From Ukraine, Roman Skaskiw asks:
“One of my great fears is that the postmodernists, like the Bolsheviks, are correct in prioritizing power over meaning. Those who believe in meaning exhaust themselves making arguments to people who do not believe in truth — modernist argument against a post-modernist ideology. What if a thousand slogans and bad arguments really are superior to fewer logical arguments rooted in evidence and subject to the test of predictive validity?”
“Leftism’s Casual Relationship with the Truth Is Intentional”
Especially when supported by a whole intellectual class that eschews objectivity and intellectual responsibility, e.g.:
Frank Lentricchia: “Seek not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”
Michel Foucault: “Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “All propositions of logic say the same thing. That is, nothing.”
Herbert Marcuse: “‘… ‘absolute annihilation’ of the common sense world.”
Richard Rorty: “I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and doesn’t care much about our past sins.”
Along the way he mentions my Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman