Posts filed under ‘September 11’
Fish Story
This essay originally appeared online at TNR Online.
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, commentators on intellectual life from a variety of quarters, including The New York Times, Time magazine, and U.S. News and World Report, speculated that the war into which the United States had been thrust would force a new seriousness upon the nation. And they wondered whether one consequence would be a decline for postmodernist thinking–among both the scholars who propound it and the students who imbibe it. As the argument went, postmodernism–with its celebration of irony, its commitment to the subversive, its conviction that all morality is local, historical, and socially constructed–would soon find itself out of step with the temper of the times. (more…)
Giving Sophistry A Bad Name
This essay originally appeared in The Weekly Standard.
IN RESPONSE TO SEPTEMBER 11, people from many walks of life performed their jobs with spirit and guts and aplomb. Exhibiting a high degree of seriousness and professionalism, the police and the firefighters, the doctors and nurses, the ground zero construction crews and the media, the mayor and the president, and the military and their man Rummy in the Pentagon have risen to the occasion. Alas, if Peter Singer’s latest offering is in any way representative, the same cannot be said of academic moral philosophers. (more…)
Put to the Test
This essay originally appeared on NRO.
We have been, we and our leaders emphatically agree, savagely thrust into a new kind of war that we have no choice but to win. What it will take to defeat the enemy remains a subject of intense analysis. But it is certain that victory will not come quickly or easily or costlessly. (more…)
