Mr BoShambles
jambiguous
From Nick Cohen's brilliant new book:
and;It wasn't just the undoubted miseries and inequalities of wealth and power the liberal order brought with it that was being condemned by the [post-modern] theorists. The victories of the Enlightenment, the vote, welfare, bills of rights, the separation of church and state and the emancipation of women, homosexuals and blacks, which previous generations had fought and on occasion died to achieve, were now all treated as parts of 'the hegemonic' and included in condemnations of a monolithic world order that made no distinctions. The theorists could not and did not want to discriminate, because discrimination would force them to admit that not everything was rotten in their societies and some victories had been worth winning. In the past people who believed in total opposition would offer a revolutionary programme to overthrow the established order. With no revolutionary programme available, the theorists offered a quasi-satirical attack on the double standards of the democracies instead.
His point: the current lack of conviction in any ideal - amongst the contemporary left - is demonstrated by a cultural relativism which justifies/turns a blind eye to all manner of persecution and oppression in other parts of the world on the basis that 'they're not like us, they've got a different regime of truth, you can't apply the same standards'. The actions of totalitarian dictators and religous fundamentalists can seemingly be justified and if not supported then certainly understood as a response to this so-called hegemonic structure of liberal markets, intellectual freedom, democracy and human rights. So much then for the traditional leftist stand against fascism, instead we have a growing 'West-bashing' sentiment combined with a sad apathy to the suffering of peoples in other parts of the world - Darfur, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea etc etc. In effect its all the fault of the 'West' (government and business alike) and thus the response of the left is passivity and isolationism. What a sad reflection of the left today - self consumed and devoid of principle!As epistemic relativism infected leftish intellectual life, all the old universal criteria, including human rights, the search for the truth and the scientific method, became suspect instruments of elite oppression and Western cultural imperialism.
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