Q&A: Pseudo-Sciences
Pseudo-Sciences
Question
Hello Rabbi Abraham,
I saw in your latest column that you called to “shut down the pseudo-sciences” (I assume you mean all the humanities and social sciences).
Now, I completely share the dissatisfaction with what goes on there and with the quality of the people there (I know it from the inside),
but what surprised me was your conclusion — to shut everything down.
First, by that logic, all the yeshivot should also have to be shut down (I probably don’t need to spell out why).
But that is presumably not a conclusion the Rabbi would accept —
because after all, there are also Torah scholars there, and important things are also being done there.
The same applies to the humanities and social sciences.
Second,
surely a society (and even an individual) cannot exist without having views about history, society, and so on —
so some kind of “humanities” will always exist.
The only question is what their quality is.
For example, anyone who knows even a little history and starts reading Sefer Yosippon immediately sees, from its opening sentences, that it was written in the Middle Ages at the very earliest. By contrast, I once saw a Haredi edition of this book in which they argue with fierce determination against anyone who denies the book’s authenticity as an original ancient work (because Tosafot said so, and so on and so on). That is only possible when history is not studied.
And so on in that vein —
it is easy to notice all the flaws in these fields, but we tend to take for granted the knowledge we have in them — knowledge we acquired thanks to researchers in these fields.
Is the Rabbi really prepared for all that knowledge to disappear? (Relying on the masses to preserve it is not advisable, and I assume there is no need to elaborate why.)
Even the Rabbi’s own books are based on information he learned from books written by “pseudo-scientists.” Would the Rabbi really want to return the level of philosophical discussion to what it was before philosophy entered the world?
Answer
Hello.
What I wrote in the column was a protest, not a practical recommendation.
“Pseudo-sciences” is not equivalent to the humanities and social sciences. As a field, for example, I would shut down gender studies. But within the humanities and social sciences there are broad groups and sectors that are mainly nonsense. Those occupied with political correctness, identity politics, post-colonialism, and the “new criticism” — that postmodern nonsense. Nothing of value is being produced there. Dozens of journals that merely consume forests and computer memory, and there are not two words there that join together into a coherent sentence or argument. It reminds you of those experiments in which people sent in nonsense articles and they were accepted.
A question I struggle with quite a bit is how to deal with this in practice. On the face of it, this would require external regulation of academia (government oversight). Everyone protests that, and rightly so (academic freedom), but while protesting they themselves engage in politics there (see the judicial reform, the hostages, and the academic shutdowns; Me Too, Black Lives, the demonstrations against Israel and in favor of Hezbollah and Hamas, and so on and so forth). Whoever enters the political arena should not be surprised to encounter politicians.
Not an easy question.