SAM writes:

I believe that we have finally reached the point where it is impossible to correct the thinking of liberals through any kind of dialectical process. One of the hallmarks of dialectical reason is the use of a technique known as the reductio ad abusurdum or the “reduction to absurdity.” Utilizing this technique, one demonstrates that the premises underpinning a certain theory logicaly entail something so repugnant to reason that the only rational response is to go back and figure out which of them needs to be rejected. No more, apparently. Witness this article.

For centuries, narcissism was rightly regarded as a spiritually dangerous, anti-social, and highly undesirable vice. Christopher Lasch, whose work is a mixed bag, nevertheless correctly classified it as a kind of pathology. (Although the therapeutic language ubiquitous in modern times utterly obscures the distinction between moral and psychological pathology; a distinction vital to a correct understanding of the human condition.)

In response to Lasch, the feminist Elizabeth Lunbeck now argues that what he describes as narcissism is really something laudable; an advanced form of social consciousness, as it were.

Making this argument, she demonstrates her immunity to the reductio ad absurdum. A normal human being in full possession of his cognitive faculties would reason as follows: “If the tenets of feminism entail that the vice of narcissism is in fact a virtue, then there is something wrong with feminism.” Lunbeck takes the opposite approach, in effect saying “Since feminism and its tenets entail that narcissism is a virtue, narcissism must in fact be a virtue.”

Lunbeck’s article is a perfect illustration of the Orwellian up-is-down, black-is-white, evil-is-good mentality is that rapidly metastasizing amongst our “educated” elites. They are quite literally demented; ideological vice has deprived of them of the basic capacity to tell good from and evil and, hence, to tell the true from the false.

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Paul T. writes:

The book review was presumably written by the same Vivian Gornick who is the author of The Romance of American Communism and, more recently, Emma Goldman: Revolution As a Way of Life (Jewish Lives Series, Yale University Press)

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