In 1996, a physicist named Alan Sokal published an essay in a trendy academic journal called Social Text. Sokal argued that gravity “is a social construct” — meaning it is something invented by society rather than an immutable law of nature.
Sokal didn’t mean it. In fact, he wrote and submitted the article to Social Text as a test to see whether “a leading North American journal of cultural studies” would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”
Social Text failed the Sokal test. It did publish the article.
Sokal’s hoax was a warning that academia’s embrace of post-modernism was leading it down the rabbit hole into the nonsense world of an Orwellian Wonderland in which, as in the case of gravity, down was up and up was down.
Well, it’s 19 years later, and Social Text has had the last laugh. We’re living in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter and the March Hare have won; the rest of us have lost.
Sokal came to mind on Sunday when the Boston Globe published an article by the president of one of America’s august schools of higher learning, Smith College.
The title of Kathleen McCartney’s op-ed: “Time to rethink our social construct of motherhood.”
In the body of the article, McCartney argues: “Motherhood is a cultural invention. It reflects a belief adopted by society that is passed down from one generation to the next.”
Unlike Sokal, McCartney’s not kidding. It should be unnecessary to point this out, but evidently it’s not, so here goes: Motherhood, literally understood, is the root of humankind—the wellspring of human existence.
By definition, it pre-exists society because there could be no society without people, and people could not exist without motherhood.
In this way, motherhood really is different from fatherhood, because while people could not exist without the seed of the father, children until very recently could not have survived infancy without a mother.
Unlike most other living creatures on earth, children are helpless for the first few years of their lives. The bodies of their mothers produced their nourishment and kept them from starving. And the care of their mothers was necessary to their flourishing.
Motherhood is the opposite of a social construct. Like gravity, its existence makes possible our existence. One might say, in fact, that everything besides motherhood that involves the raising of children is a “social construct.”
The job of “wet nurse,” the person who suckled a baby rather than the baby’s mother, is one of the oldest social constructs. The creation of a powder that substitutes for mother’s milk is a social construct. Schools are social constructs. Any and all forms of child care that do not involve the mother are social constructs.
McCartney is making an argument against the essentialism of motherhood because she wants universal child care and doesn’t want mothers to feel guilty about it.
She knows whereof she speaks, she writes, because she has done research which “demonstrated definitively that infant care did not disrupt the mother-child bond and that children thrived in quality child care.”
She is disappointed Americans have not fallen in line: “Earlier in my career, I believed solid research findings, like my own, would lead to policy change. I was wrong. Culture trumps data every time. Our romanticized views about motherhood continue to sow division and guilt.”
Telling mothers they do not have an essential bond with their children — that such a bond is being imposed on them by society rather than by the deepest mysteries of human existence — is itself a “romanticized view.”
Not of motherhood, but of the power of self-righteous academics to convince ordinary people of intellectualized nonsense backed by dubious, politicized social science.
The danger of over-intellectualization of this sort is an old one. In the 18th century, theologian George Berkeley famously argued matter itself does not exist — that physical objects only have physical substance because we imagine they do.
The biographer James Boswell told his subject, Samuel Johnson, there was no way to refute Berkeley’s claim: “I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — ‘I refute it thus.’”
Perhaps those who are thinking of sending their children to Smith College might refute Kathleen McCartney thus — by sending them elsewhere. Anywhere else.
Alas, the problem is that this sort of thinking is a dominating force on American campuses.
Time for a revolution.
Follow the link below to see what a die-hard accepter of the left's narrative on race. As an aside, her biography is notable for the absence of children. To steal a phrase from the left how can she understand motherhood not having experienced it?
After email controversy, Smith President Kathleen McCartney leads campus vigil over police killings of blacks
As time goes by the left moves ever closer to the philosophy of the Nazi's
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