A travesty of logic

Postmodernism has also inspired a chorus of criticism from left figures such as Noam Chomsky, Terry Eagleton and Eric Hobsbawm.

Chomsky's criticism is interesting because he blames the nutty anti-realist postures of postmodern academic writing, which treats objectivity as myth and logic as ideology, on the retreat of the left from mainstream debate. On the evidence of this book he has a case. Lucy and Mickler had a chance to launch a reasoned critique of conservative discourse, but they have instead produced a kind of pomo tabloid.

The feminist literary critic Lorna Sage, who was no enemy of postmodernism, nevertheless described it as an “authoritarian anti-authoritarianism”. Elaboration on this comes from French intellectual and one-time structuralist Tzvetan Todorov, who describes pomo as a form of dogmatic skepticism. “It is skepticism, to the extent that it considers knowledge and judgment impossible, along with truth and justice. But it is also dogmatism, because it decides in advance what each text means - namely, nothing.”

Oxford ethologist and science writer Richard Dawkins has observed how many honest academics of this time were “intimidated into silence” by the postmodern priesthood. Lucy and Mickler's diatribe bears out these forceful insights. It is nothing less than an attempt to silence dissent, and profoundly anti-democratic in its way.

Reviewing an anthology of academic perspectives critical of postmodernism titled Theory's Empire I argued, on January 27 last year, that some knowledge of basic philosophical concepts would help teachers and students contend critically with postmodernist notions that tend to be taught as received wisdom. “This is not to say that arguments for Derrida and his ilk should not be advanced, but that they should be advanced and tested philosophically rather than accepted on faith,” I concluded. “Where [postmodernist] theory is given shelter - increasingly, this includes schools and teaching colleges - its most intellectually respectable opponents should be invited too.”

Does this read like the ranting of someone aiming to "eradicate critical thought from society", and in fact "oppress" democracy, as these two edgy postmodernists claim? Quite clearly it's a call for a redoubling of critical activity. For open debate. For the very opposite of Lucy and Mickler's allegations.

The two had access to this passage: it was published 10 months before their paperback. Its absence is a telling rupture in their text, suggesting either a quite stupefying degree of unprofessionalism, or a calculated attempt to deceive their readers. Even polemicists need to get it right.

A few other features of Lucy and Mickler's caricature might help to flesh out this point. I'm supposed in their narrative to pine for the stitched-up 1950s, a time before I was born and an era for which I have not once declared a fondness. I am “at heart a book-burner” - a curious charge to lay against a literary journalist and former literary editor with a proven commitment to the exchange of ideas. In my eighteen months as editor of The Australian's Review of Books - a stewardship warmly praised by Inga Clendinnen in the Quarterly Essay - I published just the one article about postmodernism: a lengthy defence!

Curioser still, I read with interest in The War on Democracy that my intellectual mentor is the great bear Dr Johnson. The archives give the lie to this. In a recent article on literary biography I described James Boswell's greatest literary creation as a “monstrous wreck”, who in his early London years lived a “secret life” as a hack writer - “vulnerable, impassioned, unstable, and more than a little grotesque”. Where is the Johnsonian identification here?

There's nothing to justify Lucy and Mickler's amateurish conceit; and no evidence for it is provided. Readers who are on-side with pomo might take delight in seeing their opponents slayed, but they should still approach the book with caution for it feeds a rather base desire: it is blood sport.

But what a broken-backed exercise in pugilism it is. Niall Lucy, the author of several books popularising Derrida, remains a kind of parish priest in the much-diminished postmodern church. I am a left-liberal critic.

But this does not make me a black-hearted, book-burning neo-con striving to undermine democracy, nor Lucy a postmodernist angel and upholder of civil liberties. Criticism of postmodernism is not criticism of democracy.