BY SEAN WALSH
I think we need to get a sense of proportion and concede that, utterly shocking as it is, the Jason Arday affair is not the worst thing to have ever come out of Cambridge University. Can we agree that Kim Philby’s circle of traitors, which came close to handing the country over to Stalin, was worse, even if marginally?
Although these days that probably counts as a divisive comparison to make.
We must now and with regret question the antecedents of the more highly regarded Cambridge alumni. Did Wittgenstein really fight on the Eastern Front during WW1? Or was it a grift to get some sympathy with the Fellows, some of whom, like G.E. Moore, were said to have had reservations about his early work?
My view on this is that Arday is neither victim nor villain but inadvertent whistleblower, and that we should be grateful to him for bringing the academic discipline of “sociology” into disrepute – which is where it should have been for quite some time. Since around the time it started to be taken seriously.
With some exceptions – Weber, Durkheim, (arguably) Girard – sociologists do little to advance the sum of our knowledge.
And these thinkers count as exceptions in part because they interacted with other disciplines. Girard, for example, was a first-rate philosopher of human nature.
Sociology is usually just political activism masquerading as scholarship. True, it thinks of itself as a science, but has been humoured in that fantasy for quite long enough. A bit like the trans lunacy that it has been so eager to shunt into mainstream life.
Sociology, in its contemporary practice, wants to replace normal and evolved ways of thinking with jargon. It is a recidivist offender when it comes to flooding the economy of academic discussion with the currency of false equivalence. A man, it affirms, is most certainly a woman if we use the right form of words, and your terrorist is my revolutionary under a different description.
It does not occur to the sociologist that some descriptions are true and others are false; nor that the logical law of non-contradiction cannot be violated even by the God at whom they are furious for not existing.
The social sciences work according to what Paul Ricoeur calls a hermeneutics of suspicion – i.e. by assuming that all claims to objective truth are no more than disguised ways of acquiring or securing power. Think Marx, think Freud, and then please, please think again.
Sociology will therefore always be relativism disguised as science, because it looks for structures of power and not revelation. It is Nietzsche minus the poetry and the plausible, if depressing, moral psychology.
It is amazing that any academic papers in sociology are published at all, since most of them could be written off as AI or as jokes, or possibly jokes written by AI.
I was trying to think of an analogy for the “peer review” process when it comes to an Arday academic submission, and the only thing I could think of was one of those “ghost hunts” in which two fake psychics agree that there is a “presence” in the room while trying not to laugh at anyone stupid enough to fall for the scam.
But at least those guys know they are charlatans.
Here’s a thought experiment. Let’s say it was the maths department that got played, and not sociology. Suppose, having blagged his way to becoming the successor to Newton and Hawking, Arday had published a brilliant monograph setting out a new proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Would he still count as a fraud?
No, because in that situation, he’s genuinely Good Will Hunting. And his CV would hardly matter, save as an amusing thing to talk about at High Table.
In mathematics, and any decent discipline, there are standards of good and bad reasoning, along with ways of interrogating, reappraising, and possibly ditching assumptions on which the discipline is founded. Which, when you think about it, is what makes them disciplines.
Sociology had no way of detecting the Arday fraud using the internal thought-practices, exchange of ideas, discourse etiquette and standards of argument available to the subject itself, and had to rely on Arday’s own creative overreach to bust open the whole fiction.
Truth matters. If a discipline doesn’t care about truth, then neither, in the end, will those in charge of it. And that is why, in the end, they failed to spot the bullshit.
They don’t care about truth, but they do care about credentials. You can fake the results of your social “experiments” (or perhaps not bother to have any), but don’t offend the credential-fetishists of the Academy with a falsifiable CV.
I don’t care about his career playing alongside Babe Ruth. It doesn’t even bother me that his rhythm guitar solo on “Gimme Shelter” wasn’t great on that last tour. I’m grateful to Jason Arday for showing that sociology is as good now as it’s ever been.
Sean Walsh is an Associate Editor of Country Squire Magazine.