What is the kind of thinking being deployed here by Barry and his parade of post-modern heroes? On the face of it, there is an attempt to be scientific and to use the method of induction. The family of critiques — Marxist, structuralist, post-colonialist, etc, are each seeking to construct a general theory from specific instances. But the extreme selectivity by which those instances are chosen, and the determination to ignore context and apply judgment in a manner manifestly skewed to prove a point, is precisely evidence of the kind of rigidity typical of scholastic thinking. We may call it a new variant of scholasticism, which is a kind of reversal or mirror image of the medieval type: whereas the medievals were arguing from rigidly fixed premises, the post-moderns are arguing towards rigidly fixed conclusions. The old scholastics were confident of heaven, but did not know what to make of the finite, applying their bludgeoning logic to all manner of worldly things in a barbaric manner, as Hegel said, and mixing up the sacred with the sensual. The new post-modern scholastics have the opposite problem: they are at home with finite things, with the earthly and the political, but are desperate to find a principle of "infinite" validity that confers absolute value and commitment, so they strain the scientific method to extract spiritual and moral desiderata — and that means coercing the facts to support their preordained conclusions.

We may be able to make better sense of the remarkable parallels between the old and the new scholasticism by invoking the great medieval historian Walter Ullmann's felicitous distinction between the descending and ascending principles. The medievals, we may say, were prisoners of the descending thesis: from God comes authority; from authority comes law; and law requires intellectual and political obedience; so every subject under the sun, whether sacred or profane, tend to be viewed through the prism of an overwrought theology. The moderns and post-moderns, by contrast, may be said to be prisoners of the ascending thesis and of an overwrought science. 

What do we mean by the ascending thesis? We mean nothing less than the guiding principle of modernity: the notion that the world is governed by consideration of what constitutes human choice, human capacity and human need. It means looking at the world, as it were, bottom up, through the prism of the finite; it is very much what defines our contemporary secular mindset; and this is in contrast to the descending thesis which views the world top-down — or through the prism of the infinite. Descending: everything comes from God, religion encompasses all; or ascending: everything comes from man and nature; science and politics is the key to all. Which is it? What distinguishes the scholastic mentality is   ultimately an inflexible refusal to acknowledge the possibility that each of the two separate orders represented respectively by the descending and the ascending principles may have integrity and independent validity in their own right.

For many centuries a "descending" scholasticism governed Western modes of thought. In this regard, we cannot understate the importance of the late Roman imperial decrees of the fourth century, by which the subjects of the Roman Empire were required by law to live, as the decrees said, "according to apostolic discipline and evangelical doctrine." As a result, Western thought got shunted on to a closed track, and developed a pure descending doctrine, where the Church, as God's instrument on earth, was deemed to have ultimate jurisdiction over all questions, whether sacred or profane. (Gregory VII: "If the see of Peter decides and judges celestial things, how much more does it decide and judge the earthly and secular.") This descending ideology, perfected by the medieval papacy, effectively ruled out compromise with ascending principles. It embraced a vision of heaven, of infinity, of eternity and of grace which has effectively overwhelmed and   colonised the lower realms. Christianity had seized the whole of man, and this left no room for any serious or systematic thought about identity independent of a man's specifically Christian status, for example as a being with natural or human rights, or as a citizen of a state independent of a Church. Rather, it led straight to the scholastic type of thinking memorably mocked by Erasmus.