El colapso de la razón

Muy interesante artículo en Reason sobre el suicido de la intelectualidad de izquierda en el mundo académico de los EEUU, justo en el momento histórico en el que podrían ofrecer una alternativa racional a ciertos abusos conservadores:

I don't agree with all of Gitlin's indictment of conservatism and conservative policies, and I am far from a fan of some ideas that he wants liberal intellectuals to promote. Yet he has a point about the rise of reactionary attitudes on the right—attitudes that a principled liberalism should be in a position to counter. Instead, the intellectuals of the left make it all too easy for people like Fox News talk show host Bill O'Reilly to mock academics as "pinheads" who spend most of their time in what O'Reilly likes to call "la-la land." How can anyone, for example, take academic feminists seriously when they are discussing whether Newton's physics is a metaphor for rape or whether logic is inherently biased against women?

Indeed, long before the current wave of conservative attacks on the legacy and values of the Enlightenment, many left-wing academics were deriding reason, freedom, and tolerance as bourgeois prejudices and scholarly objectivity as a smokescreen for the white, male point of view. Instead of championing individual rights, the academic left began to promote the "identity politics" of defining people by race, gender and sexual orientation. Some feminist professors are so afraid of appearing to champion Western values that they will balk at "culturally insensitive" criticism of the oppression of women in much Islamic culture today.