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Fantasy Land

Anti-Realism In America

Release Date: 05/03/2022

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about Fantasy Land

Benson and Jensen treat a number of crucial ways in which anti-Realism—popularly known as social constructivism—pervades and ultimately corrodes American culture, everything from soccer to more serious matters such as scientific objectivity and moral realism. Establishment elites in academia, the judiciary, and the media increasingly determine the acceptability of various kinds of political and social views, moral beliefs, even the language we use—and suppress competing views. This book offers a reasoned engagement with the mandarins of this new orthodoxy imposed on our shared public life.

Because antirealism harms those who deny one or more aspects of reality, it is bound to fail. As much as people might like the idea of socially constructing reality as they go, all attempts to change traditional institutions such as marriage, or realities such as one’s biological sex—given rather than “assigned”—run counter to the hard facticity of human life and experience. Benson and Jensen help those committed to reason understand the inevitable failings of antirealism, even as they point to a better way that leads to human and cultural flourishing.

About This Author

A native Iowan and literary scholar of the English Renaissance (Ph.D. Saint Louis University), Sean Benson is the author of over a dozen articles and three previous books on Shakespeare’s plays. He holds an endowed professorship, the Frank W. Mayborn Chair of Arts and Sciences, at The University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. In his free time, Sean enjoys being outdoors, gardening, listening to live music, watching soccer, old movies (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are two favorites), and reading widely in history, philosophy, religion, and literature. A fan of the nineteenth-century novel, he is also keen on the Jeeves and Wooster novels of P. G. Wodehouse. Sean and his wife, Jennifer, recently celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary, and are the parents of two almost-grown children.

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