The Politics of "Epistemological Nihilism"

All across history the view of those who sought a more just and flourishing world have, like the protagonist of a recent Oscar-winning film, said that "If I know the world, I can improve it."

Those threatened by the prospect of such change, not only its failing but even worse its succeeding, have always had as an important weapon in their intellectual arsenal the counter-assertion that "You can never know the world"--and therefore cannot improve it; what I call "epistemological nihilism."

The result is that, as Carroll Quigley makes clear in his flawed, at times tiresomely pedantic, but still worthwhile The Evolution of Civilizations; and as one sees when working their way through the tradition of Western philosophy themselves; skepticism has overwhelmingly been utilized by those on the side of "things as they are" against those desirous of what we would call progress. And it says everything of just how muddled intellectual life has been that in recent decades postmodernists, even as they cite Nietzsche and Heidegger(!), think themselves espousing not the darkest of the Counter-Enlightenment, but some kind of progressive philosophy.