"Modern intellectuals are comparable to a psychopath who murders for kicks. They seek the thrill of the new; and the new, to them, is the negative. The new is obliteraion, obliteration of the essential in every field; they have no interest in anything to take its place. Thus the uniqueness of the century behind us: philosophy gleefully rid of system-building, education based on the theory that cognition is harmful, science boastful of its inability to understand, art which expelled beauty, literature which flaunted antiheroes, language “liberated” from syntax, verse “free” of meter. nonrepresentational painting, atonal music, unconscious psychology, deconstruction in literary criticism, indeterminancy as the new depth in physics, incompleteness as the revelation in mathematics–a void everywhere that was acclaimed by the avante-garde with the metaphysical chuckle. It was the sound of triumph, the triumph of the new anti-ideal: of the unknowable, the unreachable, the unendurable."