This excerpt for the article ‘Liberals and the New McCarthyism‘
” And I blame the groundlessness of postmodernism, with its assertion that meaning is not inherent in anything, that there are no truths, and that each person’s perception of reality is equally valid. As well as destroying class consciousness—which is one reason modern blacklisting is often based on claims of how some speaker will supposedly hurt or trigger the individual, rather than emphasizing harm or gain to society as a whole—postmodernism has led to much of the insanity we’re discussing.
As philosopher Daniel Dennett commented, “Postmodernism, the school of ‘thought’ that proclaimed ‘There are no truths, only interpretations’ has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for ‘conversations’ in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.” And if all you’ve got is rhetoric, that is, “interpretations” and “assertions,” as opposed to, say, factual evidence, then the only way, or at least the most tempting way, to conclusively win an argument is through rhetorical manipulations. If you can’t say, “Your opinion is wrong, and here are facts showing your opinion is wrong,” you’re pretty much stuck with, “Your opinion is oppressing me, triggering me, hurting my feelings.” And that’s precisely what we see. And of course we can’t argue back, in part because nobody can verify or falsify your feelings, and in part because by then we’ve already been deplatformed.”
Some food for thought.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
5 comments
August 22, 2015 at 7:02 am
john zande
What we have is interpretations, and those interpretations that reduce suffering in the real world are the ones that should be favoured. This is not complicated.
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August 22, 2015 at 7:27 am
tildeb
I wrote warning of exactly this dangerous trend sweeping institutions of higher learning decades ago. The important point is that this movement is championed by misguided liberals and it really is fascist at heart and in practice.
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August 22, 2015 at 8:20 am
The Arbourist
@JZ
Is the question more complicated though JZ when it comes to competing ideologies or ideas?
Is it best answer a utilitarian accounting of the reduction of suffering when each side can define its own terms and thus accounting methods?
I like po-mo a little for the nuance it can bring to discussions – but to argue effectively the people involved must be able to agree on basic definitions otherwise the debate usually devolves into silo-building and passionately talking past each other (see the recent abortion dust-ups).
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August 22, 2015 at 8:33 am
The Arbourist
@Tildeb
Perhaps some food for thought from Harper’s? I’m thinking the neo-liberals might be beholden for the current sad state of affairs in our academic systems.
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August 22, 2015 at 8:45 am
tildeb
I don;t think you can lay this problem at the feet of ‘neo-liberals’ so much as at the feet of the entire swath of parents.
It’s the standard quandary: do we use ‘education’ to teach skills or to teach method… do we go to school for job training or to learn how to think, do we spend taxpayer’s money on liberal arts or professional schooling, do we raise children to pay their own way at adulthood or subsidize them to live out their lives in our collective basements? Is there a middle ground? If so, how do we make it work?
The polarization of this issue in politics serves only one side: the marketplace. And this has a huge and growing social cost that will eventually have to be paid by all of us in expanding economic inequalities, social unrest, and environmental degradation. What is need is for the two sides to realize that there is a middle ground and we need to implement it sooner rather than later.
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