Glorifying difference, behaviour belongs to such and such a tribe in such and such a valley

The recent academic critical wave since the 60s has over-glorified difference.  The apparently irresistible rise of cultural studies in universities, permitting the study and analysis not only of high-class French theorists but of low-class films, videos, magazines and popular songs has aroused great hostility and contempt. Yet the boundary between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture seems as impossible to maintain as that between English and French literature, or between Christianity and Islam. Within the creative arts (for want of a better term) the intermixture is already visible

From the New York Times and the New Yorker to CNN and MSNBC, nothing has changed in the mentality of the people who arrived at that verdict  years ago; and the next Democratic president, if there is one, will be under pressure to undeline difference, and mount continuous threats against a nuclear power the Democrats have gone back to calling Russia an adversary. 

Through this way of thinking  we  risk the loss of overall meaning and of what we used to call the ‘humanities’. ‘The radical particularising of much recent theory in cultural anthropology ... seems to deny any shared base to members of the same culture, much less to humanity as a whole.