A Tall Rickety Structure Grows Taller and Taller Still.

“No foundation, anywhere. Whole world. No foundation. All the way down the line.“

–William Saroyan, The Time of Your Life.

Social sciences are in a perilous state and have been for some time. Half-a-century ago the Bostonian historian Walter Muir Whitehill derided them as “the fraudulent disciplines,” singling out psychology and sociology, and saying he would much prefer the company of an Egyptologist. Things have gotten far worse since then and worst of all is the alleged discipline which didn’t even exist in Whitehill’s time, so-called gender studies.

As a case in point, For What It’s Worth reports the supposedly science-based World Health Organization, architect of the brilliantly managed COVID (née Wu Han Flu) outbreak, has just announced its latest triumph, the updating of its coveted gender-mainstreaming manual, which now reads gender goes “beyond non-binary and that “highlighting and expanding on the concept of intersectionality, which looks at how gender power dynamics interact with other hierarchies of privilege or disadvantage, resulting in inequality and differential health outcomes for different people.” 

In the odd chance readers can’t quite grasp the meaning of the above, the WHO provides further clarification on its website.

• Harmonize a common intersectional feminist lens for WHO programme activities and deliverables across all three levels of the Organization;

• strengthen the integration of intersectionality and gender diversity aspects across the training content and materials with practical examples;

• update existing gender integration tools and frameworks and introduce new ones to further strengthen learning outcomes for staff and health outcomes at country level, supported by a practical “how-to” guide;

• ensure that the principles of ethics, gender, equity and human rights are embedded in public health activities and systems to optimize the achievement of the triple billion goals set out in
GPW13.

All sarcasm (reluctantly) aside, there is a commonality to writings in the social sciences, their utter opaqueness. Endless strings of cumbersome latinate words and neologisms (deliverables?) obscure–deliberately–one simple fact. There is nothing there.

Consider this single wordy paragraph from an accepted dissertation entitled A Queer and Crip Grotesque, which your Tatler chose at random from a website for such things. The topic is somewhat removed from that the WHO writes of, but it doesn’t matter. All dissertations, theses, books, newspaper and magazine articles pertaining to gender studies read alike.

Carnivalesque and Cosmic Terror

The co-presence of horror and humor is central to understanding the ways in which the positive and negative grotesque interact. It functions as more than a literary trope and begins to denote relations of power through the carnivalesque. The carnivalesque cannot, however, exist without cosmic terror. Cosmic terror is the fear of the infinitely powerful, that which cannot be overcome by force (Dentith 241). For religion it is a higher being, for nature it is the elemental catastrophe, for humans it is the governing institution. These terrors are a means for control, an omniscient presence to guide human behavior through fear of punishment. True to the grotesque, the terror of the cosmos is countered by the carnivalesque. It is a time of blasphemy, of masquerade and merry making, of feasting and fools. The carnivalesque is suspended in time and removed from the trepidations of reality (McWilliam 220). It often involves colorful and ornate clothing, protruding masks, and satire. Kings become fools and fools kings! Carnivale occurs in a liminal space, one that is temporary and peripheral to the lived world: It is a simulacrum (McWilliam 220, Russo 5). The carnivale flips the social script, makes the world topsy-turvy. It is a means to relieve the pressure of terror, to remove, if even for a moment, the weight of authoritative control by disarming it through farcicality. The dualistic world of the carnivalesque, both terror and laughter, expresses a distinct social commentary and subversive political tool, giving the grotesque critical implications in its application.

There is not one single fact in all that verbiage, just lots and lots of opinions. The author provides links to some of them (your correspondent assumes links are the 21st-Century equivalent of footnotes), presumably to add weight to her baseless arguments, but lo, those links simply lead one to the opinions of others higher up the academic latter.

Such is the state of the social sciences these days, scholarship without facts. With murmurings in this country growing louder and louder concerning the state of all our institutions, including the academy, it seems to your Tatler the fraudulent disciplines will eventually collapse as they grow ever bigger without foundation.

The British engineering genius Isambard Kindom Brunel (1806-59) when just a schoolboy, predicted to his classmates a building they could see going up outside the classroom window would collapse, owing to a fault he had detected in the foundation. It did, shortly afterward.

It takes no genius to predict the collapse of academic disciplines with no foundation at all.