Critique of Postcolonial Theory

All the politics today labeled progressive, to the charms of which youth is liable, were around in the 1960s, as was radicalism in the German universities in the years leading up to 1848. Heresies were born of universities in the medieval period, and faculty members had to watch what they said. The free flow of ideas is bound to generate abominations as well as insights, because the moral as the mores of the time is always flouted at the highest levels of thinking. Hence the ability to take Heidegger seriously instead of with a grain of salt. If the universities are radical, it is because the norms of a self-governing state or individual are necessarily conservative; there is something to be preserved and perpetuated for the sake of which stable governance is maintained. No stability, no culture, even if stifling stability like Franco’s is an obstruction to culture from the opposite end of the political spectrum. The danger in postcolonial critiques of imperialism is that democracy should be raced European and hence categorized as outside the charmed circle of the progressive. It is an export from England, true, but this should lead to the view that colonialism’s moral legacy is complex, rather than simple. But this latter is the view in the very universities that are supposed to flout conventional morality in the name of the truth.