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advent of today's postmodernism, which posits connections between the
denial of objective truth and political radicalism.
Edward Said, himself something of a postmodernist panjandrum,
nevertheless has noted a crucial fact about the growing democratization
and egalitarianism in the world that subverts that supposed connection:
"that the great antiauthoritarian uprisings made their earliest advances,
not by denying the humanitarian and universalist claims of the general
dominant culture, but by attacking the adherents of that culture for fail–
ing to uphold their own declared standards, for failing to extend them
to all, as opposed to a small fraction of humanity." Put another way,
would an oppressed people stand to gain more from Jefferson's Enlight–
enment premise "All men are created equal" or from the assertion from
a postmodernist manifesto, that ideology "deludes us in promoting as
universal values that in fact belong to one nation, one social class, one
sect"? Would African-Americans in the 195os have profited from
accepting the contention of critical legal studies-postmodernism
applied to jurisprudence-that, as the sophist Thrasymachus argued,
justice is merely the will of the stronger party? What appeal do the weak
make if there is no valid principle of justice, only power? Alan Ryan, the
British political philosopher, puts the matter well:
It
is pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel
Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority view was
always that power could be undermined by truth....Once you
read Foucault as saying that truth is simply an effect of power,
you've had it.. . .But American departments of literature, history
and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who
have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political rad–
icalism, and are in a mess.
The politics of the social-constructionist left call to mind the quip of a
contemporary of the Duke of Buckingham that "he never did undo any
of his enemies, but he ruined many of his friends."
Katha Pollitt, in a piece in
The Nation
occasioned by the Sokal hoax,
questions how "the porno left," which has marginal real-world signifi–
cance, has achieved such hegemony in academia.
I suspect it has something to do with the decline of actual left-wing
movements outside academia, with the development in the 1980s
of an academic celebrity system that meshes in funny, glitzy ways
the worlds of art and entertainment with careerism. .. .What
