"There are certain disciplines—linguistics, philosophy, and literary and art criticism, for example—that seem particularly suited to performing the con of converting the pretentious verbiage of certain modish arrivistes into fashionable human science. To confront this type of deception requires not only the courage to swim against the tide but also having a solid cultural background in many areas of knowledge. The genuine humanist tradition […] is the only thing that can stop, or at least temper, the harmful effects on the cultural life of a country of these deformations—lack of science, pseudo-knowledge, artifice that passes itself off as creative thought—that are the unequivocal signs of its decline."