MarcusAu wrote:
If the Regessives and their Allies could be shown to a small enough minority,
That's the worry though, "regressivism" is really the confluence of ideologies that grew out of the Left from Gramsci and the Frankfurt school, through the New Left and parallel developments in "continental" philosophy (Postmodernism, deconstruction, Lacanian ideas, etc.), and especially through the 90s with the development of ideas like intersectionality; and these ideas, memes, etc., have been the bread-and-butter of the academy since then. We've got several generations of people whose education in the humanities has been grounded in philosophical relativism or nihilism. (The imbalance between Right and Left in the academy that people like Jonathan Haidt have been talking about is part of this too - it's been a negative feedback loop that's driven the humanities - the social sciences, psychology, philosophy, etc. - further and further to the Left in this sense.)
People here are sceptics because they respect the evidence of the senses and logic; and there's still a good deal of that in the hard sciences. But in terms of academic humanism, there's been
such a long, sustained attack on the validity of reason at a deep level in philosophy for so many years now, that it's just seen as a tool of power, plain and simple, and the thinking is just to use it as a tool of power for the utopian goal that's just there on the horizon ...
Now of course many of the youngsters who've been "educated" in this sense won't necessarily hold to such ideas explicitly, and that sort of nonsense is likely to be knocked out of them as soon as they have to get a job in the real world and deal with real people and real things.
But the influence is going to be there, from ideas that were "set" in their minds at an impressionable university age. So I think that while the true regressives who know what they're about are a small minority, their
ideas are pervasive enough to do serious damage int he long run (somewhat like the way that when society was officially religious, everyone had to cast their thoughts in terms
acceptable to the religion, even if in their heart of hearts they might be sceptical themselves).
IOW, the problem isn't the sheer number of explicit regressives and ideologues per se, the problem is that when the leading ideas in society have taken on
their quasi-religious cast, You have to
Say The Right Words in order to get on in life. I think the tipping point for it has been reached already and we're now stuck in a sort of "path dependency" (or evolutionary trough in the notional equivalent of the fitness landscape here) that it's going to be hard to get out of.
The time when it could have been nipped in the bud was the 90s, but it's too late now.
