Abject madness.
One of the main problems with all of this is that it's driven by intellectually disreputable disciplines that are extremely verbal / linguistic. Weaker scholars in those fields fall into a vat of language and leave the world behind. Focusing on language (or literature) need not be un-analytic or unscientific--but that's how these pseudo-scholars do it. They spend their lives doing what Peirce calls "studying in a literary spirit." By this he means: they cease to respect facts, cease to pursue truth, instead flitting about, dilettantish, delighting in cleverness and superficiality, merely spinning out impressionistic pseudo-consequences of whatever ideas they happen to have latched onto. They are, writes Peirce, "lawless rovers on the sea of literature."
I'd say: such people tend to hunt for striking, fashionable hypotheses about impressionistic--in fact: free-associative--purely nominal, linguistic connections...and then bend all their sophistical energies to elaborating on and selling the products. Which is basically: bad poetry.
Now: take that methodological catastrophe and add in a massive dose of one of the topics known to make people lose their minds: religion or--in our time--politics.
The result is fucking disaster.
Now: imagine this maelstrom of bullshit were to escape academia and influence actual policy decisions and actual cultural change.
There you have our contemporary cataclysm...
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