By most accounts we have entered a new intellectual age. We are postmodern now. The major targets of postmodernism include doing away with Reason, Truth, and Knowledge. Postmodernism then becomes an activist strategy against the coalition of reason and power. Postmodernism seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.
Why do skeptical and releativistic arguments have the cultural power that they now do? How do the intellectual themes of exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism coexist with a broader culture that is richer, freer, and more vigorous than any culture at any other point in history? Why is it that the leading postmodern thinkers are Left in their politics--in most cases, far Left? And why is it that that prominent segment of the Left-the same Left that traditionally defended its positions on the modernist grounds of reason, science, fairness for all, and optimism--is now voicing themes of anti-reason, anti-science, all's-fair-in-love-and-war, and cynicism?