Gary, There is/was a similar article posted on Online Opinion today by Gregory Melleuish.
The philosophy and "culture" of one dimensional scientific man rules OK.

John,
Thanks for that. I've quickly read the Melleuish article.

He says that Marxism, Foucault or feminism:

are deterministic. Human beings become the products of the environment that produced them. They lack the free will to make decisions and choices and must simply play out the hand that their class or gender or race has dealt them. Trapped within their gender, class and race they are to be de-humanised, considered not as individuals in their own right but as representatives of their particular group.

Not really.There are different strands in all three traditions that give different weight to the individual, society, power relations and gender relations, with some being quite dialectical. All three are critical of the liberal humanist position that places all the emphasis on the individual.

He says that mcademics consider that they have a superior knowledge to Shakespeare because they can see a reality that was obscured for Shakespeare; then adds:

The intellectual superiority consists in its capacity to construct abstract models that academics believe enable them to explain the world. As Alan and Marten Shipman have argued in their recent book Knowledge Monopolies: The Academisation of Society, universities, especially the bureaucratised universities of the 21st century, love these types of models. Models enable them to reduce the abstract, complex and messy nature of the real world to something simple. Unfortunately these models, such as Marxism, invariably succeed in explaining very little. They certainly fail totally in the prophecy stakes.

He's forgotten to mention neo-classical economics, which is more entrenched in the university that Marxism. Why not mention the mathematical natural sciences?

His solution is humanism revival of the humanist style of culture as exemplified by rhetoric and poetry, whose setting has been the informal setting of the club, the literary circle and the dinner table.

Humanism, for me always represented by Erasmus, loves irony and wit. It can come to terms with a messy world and poke fun at the foibles of humanity. It can express itself in the common vernacular language that people generally can understand and appreciate....But most importantly it appreciates the value of the individual and the capacity of individuals to make their own lives.

You can have a humanism that decentres the liberal individual from being the centre of the universe; that displaces the tradition of socialist humanism in Britain and Australia.