Alan Sokal, the mocking physicist who ridiculed the humanities and ignited the culture war

At first, he laughed, perplexed, but then felt a little offended. It happened at a peculiar conference that brought together scientists and philosophers in Brazil in the late 1990s. It was then that someone nervously unfolded a piece of paper and snapped at Bruno Latour : "I have a question for you: do you believe in reality? " "Of course!" the Frenchman replied. "Who do you take me for?" Latour would later confess in his book Pandora's Hope that the question stung him. How was it possible that his decades-long effort, alongside other postmodern thinkers, to lift the carpets in laboratories had mutated, in the heat of the so-called science wars, into something so parodied? The funny thing is that, in fact, it all began with a parody.

In the spring of 1996, a young leftist physicist, tired of watching his fellow liberal arts students abuse scientific concepts he didn't understand while claiming that science was just another religion with hidden agendas, decided to play a trick on them. Alan Sokal wrote an article meant to parody the saints of French philosophy, packed with quotes as real as they were ridiculous, and sent it to the prestigious postmodern journal Social Text , with no hope of getting it published. But it was. Its title? Transgressing Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity .

Thus, a special issue of a prestigious academic journal from Duke University reached its readers with hilarious claims such as that gravity is nothing more than a social construct or that the existence of an external world with properties independent of any human being "is a dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony of Western thought." Then the mocking Sokal confessed to the ruse, and the time bomb exploded.

The scandal swept away the fragile bridges between the thriving sciences and the failing humanities . The most bellicose of the former claimed that this not only showed that all current French philosophy was "a load of nonsense," but also that literature should surrender and lay down its weapons: it was no longer useful for understanding the world. The champions of the latter responded by branding the masters of numbers as square pedants, without a sense of humor or metaphor, incapable of understanding the subtle pulsations of the human heart.

The following year, in a book he wrote about the catharsis that had been unleashed and which he titled Intellectual Impostures , together with the physicist Jean Bricmont, Alan Sokal recalled with some astonishment what had happened: «The debates have come to cover an ever-widening spectrum of questions that are more and more tenuously related to each other, concerning not only the conceptual status of scientific knowledge or the merits of French post-structuralism, but also the social function of science and technology, multiculturalism and political correctness, the opposition between academic left and right and the opposition between cultural left and economic left ».

Those science wars between "realists" and "postmodernists" can be seen today as the first battles of an even larger conflict, the so-called culture wars between the new populist right and the so-called identitarian left, which experienced their bloodiest episodes following the victory of Trump and Brexit in 2016. Incidentally, the battle report today dictates an almost total victory of the right over the left. Not surprisingly, the somewhat glum Sokal, who recently visited Spain, lamented that the situation had worsened terribly in the last three decades. Today, the Huns want to close Harvard while the others deny the factual existence of only two sexes.

It's striking today that it all began with such a fun book. Because Intellectual Impostures may be unfair to the undoubted greatness of much contemporary philosophy, but it's also a delightful record of its follies. Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva in psychoanalysis, Luce Irigaray in feminist studies, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Paul Virilio in philosophy, and the aforementioned Latour in science studies, parade through a pandemonium of absurd assertions, a crass scientific ignorance that, however, doesn't stop them from pontificating about topology or quantum physics, and sublime extravaganzas like the idea that the erect penis is the square root of minus one (Lacan dixit ).

Seven memorable pieces of advice fill the epilogue: you have to know what you're talking about, not everything that is obscure is necessarily profound, scientific theories are not like novels, exact sciences are not imitable, we should not confuse healthy scientific skepticism with radical solipsism , and ambiguity should never be used as a subterfuge for the truth.

In reality, by disguising himself as an impostor to dynamite a hoax, Sokal was merely using a now classic practice of investigative and infiltration journalism, whose unavoidable reference, the German Günter Wallraff , will star in the second installment of this series.