Mad, Bad and Dangerous Know-It-Alls

David Solway compares the nuttiness of today's intelligentsia to the stupid "smart" folks in a Swiftian satire:

It is also in the seminar rooms and study carrels of our current intelligentsia that we find comparable absurdities, as for example: professors who advocate rampant spending to neutralize debt (Paul Krugman); teachers who believe that history is a narrative to be manipulated for ideological ends (Howard Zinn); philosophers who affirm that truth is a relative concept, except, of course, for the truth of their own claims (Michel Foucault); writers who promote violence as the road to millennial harmony (Slavoj Zizek), and so on. Indeed, on the major issues of the day—climate change, the war on terror, the free market, Israel, Iran—our “supposed custodians of reason,” pontificating from the Left, get everything backwards, opting for measures that only magnify the problems they affect to settle. As the popular idiom has it, the inmates have taken over the asylum. Clearly, to avoid descent into madness, reason must accommodate itself to reality. Sundered from the world as it is and from men as they are, it generates only caricatures and deformities rather than solutions and practicable recommendations.