Offended by Offence

Stuart Soroka, the 2010 Programme Committee Chairperson for the CPSA, had a message posted on the Women’s Caucus listserve before it was moderated (see Email from Stuart Soroka – January 4 on the Ethics page of this blog).  In this message, Soroka assured members of the Women’s Caucus that my paper was transferred to a poster session because it “did not easily fit into a panel with other papers from the REIPP [Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples and Politics] section”.  He goes on to point out that the “the committee approved of the decision (as the committee must approve of all section heads’ decisions for CPSA conferences)” and that “the charge of any unprofessionalism on [Kiera Ladner’s] part is, to be frank, wholly unfounded”.

While “the charge of any unprofessionalism” could very well be without merit (it was merely noted that Ladner “seems to have left herself open to a charge of unprofessionalism”, and this suspicion was based on Ladner’s previous inability to be objective about my work on aboriginal policy), there are a few things that should be mentioned in response to the committee’s decision about my proposal’s lack of “fit” within the REIPP section.  I have been told that the CPSA, in the past, has been concerned about placing me on a panel with other scholars who study aboriginal politics out of fear that my ideas could create a hostile reaction (a circumstance that was realized at the 2008 conference).  The creation of the REIPP section has exacerbated this problem because it has tended to move presentations about aboriginal peoples and aboriginal-non-aboriginal relations out of more traditional academic sections (comparative politics, Canadian politics, etc.), and into a section that is influenced by an “identity politics” orientation.  Therefore, the idea of “fit” could have more to do with trying to avoid conflict than with academic considerations.

Second, it seems odd that the CPSA would not want to have a proposal concerning research ethics and aboriginal peoples, aboriginal epistemology, etc., discussed in a formal panel.  The CPSA devoted a section of its report on research ethics to “Research involving Aboriginal peoples”, and the second draft of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans’ chapter concerning “Research Involving Aboriginal Peoples in Canada” has just been released for scholarly consideration.  Brock et al., in their letter “Racism, chilly climate, our responsibility and the discipline”, even suggested that a “major CPSA *Plenary on Responsibility Difference and the Discipline* might be productive” and “would attract a phenomenal attendance and would generate the kind of constructive professional debate we desire within the CPSA, and would be a mentoring opportunity for graduate students and junior faculty” (the people recommended for the plenary, however, did not come from a wide range of perspectives and were largely supportive of the existence of different “ways of knowing”). 

Past CPSA sessions also have sparked considerable interest in these topics.  The panel that Albert Howard and I participated in with Sandra Tomsons in 2009 was packed and led to a lively, but restrained, discussion.  Kiera Ladner’s proposal last year entitled “Decolonizing the Discipline: Respecting Indigenous Knowledge & Using Indigenist Methodologies” was also accepted.  The abstract for this presentation was as follows:

“Since Columbus was discovered, knowledge of the Americas and the peoples who lived there captured the minds and imaginations of some of Europe’s greatest political philosophers: More, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Spencer, and Engels, to name but a few. Despite the fact that Indians of the Americas have occupied the imaginations of the world since the time of ‘discovery’, Indians have not occupied the imaginations of modern political scientists. Political science has ignored Indigenous political traditions and studied contemporary Indigenous politics only from the vantage point of the western-eurocentric tradition. Simply put, most have been unable to escape their paradigm paralysis to understand the politics of the ‘other’ on its own terms or as separate from the western-eurocentric experience. In so doing, political science has perpetuated a western-eurocentric understanding that virtually denies ‘others’ a voice within the discipline. This paper draws on the theoretical undertaking of my dissertation and updates the uncirculated paper presented at UofA (the abstract of which led to a heated exchange at CPSA). It engages the discipline’s construction of the Indigenous and argues that it is necessary to understand the ‘other’ not from the vantage of the western-eurocentric intellectual tradition as this readily perpetuates misunderstanding but from the vantage of their own intellectual and political traditions. It argues that proceeding as such enables a trustworthy post-colonial/decolonizing understanding of Indigenous politics within political science and that the effect of such a paradigm shift has the potential to be of great benefit to the discipline as a whole not just the study of Indigenous politics”.

A number of assertions put forward by Ladner still need to be analyzed and debated (for some reason, Ladner did not produce a paper fleshing out this abstract).  What are the “Indigenous political traditions” to which Ladner refers?  How do we “understand the politics of the ‘other’ on its own terms”?  And what is a “trustworthy post-colonial/decolonizing understanding of Indigenous politics within political science” and how will this “be of great benefit to the discipline as a whole not just the study of Indigenous politics”?  Once again, we seem to have the contradiction of saying that there should be a “different” understanding that only the identity group can have (i.e. it cannot be evaluated with universally accessible social scientific methods), yet this “understanding” must be accepted by all as a benefit to political science.

Ladner’s proposal was included in a workshop on “‘Race’, Racism and Anti-racism as Political Science: Framing and Re-Framing Relationships”, which also included presentations on “Race, Empowerment and Crisis Management: Black Political Leadership and Hurricane Katrina” and “Beyond Racial Exceptionalism: Explaining the Convergence of Mixed-Race Census Categorizations in Canada, the US and Great Britain”.  Interestingly, the two latter presentations are very dissimilar from Ladner’s and do not really concern epistemological matters.  Ladner’s presentation, in fact, would have “fit” much better with the presentations of Tomsons, Howard and myself, but, for some reason, Ladner was not included on our panel, which largely concerned epistemological questions.  Therefore, “fit” appears to be a very subjective determination of the programme committee.

It should be noted that unscholarly responses to work critical of the prevailing “aboriginal orthodoxy” have been occurring for quite some time, and so it should not really be surprising if this is continuing in my case. Radha Jhappan, for example, stated publicly that “fundamental racism” formed the basis of Tom Flanagan’s book First Nations? Second Thoughts even though no evidence was provided to sustain this accusation. Similar problematic conduct occurred when Flanagan’s book was awarded the Donald Smiley Prize. The chair of the jury, Gurston Dacks, quit when he was outvoted, displaying contempt for a process that he had agreed to participate in (rejecting it only when he lost the vote).  Joyce Green has noted that the political science community was “fractured” because the jury’s decision “implicated us all in rewarding something that many of us felt was deeply wrong” (Marci McDonald, “The Man Behind Stephen Harper”, The Walrus, October 2004, www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/the-man-behind-stephen-harper-tom-flanagan/5/).

Green’s comments reflect the deep problems that exist in political science with respect to the study of aboriginal peoples and aboriginal-non-aboriginal relations.  What is meant by saying that someone’s scholarship is “deeply wrong”?   Shouldn’t political scientists be concerned about the quality of the arguments and the amount of evidence that is being put forward to support them?  Unfortunately, the characterization of Flanagan’s work in moral terms has prevented a comprehensive analysis of his arguments.  Postmodern political scientists feel justified in dismissing Flanagan’s arguments as reprehensible, when engaging with them would help us all to more fully understand aboriginal-non-aboriginal relations.  One does not have to agree with arguments to critically analyze them; avoiding opposing viewpoints because one dislikes their preconceived implications, however, is anti-intellectual and is harmful to the academic integrity of the discipline of political science.

It has just come to my attention that Norman Levitt died on October 24, 2009 (http://spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/7652/).  I never met Norman, but became aware of his views through reading the book that he co-authored with Paul Gross, entitled Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science.  After reading his book I contacted Norman by email, and he generously provided me with a number of insights that helped Albert Howard and I write our book Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry.

Although the subtitle of Higher Superstition is a little misleading, in that it refers to the “Academic Left” when “postmodernism” or “pseudoleft” would be a better description, the work is invaluable in that it offers one of the first comprehensive critiques of epistemological relativism and its corrosive effects on a scientific worldview - defined by Alan Sokal as “a respect for evidence and logic, and for the incessant confrontation of theories with the real world; in short, for reasoned argument over wishful thinking, superstition and demagoguery” (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/nyu_forum.html). It also prompted Alan Sokal to submit a parody article (later to become known as the “Sokal hoax”), “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, to the postmodern journal Social Text.  This journal accepted Sokal’s parody as a real, academically credible article, because it pretended to oppose the “(so-called) scientific method” and to end “the [enlightenment] dogma that…there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity”.

Norman Levitt’s struggle against postmodern relativism lives on.  It is particularly relevant in that the opposition to science is still being promoted under the auspices of left-wing ideology (see, for example, the paper on the Aboriginal Policy page of this blog - “Indigenous Knowledge(s) and the Academy”).  Levitt was very effective in exposing this pernicious development, which was masquerading as ”progressive politics”.  As Stuart Derbyshire explains, “Levitt was brilliant at uncovering attacks on science made under the guise of ‘democratisation’. He rightly pointed to the absurdity of advocating teaching intelligent design or creationism alongside evolution in American schools. Many on the academic left, and Steve Fuller, support this campaign on ‘democratic’ grounds. Levitt correctly observed that teaching creation as science whitewashes the rigours of science and threatens to reduce science to a popularity contest about belief”.

This comment by Derbyshire reminded me of a segment of a recent CBC radio interview with David Suzuki on November 25, 2009 (http://www.cbc.ca/q/pastepisodes.html).  In the program, Suzuki claims that the idea of objectivity is “ridiculous”, and that we should be promoting a diversity of values and beliefs and be open to new ideas.  But what happens if these ideas are contradictory, Dr. Suzuki?  As a “scientist”, shouldn’t you be concerned about the quality of evidence that is put forward to support a claim?  And if you cannot make some objective determination about the evidence, what makes you a scientist, and not an ideologue or mystic?

It is this kind of thinking, in fact, that leads Suzuki, in the “personal foreward” of Wisdom of the Elders to promote the “wisdom” of the “shaking tent” – the Innu’s “traditional way of communicating”.  In his account, Suzuki passes over the essential characteristic of the shaking tent – that a Shaman enters a tent alone and then claims that it shook because he was able to make a connection to the “spirit world”.  Instead, Suzuki relays an Innu story about how “a man once ‘flew’ over a long distance and ‘saw’ friends at a winter camp struggling for help.  So the person in the shaking tent sent for help and saved them”.  After recounting this anecdote, Suzuku makes the following comment: “I am not in a position to pass judgement on such stories, but as a scientist, I know that Nature posseses inexplicable mysteries.  We have no theories with which to make sense of many of the phenomena that indigenous people describe”.  He concludes the discussion by stating that “the phenomenon of shaking tents should arouse interest and curiosity rather than dismissive snorts of skepticism” (xxix-xxx).

But Suzuki doesn’t “know that Nature possesses inexplicable mysteries” because he is a scientist.  It is the anti-scientific tendencies in his philosophy that enables him to claim that there are “inexplicable mysteries” in the first place.  A scientist would ask what these “inexplicable mysteries” were, and how they are revealed by the Innu’s belief in the “shaking tent”.  What Suzuki should have said was “when I am not being scientific, I know that Nature posesses inexplicable mysteries”.

Besides, it is not difficult to explain the particular “mystery” that Suzuki describes.  The Shaman goes into a tent, shakes it, and then claims that he was able to do this because of his “powers”.  Then, when something good happens to the community (the “friends struggling for help” being found, for example), the Shaman takes credit for it.  This, of course, makes the community beholden to the Shaman, enabling him to control others for his own benefit.  Encouraging people not to approach the shaking tent with skepticism is to make the Innu susceptible to the Shaman’s manipulation.  It is outrageous and hypocritical for Suzuki, when he is presenting himself as a scientist, not to “pass judgement” on such obvious charlatanism.