Stop Blaming Foucault: It’s ontological absolutism, not the postmodern emphasis on deconstruction and contingency, that is turning the humanities into a race-obsessed, pro-genocidal wasteland (Ari Gandsman, October 21, 2024, The Tablet)

Sadly, the vision of academic pursuit in the social sciences and humanities being guided by disinterested inquiry is obsolete. Job descriptions, not just in the humanities but also in the empirical sciences, increasingly demand explicit ideological and activist orientations (e.g., decolonialism, environmental justice, anti-racism). Analytic distance and critical detachment are denounced as outmoded colonial vestiges of cisgendered white male supremacy. Meanwhile, a scholar’s identity and therefore their experience is privileged, especially if they are from underrepresented groups where a tacit and often condescending expectation often exists that their topics of research overlap with their identity. Academic pursuit guided by nondogmatic, open-ended inquiry hears its death knell.

A popular explanation for this larger shift blames the abandonment of the pursuit of truth as root cause and points the finger at social constructivists like my doctoral adviser. This argument is epitomized by public intellectual Yascha Mounk’s recent book The Identity Trap which names the usual suspects—the French philosopher Michel Foucault, critical theory, and the bogeyman known as “postmodernism”—as key culprits of the new dogmatism. With truth dead, everything is permitted.

Yet as someone who grew up intellectually in this milieu, I believe that today’s stridency and moral absolutism is less explained by social constructivism but by its rejection. While social constructivists emphasized doubt, ambivalence, and uncertainty, academics now speak with absolutist, if imaginary, moral clarity on a host of issues ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A main explanation for this is “the ontological turn” that swept many disciplines, including my own, anthropology, in the first decade of the 21st century. While social constructivist approaches are associated with epistemology—questions of knowledge and how we know what we know—ontologists are concerned with questions of being, the essence of existence, and the nature of reality. To see all knowledge as socially constructed means seeing our own knowledge is too. This leads to a modesty of what we can claim to know about the world.

In a major article from my minor discipline of anthropology 40 years ago, my doctoral adviser argued against thinking we could pierce through our own cultural precepts to access “demystified reality.” He cautioned against uncritically believing our own beliefs were the true ones or that our own concepts and interpretations of the world were necessarily better than others. This required embracing what the late great philosopher Richard Rory referred to as “contingencies.” Or as the influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz once put it, lifting from the great sociologist Max Weber, we are “an animal suspended in webs of significance” that we ourselves spun.

Geertz cites an apocryphal Indian story in which the world was described to an Englishman as resting on the back of an elephant that rested on the back of a turtle. When the Englishman asked what the turtle rested on, he was told, “it is turtles all the way down.” We were trapped in our own representations and could never get to the essence of existence, yes—but we did not see this as a bad thing. We took seriously Nietzsche’s famous observation that believing in a “true world” was both myth and error.


Ontologists not only make broad and foundational claims about the world but also normative claims about how it should be. If knowledge-oriented social constructivists were focused on how our ways of seeing the world were filtered through our own cultural and historical lenses, ontologists attempt to break through the filters to get to absolutes.

Post-modernism is a return to pre-modernism. Once you get back you have to choose your faith. the oncologists above choose a particularly ugly one.