"...I see irony here, because this whole postmodern ideology could never have emerged from anywhere but at the heart of western civilization, which gave the world the idea of equal political rights and successively extended that idea to new economic and social groups, to all races, and to women as well as men. Yet some postmodernists have now repudiated that idea as a snare and a delusion. This is how the distinguished historian Joan Wallach Scott, who has worked for decades at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, could actually come to argue, in a recent book, that the Enlightenment, not the Muslim religion, has had the worst impact on women’s rights in the Muslim world.[1] That, however, offers a clue as to how this remarkable world view, so utterly at odds with both historical and contemporary realities, could have become so popular. And here, in another irony, the postmodernists have something to tell us...." DK
[1] See the review of Scott’s book, Sex and Secularism, by Laura Kipnis in the New York Review of Books, May 24, 2018: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/05/24/secularism-letting-their-hair-down/
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