Fox Mulder said that. Such a remark would have earned him a sneer in most universities, especially from philosophers, the more so for those who declaim themselves to be post-modernist.*
For the last two generations scholars and writers have been telling students there are no facts. Marxists denied the law of supply and demand as a fraud. Philosophers emerged from Plato’s cave. blinded by the sun, saw no facts but only heard words and more words. It was all relative. Then the post-modernists came along and bulldozed everything flat with Gallic subtlety. It is all subjective.
In a curious way even school teaching went along with this rarefied nonsense by increasingly ignoring facts. Students no longer learned facts, like historical eras, conjugations of verbs, the formulae for a solution, or the dates of queens and presidents. If such trivia was needed it could be looked up. This was the line long before Google came along.
As ever, the nonsense peddled in college and university classrooms seeps out with the graduates and in time it come back to haunt the groves of academe. What started as intellectual pyrotechnics, harmless fun, and oneupmanship, and the path to promotion is not so funny when it mutates and returns to bite. Think Godzilla.
Now politics in the United States, and to some extent in Australia, has practitioners who publicly and explicitly dismiss facts. The lesson has been learned. Climate change may be a fact but that does not privilege it. All is relative, a fraud, or subjective. Hearing a minister of the crown dismiss scientific evidence sounds like a philosophy seminar.
Social workers were bitten by their own arguments years ago when they espoused the conviction that disabled people should not be institutionalised as this further diminished them. In time the political class learned this lesson and closed the institutions to cut budgets, putting the disabled in ‘the care of the community,’ that was the phrase trumpeted by social workers forty years ago. That care is now to be seen in such people sleeping on the sidewalk and living in parks. In addition, the career paths created in larger institutions were closed off to social workers.
*I have always expect the worst when I hear the word ‘post-modernism’ and so far it has never let me down.
I hemmed and hawed about ‘oneupmanship’ but decided to us it since its prime exponents are men.
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