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French attempts at resistance. It takes courage to join the opponents, he
notes, since these "new theorists" keep books by dissenters from being
reviewed, pan them reactionary and conservative, or put them down as just
plain wrong. Consequently, antagonists inhabit minuscule oases in a vast
desert of gibberish, and the colonization of academe proceeds apace. A
lecturer "in an English medical school," Professor Windshuttle states,
"assures us that our concepts of 'the patient' and 'illness' are 'sociological
fictions' which can be expunged by 'elements of feminist theory and
Derridean concepts of
difJerance
and intertextuali ty." I should add that not
even Derrida ever produced such a mishmash .
In fact, the infatuation with this nonsense began in Anglo-Saxon (pri–
marily American elite) universi ties, when the recogni tion that these
institutions were too rigidly segregated into departments was being fused
with the aims of partisan politics. To steer the curriculum away from tra–
ditionallearning, the cultural politics that followed from the events of the
late 1960s soon were being converted into cui tural studies which, in turn,
were bending the French theories out of shape in order to fi.lfther libera–
tionist ends. According to Professor Windshuttle, cultural studies for some
"amounts to little more than opportunism ." For others it has become a
refuge from Marxism. To the new historicists, it has provided a method–
ology to debunk history as we have known it. One of its proponents
defines cultural studies not as "a
critique
of poststructualism but rather an
extension
of this movement into ideology, history writing and social the–
ory of the past." These historicists reject those aspects of the scientific
method of the Enlightenment that were based on observation and induc–
tive argument; they do not approve of history that moves over time; they
do not distinguish between history and fiction; and they do not believe
that what we used to call truth may even be approximated.
In the chapter, "The Fall of Communism and the End of History,"
Professor Windshuttle focuses on the critiques of Francis Fukuyama's the–
sis. He agrees with Fukuyama that Marxism as a coherent and universal
process fueled by the class struggle is dead, and that history moves forward
insofar as technology and scientific progress engender more and more
homogenization of human societies - in terms of urbanization, education
of citizens, modernization and consumerism. But he disputes that this
evolution necessarily is linked to capitalism. And he elegantly and knowl–
edgeably summarizes the dangers posed by increasing economic
inequality, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, creeping socialism and
state corporatism, as well as by the levelling effects of liberalism. Both the
right and the left, he maintains, keep holding on to some sort of Hegelian
explanation of history they must discard. An empirical approach alone is
valid, he states:
