The Left’s Intellectual Bankruptcy on Full Display

Wade Davis is an anthropology professor at the U. of British Columbia. On Sept. 10, 2022, he published a massive article in The Globe and Mail celebrating Indigenous Cultures, while demonizing Western Civilization’s assumption of its superiority as just so much myopic arrogance.

The intellectual and moral relativism underlying his politics is fairly obvious in the following: “All cultures are myopic, loyal to their own interpretations of reality….. Western society is culturally myopic as well, often forgetting that it represents not the authoritative apogee of civilization, but merely a contemporary worldview, and that modernity, as we conceive it, is but an expression of cultural values rooted in our history.”

Of course there is a tendency within every Identity group to react with hostility to criticism from without. But the Western Tradition, with which I am fully familiar, has been rife throughout its history with criticisms lodged from within by philosophers and literary artists skeptical of both its political institutions and fundamental values. The cultural evolution wrought by this dialectical process is obvious to any honest student of history. But “intellectuals” such as Davis are anything but honest!

Socrates faith in Man’s capacity for Reason led him 2500 years ago to endorse the free exchange of ideas whose “dialectic” must inevitably lead Man forward. But contemporary “intellectuals” such as Davis, in their fanatic devotion to Inclusiveness, suggest all cultural articulations to be but the biased rantings of their proponents. The strange thing is, however, that their Postmodern Cultural Rants are apparently exempt from this dementia. Yes, everyone else’s Ideas and Values are projections of their egos save theirs which are unequivocally True. This is both Arrogant and Intellectually Preposterous.

Hence our Orwellian world in which those who hold the cultural reins of power denounce all who disagree with them by simply calling them names [racist, white supremacist, misogynist, etc.] without ever submitting the issues in question to rational analysis. Intellectual and Moral substance is rarely discussed in the Leftist media because Inclusiveness is implicitly indifferent to the efficacy of Ideas and Values! We’re not, as Socrates imagined, Intelligent Beings, but just another animal, save, of course, those who have pronounced us so from their lofty perches above the human herd.