"What is truth?" asked jesting Pilate, but would not stay for an answer

There is world of difference between “What is truth?” in the sense Pilate asks it—where it expresses cowardly acceptance of temporal power and impatience with those who question it—and “What is truth?” in the sense Nietzsche and Marx ask it—where it expresses the brave desire to assiduously question the truths with which ecclesiastical and economic interests have indoctrinated us. The postⁿ-modernists of today’s academy, it seems to me, ask the question in a sense far closer to that of Pilate than that of Nietzsche. Rather than undertaking the difficult task of questioning the merits of the banal culture fed to them by so-called artists whose motives are in fact no higher than self-enrichment, they insist pop-culture is the equal of high culture created with motives of cultivating wisdom and virtue. Rather than undertaking the difficult task of questioning the motives of an academic enterprise whose primary purpose is to fodder capitalist enterprises with intellectually lobotomized students eager to serve power, the postⁿ-modernists want to make sure they can get a job in that enterprise. Although they love to cite the occasional posthumous aphorism that seems to support their cause, they certainly have no intention of modelling their life conduct on that of Nietzsche, who bravely endured poverty and ridicule in order to dedicate his life to discovering and bearing witness to difficult truths about the human condition. When the postⁿ-modernists ask “What is truth?” what they mean is that any inconvenient conception of truth that might make rigorous demands of them—courage, asceticism, or even assiduity—is impolite to discuss.