“Ten years ago, what goes loosely under the name of ‘post-modernism’ was much more an ‘item’ in the general cultural conversation,” Blackburn said in a recent NCR interview. “Its heyday was in the 80s and 90s.”

“People like Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida in France, some aspects of Heidegger, had led people in academic and semi-academic conversation to doubt authority and to doubt even their own judgment – to become, as it were, paralyzed because of familiar thoughts about plurality of opinions, the difficulty of proof, cultural relativism.”

That mood, Blackburn said, was in some ways “killed off” by 9-11.

¶ 11:24 PM