Seth's Blog

Deirdre McCloskey wrote again.

Dear Professor Roberts:

Criticizing someone is “abridging free speech”? Good Lord, how do you think the Constitutional Convention went? Have you listened to a political campaign? Have you participated in any scientific dispute? I guess not.

If Bailey is chilled, perhaps he should get out of the cold room. If one doesn’t like the heat of real scientific disagreement, get out of the kitchen. Free speech is how science advances. It ain’t beanbag.

You want to think of yourself as defending the weak. It’s a silly thought, which you have adopted completely uncritically from Mr. Carey’s journalism. You’ve in fact allied yourself to the most powerful and queer-hating forces in the society. Congratulations.

The “great power” is on the other foot. Relative to the Hispanic women he abused, Bailey had the power. Relative to Lynn and me (you never mention the other distinguished scientists involved, incidentally) in sexology, Ken Zucker has the power (which he has duly exercised, and which again you do not mention: perhaps it has not registered that he allocated 52 pages of his journal on sexual behavior to what the author described as history of science. Would you be the slightest bit suspicious if an editor in your field used his journal, unrefereed, in this way to defend his own views? Relative to Sex Scientists like Bailey and Zucker, and the reactionary and queer-hating people that Bailey, and now you, have inspirited (look at the blogs, dear), Lynn and I, as notable queers, do not have the power. Relative to the authority of The New York Times and it’s “Science” worshiping and queer-hating editors (though Carey himself, I think, is gay, which of course doesn’t mean he’s not queer hating!), the “power” of our articles is merely, as I said, a feeble one. The feeble power of truth against prejudice and ignorance and cowardice.

You simply won’t listen to the claims of the other side. You won’t read. You won’t consider. Nothing you say can be mistaken. Dreger got her facts exacly right. I have to conclude that you are immovable and uncritical. Bad qualities in a scientist, though in truth not all that rare in science and scholarship as they actually are.

I recommend that you get out more. Listen to a philosopher and anthropologist, Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, who wrote a long time ago that what matters in science and scholarship is

our ability to engage in continuous conversation, testing one another, discovering our hidden presuppositions [in your case: sex, sex, sex is a true theory of queers; no Hispanic queer tells the truth; ordinary scientific disagreement abridges free speech], changing our minds because we have listened to the voices of our fellows. Lunatics also change their minds, but their minds change with the tides of the moon and no beause they have listened, really listened, to their friends’ [and enemies'] questions and objections
Rorty, “Experiments in Philsophical Genre,” Critical Inquiry 9 (March, 1983); 545-565, p. 562.

Words to live by. You’ve given no evidence that you have listened, really listened, to anyone except the tiny group of sex, sex, sex folk, believing uncritically their recently constructed image of Bailey as Galileo. You’ve not done the homework, and apparently have no shame that you haven’t.

Have I got you pegged right: Get a theory, any old theory, of gender crossing or of the Bailey Controversy, and stick with it, regardless of the evidence or logic, eh? Don’t open your mind. Don’t read. Don’t listen, really listen. I know a lot of economists like this, intellectually closed; my sister tells me they are pretty common in psychology, too.

Jean-Sartre wrote in 1944 (Anti-Semite and Jew: it’s the only book of his I have fully understood, and one the few of his writings I agree with) about a personality type:

there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed,would change take them? . . . . What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation(Sartre 1944, p. 18).

Until you’ve read, really read, my autobiography, say, or done other serious homework, listening, really listening, you’re not going to find the truth. You’re going to be stuck with your first impressions and your apparently very deep prejudices. I say again (I expect it will have no more effect than it has had before): shame on you for the socially bad and scientifically indefensible thing you have done.

Sincerely,

Deirdre McCloskey

Before I replied, McCloskey wrote again. I will post that letter tomorrow.

Her first letter and my reply. Her second letter and my reply

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 6:18 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.