I just had the most infuriating seminar in a good long while. The whole thing was dominated by one or two people, ranting incoherently about how knowledge is implied by power, about deconstructing dominant discourses, and how much of an inspired genius Jacques Derrida is. I said one thing and one thing alone during the whole hour:

"How does this relate to international relations? How does it stop wars, ensure reasoned progress and improve the lives of all?"

I am told this is 'not the point'

My main concern is the flippant way in which PoMos treat reason. One of the authors of my main book on this subject criticises the idea that knowledge depends on the:

sovereignty of the heroic figure of reasoning man who knows that the order of the world is not God-given, that man is the origin of all knowledge, that responsibility for supplying meaning to history resides with man himself, and that, through reason, man may achieve total knowledge, total autonomy, and total power

Excuse me? I don't suggest we can reach a perfect world - of course we can't - but to declare an end of the modernity project? To say that attempting to establish the Enlightenment values of logic, rational inference and evidence based conclusions, is the problem, rather than the solution? Its genuinely scary.

The ridiculous nature of this pseudo-intellectual leaning was exposed by Professor Alan Sokal, who in 1997 submitted a satirical article to the journal Social Test. The essay maintained that scientific procedures of testability and experiment were themselves culturally produced or constructed, and possessed no independent validity. On seeing his preposterous submission accepted and published by the editors, Professor Sokal revealed the hoax.

(As a proud disciple of George Orwell's insistence on clear writing, I don't know whether to laugh or cry over the largely terrible english exhibited by post-modernists. It is as if these people take pride in forgetting their full stops, writing in hyper-technical language, and revel in the use of tautology)

This kind of crap is serious, though. Its anti-modern rhetoric directly challenges liberty. Michael Foucault, prized postmodernist heroine, went to Iran in 1978 to praise the Ayatollah - calling him an "old saint". He attacked the secular, democratic and feminist wings of the Iranian revolution, saying Iranians don't have the same "regime of truth" as we do. He then implored Khomeini to avoid any move toward proper democracy, because "we all know what that leads to"

The final straw for me is the obscene way postmodern artists go around simply trying to shock people. Jake and Dinos Chapman, prized wankers, recently bought and defaced a copy of Goya's Disasters of War (which pictures harrowed victims of the Napoleonic wars) by scribbling pictures of babies and puppies on the character's faces. Why did they do this? I haven't the slightest idea. But Jake Chapman has said previously in an interview that "the Enlightenment project. ... virulently infects the earth"

If someone can explain to me - coherently- the value of postmodernism, I'm happy to listen. Yet I can't find anything. All I can see are pre-modernists - Islamic fundamentalists, dictators, fascists - and post-modernists - pompous continental pseudo-intellectuals, bricked up in their cushy university departments - coming together in alliance against those values that we all need to adhere to now more than ever. Freedom, democracy, liberty. Progress. Reason.