On academic liberalism

Academic conferences can expose you to a world of left-liberal ideology. I am an alien with respect to that world. It isn't that I don't understand the project of liberalism, which is to ameliorate reality. What I do not "understand" so much is how a left-liberal ideal of inclusiveness can be taken for the reality of life. It is as if left-liberals work very hard to promote a notion that there is intellectual and social space for us all to live in harmony together. Having produced this notion (for instance by means of a orchestrating a seminar or a conference), they are done. It now really seems as if nothing has been excluded from the scope of left-liberal hegemony. A notion like that of patriarchal psychology being equivalent to "black holes" in the universe must be dismissed as something irrelevant to the project at hand -- the gathering of all into one tent of harmony.

But this tent remains what it is -- merely conceptual. And despite the hard work and the good intentions of academics, their pronouncements remain pronouncements. Their sense of achieving inclusiveness is limited to change at a conceptual level. I do not, by writing an academic text, remake the world.

The real danger is the development of a left-liberal hegemony within academia. This concerns intellectual blind spots, which form wherever good feelings about living in collective harmony with eachother find their natural limits in the lives of those who are belligerent, desperate or struggling, and in any case excluded from a realm where social harmony is even thinkable.