Our Postmodernist President

Strangely overlooked in these debates about teaching evolution in the schools are the full implications of the President's own words on the matter.

"I think part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought."

Does anybody else want to call a spade a spade here? Okay, fine. This is cultural relativsim.

But, Carlton, isn't the point of education to expose people to different schools of thought?

Sure. But, what do you call it when a grubby hippie professor decides that, instead of searching for objective standards of truth, science should teach what every different culture believes and treat all of these ideas as equally "true"? Hmmm. You call it "postmodernism". You call it "cultural relativism". And, if you're Roger Kimball, you'd claim each and every day that this "cultural relativism" is threatening everything that we hold dear in the west. Then you'd probably talk about how Derrida ruined education in America. Because, after all, the underlying argument here is that there is no such thing as objective truth- just different interpretations. What nihilism!

Now, when the President of the United States says that, instead of searching for objective standards of truth, public high school science classes should teach what every different culture believes and treat all of these different ideas as equally "true", what do you call that? I'll say it- this is cultural relativism. Because, again, the argument here is that there is no such thing as objective truth- just different interpretations. What (politically-motivated) nihilism!

Given the man's repeated stated belief that it really shouldn't matter whether or not there were WMDs in Iraq, so long as we believed there were, and the slander by the administration that journalists are "members of the reality-based community", I'm starting to believe two things:
1) This should underline the uselessness of postmodern theory for my generation,
2) The President's great philosophical influences are Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard.

Talk about seeming a bit "French"!