Dilettante vs Synthesizer

Malcolm Gladwell’s beat down by Steven Pinker seemed to keep popping up in conversation last week. Anissimov has been tracking the back and forth, I saw Outliers on my friend Drea’s bookshelf, and Alex and I chattered about Gladwell vs. Pinker between mouthfuls of Indian food. Why does this guy, whose clever, but individually inconsequential essays on pedestrian topics bother so many of us who at least pretend to be serious thinkers?

For one, I’ve always disliked Malcolm Gladwell’s demeanor. He’s like the anti-John Hodgman. Hodgman’s humility and curiosity are, regardless of their amplification for comedic effect, real. His speech at TED about falling in love with his wife and his speech at the TV & Radio Correspondent’s dinner honoring Obama’s nerdiness exemplify Hodgman’s weird blend of self-effacement and unique perspective. Gladwell comes off as the opposite, as if he gets an erotic tickle of pride every time he says something contrary to common logic. The Vanity Fair parody of him is pitch-perfect.

But in the end, Gladwell really is small potatoes. Yes, he’s Famous and Important right now, but Pinker and the NYT effectively lowered the banhammer on his shenanigans. Yet he’s indicative of a larger trend among intellectuals and it is here that the problem becomes more serious. Interdisciplinarity – once shunned as the realm of the ADD scholar who couldn’t cut it as an expert in a single field – is now being popularized by folks like Zizek, Haraway, and Habermas. Literary critics are writing about computer theory. Psychoanalysts are writing about politics. Political theorists are writing about bioethics. Cross-over! Synthesis! By your powers combined- I am Captain Planet!

Thinking about this little problem, Alex made a good point: how do you tell the difference between a real synthesizer (i.e. Elizabeth Grosz’ work on Darwin) and a power-intellectual playing dilettante? What happens when say, oh, Jurgan Habermas decides that – despite having zero background in bioethics (Rawls does not count), a popular knowledge of general science, and being a cantankerous old man – he wants to get into discussing the bioethics of genetic engineering and pre-implantation genetic diagnostics? How would we know if he’s qualified to speak on the topic?

I guess we ask a few questions:

Q: Has he read the core literature?

A: No. Habermas did cite Beyond Therapy, Kass and Fukuyama’s much derided neocon polemic, but somehow managed to miss From Chance to Choice: Genetics & Justice, one of the canonical texts of bioethics.

Q: Does he cite empirical evidence backing his claims regarding body/mind cognitive development or genetic influence on personality?

A: Not really. Weirdly, Habermas insists his arguments aren’t based in genetic determinism and then goes on to rail against how engineered people will be bound by their “programing.” More bizarre is his assertion that the knowledge of one’s creation being “intentional” will somehow lead to a fissure between body and mind. Habermas provides a grand total of zero research studies as evidence and a whole lot of rhetorical hand-waving for that claim.

Q: Does he get basic science correct, such as the significance of environment in phenotypic expression or the difference between genetically based diseases and nebulous traits like intelligence?

A: In several cases, no. Throughout The Future of Human Nature, Habermas treats genetic enhancement as simply the reverse process of preventing genetic diseases or that something like “intelligence” is programmable, and not at least partially a socially constructed category. Ugh.

Infuriatingly, Habermas, a brilliant mind and a wonderful political theorist, has come crashing through the brush to make a very complicated and very overwrought argument that boils down to: genetically engineering people are scary and those people will be different from the rest of us so we should really worry about it and probably not do it. Worse yet, his research barely qualifies him for the pejorative of dilettante.

I’m still picking apart Habermas arguments and trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but so far I’m disappointed. The Future of Human Nature needs one more re-read before final analysis. More to come.

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