The Postmodern Misuse of Tolerance

The Postmodern Misuse of Tolerance

"people increasingly rely upon tolerance because other Enlightenment values such as reason, equality, and liberty have lost the power to inspire. 

For liberal societies beset by creeping anxieties about the value of their form of government, it is doubtful that this new emphasis on tolerance constitutes a net benefit. The celebration of tolerance as an end in itself is a symptom of the shift from self-confident modern liberal democracies to the self-doubting postmodern ones. Many of the groups that claim diversity and tolerance as their guiding principles, combine it with a more-or-less explicit rejection of liberalism. The great danger is that, increasingly, attachment to liberalism and tolerance are seen as incompatible and mutually exclusive, and this conviction is the result of a radical change in the understanding of what tolerance means.

By its very nature, tolerance has an ambiguous status amongst liberal values. People with diverging lifestyles cannot live together unless they qualify their attachment to the particular with a corresponding commitment to the universal values that help unify the wider society in which they live. They can only do so if they believe that the institutions responsible for organising a society’s collective life benefit everyone. But, lately, wariness of moral judgment has come to outweigh the quest for rational principles of universal justice...

The mere fact of cohabitation doesn’t necessarily constitute an example of tolerance and people back then probably would not have understood it as such. This distinction is apparent from one of the most common examples of what people mistakenly call Ancient tolerance, the Islamic Caliphate of Córdoba. 

Jews and Christians were permitted to practice their faiths as Abrahamic ‘People of the Book’ by the Caliphs of Spain, but only so long as they acknowledged the ultimate truth of Islam by payment of tribute to the Caliph in the form of the jizya. This was not because faith was considered a matter of personal judgment, but because loyalty was better secured by fiscal and legal incentives than forcible conversion. But this did not make apostasy any more possible for a Muslim, nor did it affect the hostility of Sunni leaders towards Muslims of other sects, such as the Shia.

The notion of tolerance as the ability to set aside absolute moral standards and work out a collective path to coexistence began as a religious discussion. By the beginning of the 16^th century, the political model of the Christian Kingdom, conceived as a community of salvation, was splintering under the weight of theological disagreements...

Influential pre-Enlightenment thinkers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes who sought a means of making societies peaceful and coherent realised they could no longer rely on moral and religious doctrines. Firstly, because Christian morality had made political power weak and inefficient and, secondly, because the debates it had created were now the cause of disorder and division among its adherents. A new system of government thus had to be based on things which avoided the kinds of disagreement moral reflections could not overcome.

Whatever the basis of that new State, it needed to be neutral – that is, indifferent to moral questions, and to the conflicts they inevitably produced. It needed to shift its mission from a prescriptive definition of life (what the right life is) to the preservation of life, whatever that life may be and however it is lived. This led to the creation of a new distinction between morality and politics. But for that to happen, morality itself would need to be reshaped to accommodate that separation.

The separation of the good from the common good isn’t natural. From the point of view of the moral individual, tolerance is bound to appear as the acceptance of evil...

This division of morality and politics grew from the separation of Church and State. But religious freedom also provided a space for the development of other freedoms. Because the correct path to salvation no longer fell within the purview of State power and authority, it created space for what would soon become civil society...

For Burke, particularism need not be hermetic. On the contrary, his interest in the variety of human behaviours is a product of his concern for “original justice” or “natural law.” The error of the French revolutionaries, he argued, wasn’t to cherish universal values, but to behave towards their people as strangers, sharing nothing but the cold calculation of general and empty norms. There could be no government on the basis of instrumental reason alone, he went on, because self-interest can do nothing without trust, and there is no trust without love. And we do not love things because they are rational, but because they are our own.

Human societies cannot function properly if their individual constituents do not know one another. And they cannot know one another without sharing common objects of affection (territory, manners, language, images and so on). The universal principles that inform our institutions can only become efficient tools of government if we transform them into an extension of our own.

That, for Burke, is accomplished by shared identity, by common prejudices, without which reason would become either powerless or tyrannical. The principles of our government – liberty, equality, the rule of law, and so on – can only successfully organise and pacify our collective life if we accept them as a community, rather than as isolated ahistorical, self-interested individuals. State building is inseparable from nation building.

While appearing to speak in the name of liberal values and social norms, the rhetoric of tolerance is often used today by those who want to deny their universality.

Following the murder of 12 people at the offices of French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, an alarming number of people claimed that the magazine should have been sensitive to Islamist blasphemy doctrines. For these critics, individual liberty, freedom of expression, and even personal security from lethal violence, were subordinate to the need to respect cultural difference...

Postmodern tolerance is used as an instrument of confusion, in order to impose the recognition of difference on social agents using state power. The assumption behind this move is that society isn’t a realm of individual freedom, but a pyramid of domination which benefits an elite. In such a situation, equality of rights is threatening. To protect the oppressed it is not sufficient to grant them the right to express difference – the State needs to silence those deemed to be oppressors...

The implication behind this characteristically abstruse prose is that, without radical reform of language and culture, the oppressed will remain invisible and something less than human. Liberation requires, not only the rights to self-assertion (living one’s life as one sees fit) and self-expression (being one’s own representative) secured by liberal institutions, but also the adoption of new codes of speech and conduct by everyone else. Moreover, since oppression may be invisible to the oppressed, they need to be informed of their condition before committing to the struggle for emancipation. But informed by whom, if not those, like Butler, who already see democratic societies as systems of oppression?

Catholics and Protestants didn’t need to be told by academics that they were oppressed by one another. And the subsequent creation of the modern State didn’t require them to stop thinking of one another as heretics. Rather, it compelled them to put an end to sectarian violence as a means of punishing heresy. What Butler is asking of the alleged oppressor isn’t simply to refrain from violence, but to see in his opinions the cause of the another’s suffering. In this way, speech and opinion are redescribed as a kind of violence. Through the recognition of the oppressed identity, the oppressor admits to being the product, the agent, and the beneficiary of injustice, and acknowledges a debt to the oppressed. Instead of judging people regardless of identity, the State is consequently required to promote and protect some identities and condemn others.

This betrayal of the intended meaning of tolerance was made possible by a deliberate expansion of the definition of safety. Suddenly, tolerance was asked to encompass exactly was it was meant to exclude – beliefs individuals take to be moral wrongs on the basis of their own value judgments. The modern State was supposed to be concerned only with what people did, and not with what people thought or said. Its mission was to protect our physical safety and the security of our property, while leaving to individual judgment whether to agree or disagree with speech and opinions.

But by promoting a ‘performative’ conception of individual identity, ‘critical theorists’ and postmodern academics intend to blur that important distinction.

If who I am cannot be distinguished from who I say I am (e.g. the gender or the religion with which I identify) then people who disagree with me are a threat to my very existence. Worse, this asks – or, ideally, compels – the State to either accept all such claims, or to assess their sincerity or insincerity (for example regarding access to public bathrooms). Not only is this an impossible task, it is precisely the kind of task the modern State was designed to avoid.

This is why tolerance, rightly understood, cannot be the blind cultivation of difference... The rejection of political neutrality destroys the very basis on which tolerance was conceived and cultivated; not as something worth pursuing in itself, but as a value that can only be enjoyed in relation with others."

AIDS as a Social Construct

"Modernism meant the whole modern show—including the Enlightenment, empirical science, and rational thought—and postmodernism, which was sometimes called post- structuralism, was its refutation and replacement.

If the old dispensation was the age of reason, the new one was the age of unreason. That would explain why Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization was one of the touchstone texts always lurking in the background. It didn’t matter that its author rejected the postmodern label, because postmodernists like Foucault rejected all fixed meanings. That was the whole point.

There was no truth in this new world, only “truth”—sometimes called “knowledge”—which lived inside quotation marks whether you noticed them or not. Truth wasn’t established with empirical evidence but talked into existence with a kind of rhetorical magic called “discourse” that made something so because of how you expressed it.

Truth was the “product” of discourse, not the other way around. It was manufactured like a salami in a metaphorical meaning factory operated by unseen systems of authority whose interests it ultimately served and whose only purpose was maintaining power. Accordingly, the madness in Madness and Civilization wasn’t a medical diagnosis but a “social construct,” devised in the seventeenth century to enforce the rule of reason by demonizing anyone who strayed beyond the boundaries of convention. “Madness” turned nonconformists into “the other” so they could be locked away. Like madness, invented to serve as reason’s defining opposite, the asylum was the indispensable foil of freedom, making forced confinement not just the dark side of the Enlightenment but its raison d’être.

Foucault’s true theme was power, the only thing that was really real. There was something seductive about seeing everything in terms of its secret relationship to power, and the critic as someone trained to unmask it. It made the intellectual a kind of superhero, freeing people from the structures of oppression embedded inside institutions, social systems, and works of art. The suffering of people imprisoned by a poem might not be great, but the person exposing it was a liberator. And wasn’t I trying to liberate myself, at least a little, from false

constructions, so I could live inside the story of my own unfolding? The beauty of postmodernism was that it erased the world with one hand while rewriting it with the other, allowing you to inherit the authority you discredited like a spoil of war. But there was something arbitrary about it, too, that left me feeling falsified in ways I lacked the clarity to put my finger on. Foucault’s obsession with hidden power engendered a low-level paranoia that took the place of thought while making you feel smart.

The hyperrational aspects of the Enlightenment did have a dark underside, and those with power were constantly drawing arbitrary lines they pushed the powerless across, but did the Enlightenment really destroy an age of freedom and use reason only to suppress its enemies? Having banished medical causes, all that remained to explain madness in Madness and Civilization was a social construct creating a supply of demonized “others” leading to a demand for asylums that in turn increased the supply of madmen in a widening spiral of expanding categories and segregating spaces culminating in “the great confinement.”

Foucault even considered AIDS a social construct, waving away the warning he received from the writer Edmund White in the early 1980s when he was teaching at Berkeley. “You American puritans, you’re always inventing diseases,” Foucault told White, though people were already dying of AIDS, most conspicuously gay men like Foucault himself, who had plunged into San Francisco’s bathhouse scene in the orgiastic seventies and remained passionately devoted to anonymous drug-fueled sadomasochistic sex. Still, he preferred to see the disease, which killed him the year before I got to graduate school, as an imaginary disorder, “and one that singles out blacks, drug users and gays—how perfect!”"

--- The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions / Jonathan Rosen

The Roots Of Wokeness

From 2020, which among other things explains again the link between post-modernism and social justice. It also explains why liberals are so obsessive about language (my own take is that liberals think that language shapes reality so they think changing language changes reality, and also that language is a shibboleth to distinguish insiders and outsiders):

The Roots Of Wokeness

In the mid-2010s, a curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media. A data site, storywrangling.org, which measures the frequency of words in news stories, revealed some remarkable shifts. Terms that had previously been almost entirely obscure suddenly became ubiquitous—and an analysis of the New York Times, using these tools, is a useful example. Looking at stories from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes. 

Language changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. While the New York Times once had a reputation for being a bit stodgy on linguistic matters, pedantic, precise and slow-to-change, as any paper of record might be, in the last few years, its pages have been flushed with so many neologisms that a reader from, say, a decade ago would have a hard time understanding large swathes of it. And for many of us regular readers, we’ve just gotten used to brand new words popping up suddenly to re-describe something we thought we knew already. We notice a new word, make a brief mental check, and move on with our lives. 

But we need to do more than that. We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades, and appears to have reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s. Most normal people have never heard of this theory—or rather an interlocking web of theories—that is nonetheless changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy. 

What we have long needed is an intelligible, intelligent description of this theory which most people can grasp. And we’ve just gotten one: “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity,” by former math prof James Lindsay and British academic, Helen Pluckrose. It’s as deep a dive into this often impenetrable philosophy as anyone would want to attempt. But it’s well worth grappling with.

What the book helps the layperson to understand is the evolution of postmodern thought since the 1960s until it became the doctrine of Social Justice today. Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning—from Christianity to Marxism—postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture. The entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or  even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and “problematized” whenever possible. Postmodern theory does so mischievously and irreverently—even as it leaves nothing in reason’s place. The idea of objective truth—even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach—is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized.

During the 1980s and 1990s, this somewhat aimless critique of everything hardened into a plan for action. Analyzing how truth was a mere function of power, and then seeing that power used against distinct and oppressed identity groups, led to an understandable desire to do something about it, and to turn this critique into a form of activism. Lindsay and Pluckrose call this “applied postmodernism”, which, in turn, hardened into what we now know as Social Justice.  

You can see the rationale. After all, the core truth of our condition, this theory argues, is that we live in a system of interlocking oppressions that penalize various identity groups in a society. And all power is zero-sum: you either have power over others or they have power over you. To the extent that men exercise power, for example, women don’t; in so far as straight people wield power, gays don’t; and so on. There is no mutually beneficial, non-zero-sum advancement in this worldview. All power is gained only through some other group’s loss. And so the point became not simply to interpret the world, but to change it, to coin a phrase, an imperative which explains why some critics call this theory a form of neo-Marxism.

The “neo” comes from switching out Marxism’s focus on materialism and class in favor of various oppressed group identities, who are constantly in conflict the way classes were always in conflict. And in this worldview, individuals only exist at all as a place where these group identities intersect. You have no independent existence outside these power dynamics. I am never just me. I’m a point where the intersecting identities of white, gay, male, Catholic, immigrant, HIV-positive, cis, and English all somehow collide. You can hear this echoed in the famous words of Ayanna Pressley: “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” An assertion of individuality is, in fact, an attack upon the group and an enabling of oppression.

Just as this theory denies the individual, it also denies the universal. There are no universal truths, no objective reality, just narratives that are expressed in discourses and language that reflect one group’s power over another. There is no distinction between objective truth and subjective experience, because the former is an illusion created by the latter. So instead of an argument, you merely have an identity showdown, in which the more oppressed always wins, because that subverts the hierarchy. These discourses of power, moreover, never end; there is no progress as such, no incremental inclusion of more and more identities into a pluralist, liberal unified project; there is the permanent reality of the oppressors and the oppressed. And all that we can do is constantly expose and eternally resist these power-structures on behalf of the oppressed.

Truth is always and only a function of power. So, for example, science has no claim on objective truth, because science itself is a cultural construct, created out of power differentials, set up by white cis straight males. And the systems of thought that white cis straight men have historically set up—like liberalism itself—perpetuate themselves, and are passed along unwittingly by people who simply respond to the incentives and traditions of thought that make up the entire power-system, without being aware of it. There’s no conspiracy: we all act unknowingly in perpetuating systems of thought that oppress other groups. To be “woke” is to be “awake” to these invisible, self-reinforcing discourses, and to seek to dismantle them—in ourselves and others. 

There is no such thing as persuasion in this paradigm, because persuasion assumes an equal relationship between two people based on reason. And there is no reason and no equality. There is only power. This is the point of telling students, for example, to “check their privilege” before opening their mouths on campus. You have to measure the power dynamic between you and the other person first of all; you do this by quickly noting your interlocutor’s place in the system of oppression, and your own, before any dialogue can occur. And if your interlocutor is lower down in the matrix of identity, your job is to defer and to listen. That’s partly why diversity at the New York Times, say, has nothing to do with a diversity of ideas. Within critical theory, the very concept of a “diversity of ideas” is a function of oppression. What matters is a diversity of identities that can all express the same idea: that liberalism is a con-job. Which is why almost every NYT op-ed now and almost every left-leaning magazine reads exactly alike.

Language is vital for critical theory—not as a means of persuasion but of resistance to oppressive discourses. So take the words I started with. “Non-binary” is a term for someone who subjectively feels neither male nor female. Since there is no objective truth, and since any criticism of that person’s “lived experience” is a form of traumatizing violence, that individual’s feelings are the actual fact. To subject such an idea to, say, the scrutiny of science is therefore a denial of that person’s humanity and existence. To inquire what it means to “feel like a man,” is also unacceptable. An oppressed person’s word is always the last one. To question this reality, even to ask questions about it, is a form of oppression itself. In the rhetoric of social justice, it is a form of linguistic violence. Whereas using the term nonbinary is a form of resistance to cis heteronormativity. One is evil; the other good. 

Becoming “woke” to these power dynamics alters your perspective of reality. And so our unprecedentedly multicultural, and multiracial democracy is now described as a mere front for “white supremacy.” This is the reality of our world, the critical theorists argue, even if we cannot see it. A gay person is not an individual who makes her own mind up about the world and can have any politics or religion she wants; she is “queer,” part of an identity that interrogates and subverts heteronormativity. A man explaining something is actually “mansplaining” it—because his authority is entirely wrapped up in his toxic identity. Questioning whether a trans woman is entirely interchangeable with a woman—or bringing up biology to distinguish between men and women—is not a mode of inquiry. It is itself a form of “transphobia”, of fear and loathing of an entire group of people and a desire to exterminate them. It’s an assault. 

My view is that there is nothing wrong with exploring these ideas. They’re almost interesting if you can get past the hideous prose. And I can say this because liberalism can include critical theory as one view of the world worth interrogating. But critical theory cannot include liberalism, because it views liberalism itself as a mode of white supremacy that acts against the imperative of social and racial justice. That’s why liberalism is supple enough to sustain countless theories and ideas and arguments, and is always widening the field of debate; and why institutions under the sway of Social Justice necessarily must constrain avenues of thought and ideas. That’s why liberalism is dedicated to allowing Ibram X. Kendi to speak and write, but Ibram X. Kendi would create an unelected tribunal to police anyone and any institution from perpetuating what he regards as white supremacy—which is any racial balance not exactly representative of the population as a whole.

For me, these theorists do something less forgivable than abuse the English language. They claim that their worldview is the only way to advance social progress, especially the rights of minorities, and that liberalism fails to do so. This, it seems to me, is profoundly untrue. A moral giant like John Lewis advanced this country not by intimidation, or re-ordering the language, or seeing the advancement of black people as some kind of reversal for white people. He engaged the liberal system with non-violence and persuasion, he emphasized the unifying force of love and forgiveness, he saw black people as having agency utterly independent of white people, and changed America with that fundamentally liberal perspective. 

The gay rights movement, the most successful of the 21st century, succeeded in the past through showing what straights and gays have in common, rather than seeing the two as in a zero-sum conflict, resolved by prosecuting homophobia or “queering” heterosexuality. The women’s rights movement has transformed the role of women in society in the past without demonizing all men, or seeing misogyny as somehow embedded in “white supremacy”. As we have just seen, civil rights protections for transgender people—just decided by a conservative Supreme Court—have been achieved not by seeing people as groups in constant warfare, but by seeing the dignity of the unique individual in pursuing their own happiness without the obstacle of prejudice. 

In fact, I suspect it is the success of liberalism in bringing this kind of non-zero-sum pluralism into being that rattles the critical theorists the most. Because it suggests that reform is always better than revolution, that empirical truth is on the side of the genuinely oppressed and we should never fear understanding things better, that progress is both possible in a liberal democracy, and more securely rooted than in other systems, because it springs from a lively, informed debate, and isn’t foisted on society by ideologues. 

The rhetorical trap of critical theory is that it has coopted the cause of inclusion and forced liberals onto the defensive. But liberals have nothing to be defensive about. What’s so encouraging about this book is that it has confidence in its own arguments, and is as dedicated to actual social justice, achieved through liberal means, as it is scornful of the postmodern ideologues who have coopted and corrupted otherwise noble causes.

This is very good news—even better to see it as the Number 1 Amazon best-seller in philosophy long before its publication date later in August. The intellectual fight back against wokeness has now begun in earnest. Let’s do this.

Postmodern Philosophy is a Debating Strategy

Postmodern Philosophy is a Debating Strategy

"What characterizes postmodern thought? In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean Lyotard defines postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives.” According to Lyotard, postmodernism is a critical response to the presumption of ultimate truth embodied in modernist doctrines as wide ranging as Enlightenment liberalism, Marxist Socialism, and Religious Fundamentalism. Postmodernists follow Friedrich Nietzsche in endorsing a radical epistemological skepticism embodied in what is often called a “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

While I think postmodern philosophy is interesting and even sometimes instructive, I am convinced that in practice it is often incoherent, not to mention politically self-refuting. But this raises the question: why, if postmodern philosophy has been shown to be so intellectually and politically confused (by observers on both the Left and Right), does it remain so popular?...

This speaker applied a hermeneutics of suspicion with great skill to these discourses, identifying how they were not only socially constructed, but also how they served the nefarious ends of their various proponents.

It was a well-argued paper that left me impressed but also puzzled. The speaker had deconstructed all of these accounts but supplied no alternative account. After the session ended I approached him to inquire about this. But he just stared at me blankly, as if I had just asked him how to tie my own shoelaces. This was not his job, he told me. He seemed to believe an alternative account to be unnecessary. I wanted to know what underlying values and beliefs were motivating his critique so I asked him to describe his worldview. He responded, “I have no worldview.”...

It seems to me that postmodernism is popular—especially among academics—not merely because of the social and cultural conditions of late modernity, but because it is immensely powerful as a tool or strategy of argument. For how can you possibly refute a person’s position when they deny even having one? In turn, arguing with someone who subscribes to postmodern thought is like fighting someone who has nothing to lose. There is no winning.

I have experienced this repeatedly in graduate seminars and at conferences. I will make a substantive judgment about history or some event, and some postmodern junkie will reply that I am merely reproducing a socially constructed discourse. In these moments, it’s hard to know what to do. I usually end up keeping quiet, but then I can’t help thinking the person who just deconstructed my truth claim doesn’t actually believe what they’re peddling. Because how could you possibly live a human life really believing that there is no ultimate truth?

Postmodern philosophy affords a position of power within the academy because it arms the scholar with tools to pick apart everyone else’s work, without leaving itself open to objections or refutations. By feigning a position of critical neutrality, the postmodern critic can stand back and deconstruct everyone else’s discourses, as if they occupy an archimedean point.

But the postmodern critic has entered into a Faustian bargain: they have traded in their humanity—rooted in the need for meaning and coherence—in order to win arguments. I realize this sounds a bit over the top, but I can’t think of a better way to put it. Postmodern philosophy gives you the power to crush any intellectual opponent because it allows you to make the case that everything they believe is socially constructed, corrupt, oppressive, or all of the above.

As a result, a commitment to postmodern thought is likely to breed one of two things: severe existential angst and disenchantment or hypocrisy. Based on my observations I have seen both of these play out in the lives of fellow grad students. Some take postmodern epistemology seriously and this leads to a life of ironic distancing (nothing matters, but whatever) or in some instances serious mental illness like crippling anxiety and depression. Whereas others only use it rhetorically, all the while living life like everyone else—as if truth does exist and also matters. Indeed, I think the most famous postmodern thinkers fall squarely in this second category and thereby produce what I want to call vigilante scholarship.

The vigilante scholar, in their quest for “justice” is a solitary figure; a byproduct of their perceived epistemic superiority. They need not reveal how they came to hold the views they do, nor justify them, for they know what is just. Their gift is their ability to see what no one else can, and their courage to speak “truth to power.”

We can see an example of this in Foucault (or at least the version of him which has been popularized)...

Foucault was offering an evaluation of modernity. But we might ask: how can one evaluate something without having some positive standard with which to compare it? Good question. My argument is that Foucault does have a standard, it’s just that he doesn’t admit it. This is also true of the speaker I met at Oxford. These postmodern thinkers therefore execute a very sly sleight of hand: in one breath they tell us all claims to truth are mere claims to power and therefore we ought to give up the quest for truth itself, while in another they claim to have some enlightened view of reality which allows them to critique what they see as unjust or oppressive."

Post-modernism and the Basics

Ravi Zacharias on Postmodern Architecture at Ohio State

"I remember lecturing at Ohio State University, one of the largest universities in this country. I was minutes away from beginning my lecture, and my host was driving me past a new building called the Wexner Center for the Performing Arts.

He said, “This is America’s first postmodern building.”

I was startled for a moment and I said, “What is a postmodern building?”

He said, “Well, the architect said that he designed this building with no design in mind. When the architect was asked, ‘Why?’ he said, ‘If life itself is capricious, why should our buildings have any design and any meaning?’ So he has pillars that have no purpose. He has stairways that go nowhere. He has a senseless building built and somebody has paid for it.”

I said, “So his argument was that if life has no purpose and design, why should the building have any design?”

He said, “That is correct.”

I said, “Did he do the same with the foundation?”

All of a sudden there was silence.

You see, you and I can fool with the infrastructure as much as we would like, but we dare not fool with the foundation because it will call our bluff in a hurry."

This is like Dawkins on cultural relativists at 30,000 feet

All bow to High Priests of cancel culture who warned me NOT to write this

LOUIS DE BERNIERES: All bow to High Priests of cancel culture who warned me NOT to write this

"Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, one of our greatest writers, expressed anxiety that young authors were being forced into self-censorship out of fear of being trolled by the anonymous lynch mobs of the politically correct.

He said that he felt safe himself, because he was already well-established: ‘It may be an illusion, but I think I am protected.’

Ish may be more protected than I am by the fact that he is not white...

This is mainly out of consideration for my editors, who display mild panic at every sign of political incorrectness.

I don’t know whether or not they actually are ‘wokesters’ — I rather doubt it — but I think they might be terrified of those who are.

Everyone dreads being trolled by the Pharisees who pray in public, our social-justice and identity warriors.

I refer to the kind of people who force students to take unconscious bias exams in which you have to admit to things of which you are not guilty because otherwise you don’t pass; to those who have ‘cancelled’ or ‘no-platformed’ both our most influential modern feminist (Germaine Greer) and our most popular storyteller (JK Rowling) in order not to be ‘triggered’, and to be ‘safe’.

Even Lionel Shriver, who has been an outspoken critic of political correctness, admitted last week that she had agreed to remove dialogue from her forthcoming book after being told it was ‘othering’...

Thanks to the success of my novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, I was made patron of The British Banjo, Mandolin And Guitar Federation but, after I wrote a letter to The Times about the attitudes of Scottish nationalists in January, some snowflakes from north of the border complained and I was promptly fired.

Even though I was warned not to write this article by a well-meaning friend, I decided to go ahead because my partner insisted that I must. She is full of the dread of what will become of us if there is no resistance.

My own fears have roots in the past. My parents are both dead now, but they were proud of having struggled through World War II because our freedom of speech and thought were thereby set in stone.

In fact, we didn’t become truly free until the Lady Chatterley trial, when Penguin was found not guilty of obscenity after publishing D. H. Lawrence’s sexually explicit novel about a love affair between an aristocratic woman and her gamekeeper.

Ever since then, we have steadily been losing ground. I think I might have lived at the best time in our cultural history, set up for freedom by my parents’ generation, and dying just in time not to see us spiral back down again into a stultifying intellectual and moral captivity.

My theory is that the older people in publishing, of whom there are no longer very many, may have become over-sensitive to the passions of younger members of staff.

These have come through the humanities departments of universities that have, since the 1990s, been steadily taken over by petit bourgeois armchair revolutionaries who have never used a shovel in their lives.

These are the kind of people who hounded the writer and philosopher Roger Scruton for being conservative, drove Laurence Fox out of the acting profession... and have recently ganged up in their hundreds against Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex, for stating that she thinks there is a biological basis to sex difference.

This terrible sin is known as ‘essentialism’, which is taboo over all issues of race, gender and diversity, except in the case of white middle-class male heterosexuals (WMCMH), who are quintessentially evil and the cause of all that’s wrong in the world.

I first became aware of these tendencies in the 1990s, when English Literature departments in Canada became obsessed with post-colonial studies. Suddenly, people were studying works not because of their intrinsic literary merit, but because of who wrote them and where they came from.

It’s easy to fall into this kind of mistake. In my 20s, I fell in love with the work of a small posse of Latin American writers and, so, for ten years, read nobody but Latin Americans. One day, I suddenly realised that I had been loyally hoovering up any old dross as long as it was from Latin America.

This kind of thoughtlessness has now extended in every direction, and ideology routinely trumps quality. Any and everything has to be ‘problematised’.

‘Cultural theory’ is taught as if it were fact, by people who say it’s a fact that there are no facts, but only ‘texts’.

The whole world is construed not as an empirical shared reality but as a text whose reality is dependent upon the standpoint of the ‘reader’.

So if you think a horse is really a car you are still perfectly sane if you walk round and round it looking for the doors and headlights, and you are exceptionally correct if you happen to be from the tiniest of tiny minorities.

The concept of ‘intersectionality’ means you get many more gold medals in the Oppression Olympics if you can find ever more recondite niches to occupy. There are an awful lot of boxes to tick these days, and those from the greatest number of oppressed minorities get to be the winners.

There is a comical struggle for the moral high ground in all this, reminiscent of the circular firing squads of the socialist Left in the past. The point of these ‘studies’ and this ‘critical theory’ is to privilege minorities at the expense of the mainstream culture that has allegedly oppressed them, and it is a dog-eat-dog competition to assert oneself as the most downtrodden.

God help you if you are a WMCMH and you want to open your mouth and speak, perhaps to suggest that maybe one’s sex and sexual orientation are not socially constructed, and to confess that no one has been able to discover any unconscious bias in the sewers of your psyche.

The more you can’t find it, the more it’s there, of course. That’s how deeply ‘structural’ and ‘systemic’ it is.

Connected with all this, which I think began in American universities many years ago, is the attempt to proscribe all ‘appropriation’ of other people’s cultural experience. What this amounts to is that you can’t write about being a woman in a kitchen unless you actually are a woman in a kitchen...

Paul Simon suffered hideous flak for his Gracelands album, one of the greatest ever created, because he ‘exploited’ South African musicians, who then went on to become successful and beloved all over the world.   

It means telling Eric Clapton, one of the greatest blues guitarist who has ever lived, that he shouldn’t be playing the blues, and that he ‘exploited’ BB King by making an album with him. 

It means accusing me of ‘Orientalism’ for writing a novel that is now used for teaching Ottoman history in Turkish universities. Luckily, the offence of Orientalism is one that almost no ‘Orientals’ give a damn about.

Bob Dylan is said to have answered a critic who accused him of appropriation by looking at him as if he were mad, and saying: ‘That’s how it works.’

It’s true; all art is related to all other art; all books are made of other books. Any artist knows that theft is of the essence. Without theft nothing new is created.

You steal what you want without shame or permission, and you make it new and original through your own talent. If some academic heretic-hunter tells you otherwise, the only response worthy of an artist is to give them the finger.

Irrationality and bad logic are at the heart of the matter. I have even read somewhere that logic is to be deplored because of its white male ‘heteronormative’ origins. The unintentional insult to women worldwide is apparent.

In informal logic, there is something known as ‘the genetic fallacy’. This consists in appraising the worth or truth of a statement on the grounds of its origin.

If it is raining, only an idiot would deny it just because it was, for example, Adolf Hitler who pointed it out. If it is not raining, only an idiot would say that actually it must be, as it was an ‘oppressed’ person who just said it was...

The canon became the canon because of its excellence. The point is to add to it, not signal your piety by substituting someone else just because you think they were from a disadvantaged minority.

It is a great testament to the public that it keeps the arts flourishing in our civilisation with very little assistance from the universities, which for years have been abandoning the cultural transmission model of education. On reflection, giving our culture back to the people may even be a good thing, because it is clearly not safe in the hands of academics.

The trouble with grievance and victimhood studies is that they cannot thrive without creating, exaggerating, and cementing division, like the vulture that cannot thrive without a corpse.

You have to tell someone they are oppressed so they can get angry about it and become your disciple. Every time they fail, or something goes wrong, or somebody is curt to them, you tell them to blame institutional prejudice and unconscious bias.

Why bother to try when you’ve been educated to believe you haven’t got a chance? When pessimism and hopelessness have been drummed into you?...

We have fine exemplars of people who might have been told that they didn’t have a chance, but must have waved the idea away with contempt. Sadiq Khan, Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Diane Abbott, Ben Okri, Floella Benjamin, David Lammy, Kwasi Kwarteng, and Nadiya Hussain. The Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott, author and broadcaster Lemn Sissay, Cabinet Office minister Alok Sharma, and Labour frontbencher Tan Dhesi…

The list is so long that one would lose heart attempting to exhaust it. None of them got to the top of the tree by playing the victim...

Once I was in a pub talking to a young black woman, who said: ‘I don’t understand all this fuss about identity. We’re all just human, aren’t we?’

She saw the delight in my eyes, and we did a high five."

Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism.

Even in 2006 the rot was evident:

Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism.

"Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena...

We can already hear the objections. The term fascism represents an emotionally charged concept in both the political and religious arenas; it is the ugliest expression of life in the 20th century. Although it is associated with specific political systems, this fascism of the masses, as was practised by Hitler and Mussolini, has today been replaced by a system of microfascisms – polymorphous intolerances that are revealed in more subtle ways. Consequently, although the majority of the current manifestations of fascism are less brutal, they are nevertheless more pernicious...

Within the healthcare disciplines, a powerful evidencebased discourse has produced a plethora of correlates, such as specialised journals and best practice guidelines. Obediently following this trend, many health sciences scholars have leapt onto the bandwagon, mimicking their medical colleagues by saturating health sciences discourses with concepts informed by this evidence-based movement. In the words of Michel Foucault, these discourses represent an awesome, but oftentimes cryptic, political power that ‘work[s] to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it’ (p. 136). Unmasking the hidden politics of evidence-based discourse is paramount, and it is this task that forms the basis of our critique...

The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research paradigm – that of post-positivism – but also and foremost in showing the process by which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore acting as a fascist structure.

At first glance, EBHS [Ed: evidence-based health sciences] seems beneficial for positive patient outcomes, which is a primary healthcare objective...

EBHS comes to be widely considered as the truth. When only one method of knowledge production is promoted and validated, the implication is that health sciences are gradually reduced to EBHS. Indeed, the legitimacy of health sciences knowledge that is not based on specific research designs comes to be questioned, if not dismissed altogether. In the starkest terms, we are currently witnessing the health sciences engaged in a strange process of eliminating some ways of knowing. EBHS becomes a ‘regime of truth’, as Foucault would say – a regimented and institutionalised version of ‘truth’...

We believe that health sciences ought to promote pluralism – the acceptance of multiple points of view. However, EBHS does not allow pluralism, unless that pluralism is engineered by the Cochrane hierarchy itself... the evidence-based movement is neither ‘progressive’ nor a ‘natural’ development in health sciences: it is a trend that is engineered. As a response to this, a vigilant resistance must arise from within the health disciplines themselves, and one way of deploying such resistance is by using a tool called ‘deconstruction’...

We believe that EBM [Ed: evidence-based medicine], which saturates health sciences discourses, constitutes an ossified language that maps the landscape of the professional disciplines as a whole. Accordingly, we believe that a postmodernist critique of this prevailing mode of thinking is indispensable. Those who are wedded to the idea of ‘evidence’ in the health sciences maintain what is essentially a Newtonian, mechanistic world view: they tend to believe that reality is objective, which is to say that it exists, ‘out there’, absolutely independent of the human observer, and of the observer’s intentions and observations. They fondly point to ‘facts’, while they are forced to dismiss ‘values’ as somehow unscientific. For them, this reality (an ensemble of facts) corresponds to an objectively real and mechanical world. But this form of empiricism, we would argue, fetishises the object at the expense of the human subject, for whom this world has a vital significance and meaning in the first place. An evidence-based, empirical world view is dangerously reductive insofar as it negates the personal and interpersonal significance and meaning of a world that is first and foremost a relational world, and not a fixed set of objects, partes extra partes...

Arendt herself draws the link between totalitarian ideology and the modern sciences, and so we are justified to turn to her, among others, to find a trenchant critique of EBHS. The ‘regime of truth’ that has emerged from the EBM is an ideology that is supported by a number of contingent factors – contingencies that EBHS would mistakenly classify as ‘truths’. An ideology is monolithic: those who adhere to the ideology believe it ‘can explain everything and every occurence [sic] by deducing it from a single premise’ (p. 468). She warns that totalitarianism ‘is quite prepared to sacrifice everybody’s vital immediate interests to the execution of what it assume[s] to be the law of History or the law of Nature’ (pp. 461–462). But, as we have remarked, History and Nature are made; these forms therefore call for an ever-renewed critique...

Applying the work of Orwell in a critique of EBM in health sciences might surprise the reader; however, after an in-depth reading of 1984, we feel that Orwell’s vision is gradually becoming a reality. Currently, a large number of scholars in the health sciences follow their colleagues in medicine down a narrow path leading to uniformity and intolerance. There is therefore in our opinion, the creation and advancement of a new ‘language’ that is supplanting all others, attempting to discredit or to eliminate them from the discursive terrain of health. This is scientific Newspeak. It is a highly normative and recalcitrant scientific language that stands in opposition to that sense of hope that sustains every freedom-loving individual."


Remarkably no evidence is given for the grand claims made here - just the throwing out European names and the most tenuous of connections to the argument.

Dawkins's famous quote applies with very few changes:

"Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes are built according to scientific principles and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icarus don’t."

“More Studying and Less Sex. That Is Not Something to Be Regretted.”

“More Studying and Less Sex. That Is Not Something to Be Regretted.”

"Aaron Sibarium (The American Interest): Thank you for agreeing to do this, Heather. To begin, why don’t you tell me what The Diversity Delusion is about, and what inspired you to write it at this particular moment.

Heather Mac Donald: The book is about the identity politics and victim ideology that have taken over college campuses. I was inspired to write it out of a combination of sorrow and rage. Sorrow, because I believe so strongly in the humanist mission of universities and the extraordinary privilege of being able to study the greatest works of civilization. And rage, because I see ignorant students being encouraged by faculty and campus administrators to reject the monuments of human thought on such absurd grounds as an author’s gonads and melanin...

We have just lived through a month of Gender Studies 101 with the hysteria over the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The tribal victimology that characterizes college campuses is now becoming the currency of a surprisingly large sector of the Democratic Party. Many females have decided that they represent an oppressed class and that such traditional Enlightenment values as due-process and the presumption of innocence are expendable. Campus rape tribunals have discarded essential truth-finding mechanisms such as cross-examination in the service of the #BelieveSurvivors mantra. And now that contempt for rational means of proof is entering the public consciousness as well...

What matters is the dominant narrative, whether or not the majority of people subscribe to it. That narrative sees white males as the source of most everything evil in the world. The hemorrhaging of lower-class, white males from the American economy and civil life, documented by Charles Murray, may be partly influenced by such circumambient contempt.

To further buttress Mounk’s point, the Pew Research Center did a study of so-called gender equity in STEM within the last year and found that the more years of higher education that females had, the more likely they were to say that they had been the victims of sex discrimination...

I do not think that [helicopter parenting] is what is generating the maudlin campus victimology, because the demographics don’t really match up. The brothers of white females are subject to the same overprotective parents, as noted above, and yet they are not, by and large, identifying themselves as an oppressed victim group needing safe spaces and all sorts of reparations. At best, they can present themselves as allies.

Moreover, blacks and Hispanics are, on average—and I’m making a generalization here—not over-parented to the same extent. In fact, there’s often a lack of parenting on the part of fathers. Yet black and Hispanic students are eager to jump on the victim bandwagon. So my alternative hypothesis to the over-parenting, psychological explanation is that this really is an ideological phenomenon...

There are two important ironies here. First, the original poststructuralist thinkers who created the rhetoric of high theory read the Western canon exclusively. Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, for example, deconstructed Proust and Plato; they never thought to go in search of female or black writers to fill a quota.

Second, one of the most bizarre tenets of deconstruction was that the self was a mere linguistic trope—there was no self, just language play. But in the 1980s, with the rise of multiculturalism, the self came roaring back with a vengeance. Suddenly academic victimologists were defining the self in the most reductive manner possible, in terms of gonads and melanin. The self became the subject of endless study and theorizing—but it was emphatically not a made-up construct...

We have a bizarre hybrid of promiscuity and neo-Victorianism, which is characterized by a belief in ubiquitous male predation but which also looks to males to be the unique guardians of female well-being. When you destroy the traditional restraints on the male libido as sexual liberation did—those restraints being chivalry and gentlemanliness on the one hand and female modesty and prudence on the other—you’re unleashing a force that the female libido can rarely match. Sexual liberation was premised on a fallacy that males and females are identical in their sexual drives. They are not. Nor are they identical in their emotional (and hormonal) responses to intercourse.

TAI: You suggest at one point that the only good thing about Title IX is that it is actually remoralizing campus sexuality in a weird way. That it paradoxically results in a more conservative or, as you call it, neo-Victorian sexual ethic.

HMD: More studying and less sex. That is not something to be regretted. Colleges are not primarily for partying and one night hook ups...

Just as a female can, with almost 100 percent certainty, avoid becoming what is viewed on campus as a rape victim by acting prudently and not getting blackout drunk, by not taking off her clothes and getting into bed with a guy whom she may or may not know, so, too, can every college male usually avoid the predicament of being falsely accused of rape by walking his girlfriend home after a date, kissing her goodnight, and writing her a love poem back in his own dorm room. If the bureaucratization of campus sex, with campus rape bureaucrats promulgating preposterous ten-page legalistic rules for coitus, results in less campus sex, there is simply no social cost, unlike, say, the over-regulation of natural gas production, which results in less of a socially useful product and activity...

[On the feminist myth of one-in-five college women being raped/sexually assaulted] The mother of all campus rape surveys was a study that was published in 1985 in Ms. magazine by University of Arizona professor Mary Koss. Koss found that 42 percent of the college females whom she characterized as rape victims went on to have sex again with their alleged assailant. I propose that that is a behavior that is inconceivable in the case of what most people would understand as rape. Koss also found that 73 percent of the campus females whom she characterized as rape victims, when asked directly whether they have been raped, said they had not. In other words, the feminist claim that we’re living through an epidemic of campus sexual assault depends on doing something that feminists have told us one should never, ever do, which is to ignore what females say about their own experiences...

But the other reason that I reject this narrative about an epidemic of sexual assault is that if it were the case, we would have seen a stampede decades ago to create single sex schools where girls could study in safety. Instead, the stampede of girls to get into this alleged maelstrom of sexual violence increases in ferocity each year...

Unless females are too clueless to look out for themselves and to get the word out: “Don’t go to those frat parties, they are one big gang rape,” one has to assume that this epidemic of sexual assault is not occurring...

There are very simple steps that girls can take to avoid getting raped. Do not drink yourself blotto. The drinking that happens on the part of females is done quite often to deliberately lower their sexual inhibitions. Do not get into bed with a guy you don’t know. Don’t take your clothes off. Doing those things sets in motion processes and impulses that are hard to control once you unleash them.

Do we believe that girls are capable of using their reason to evaluate risk and take simple precautionary measures, or not? If they’re not capable of doing that, I don’t know whether they even belong in college.

You say if rape culture is so pervasive, you might as well go to college because it’s going to be everywhere. But you could still have single sex schools. You could ask the adults to once again say, “No sex in dorms,” instead of saying, “Here’s a 20-page contract modeled on a mortgage to sign before you have sex.”...

TAI: It sounds almost as if you’re making a kind of feminist argument for women’s empowerment. That’s the language you’re using—“power.” Have you ever put it in these terms to college audiences, and if so what has the response been? Because although you’re denying a lot of the Left’s empirical premises, you’re also asserting that women have agency—an idea the Left can’t get enough of...

HMD: I have put the question to many a campus rape bureaucrat and said, “If you really believe there’s this epidemic of campus rape going on, doesn’t it behoove you to try to stop it? Shouldn’t your primary responsibility be female safety, and given that a message of female prudence and modesty would be an almost 100 percent prophylactic against what you insist on calling rape, why don’t you send that message of female prudence and modesty?”

And what I’m told by the campus rape bureaucrats is, “Oh, we would never send that message because then people would presume that females are responsible for being raped, and we all know that they’re not.” That means that these bureaucrats are more interested in preserving the principle of male fault than they are in guaranteeing female safety...

The 2015 surveys commissioned by the American Association of Universities on 27 college campuses found that the LGBTQ communities reported much higher rates of sexual assault than everybody else...

There is an entire campus bureaucracy dedicated to LGBTQ’s allegedly oppressed status, a status that has admittedly been somewhat subsumed of late now that trans is the top victim dog. But until trans came along, being gay on campus probably enjoyed the highest victim ranking...

[On minorities having poor writing skills] People are terrified of correcting black students or Hispanic students, because of the chance that they will be accused of racism...

If MIT admitted me to its freshman class, and I had a 650 on my math SAT on an 800-point scale, and my peers, by and large, had 800s on their math SAT, I would struggle miserably in my first year. I would not be able to keep up with freshman calculus or advanced calculus which understandably and unimpeachably would be pitched toward the average level of academic preparedness of my peers. I would flounder. I would very likely drop out of my STEM track, and I would then have two options. I could say I was admitted without competitive scores, and I am now suffering the consequences. Or I could I say that I am in a patriarchal environment which is causing me to feel trauma and flounder because I am surrounded by implicit bias.

Not surprisingly, students who are the alleged beneficiaries of preferences tend to choose the implicit bias or institutional racism explanations for their problems. There was a very good study that was done at Duke University that found that incoming Black male freshmen intended to major in a STEM field at a higher rate than white male freshmen. But by the time of graduation, the attrition rate of Black males out of STEM majors was enormous, leaving the field almost exclusively to whites and Asians. Meanwhile those Black male students gravitate into much easier fields that do not have the same objective rigorous standards. That’s part of what we see with these absolutely abysmal writing examples that I’ve put forward in the book. Not just bad writing but also bad thinking...

The Trump Education and Justice Departments withdrew guidelines that the Obama Education and Justice Departments had sent out to colleges outlining how they could best implement racial preferences within the confines of the law. The Trump Administration withdrew those guidelines and substituted something from the Bush Administration that was much less enthusiastic about racial preferences.

And predictably, the coverage of the Trump Administration’s actions in the mainstream media was completely silent about why colleges feel compelled to use racial preferences in the first place. There was virtually no mention of the academic skills gap. Indeed, the New York Times framed this as an ongoing fight for equity and integration, using language from the ’60s to imply that schools today are like Ole Miss barring the door to Black students and that we still have to force them to integrate themselves. This is preposterous. Every selective school in the country is twisting itself into knots to admit as many underrepresented minorities as possible, via the folly of racial preferences that only sets up students to struggle if not fail completely.

So, yes, it is completely verboten to mention the academic skills gap. It only comes up fleetingly in the context of, “Well, we’re not spending enough taxpayer dollars on schools.”...

One danger of this universal frenzy, the idea that everybody should go to college, is that it devalues occupations that don’t require high levels of cognitive sophistication and implies that there are certain jobs that are not worth doing. That is a trope you hear with a certain degree of regularity from the New York Times and others in discussing poverty.

In many ways, we’re a more meritocratic society than ever before in human history because we have largely cast aside the traditional kinship rules that would determine who gets hired (the Trump family White House notwithstanding). Yet we also have an incessant assault on meritocracy because of identity politics and the notion that the National Science Foundation has embraced: that the only good science is diverse science. That’s ridiculous. But nevertheless, every STEM faculty in the country is being forced to interview and hire females simply because of their gender rather than their scientific qualifications...

I do have a chapter on the Great Courses, which are video lectures by college lecturers who are screen-tested to make sure that they are able to present their material in an accessible way. My point was not that this provides a serious alternative to college; rather, it’s just to say that there’s a vast untapped desire for traditional humanistic learning that has not been colonized by high theory and identity politics. Adults feel like they have a gap in their education and hunger for teaching that speaks unapologetically about great literature, great philosophy, and ideas that changed the world, without all the harping on unending oppression.

I’m not sure that the Great Courses themselves can point us out of the dilemma, but certainly they demonstrate an untapped desire. I write about UCLA in 2011 jettisoning its requirements that every English major take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one course in Milton. This was an absolutely reasonable requirement given the importance of those authors to English literary tradition, yet UCLA replaced it with requirements in various identity-based theories. At the time they did this, UCLA had the most popular English major in the country because it was still wedded to a traditional historical approach to the study of literature. This is something that college students themselves want. One of the Great Courses lecturers on medieval history told me that if you ask students what they want to study, they’ll say kings and queens and knights, not the construction of the gendered self.

To a certain extent, schools are betraying their own students by forcing this stuff down their throats. The driving force in this entire enterprise is the idea that America today remains endemically racist and sexist and that any disparity in group representation in any institution is, by definition, the result of bias as opposed to differences in culture, skills, behaviors, and preferences. As long as that idea of endemic racism and sexism remains the dominating force of elite thought in this country, it’s not going to be possible to beat the diversity delusion back.

Then there’s the whole free speech issue, which we haven’t talked about, but which I regard as a mere epiphenomenon of victim ideology. We’re not going to solve that one either, without taking on the structural bias claim head-on. Even if more faculty issued high-sounding statements about the value of free speech, it’s not going to make a damn bit of difference as long as students are told that they are existentially threatened by circumambient racism and sexism and therefore entitled to silence others by force to protect their very lives...

A professor at the University of Southern California public policy school, James Moore, sent around an email in response to calls to “believe survivors.” Moore said, paraphrasing here, Well, if anyone in the future is ever the subject of a false criminal or tort claim, you may find yourselves to be bigger supporters of due process than you are now. Accusers sometimes lie. This provoked an absolute meltdown on the part of the school. The dean of USC’s public policy school, Jack Knott, sent around an email message exactly like Salovey’s, talking about the importance of free speech but then asserting that Moore’s mild email was antithetical to the school’s values and would make it even harder for USC’s oppressed female students to survive. So these administrators pay lip service to free speech, but then go and stoke the furies...

TAI: Now even some Never Trumpers like Bret Stephens are saying, “You know I gotta hand it to the President, he stood up for due process and didn’t let the Left totally destroy a good man’s life. Yes, he’s crude and he’s an asshole, but at least he’s fighting back.”

Is that true? Has Trump been effective at resisting identity politics, or do you think it’s a lost cause at this point?

HMD: Interesting. Well, is he effective? He’s certainly fighting back. The question is, “Is he fighting back effectively, or is he just going to create more backlash?” Is he inflaming the delusional idea that America is endemically racist and sexist more than he is putting it to rest. Again, that’s an empirical matter. I’m not sure...

I view Trump as an incredibly painful dilemma: I support his policies but deplore his personality. I don’t think he’s a racist and sexist. I just think he is the worst possible example of an adult male. He is thin-skinned, gratuitously vindictive, the opposite of magnanimous. I would think it would be very hard to raise a boy today with that as our premier male role model."

The Grievance Studies Scandal

Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship

"Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.

We spent that time writing academic papers and publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the late sixties. As a result of this work, we have come to call these fields “grievance studies” in shorthand because of their common goal of problematizing aspects of culture in minute detail in order to attempt diagnoses of power imbalances and oppression rooted in identity.

We undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research. Because open, good-faith conversation around topics of identity such as gender, race, and sexuality (and the scholarship that works with them) is nearly impossible, our aim has been to reboot these conversations. We hope this will give people—especially those who believe in liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice—a clear reason to look at the identitarian madness coming out of the academic and activist left and say, “No, I will not go along with that. You do not speak for me.”...

While our papers are all outlandish or intentionally broken in significant ways, it is important to recognize that they blend in almost perfectly with others in the disciplines under our consideration. To demonstrate this, we needed to get papers accepted, especially by significant and influential journals...

What we just described is not knowledge production; it’s sophistry. That is, it’s a forgery of knowledge that should not be mistaken for the real thing. The biggest difference between us and the scholarship we are studying by emulation is that we know we made things up...

What if we write a paper saying we should train men like we do dogs—to prevent rape culture? Hence came the “Dog Park” paper. What if we write a paper claiming that when a guy privately masturbates while thinking about a woman (without her consent—in fact, without her ever finding out about it) that he’s committing sexual violence against her? That gave us the “Masturbation” paper. What if we argue that the reason superintelligent AI is potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lacanian psychoanalysis? That’s our “Feminist AI” paper. What if we argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of professional bodybuilding? You can read how that went in Fat Studies...

Just about anything can be made to work, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates understanding of the existing literature.

Put another way, we now have good reasons to believe that if we just appropriate the existing literature in the right ways—and there always seems to be a citation or vein of literature that makes it possible—we can say almost any politically fashionable thing we want...

1 paper (the one about rape culture in dog parks) gained special recognition for excellence from its journal, Gender, Place, and Culture, a highly ranked journal that leads the field of feminist geography. The journal honored it as one of twelve leading pieces in feminist geography as a part of the journal’s 25th anniversary celebration...

The papers themselves span at least fifteen subdomains of thought in grievance studies, including (feminist) gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy. They featured radically skeptical and standpoint epistemologies rooted in postmodernism, feminist and critical race epistemology rooted in critical social constructivism as well as psychoanalysis. They all also endeavored to be humorous in at least some small way (and often, big ones). The project so far has generated more than 40 substantive editorial and expert reader reports, constituting a further 30,000 or so words of data that provide a unique insider’s look into the field and its operation.

Our papers also present very shoddy methodologies including incredibly implausible statistics (“Dog Park”), making claims not warranted by the data (“CisNorm,” “Hooters,” “Dildos”), and ideologically-motivated qualitative analyses (“CisNorm,” “Porn”). (NB: See Papers section below.) Questionable qualitative methodologies such as poetic inquiry and autoethnography (sometimes rightly and pejoratively called “mesearch”) were incorporated (especially in “Moon Meetings”).

Many papers advocated highly dubious ethics including training men like dogs (“Dog Park”), punishing white male college students for historical slavery by asking them to sit in silence in the floor in chains during class and to be expected to learn from the discomfort (“Progressive Stack”), celebrating morbid obesity as a healthy life-choice (“Fat Bodybuilding”), treating privately conducted masturbation as a form of sexual violence against women (“Masturbation”), and programming superintelligent AI with irrational and ideological nonsense before letting it rule the world (“Feminist AI”). There was also considerable silliness including claiming to have tactfully inspected the genitals of slightly fewer than 10,000 dogs whilst interrogating owners as to their sexuality (“Dog Park”), becoming seemingly mystified about why heterosexual men are attracted to women (“Hooters”), insisting there is something to be learned about feminism by having four guys watch thousands of hours of hardcore pornography over the course of a year while repeatedly taking the Gender and Science Implicit Associations Test (“Porn”), expressing confusion over why people are more concerned about the genitalia others have when considering having sex with them (“CisNorm”), and recommending men anally self-penetrate in order to become less transphobic, more feminist, and more concerned about the horrors of rape culture (“Dildos”). None of this, except that Helen Wilson recorded one “dog rape per hour” at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon, raised so much as a single reviewer eyebrow, so far as their reports show...

Why Did We Do This?

Because we’re racist, sexist, bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, transhysterical, anthropocentric, problematic, privileged, bullying, far right-wing, cishetero straight white males (and one white female who was demonstrating her internalized misogyny and overwhelming need for male approval) who wanted to enable bigotry, preserve our privilege, and take the side of hate?...

We have stated firmly that there is a problem in our universities, and that it’s spreading rapidly into culture. It is aided in this by being tricky to understand and by intentionally using emotionally powerful words—like “racist” and “sexist”—in technical ways that mean something different than their common usages. This project identifies aspects of this problem, tests them, and then exposes them.

The problem is epistemological, political, ideological, and ethical and it is profoundly corrupting scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. The center of the problem is formally termed “critical constructivism,” and its most egregious scholars are sometimes referred to as “radical constructivists.”...

Peer review can only be as unbiased as the aggregate body of peers being called upon to participate. The skeptical checks and balances that should characterize the scholarly process have been replaced with a steady breeze of confirmation bias that blows grievance studies scholarship ever further off course. This isn’t how research is supposed to work...

Politically biased research that rests on highly questionable premises gets legitimized as though it is verifiable knowledge. It then goes on to permeate our culture because professors, activists, and others cite and teach this ever-growing body of ideologically skewed and fallacious scholarship...

Look at the hundreds of papers we cited to enable us to make these claims and to use these methods and interpretations and have reviewers consider them quite standard. Look at the reviewer comments and what they are steering academics who need to be published to succeed in their careers towards. See how frequently they required us not to be less politically biased and shoddy in our work but more so."

***

The Grievance Studies Scandal: Five Academics Respond

"For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.”

To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory and published in the Gender Studies journal Affilia...

Twenty years ago, Alan Sokal called postmodernism “fashionable nonsense.” Today, postmodernism isn’t a fashion—it’s our culture. A large proportion of the students at elite universities are now inducted into this cult of hate, ignorance, and pseudo-philosophy. Postmodernism is the unquestioned dogma of the literary intellectual class and the art establishment. It has taken over most of the humanities and some of the social sciences, and is even making inroads in STEM fields. It threatens to melt all of our intellectual traditions into the same oozing mush of political slogans and empty verbiage.

Postmodernists pretend to be experts in what they call “theory.” They claim that, although their scholarship may seem incomprehensible, this is because they are like mathematicians or physicists: they express profound truths in a way that cannot be understood without training. Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose expose this for the lie that it is. “Theory” is not real. Postmodernists have no expertise and no profound understanding.

Critics of Sokal point out that his paper was never subjected to peer review, and they say it was unfair to expect the editors of Social Text to spot errors concerning math and science. This time there are no excuses. LBP’s papers were fully peer reviewed by leading journals. The postmodernist experts showed that they had no ability to distinguish scholarship grounded in “theory” from deliberate nonsense and faulty reasoning mixed in with hate directed at the disfavored race (white) and sex (“cis” male).

King Solomon said of the fool: “His talk begins as foolishness and ends as evil madness” (Ecclesiastes 10:13). Can a disregard for evidence, logic, and open inquiry combined with a burning hatred for large classes of people perceived as political opponents (“racists,” “sexists,” “homophobes,” “transphobes,” etc.) possibly lead to a good result? The editors and peer reviewers who handled LBP’s papers have revealed their true, vicious attitudes.

The flagship feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, accepted a paper (not yet published online) arguing that social justice advocates should be allowed to make fun of others, but no one should be permitted to make fun of them. The same journal invited resubmission of a paper arguing that “privileged students shouldn’t be allowed to speak in class at all and should just listen and learn in silence,” and that they would benefit from “experiential reparations” that include “sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or intentionally being spoken over.” The reviewers complained that this hoax paper took an overly compassionate stance toward the “privileged” students who would be subjected to this humiliation, and recommended that they be subjected to harsher treatment. Is asking people of a certain race to sit on the floor in chains better than asking them to wear a yellow star? What exactly is this leading to?...

The battle was lost around 1991. Around that time the great historian of the Tudor period, G.R. Elton, had been fighting rear-guard action for the discipline he loved. He saw history in the tradition of Leopold von Ranke: a meticulous examination of the primary evidence and a refusal to allow present-day concerns or attitudes to colour the subject matter. But traditional history, like all other disciplines, came under attack. Elton fumed that the younger generation was on “the intellectual equivalent of crack”, addicted to the “cancerous radiation that comes from the foreheads of Derrida and Foucault”. But Elton lost the day to Hayden White who “deconstructed” history...

Where some of us might see Niccolò Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, or David Hume palpably struggling with the deepest questions of political philosophy or epistemology, Cixious or Greene see only dead white men. What they say matters less to them than who was saying it. Thus, the competing systems of knowledge that came out of the Enlightenment – rationalism and empiricism – are both always-already tainted as “products of the patriarchy.” It has been the explicit goal of post-modernity to reject reason and evidence: they want a “new paradigm” of knowledge...

Sokal’s spoof took aim at obscure language and epistemic relativism. But his quarry escaped...

One published paper proposed that dog parks are “rape-condoning spaces.” Another, entitled “Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism” reworked, and substantially altered, part of Mein Kampf. The most shocking, (not published, its status is “revise and resubmit”) is a “Feminist Approach to Pedagogy.” It proposes “experiential reparations” as a corrective for privileged students. These include sitting on the floor, wearing chains, or being purposely spoken over. Reviewers have commented that the authors risk exploiting underprivileged students by burdening them with an expectation to teach about privilege.

These psychoactive hoax papers, some penned in just a few hours, are taken seriously because they fit with social science sub fields in which reason has been exchanged for ideology. How did we get here? Did it begin with scholars wanting to right social wrongs?...

Readers are ill-served by opaque writing. Text can be hard-going because of its specialised content (such as string theory), or hard to decode because it has been written to sexily seduce the reader into slowly undressing the meaning (such as poetry, take, for example, the metaphysicals). But the shamed hoaxed journals too often host unintelligible waffle. Clear writing is not a matter of style; it’s a matter of clear thinking...

For academia to be worth anything, it is crucial that reviewers and editors understand what any particular experimental design can deliver. This holds for quantitative, qualitative, and post-qualitative (whatever that is) research. Reviewers and editors must object when results or interpretation over-reach the methods. If a hypothesis is unfalsifiable, it doesn’t hurt to say so. The function of empirical work is to steer us closer to the truth about the world. It is therefore crucial to distinguish between what can constitute evidence and what cannot...

When I grew up something like the following order of badness prevailed: murder (the worst), followed by serious physical violence, cheating and lying, nasty shouting, nasty speaking and at the milder end, nasty thinking. This has changed. There is evidence that many scholars favour punitive thought-reform. Orwell had a word for this.

It is emblematic of that huge change that I feel queasy here, at risk of being misquoted, when I say that a sexist, racist, or foolish thought or comment is likely to be punished with what was formerly reserved for someone who throws a punch at the Dean’s snout. This, while actual scientific waffle—and worse—is published without criticism...

It is a carefully guarded secret in philosophy that feminist philosophy is often not characterized by intellectual rigor and high academic standards...

A good example is an article from the Australasian Journal of Philosophy in which a feminist describes a “phallic drama” involving two statements, p and ~p (the negation of p):

There is really only one actor, p, and ~p is merely its receptacle. In the representation of the Venn diagram, p penetrates a passive, undifferentiated universal other which is specified as a lack, which offers no resistance, and whose behavior it controls completely.

Note that this is no longer a Sokal-type hoax but an instance of authentic feminist philosophy. Sometimes it is impossible to tell the difference...

The authors have pulled off a modern Sokal hoax. The sequel is rarely as good as the original, but in this case it was more comprehensive and more fun than Sokal’s mockery of postmodernist scholarship (a computer-generated version of which can be found here). The project exposes some of the cultish ideas shared by faculty who have created fake subjects and staffed their departments with political activists. Many faculty in these departments seem alarmingly eager to hijack for their own ends the emotional circuitry of teenagers who arrive on campus in search of a tribe to join and a dragon to slay...

The main problem is not the rise of trendy disciplines with names that end with the word “studies,” or the opportunity cost of spending taxpayer money on bogus scholarship and bad education rather than medical research and space exploration. The problem is that many students are required to take these classes as part of a “diversity” requirement at universities, and that when students graduate, these ideas influence leaders of corporations like Google, which can manipulate its search engine to alter elections and change our epistemic environment in subtle ways.

To take an example, many students in universities and employees at Google take bias training courses that tell them “white privilege” and “systemic racism” explain disparities in outcomes between groups, despite the fact that—to take one example—Asian Americans from China and India (‘people of color’) make more money and are incarcerated at lower rates than whites. According to the conspiratorial worldview of many faculty in grievance studies departments, citing statistics and making arguments that go against the privilege narrative proves that you have an unconscious bias against minorities, and that you’re probably a white supremacist...

Their articles did pass peer review in journals from fields whose basic assumptions are shared by mainstream subjects like literature, sociology, and (increasingly) philosophy...

It is worth reminding those who subsidize this circus that we’re not in Las Vegas."

What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus.


This suggests that feminism really is about hating men, anti-racism really is about hating white people etc

Technically, anti-Semitism is "punching up", so resembling Mein Kampf is not a bad thing (within the anti-racist paradigm)

The Decline and Fall of Literature

The Decline and Fall of Literature | by Andrew Delbanco | The New York Review of Books
(from 1999)

"It has become a holiday ritual for The New York Times to run a derisory article in deadpan Times style about the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, where thousands of English professors assemble just before the new year. Lately it has become impossible to say with confidence whether such topics as “Eat Me; Captain Cook and the Ingestion of the Other” or “The Semiotics of Sinatra” are parodies of what goes on there or serious presentations by credentialed scholars.

At one recent English lecture, the speaker discussed a pornographic “performance artist” who, for a small surcharge to the price of admission to her stage show, distributes flashlights to anyone in the audience wishing to give her a speculum exam. By looking down at the mirror at just the right angle, she is able, she says, to see her own cervix reflected in the pupil of the beholder, and thereby (according to the lecturer) to fulfill the old Romantic dream of eradicating the distinction between perceiver and perceived. The lecturer had a winning phrase—“the invaginated eyeball”—for this accomplishment. During the discussion that followed, a consensus emerged that, in light of the optical trick, standard accounts (Erwin Panofsky’s was mentioned) of perspective as a constitutive element in Western visual consciousness need to be revised.

As English departments have become places where mass culture—movies, television, music videos, along with advertising, cartoons, pornography, and performance art—is studied side by side with literary classics, it has not been easy for the old-style department to adjust. The novelist Richard Russo captures the mood of such a department trying to come to terms with a (rather tame) new appointee named Campbell Wheemer, who “wore what remained of his thinning hair in a ponytail secured by a rubber band,” and who

startled his colleagues by announcing at the first department gathering of the year that he had no interest in literature per se. Feminist critical theory and image-oriented culture were his particular academic interests. He taped television sitcoms and introduced them into the curriculum in place of phallocentric, symbol-oriented texts (books). His students were not permitted to write. Their semester projects were to be done with video cameras and handed in on cassette. In department meetings, whenever a masculine pronoun was used, Campbell Wheemer corrected the speaker, saying, “Or she.”…Lately, everyone in the department had come to refer to him as Orshee.

... Bickering, backbiting, generational rift are not new, but something else is new. Outside the university, one hears a growing outcry of “Enough!” (it takes many forms, including a number of Bad Writing contests, in which English professors are routinely awarded top prizes), while within the field, the current president of the Modern Language Association, Edward Said, has caused a stir by lamenting the “disappearance of literature itself from the…curriculum” and denouncing the “fragmented, jargonized subjects” that have replaced it...

Almost from the start there have been periodic announcements from a distinguished roster of Jeremiahs that liberal education, with literary studies at its core, is decadent or dying. In 1925, John Jay Chapman looked at American higher education and, finding Greek and Latin classics on the wane, proclaimed “the disappearance of the educated man.”...

The decline in humanities students relative to other fields reflects the fact that the postwar expansion took place especially in the previously underemphasized fields of science and technology. With increased access to college for many students whose social and economic circumstances would once have excluded them, vocational fields such as business, economics, engineering, and, most recently, computer programming have also burgeoned. Moreover, as the historian Lynn Hunt points out, the average age of American undergraduates has risen sharply in recent years, and older students tend to pursue subjects that have practical value for finding a job.

But it is also true that many “traditional” students (the new term for those who used to be referred to as “college age”) are turning away from literature in particular and from the humanities in general already in high school...

Literature is a field whose constituency and resources are shrinking while its subject is expanding. Even as English loses what budget-conscious deans like to call “market share,” it has become routine to find notices in the department advertising lectures on such topics as the evolution of Batman from comic-book crusader to camp TV star to macho movie hero alongside posters for a Shakespeare conference.

This turn to “cultural studies,” which has not been much deterred by any fear of trivialization or dilettantism, means that English studies now venture with callow confidence into the interpretation of visual, legal, and even scientific “texts.” As the young critic Michael Bérubé reports, “English has become an intellectual locus where people can study the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from a Christian perspective, the text of the O.J. trial from a Foucauldian perspective, and the text of the Treaty of Versailles from a Marxist perspective.”...

Literary studies, in fact, have their roots in religion. Trilling understood this when he remarked, in his gloomy essay about the future of the humanities, that “the educated person” had traditionally been conceived as

an initiate who began as a postulant, passed to a higher level of experience, and became worthy of admission into the company of those who are thought to have transcended the mental darkness and inertia in which they were previously immersed.

Such a view of education as illumination and deliverance following what Trilling called “exigent experience” is entirely Emersonian. It has little to do with the positivist idea of education to which the modern research university is chiefly devoted—learning “how to extend, even by minute accretions, the realm of knowledge.” This corporate notion of knowledge as a growing sum of discoveries no longer in need of rediscovery once they are recorded, and transmittable to those whose ambition it is to add to them, is a great achievement of our civilization. But except in a very limited sense, it is not the kind of knowledge that is at stake in a literary education.

... the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, in a broadside published in 1887 in the London Times:

There are many things fit for a man’s personal study, which are not fit for University examinations. One of these is “literature.”…[We are told] that it “cultivates the taste, educates the sympathies, enlarges the mind.” Excellent results against which no one has a word to say. Only we cannot examine in tastes and sympathies.

English, in other words, amounted to nothing more than “chatter about Shelley.”...

Kernan tells how, as a student at Oxford after the war, he was trying without much success to master the history of the English language until his tutor took pity on him and advised, “When you hit a word in a text that you cannot identify, simply correlate it with some modern word that it sounds like and then invent a bridge between them. Most of the examiners will be suspicious, but may consider, so imprecise is linguistic science, your little word history an interesting possibility.”...

The idea that reading can be a revelatory experience stretches back in its specifically Christian form at least to Saint Augustine, who wrote of being “dissociated from myself” until he heard a child’s voice beckoning him to open the Gospels, “repeating over and over, ‘Pick up and read, pick up and read.”‘...

Something like faith in the transforming power of literature is surely requisite for the teacher who would teach with passion and conviction...

This large assertion links aesthetic response with moral (or what Kernan prefers to call “existential”) knowledge, and even with the imperative to take reformist action in the world...

The sad news is that teachers of literature have lost faith in their subject and in themselves. “We are in trouble,” as Scholes puts it, “precisely because we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we cannot make truth claims but must go on ‘professing’ just the same.” But what kind of dubious “truth-claims” does literature make? Literature does not embody, as both outraged conservatives and radical debunkers would have it, putatively eternal values that its professors are sworn to defend. It does not transmit moral certainty so much as record moral conflict. Its only unchanging “truth-claim” is that experience demands self-questioning...

In acknowledging what every true writer knows—that words are never quite governable by the will of the author—the New Critics were planting seeds of future trouble for English studies. Paul de Man, who introduced the deconstructionist theory of Jacques Derrida to American readers after the New Criticism had become a received orthodoxy, detected in the New Critics a “foreknowledge” of what he called, borrowing a phrase from the Swiss critic Georges Poulet, “hermeneutic circularity.”...

Captain Ahab’s second mate on the Pequod, Mr. Stubb, had pretty much summed it up a long time before: “Book!…you’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.”

Deconstruction fit the darkening mood of the Seventies, when all claims to timeless or universal truth became suspect as self-serving deceptions perpetrated by wielders of power. It was an effort, as we used to say, to heighten the contradictions and raise them to the level of consciousness. Along with its offshoot, “reader-response” criticism, it was a mischievously extreme skepticism that regarded all meanings and judgments as contingent on the “subject-position” of the reader...

One of the implications was that literature was no more or less worthy of study than any other semiotic system; fashion, gestures, sports could now serve as a “text” for the game of interpretation. But this view soon lost its playfulness, and turned into the dogma that literature, like any constructed system of meaning, must be assessed in relation to this or that “identity” (race, class, gender, etc.) to the exclusion of every other point of view. Here began in earnest the fragmentation of literary studies that is so evident today—and that has left a legacy of acrimony, and of intellectual and professional fatigue.

Deconstruction can also be seen as simply another phase in the continuing effort by literary studies to get respect from “hard” disciplines by deploying a specialized vocabulary of its own. Long before its rise, in an essay entitled “The Meaning of a Literary Idea” (1949), Trilling had remarked that “people will eventually be unable to say, ‘They fell in love and married,’ let alone understand the language of Romeo and Juliet, but will as a matter of course say, ‘Their libidinal impulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated them within the same frame of reference.”‘ Trilling’s parody of the Freud fad of his day was intended to illustrate how “ideas tend to deteriorate into ideology,” and by ideology he meant

the habit or ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.

Today’s rendition, to which the requisite dash of Gramsci and sprinkle of Foucault (among the biggest post-deconstruction influences on literary studies) are added, would go something like this: “Privileging each other as objects of heterosexual desire, they signified their withdrawal from the sexual marketplace by valorizing the marital contract as an instrument of bourgeois hegemony.” Who knows what tomorrow will bring?...

Why has this happened? Was there some singular force behind the multiple events that Scholes sums up as the “fall of English”?

In Literature Lost, the shrillest of recent books on the crisis, John Ellis blames the whole mess on the dynamics of professionalization—on, that is, the pressure to publish something, anything, that is novel or startling or upon which a reputation can be built. The publish-or-perish desperation has only increased as the readership for what is published declines. “This is rather like the Irish elk syndrome,” Ellis says, by which “competition for dominance within the species led to the evolution of ever larger antlers, but the larger antlers caused the species as a whole to become dysfunctional and dragged it down.”...

The process of changing the assump-tions of literary studies began in the late 1950s under the name “structuralism”—a technique by which culture was analyzed as a collection of codes and rituals denoting tribal boundaries that protect against transgression by a threatening “other.” Words like “high” and “low” (along with other evaluative terms such as “primitive” and “advanced,” or “savage” and “civilized”) acquired obligatory quotation marks, and literature, in effect, became a branch of anthropology. By the 1970s, leading figures in literary studies were calling into question even the residual aspiration to positive knowledge that structuralism expressed. “A literary text,” de Man wrote in 1970, is so dependent on changing interpretation that it “is not a phenomenal event that can be granted any form of positive existence, whether as a fact of nature or as an act of the mind.” Nor could literature any longer be understood, on the model of religion, as a body of inspired writings with discernible meanings. “It leads,” de Man declared, “to no transcendental perception, intuition, or knowledge….” The very subject—literature—that gave the English department its claim on the university was now revealed to be a mystifying name assigned to texts so designated by those with the power to impose their tastes on impressionable readers.

Under these “postmodern” conditions, what was left for English professors to believe and do? The point of writing and teaching was now less to illuminate literary works than to mount a performance in which the critic, not the instigating work, was the main player. The idea of rightness or wrongness in any reading (“there is no room,” de Man wrote, “for…notions of accuracy and identity in the shifting world of interpretation”) was rendered incoherent...

English has become, as Louis Menand says (following a suggestion from David Bromwich) in What’s Happened to the Humanities?, “‘hard’ and ironic at the same time,” emphasizing “theoretical rigor and simultaneously debunk[ing] all claims to objective knowledge”—an inner conflict that has proven costly to its standing in the modern university. It will never be able to submit its hypotheses to the scientific test of replicable results, and it can never be evaluated according to some ratio between the cost of the service it provides and the market value of its results. It has reached a point of diminishing returns in proportion to the scale of its operation: the texts of the major writers have been established; the facts of their biographies are mostly known. And while old works will always attract new interpretations from new readers, and the canon will continue to expand with the discovery of overlooked writers—a process that has accelerated enormously over the last twenty-five years with the entrance into the profession of women and minorities—the growth of English departments at anything like its former pace cannot be justified on the grounds that literary “research” continues to produce invaluable new knowledge.

Yet even as they lose respect in-side universities, English departments are still refurbishing themselves as factories of theories and subfields. All of these—feminist, gay and lesbian, and postcolonial studies, the New Historicism (which acquired its name when Stephen Greenblatt used a phrase that proved infectious, but that he never intended as a big claim for novelty), and, most recently, “eco-criticism”—are yielding some work that illuminates aspects of literature to which previous critics had been closed and that merits the Arnoldian description, “fresh and free thought.” But much of the new theory is tendentious or obscure, and the imperative to make one’s mark as a theoretical innovator has created what John Guillory calls a “feedback loop”: “The more time devoted…to…graduate teaching or research, the more competition for the rewards of promotion and tenure… [and] the more pressure to withdraw from labor-intensive lower-division teaching.” Despite the job shortage, the prestige of graduate teaching rises at the expense of undergraduate teaching, and English departments thereby cut themselves off from the best reason for their continued existence: eager undergraduate readers...

Disputes that once seemed vitally important have settled into a family quarrel about which no one outside the household any longer cares...

Woodring describes the situation as “a seriocomic scenario in which sodden firefighters spray water on each other while the house burns down.” If the humanities are in danger of becoming a sideshow in the university, it is we the humanists who, more than demographic changes or the general cultural shift toward science, are endangering ourselves.

The field of English has become, to use a term given currency twenty-five years ago by the redoubtable Stanley Fish, a “self-consuming artifact.” On the one hand, it has lost the capacity to put forward persuasive judgments; on the other hand, it is stuffed with dogma and dogmatists. It has paid overdue attention to minority writers, but, as Lynn Hunt notes in her essay in What’s Happened to the Humanities?, it (along with the humanities in general) has failed to attract many minority students. It regards the idea of progress as a pernicious myth, but never have there been so many critics so sure that they represent so much progress over their predecessors. It distrusts science, but it yearns to be scientific—as attested by the notorious recent “Sokal hoax,” in which a physicist submitted a deliberately fraudulent article full of pseudoscientific gibberish to a leading cultural-studies journal, which promptly published it. It denounces the mass media for pandering to the public with pitches and slogans, but it cannot get enough of mass culture. The louder it cries about the high political stakes in its own squabbles, the less connection it maintains to anything resembling real politics. And by failing to promote literature as a means by which students may become aware of their unexamined assumptions and glimpse worlds different from their own, the self-consciously radical English department has become a force for conservatism.

English, in short, has come to reflect some of the worst aspects of our culture: obsessing about sex, posturing about real social inequities while leaving them unredressed, and participating with gusto in the love/hate cult of celebrities. (At the conventions these days, resentment is palpable, as celebrities hold forth before colleagues frightened about their chances of getting a job or keeping the one they have.) English today exhibits the contradictory attributes of a religion in its late phase—a certain desperation to attract converts, combined with an evident lack of convinced belief in its own scriptures and traditions.

In what is perhaps the largest irony of all, the teaching of English has been penetrated, even saturated, by the market mentality it decries. The theory factory (yesterday’s theory is deficient, today’s is new and improved) has become expert in planned obsolescence"