That Gibberish They Call Postmodern

I greatly enjoyed this crisp takedown of postmodernism by Helen Pluckrose (hat tip, Michael Lind). She might go a bit far in how much of the current ills of the left she blames on postmodernism, but I certainly agree with her that the influence of these intellectual charlatans has been, on net, pretty terrible.

And I definitely agree with this:

[T]he Left needs to recover a strong, coherent and reasonable liberalism. To do this, we need to out-discourse the postmodern-Left. We need to meet their oppositions, divisions and hierarchies with universal principles of freedom, equality and justice. There must be a consistency of liberal principles in opposition to all attempts to evaluate or limit people by race, gender or sexuality. We must address concerns about immigration, globalism and authoritarian identity politics currently empowering the far- Right rather than calling people who express them “racist,” “sexist” or “homophobic” and accusing them of wanting to commit verbal violence. We can do this whilst continuing to oppose authoritarian factions of the Right who genuinely are racist, sexist and homophobic, but can now hide behind a façade of reasonable opposition to the postmodern-Left.

Just so. And above all, let us reason together, as the architect of the Great Society was fond of saying, rather than shutting down conversations with accusatory labels.