Goodbye to the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the Left, who believe their unreadable, jargon-clotted theory-sophistry somehow helps liberate the wretched of the earth.
Part of this is painful to read because it so resembles my own epiphany of thirty years ago now. The entire Marx/Foucault/Postmodern intellectual dance depends entirely on a close selection of criteria to measure the truth that does not admit of contraindication. It is a system of thought that puts more work into fitting available evidence into the mold of theory than in measuring that theory in the terms of the evidence. It is a very strange, incestuous, inbred, profoundly uncreative shield against the necessities of rational thought and the humbling intellectual experience of being mistaken. As such it is inherently brittle, and what we see before us, IMHO, is a piece of its long overdue crackup.
What is happening is very simple - there has developed a vital contradiction between its ostensible values - equality, human rights, liberation of women - and its established practices - that reflexive anti-Americanism, anti-Corporatism, anti-Militarism, anti-Capitalism - that has led it into conflict with those values. Hitchens pointed this out long ago and it is evident that our author is finally being forced to admit it. The greatest acts of human freedom in the last half-century came largely as a consequence of those abstractions that the Left abhors - when faced with a choice between re-examining those abhorrances or simply denying the freedom, the Left has been reduced to denial. And that denial is inexorably reducing its sphere of influence step by step into a mutual admiration society of intellectual dinosaurs. A loud one, to be sure, but one that is increasingly and embarrassingly irrelevant.
I think that's true. But one of the problems is that a lot of those supposed values were coopted in the 30's by the Communists, who somehow seized all of the words. That is, they didn't value the meaning of the words, but they somehow were perceived as holding title to the words, with the result that anyone who was in favor of these things automatically had to be aligned with the left.