What is the new Sokal hoax – Sokal Squared – and why does it matter?

Back in 1996, physics professor Alan Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodernism studies. The idea was to test whether or not a leading academic journal in this field of grievance studies had any intellectual rigor for an article filled intentionally with meaningless terms and an idiotic conclusion that appealed to what Sokal suspected was the editors’ and peer reviewers’ ideological preconceptions. The article not only passed peer review but was then published and used as an academic ‘source’ for other grievance study ‘scholars’. This was the hoax and it exposed the field of grievance studies to be an ideological field and not a scholarly one.

Did this exposure by means of an embarrassing hoax have any lasting effect in academia regarding grievance studies?

The Snowball Effect: How does demographic data fuel identity politics?

Demographic data is the means by which groups can be created and quantified. This data is then used to grant us the means to compare and contrast different groups. By doing so, we (not surprisingly) find differences. These differences are then presented with what appears to be an independent and objective hierarchy based on the selected criterion: higher and lower groups in the hierarchy. Membership is automatic: an individual who shares the criterion is member, as is one’s placement in the (obviously) unequal group hierarchy, which in turn defines the selected group disparity shared by all its members. Group disparity is then used as the evidence for group inequity and is the foundation for justifying political activism to address the group disparity. This is the core feature of identity politics in action… individuals acting on behalf of the group with which one has membership (or sympathy) and attempting to address the disparity using politics and legislation (or various immediate bullying tactics if impatient for systemic change) as the means.

Why is this a problem that is snowballing?

What have so many of today’s liberals managed to forget?

Quite simple, liberalism

What does liberalism mean?

What is a group and why does it matter?

Almost seems like a silly question. 

A group (for my purposes here) is defined by the OED as “A number of people or things that are located, gathered, or classed together; Put into categories; classify.”

In this sense, classifying people into groups is an action undertaken not by the people classified but from those wishing to create a group by means of classification. Classifying people into groups is called a construct (meaning “an idea or theory containing various conceptual elements, typically one considered to be subjective and not based on empirical evidence” OED). In other words, a construct is constructed using elements selected by the classifier.

So what?