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results is a pseudo-politics, in which everything is claimed in the
name of revolution and democracy and equality and anti-authori–
tarianism, and nothing is risked, nothing.. .is even expected to
happen outside the classroom.
Apposite as Pollitt's assessment is, it fails to account for why
this
par–
ticular ideology, fact-phobic and ultra-esoteric, should become the rad–
ical academics' substitute for activism, why
it
emerged as the
chic du
jour
for the careerist. The collective solipsism of Oceania in Orwell's
novel represented the Party's attempt to control reality, to conform it
to its purposes; but, in the most controversial and probably least per–
suasive theorem in the book, Orwell (or at least O'Brien) posits the
exercise of power to be an end in itself, not the means to some higher
purpose. "One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard
a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictator–
ship....The object of power is power." Oceania, O'Brien explains, is
the exact opposite of the utopias imagined by the old reformers, who
used totalitarian means for idealistic ends .
In
making this claim, Orwell
quite explicitly eschews the perverse paternalism famously advocated
by Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, that the utopian philosopher kings
are cruel to their charges only to be kind . Other dystopian writers like
Yevgeny Zamyatin in
We
or Aldous Huxley in
Brave New World
or
Kurt Vonnegut in
Player Piano
develop this theme-ironically, of
course-to demonstrate the evil consequences resulting from good
intentions. The road to dystopia is paved with utopian projects.
The collective solipsism of the social constructionists stems, no
doubt, from precisely this utopianesque desire to remedy the world's
evils (or what they construe to be the world's evils).
If
the facts won't fit
the nostrums, deny the facts-or that there are facts .
If
reality appears
hard and recalcitrant, deconstruct it and construct a new one-in the
classroom anyway, in collaborating journals. This postmodernist strat–
agem doesn't change the world, but it makes its proponents feel better:
rather like the word magic that ameliorates an unpleasant condition by
euphemism. The defining example of this practice, called in China "the
rectification of names," is the Ming emperor who, when petitioned to
help his subjects flooded by a dangerous river, changed its name from
The Wild One (Wuting) to The Peaceful One (Yungting). Here we have,
in effect, the ideology-in-practice of the social constructionists .
On the one hand, postmodernism may be little more than a tempest
in the academic teapot, relatively harmless. A few years out of college
and experience and common sense will probably erase for most students
