"What must be protected, then, is the general, the possibility of
making pronouncements from a perspective at once detached from and
superior to the sectarian perspectives of particular national
interests, ethnic concerns, and religious obligations; and the threat
to the general is posed by postmodernism and strong religiosity alike,
postmodernism because its critique of master narratives deprives us of
a mechanism for determining which of two or more fiercely held beliefs
is true (which is not to deny the category of true belief, just the
possibility of identifying it uncontroversially), strong religiosity
because it insists on its own norms and refuses correction from the
outside. The antidote to both is the separation of the private from the
public, the establishing of a public sphere to which all could have
recourse and to the judgments of which all, who are not criminal or
insane, would assent. The point of the public sphere is obvious: it is
supposed to be the location of those standards and measures that belong
to no one but apply to everyone. It is to be the location of the
universal. The problem is not that there is no universal--the
universal, the absolutely true, exists, and I know what it is. The
problem is that you know, too, and that we know different things, which
puts us right back where we were a few sentences ago, armed with
universal judgments that are irreconcilable, all dressed up and nowhere
to go for an authoritative adjudication.

What to do? Well, you do the only thing you can do, the only honest
thing: you assert that your universal is the true one, even though your
adversaries clearly do not accept it, and you do not attribute their
recalcitrance to insanity or mere criminality--the desired public
categories of condemnation--but to the fact, regrettable as it may be,
that they are in the grip of a set of beliefs that is false. And there
you have to leave it, because the next step, the step of proving the
falseness of their beliefs to everyone, including those in their grip,
is not a step available to us as finite situated human beings. We have
to live with the knowledge of two things: that we are absolutely right
and that there is no generally accepted measure by which our rightness
can be independently validated. That's just the way it is, and we
should just get on with it, acting in accordance with our true beliefs
(what else could we do?) without expecting that some God will descend,
like the duck in the old Groucho Marx TV show, and tell us that we have
uttered the true and secret word."

"It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in the
streets over the question of universals. The stakes are high, for at
issue is our whole conception of our ability to describe the world
truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any opinions we frame to
ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most
profound problem of philosophy. It structures Plato's (realist)
reaction to the sophists (nominalists). What is often called
'postmodernism' is really just nominalism, colourfully presented as the
doctrine that there is nothing except texts. It is the variety of
nominalism represented in many modern humanities, paralysing appeals to
reason and truth."