Two important insights from the influential French thinker Michel Foucault (with an assist from Leo Strauss) can help us understand the mass psychosis and totalitarian hysteria of the left in our time. Foucault’s account of the the merger of “power/knowledge” helps explain why so many people across the West are descending into a kind of irrational tribalism or premodernism. Once the foundations of knowledge—God, nature, and history—have been destroyed, and truth is nothing but a function of power, it becomes almost impossible to make reasonable judgments based on common sense.
The postmoderns did not invent the notion of knowledge as power. The modern project launched in the 16th century by Machiavelli, Bacon, and Descartes reconceived science as mastery over nature “for the relief of man’s estate.” The most important knowledge became practical; philosophy or wisdom was no longer pursued for its own sake, but rather to command the physical laws of nature for human ends. But science thus conceived could never explain what this liberation or freedom was for; and thus the logical consequence of the modern scientific project was the control of human nature detached from any rational and enduring conception of the good. What appears to be a contradiction—the left’s ostentatious defense of “science” and its simultaneous embrace of quasi-religious superstitions—is the predictable result of science’s transformation into an ideology.