7
she looks at the Church, she sees only its complicity in these evils. She shoves detailed
analyses of these phenomena at the Traditionalist, who simply shrugs his shoulders and
says he has never denied them. Flawed human nature produces them everywhere, he
reminds her; his point is not that the West is immune to them but that it alone holds
out the promise of something better. But to the Post-Modernist, that promise, like all
human words, is empty air.
Thus the two scholars stand and stare at each other across a huge chasm. They
each grow increasingly frustrated with the other, for they are constantly tossing facts
and arguments at one another to no avail. Their words fall unheeded into the abyss
which divides them. They cannot even, like Frost and his neighbor, cooperate to repair
the boundary about whose rationale they disagree. For they are looking at the world
through two different sets of presuppositional glasses, whose effect is that everything
they see looks different. If the Enlightenment devotion to objective Truth has indeed
been exploded, then truth-claims are truly [ahem!] nothing more than the most
dishonest of power plays. Philosophy and Literature are nothing but class warfare
conducted by other means, and the Post-Modernist is just more honest about the
situation. But if we think that this alleged explosion has produced more heat and noise
than light, then post-modernist analyses tend to be marked by false sophistication,
vitiated by a suffocating reductionism, and to be both morally and intellectually
perverse. For these scholars are working constantly to undermine the foundations of the
very civilization that makes their sheltered academic lives possible.
The difficulty in adjudicating between these two camps lies in the fact that any
analysis one might offer is already committed to one of the two paradigms at the outset.
If we point out that Post-Modernists are constantly trying to convince us that their
insights are true (which, if they actually believed them, is something they ought not to
do), or if we notice their dependence on the all-or-nothing fallacy (if an influence is
demonstrated, it is immediately taken as proof of a determinism), or if we call attention
to their addiction to reductionism, they will correctly respond that these critiques have
1
Alert readers will have noted that not all of the individuals I have listed as bearers of the Tradition were white, and
many were neither Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant. But we are characterizing the caricature of the Tradition as it is