Stephen Hicks,

An intresting article. Perhaps you might be interested in philosophically more serious discussions I had with potmodernists and others on this OLO about nine years Ago:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3445#82274, and onwards;
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10189#165587, and onwards.

Not_Now.Soon,
>I didn't see in the article anything about the left or the right.
Then you obviously didn't read it properly.

(From the top of page 2)
| Here again Rorty represents the other, postmodern side. When asked directly about
| the Left’s many historical sins, crimes, and outright brutalities - and it’s important to
| note that all of the leading postmoderns are of the Left, usually the far Left - Rorty
| replied: “I think that a good Left is a party that always thinks about the future and
| doesn’t care much about our past sins.” [Source: “A Conversation with Richard
| Rorty.”]
|
| (How unsurprising, then, that younger Leftists have little understanding of or care
| about the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Cuba, or even Venezuela.)

I was not the one who brought Trump into the discussion. But considering Trump's attitude to truth, I think when Hicks is being rather postmodern himself when he claims that "all of the leading postmoderns are of the Left...".

Stephen,

Yours is an excellent expose of the downside of the pursuit of postmodern deconstruction.

<<Postmodernists don’t fight by the same rules the rest of us do. When everything is subjective narratives, the subversion goes all the way down.>>

Then add reader-response techniques of creativity that postmoderns use in reading any document. This avoids the intended meaning of any author's writing and replaces it with the reader's, 'subjective narratives'.

That's as postmodern, historical Jesus' scholar, J D Crossan, saw it when he gave his working definition of history: 'History is the past reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse’ (Crossan 1998:20).

When subjectivism of anything by postmodern imposition on the text is applied, anything goes with values or content of any document.

Can you imagine the history of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 being deconstructed interactively through argument in public discourse, rather than pursuing historical methods to discern what really happened in that shocking event?

You are dead right! Subjective deconstruction will lead to a moral low ground because it is like relativism - every person does what is right for himself/herself.

If this philosophy continues to flood our universities, expect many kinds of idiosyncratic ethics to be pushed.