May 18, 2008
In the The Long March Out of the 20th Century in Telos Robert D’Amico and Paul Piccone say that:
modernity and its successor, postmodernity, remain the broad horizons within which all problems are still framed, despite the fact that they have provided no viable solutions but, at best, only misleading ones. Although the kind of theoretical watershed prefigured but never registered after 1989 had finally arrived with 9/11 and the beginning of a new world order, and even the stagnant intellectual waters of academia are beginning to stir with the realization of the need for radical desecularization and the refunctioning of allegedly long-since buried traditions, the paladins of 20th century modernity are still celebrated as the starting point of any future critique
The predominance of 20th century modernist thought not only plunges intellectual life into a nihilism and irrelevance that, in cleansing students’ self-understanding of all traditional residues, produces new generations of people unable to sustain a healthy stable life, but continues to infect geopolitical relations.
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Gary, This graphic image depicts what "enquiry" in the academy is really all about.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/Orozco/panel17.html
Meanwhile how much research done in the academy, even in the soft sciences, is funded by the Pentagon.
http://www.insidehighered.com/layout/set/print/news/2008/04/16/minerva