I appreciate that you are a thoughtful person, and not a knee-jerk ideologue, but you haven’t directly addressed the issue I raised: the power that large corporations possess. For that matter, while you are an excellent writer, you seem to have a weakness for eloquent rhetoric that has no clear meaning, such as, “A fight for decentralization means appealing to local communities to be much more cognizant of the full impact of their choices.” I have to say, that sounds like some slick politician talking.

Surely you aren’t suggesting that every little town should confront multi-national corporations on their own. Besides, if by some miracle they were successful, it would be the ultimate nightmare for people running a corporation to have to deal with so many varying regulations. If there were fewer people in this nation (the U.S.) who insist that ‘government is the problem’ and more who agreed that the problem is the existence of huge corporations, the task of regulating them would exist on a different plane.

I agree with Marx’s critique of capitalism and some of the postmodern critique of Modernity. Specifically, I agree that a focus on a radical individualism, promoting “contests of power” (Foucault) as opposed to cooperation for the good of all, has been bad for society. I also accept the impossibility of any human being attaining ‘objectivity’ as a state of mind, with no extraneous subjective influences intervening (Derrrida).

I think Marx was wrong in thinking that abolishing private property would be the solution and that postmodernists went off the tracks in making all knowledge a matter of personal tastes and preferences. Interestingly, both have been promoted in the name of ‘emancipation’.

To my mind, it is the ultimate irony that many of the people who deny the reality of climate change also rail against postmodernism without realizing, apparently, that they are appealing to that part of postmodernism. As far as I can tell, an ‘elitist’ is someone — with whom one disagrees — who has a claim to having more knowledge than one does.

Still — Foucault again — human beings are not just entitled to our own opinions, but our own realities. When your reality is contrary to material reality, though, that can be a problem. Denying global warming is like denying that that freight train and you are going to be at the crossing at the same time. It is one thing for Joe Blow in a bar to be a Denier; it is quite another for a political leader be be one.

Rationality and material reality are linked. That is the sense in which I am a rationalist.