After hearing a guest on NPR discuss “imposing our narrative on the Iraqis” yesterday, I found this passage from The Redistribution of Honor particularly on target:
The funhouse of the postmodern academics was built around the two closely related themes of postmodernism and multiculturalism. Together they displaced the idea of truth and its cousin, empirical evidence, with the notion of “narrativity.” All the world was simply words. There was no reality, just a series of competing stories all of which were mere social constructs and none of which was more correct than any other. In political terms, the campus postmodernists identified with the pre-modern rebels against modernity in the Arab world. But with the war in Iraq, those on campuses who, like Al Jazeera, believed “Baghdad Bob’s” account of events discovered that lo and behold there is such a thing as an empirically grounded reality.