Dear Lou,
Many thanks for forwarding your post to me. I didn't know about
Norm Levitt's latest Spiked article, but I have now taken a look at it.
My impression is that Norm is still a social democrat on economic issues,
but increasingly pissed-off with PC of all kinds. As far as I can tell,
he's not a rightist, but simply a grumpy old fart (as he himself has
described himself elsewhere). For instance:
... the chief effect of PC-sponsored initiatives has been to
make the sponsors unpopular while doing virtually nothing
concrete to ameliorate the painful real-world situations that
provoke these projects in the first place.
Most folks on a typical US campus think of PC as tiresome and
even silly, and regard its advocates as self-righteous and
censorious to the point of nastiness. The chief beneficiaries
of PC antics, indeed, are the right-wing talk show hosts,
bloggers and columnists who gleefully decry them at every
opportunity.
And he does keep the various dangers in perspective:
The cult of 'cultural competence' is now beginning to afflict
universities because they lack the immune system necessary to
suppress such inane crap before it gets a foothold. It is
distinctly possible that the even more inane crap called
Intelligent Design theory might also afflict them before too
long, especially if the power of the PC Mafia starts to slip
while that of the Dark Side waxes.
I certainly wouldn't have written an article like his, but it seems
to me that large parts of it could be agreed to by social democrats
and even by Marxists, once they get over their aversion to its TONE.
(After all, Marxists have their own criticisms of pomo leftists,
which are not really so different from Levitt's.) Even in the
incendiary phrase you quote,
You doubt that Malcolm X was a paragon of humanitarianism,
that gender is a construction, that Native American myth is true?
You're culturally incompetent...
if you put aside the case of Malcolm X, most Marxists would (I presume)
agree with Levitt on the other two, i.e. that
1) sex is an objective biological fact that is not PURELY
a social construction (please note that admitting this obvious fact
does NOT imply any particular sex roles or contradict most feminist
goals; nor does it deny that gender is IN PART a social construction)
2) Native American (and Christian and Hindu and ...) myths,
if interpreted as objective statements about history, are false.
Or more precisely, as Norm puts it, "the early demographic history
of the Americas is more accurately revealed by scientific
anthropology than by the Native American folklore and myth
celebrated by tribal militants".
What Marxist would disagree with that?
I would be grateful if you could forward this clarification to the
Marxism list, as people might be interested in it.
Best wishes,
Alan
P.S. I'm sorry that you didn't come up to me when we last crossed paths:
> I didn't speak to Alan at the time because I was not really
> in the mood to confront him about the sordid company he was keeping.
> I only hope that he has wised up over the past 4 years.
It doesn't seem to me that attending a few talks at a conference
(exactly the same as you did) constitutes "keeping the company"
of anyone. And instead of worrying so much about what "company"
people keep, why not just discuss their ideas, and criticize the ones
you think are wrong? I would be extremely happy if you were to offer
criticisms of my ideas. For instance, you might be interested in
an essay I recently wrote, "Pseudoscience and Postmodernism:
Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?"
(http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/pseudoscience_rev.pdf)
-- most of it is philosophical and cultural rather than directly
political, but Sections 3 and 6 have some political relevance.
Also, in the French edition to the book, Jean Bricmont wrote an
excellent preface that is explicitly anti-imperialist.
