New Category: “Say What?”

Aug 5, 2008 by Farhang Erfani

For a while, I have been meaning to have a less important category added to this site, devoted to strange uses, misuses and abuses of philosophy in the media. Sartre is often the one misquoted or very strangely cited. But I am pleased to start this category with a far broader case than the deranged use of a single philosopher.

From USA Today, Jonah Goldberg, author Liberal Fascism, gives us: Obama, the Postmodernist

Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is “being out of alignment with my values.” Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn’t being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn’t be a sinner because his values hold that it’s OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama’s — unless he really is our Savior.

There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

…

Obama gives every indication of having evolved from this intellectual soup. As a student and, later, a law school instructor, Obama was sympathetic to Critical Race Theory, a wholly owned franchise of postmodernism.

Keep reading here

Say what??