Listen to you guys dissing French PoMo philosophers. Sara is on the right track.
The French english profs are merely the outgrowth of the real root cause of this inversion of rationality. The actual cause is the Frankfurt School neo-marxist philosophers, particularly the incisive Gramsci and turgid Marcuse. They (and their followers, legions of 60′s radicals) believed that the revolution could only come by privileging the criminal over the cop, the lunatic over the psychiatrist, the oppressed over the hegemon.
Because white males (particularly dead, well known ones) discussed a lot of stuff about empirical method, rationality, and so on, and they are associated with things like A-bombs, televisions, and cars, then anything having to do with science and rationality and empirical method must be overturned.
The notion that men and women, in their ordinary lives might have a pattern of picking one type of career over another in disproportionate numbers, is anathema to the neo-marxists. The sooner that can be overturned, the better. Hence there’s an outcry when there aren’t enough women engineers, or enough women varsity athletes, or women deans, but nobody gives a damn that the female/male ratio in college is now roughly 60/40, or that the odds of a black male graduating high school in a lot of urban areas is under 10%. (See, e.g. Durham, NC). See? Revolutionary success.
The radical egalitarians who insist no animals are superior to any others (even in math tests), the feminists who insist women must be as interested as men in engineering and sports, and the weepy Oprah fans who insist women’s special way of knowing is superior to your puny empiricism, are simply the useful idiots, the unknowing footsoldiers in this revolutionary war. Most of them don’t appear to realize they are co-opted since egalitarianism, equality and all that stuff sound pretty good. The bottom line is there are a lot of footsoldiers in that army and they are winning a lot of the battles. Once again it’s Athens against the barbaroi, only this time, most of Athens doesn’t realize it’s at war, since the barbaroi are arriving in Priuses with MacBooks, not on horseback with bows.
