Gresham’s Law of Criticism

One of the reasons that post-modern theorists have driven reasoned objective scholarship underground is that it is simply too tedious to shred their conceits into proper little handfuls of confetti. Whenever anyone says “the moderns say this” or “the moderns say that” I really can gainsay them no credibility if they don’t say precisely which moderns, and precisely where they said this and that. I find particularly galling such officious, obnoxious, trivial and passe observations as Postmodern interpreters typically challenge modern interpreters’ claim that their hermeneutical axioms constitute the scholarly conclusions of non-partisan reason; as male white European and North American scholars dominate the guild of biblical criticism, their social location cannot escape affecting these scholars’ interpretive reasoning. You see, without a sense of which modern interpreters the self conscious post-modern is attempting to pillory, and without a guidepost to the actual textual matter that is being criticized for what cliched white male locative gaffe, I think it likely that the post-modern fellow is at best practicing a somewhat abstract form of self aggrandizement, and at worst he is simply stroking it.

It’s not that I don’t love AKMA. I do. But his prose is entirely too mannered to be believable. I think he should read some Thomas Love Peacock to hold a mirror to his own strained artifice.