From The Chronicle of Higher Education’s daily news section (subscriber site) comes this from Yale historian Donald Kagan in the 34th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, which “is the highest honor accorded by the federal government for achievement in the humanities”:
Titled “In Defense of History,” Mr. Kagan’s address offered a robust attack on the baleful influence of postmodern theory on the humanities. In remarks prepared for delivery and obtained in advance by The Chronicle, he took particular aim at what he described as theory’s goal of seeking to reduce “claims to the existence or search for objective truth” as “part of the racket by which ruling groups try to retain power,” and stated a belief that history was the discipline best positioned to reassert a more traditional view of the humanities’ role in public life.
“Although historians in universities have given far too much ground to such mindlessness promoted by contemporary political partisanship,” said Mr. Kagan, “as historians they are better situated than their colleagues in the other humanities to recover their senses. They know that the current fad of skepticism and relativism is as old as the Sophists of ancient Greece and had a great revival with the Pyrrhonism of the 16th century. On both occasions their paradoxical and self-contradictory glamour yielded in time to common sense and the massive evidence that some searches are more objective, some things truer than others, however elusive perfect objectivity and truth may be.”
Well said. On a more basic level, why on earth would a historian not believe that objective truth exists? The absence of such would surely erase all meaning of the discipline, would it not? It would be as devastating to the discipline, though in more subtle ways, than the erasure of objective truth from mathematics.