I am clapping my hands and quietly cheering…

There is something a little breathtaking in a level of science-phobia that can see ‘negativizing’ disease, suffering and death, as harmful and repressive. One is reminded of Woody Allen’s retort to a character’s reproach, in ‘The Front’, that he really wanted success: ‘So what should I want, a disease?’ Does Marglin seriously think that disease, suffering and death (the death of other people, remember, as well as one’s own) would be a source of joy and pleasure if only it weren’t for the ‘scientific medical system of knowledge’? Has the postmodern left become so tone deaf that it can hear no echo of the complacent droning of landowners and priests (and colonialists, surely) about the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate?

And check this out:

Nanda is eloquent and impassioned on the way postmodernist and constructivist ideas have been adopted and used by the fundamentalist Hindu Right in India for purposes that are anything but progressive. ‘I submit that the moment the Indian left began to talk the language of cultural constructionism, it lost the battle to the Hindu nationalists.’

This interesting article is called Butterflies and Wheels , and it’s by Ophelia Benson.