruction” itself sounds a bit fascoid,[7] not to mention a rather vague concept. The authors seem intent to promote multiple ways of knowing without epistemic content. Indeed, our antifa authors do not attempt to show that evidence-based medicine leads regularly to incorrect results, or that their unspecified alternatives have greater predictive value. Nonetheless, decolonization of medicine and deconstruction of hierarchical methodology remain key for them to achieve an egalitarian epistemology, by which everyone is equally informed and equally stupid. In the inimitable words of the authors, “many scientists find themselves interpellated by hegemonic discourses and come to disregard all others.”[8]
These epistemic freedom fighters want to divorce the idea of evidence from objective reality, and make evidence bend to “values.”[9] Apparently, the required deconstruction of the “knowing subject” is that the subject is “implicitly implicitly male, white, Western and heterosexual.” Medicine’s fixation on binaries such as normal and pathological, male and female, shows that evidence-based medicine is simply not queer enough. Our intrepid authors must be credited for having outed the “hidden political agenda” of those who pretend simply to find the truth, but who salivate over imposing their “hegemonic norms,” asserted in the “name of ‘truth’.”
These Canadian authors leave us with a battle cry: “scholars have not only a scientific duty, but also an ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power.”[10] Scientists of the world, you have nothing to lose but your socially constructed non-sensical conception of scientific truth.
Although it is easy to make fun of post-modernist pretensions,[11] there is a point about the force of argument and evidence. The word “valid” comes to us from the 16th century French word “valide,” which in turn comes from the Latin validus, meaning strong. Similarly, we describe a well-conducted study with robust findings as compelling our belief.
I recall the late Robert Nozick, back in the 1970s, expressing the view that someone who embraced a contradiction might pop out of existence, the way an electron and a positron might cancel each other. If only it were so, we might have people exercising more care in their thinking and speaking.
[1] “Is Your Daubert Motion Racist?” (July 17, 2020). The Smithsonian has since seen fit to remove the chart reproduced here, but we know what they really believe.
[2] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987). This dross enjoyed funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
[3] Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1973); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (trans. Robert Hurley 1978); Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (2003); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (1980); Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (2001).
[4] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984).
[5] Dave Holmes, Stuart J Murray, Amélie Perron, and Geneviève Rail, “Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism,” 4 Internat’l J. Evidence-Based Health 180 (2006) [Deconstructing]
[6][6] Deconstructing at 181.
[7] Pace David Frum
[8] Deconstructing at 182.
[9] Deconstructing at 183.
[10] Deconstructing at 180-81.
[11] Alan D. Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” 46 Social Text 217 (1994).
