Thread by @AcadFreedom

Our podcast motto states (inter alia):

"We oppose as best we can a sort of anti-intellectualism coming from a section of the intellectual class."

And boy, is it coming strong from a certain section

Behold these intellectuals' hatred for the Enlightenment, their eagerness to blame it for the worst ills of mankind, which the Enlightenment has in fact critically contributed to undermine

This hatred bears the mark of postmodernism on our intellectual culture, which started with the French post-war poststructuralists and their 'left Heideggerianism', as Richard Wolin has described it

For these theorists, science and technology are mostly instruments of oppression, responsible through and through for the ills of modernity

In nuce, after the war, the Counter-Enlightenment blamed the Enlightenment for the quintessentially Counter-Enlightenment nazis

Behold the common use of the dismissive term 'scientism', now very much in vogue in left-wing intellectual circles

Its purpose is to carve out a space in which critical thinking and the appraisal of empirical data are made irrelevant

This term has often been used by religious apologists, who claim to deduce, from the correct premise: "science does not explain everything", the wrong conclusion: "therefore religion is a valid explanation of that which science cannot explain"

Behold the hostility to data-driven assessments of the state of the world, as the one undertaken by @sapinker in his latest book 'Enlightenment Now'

That is: hostility to the use of data to answer questions of interest to the social sciences

Behold the hostility to good news about the state of the world

Such news bother the intellectual doom-mongers, whose whole claim to relevance is staked on 'critiquing' the current state of things, 'exposing' it as broken and unjust...

... and smugly implying that they know how to arrange for a better society, while all they have is really the reheated leftovers of Marxism

Behold how the accusations of scientific aspirations to hegemony follow decades of mad theorising, whereby it was taken for granted that the idiosyncratic reading of texts grants one unmatched insight into all phenomena related to human culture (and often beyond)

Remember how deconstruction was held by many of its proponents as a theory of everything, remember how intersectionality has been smuggled from being a unified theory of injustice to being used as a grand unified field theory of humanity

cc. @GEdwardsTwit @clairlemon @SwipeWright @Evolutionistrue