This is hardly standard fare for our political site, but perhaps Centreright readers might be interested in this review over at Spiked Online, of a book with a great title - Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists. Here's an extract:
[T]he history of philosophy was dominated far more by the kind of questions that inspire the young to study the subject in the first place, questions ‘of how to live, of the meaning of life, of the relation between morality and politics’. This is stirring stuff. Unfortunately what students find upon entering a university philosophy department is something very different: ‘an appalling distance from the real world’
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The real problem, according to Neiman, lies elsewhere, with the academic left, which, although it was at least once verbally committed to changing the world, has in recent years retreated into what she describes as ‘obscurantism and equivocation’.
In the hands of the campus radicals, ideals historically associated with the left, such as progress, justice, freedom and even socialism, became suspect. Once held dear by those seeking to change the world, such concepts were literally de-valued. They became at best mere words, textual fodder for deconstructive analyses, lexical window-dressing in a Nietzschean universe of wills-to-power, a charge, as Neiman shows, that goes back in spirit at least as far as Socrates’ virtue-doubting adversary Thrasymachus. And where does that leave the contemporary humanities student? With dense verbal thickets that refuse to say too much at all.
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‘While abandoning Marxist claims about progress in history, the left was united in its determination to believe in nothing else.
Go read the whole thing. (Hat tip: aldaily)
