Saturday, June 19, 2004
(2:48 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Re: Chris's Post at The H is O
Okay, I get that fundamentalists are bad and that an analogy between leftists and fundamentalists proves that leftists are bad, too. I'm with you there, 100%. But the solution to over-reliance on theory is to read Plato? How does basing one's politics on the musings of a philosopher who's been dead for well over two millenia represent an improvement over basing one's politics on the book of Revelation or on Lacan (who, whatever his faults, had the advantage of actually living through much of the century whose history is determinative for our present moment)? And it's weird, because I thought I detected some name-dropping of Rorty, and I suspect there are other theory/philosophy types who helped our intrepid author come to his conclusions.
I'll also note that while he's great at describing the problem of the leftist/fundamentalist on a theoretical level, he doesn't really offer any solution other than shifting from dispensationalism/postmodernism to Platonism, which indicates to me that he believes, with leftists, that a change in theory will result in a more effective politics and that theory is somehow generally efficacious in the real world. So why not go all the way and point out the analogy among fundamentalism, leftism, and his own (implicit) position? Then he could come right out and state the question-begging argument that is implicit in his entire post: that the important difference among the three is that his position is good and that you can tell because it's presently dominant.
