I am chagrined by the sense of having my little essay go over like a lead balloon, and thought I would try to explain what was on my mind a little better.
The sense of crisis entailed in having the modern world both shatter settled customs and disappoint with its own problems and horrors elicited two main responses: the first, that there had to be an adaptation of widely understood norms to changing material and social realities, so that society could regain its moral compass. The second was that social science, however construed, would provide ever more refined techniques of improvement through planning, and that democratic legitimacy could be maintained by making the masses understand that social planning would be in their interests. Of course, there was a less committed "center" which agreed with the strengthening of national tradition and reverence for culture shaping institutions, but also looked to social science for information.
As the century wore on, the Left sought to explain why it could not secure a reliable majority in the developed world. This lead to theorizing about the way in which bourgeois culture established its ideological hegemony by making certain things appear "natural", when, in reality, they are social constructs. For example, sex is natural, but "gender" is a social construct, and can be altered by mere cultural change. "Race" has natural elements, such as broad physical markers, but it is supercharged with cultural baggage. It is not that there is no truth to these observations, it is that everything is under suspicion, including traditional scholarly and scientific standards, so that overcoming bourgeois ideology becomes a matter of casting doubt ("problemitizing") more than showing precisely what is sound and what is "constructed". This has become congenial to certain disciplines, like Comparative Literature, where "deconstruction" seeks to attack basic notions of authorship and meaning to undermine the very idea of independent standards and authority.
Oddly enough, this tendency to focus on "problematizing" rather than constructive social science has lead to a situation where the previous center has moved Right, and where social scientists, who would have been vaguely considered part of the Left, lead the way into "neoconservativism", a primarily academic movement. This is not to say that there are no longer Left leaning social scientists, it is to say that those who might have been considered more center- Left thirty or forty years ago have often moved to the Right.
Combine these academic tendencies with the fact that a large part of the New Left moved into academia, and you have a cultural intelligentsia noted more for its counter cultural stance than anything else.
As a footnote, libertarians general fitted into this scheme by emphasizing Americanism, and a desire to stick close to norms like self- reliance and entrepreneurialism, however they viewed other aspects of tradition. Some of them, however, became similar to the New Left in respect of cynicism, and are cultured indistinguishable, even if politically differentiated. |
