Jonah Goldberg, scholar

Via Andrew, Jonah Goldberg demonstrates his enormous intellectual courage by attacking that vague shibboleth postmodernism. I mean this guy doesn't care who he goes after!

Honestly, there may literally be no one I have less faith in to criticize a person, concept or ideology fairly and constructively than Jonah Goldberg. Some people I admire and respect have affection for Goldberg, but I just don't see it. What is patently obvious from Goldberg's post is that he has no idea what postmodernism is. His post contains nothing but the vaguest, shallowest notions of postmodernity, things that could be culled from Wikipedia or taken from boilerplate David Horowitz. Hey, did you guys hear that postmodernists don't believe in truth? Fascists!

Who was Ferdinand de Saussure? What consequences of his work helped create postmodernism? Who was Derrida? Althusser? How are their visions of human interpretation alike, and different? What is post-structuralism? What critiques of post-structuralism arose from the larger postmodern community? Who is Spivak? How does her work critique and expand on deconstruction? To what degree do various postmodernists really dispute the existence of reality? How is the postmodernism of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard different from that of Jean-Francois Lyotard? What is the great divide between Habermas and Lyotard?

These are essential questions if someone is going to have anything resembling an intelligent take on postmodernism, but I am certain Goldberg doesn't have the faintest idea about them. If he does, he certainly hasn't demonstrated it in his writing, or in this post in particular. Simply acting as there is some monolithic school of opinion called postmodernism gives away his vapidity. There are many critiques of postmodern themes and ideas, some valid, some not, in my opinion. But the people who make them successfully do so because they do what every who argues with integrity does. They make a good faith effort to confront the actual content of what they're critiquing, and attempt to engage it on its own terms. Goldberg doesn't want to do anything similar, of course. He just wants to take some pot shots at Obama and gussy up his credentials as a conservative "intellectual". Of course, bending the definition of a term, being deliberately vague about what it means and how it's used, thinking that you can create meaningful notions about an idea without having actually interrogated the idea at all, well... that's downright postmodern.

Update: Ok yes this last little bit is awful. I was being rushed out the door when I wrote it, sorry.

Update 2: Yikes! Somehow my link got spammed above and led to a malware-y site. Very sorry, removed. I'll have to change passwords and stuff... that's very disturbing.