cept by insisting that it does not refer to anything factual but is simply a "label we confer." What's more, he says, it's a label that depends completely on "how we choose to define it," based on what's important to us in various contexts.
This is the postmodernist view of human life: The term is merely a social construction that we confer if it serves our own purposes.
No doubt Kinsley senses that this is a perilously thin basis for any ethical stance, which is why he appeals to science to bolster his own. But the scientific theory he offers is outdated and discredited. How odd that a contemporary liberal is resurrecting the long-defunct argument of a racist German scientist.
Copyright (c) 2000 Nancy Pearcey, World Magazine.
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File Date: 9.22.00