https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/corrupt-university-and-911-bruce-thornton/
In the Nineties I wrote frequently about the role of multiculturalism, leftist politics, and postmodern theory in the degradation of the humanities and social sciences. It was clear to many of us tracking these developments that since the Seventies, foundational skills and knowledge had been slowly eroded, their place taken by politics and dubious theory. Back then, the danger seemed confined to the elite groves of postgraduate education. As a consequence, liberal education, the “free play of the mind on all subjects,” as Matthew Arnold put it, and “the instinct to know the best that is known and thought in the world,” was being replaced by the “boots are better than Shakespeare” philistinism of political activism, and the “higher nonsense” of postmodern theory.
But our government’s feckless response during the Nineties to al Qaeda’s serial attacks, and the gruesome slaughter on 9/11 that climaxed those errors, made me realize that much of our foreign policy failures reflected some of the pernicious ideas that had escaped from the diseased groves of academe. The smoldering ruins and 3000 dead was a graphic reminder that ideas do indeed have consequences.
The foundational idea of both Marxist theory and postmodernism is the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the assumption that what we perceive as the true nature of things is a false narrative contrived by hegemonic power to keep us pliant and obedient as it pursues its nefarious, oppressive policies and practices such as colonialism, imperialism, racism, and sexism. In time the list would include homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, and a generalized bigotry against “people of color,” a category based on the old, reductive taxonomy of “scientific racism.”
From this perspective, the achievements of Western Civilization were a mere fictive construct designed to mask that history of bloody oppression. “Facts” and “truth” likewise were mere components of a “discourse regime,” arbitrary linguistic signs with no foundation in reality. “Multiculturalism” and “diversity” became the weapons for dismantling this regime by elevating and privileging the “other” of “color.” All political analyses were reduced to the Leninist “Who, whom”––Who is the oppressor, and whom does he oppress.
Of course, it is easy to see the fundamental contradiction in this narrative. If truth is just a construct that enables oppression, on what grounds can the postmodern theorist embrace, or even articulate, any political cause? Where is his privileged space existing apart from the hegemonic discourses that allegedly have so much reach and power over us for obscuring its malignant machinations? If language is reduced to the play of signifiers that can never communicate a meaning, what happens to “human rights” or “liberation” or “national self-determination” or the “workers’ paradise”?
