[MD] Julian Baggini: This is what the clash of civilisations is really about

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[DMB]
The linked article takes up the same basic problem that Baggini's article discusses, but from a different angle. It just came out (June  8, 2015) and is titled "The Attack on Truth: We have entered an age of willful ignorance". Check it out. I think it describes John's "thinking" pretty well. 
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Attack-on-Truth/230631/  

[Arlo]
I read this article the other day, and was left a little disappointed. The author sets up the (almost classic) 'subjective-objective' clash, here coming from the cultural studies folks versus natural scientists. And from here he laments how the rhetoric of the cultural studies folks (no truth) was appropriated by the anti-intellectualists as a way of undermining research that violated their ideology. But I think what the author is trying to present is impossible without an understanding of the simultaneous clash between social and intellectual values. Without this, it comes across as an argument for the 'objective' truth of the natural scientists, when instead the 'victory' should be to the empirical truth of intellect over the dogmatic truth of social value. 

This would allow the author to better illuminate the 'intelligent design theory' strategy of the Discovery Institute, not as way to use relativism to discredit evolution theory, but as a way of masquerading social dogma as intellectual theory. Or, to restate, its wrong argue the objective truth of evolution theory when we should not take it is objective truth. But the challenges, when they come, should originate in empirically-based research, not in the scripture-based rituals of organized religions. 

So the solution to the dilemma proposed by the author is not to hunker down with the objective truth of the natural scientists as the author is forced to imply (in my reading) without a way of introducing the social-intellectual clash that is driving the "willfully ignorant".