Over in my philosophy department they used to shake their heads and smile. They didn’t actually pat me on the head or anything; professors don’t do that. But they did get a kick out of what they saw as my naiveté. “How sweet,” they seemed to think, “that he could really believe that philosophy is, by its nature, impenetrable by the sort of idiocy that has penetrated sociology and anthropology.”

Well, it made sense to me. In sociology, the irrelevance of fact is such that over three quarters (well over three quarters) of the introductory textbooks can claim, even after more than 50 years of Margaret Mead’s vehemently denying she ever said any such thing, that Mead’s Tchambuli reversed sex roles. But philosophy doesn’t have empirical facts, and so, it seemed to me, any logical equivalent of the made-up fact would be so obviously false that derisive laughter would be philosophy’s source of immunity.

It turns out it doesn’t work that way. You wouldn’t believe the nonsense that some men and women in philosophy, at least in the area of sex-role issues, now take seriously. Most of the nonsense is a sort of Dadaist entwining of confused argument and obsessive concern with bodily functions. It’s a little easier to think that this stuff isn’t actually taken seriously by the author (even if it is taken seriously by Harvard University Press), than to believe the author or anyone else could confuse it with serious thought. But whether one finds duplicity or stupidity more repugnant is a matter of taste, and ultimately irrelevant. Dumb is dumb.

A sentence created by a third-rate mind and devoid of any real meaning can sound meaningful, even profound, particularly if dressed up in splashy footnotes that misrepresent serious work and accurately present work even more ridiculous than that of the author. Rectifying the intellectual damage done by such a sentence requires a rigorous mind devoting pages to undoing the confusion and exposing the lack of content. Whole books of such sentences (see, for example, Catherine MacKinnon’s Feminism Unmodified, 1987) dissuade those who lack the necessary rigor, endurance, or courage from responding. Until now, in philosophy, this seems to have meant everybody.

Finally, one of the few contemporary philosophers who possesses the necessary traits in sufficient quantities has responded to the thousands of papers and hundreds of books that would lead an outsider to think that philosophy is the silly studying the sillier. What is particularly admirable is that Michael Levin didn’t need this. Already possessing a world-class reputation in abstruse areas of mathematical and other philosophies, Levin could have ignored the once-unimaginable depths of incompetence now exhibited by many of those who perform at philosophy conferences and conventions. All the other smart ones did.

Levin calls his book Feminism and Freedom, a title that reflects his belief that feminist philosophy generates a world view and a set of policies discordant with the requirements of liberty. He effectively demolishes both feminism’s assumptions and the arguments drawn from them. Feminism and Freedom deserves an audience far wider than its obvious constituency of conservatives and others for whom the issues of liberty and freedom are of central interest.

Levin’s primary concern is that a combination of illogic and bullying can lead—and has led—to policies that are inefficient at best, disastrous at worst, and always unjust. He examines the myriad areas in which a feminist environmental model has denied the relevance of physiologically-rooted sex differences, and then coerced ignorant and/or cowardly politicians into supporting policies that would make sense only if the model were correct. By the time Levin has demonstrated the lack of common sense in arguments for comparable worth, military Rambettes, unisex educational policies, alteration of the language, redefinition of excellence in athletics, and a score of other denials of human experience, one wonders what leg their supporters are left standing on.

Consider, for example, the case of the women who wanted to be firemen. These women, like all potential fire fighters, were given a strength test. To any of you who have ever lifted a fire hose, to say nothing of a 200-pound man, such a test is obviously necessary, given the nature of the job.

The judge who heard the womens’ suit (Berkman v. NYFD) did not think so. When faced with the fact that all 88 female applicants failed the test, the judge decided that here was discrimination at its most pernicious. (The fact that over half the males failed the test doesn’t seem to have bothered His Honor too much.) Demonstrating the correctness of the truism that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” the judge concluded that the odds against this happening in the absence of a biasing factor are less than one in ten trillion.

“Bias” has two different meanings—one being “statistical skewing resulting from real differences” and the other “invidious discrimination.” Confusing them is crucial to the judge’s argument. If it were true that men and women were equally strong, then the failure of 100 percent of the women would occur by chance only once every ten trillion sets of tests (on the average)—indicating that this particular test was probably discriminatory. But of course, as the more sharp-eyed among us have noticed, men and women are not equal in strength. With that as the given there is no argument.

In other cases Levin exposes fallacies both deeper and more subtle, and in every case he merely begins with exposing the weakness of thought and then demonstrates how weak thought has become public policy. This is an excellent book that will endure.

[Feminism and Freedom, by Michael Levin; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books]