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Although the ideas in the CER special issue are presented as challenging both the scholarly mainstream and a wider neoliberal or neocolonial establishment, the seriousness of this challenge is doubtful. Exhortations to embrace ‘opacity’ or to ‘think otherwise’ in the name of ‘contesting coloniality’ imply no coherent programme, and suggest an overwhelmingly negative agenda. Meanwhile, far from risking ostracism, the contributors can expect warm endorsement of their views from regulars at the major international conferences. For many in the CIE community in North America and beyond, sweeping critiques of Western ‘hegemony’, ‘coloniality’ and so forth hold a strong appeal; it is those seeking to question the balance or accuracy of such theorising who risk opprobrium. As Merquior wrote of Foucault, Derrida and their postmodernist or ‘deconstructivist’ followers, their ‘skepsis’, ‘highly placed in the core institutions of the culture it so strives to undermine,’ has come to constitute an ‘official marginality’ (Citation1991, 160). The potential – and actual – consequences of this are troubling. Takayama et al call for the WCCES in particular to embrace the agenda of ‘contesting coloniality,’ but one conclusion to be drawn from recent events is that this is already happening, with damaging consequences for civility within the Comparative Education field, and for the wider credibility of its scholarly output.Footnote15 Reducing scholarship to the projection of the scholar’s own positionality can only lead to fragmentation and irrelevance. To quote Merquior again (paraphrasing Hilary Putnam), ‘to demote rationality, in a relativist way, to a mere concoction of a given historical culture is as reductionist as the logical positivist’s reduction of reason to scientific calculus’ (160). What he calls the ‘Elixir of Pure Negation’ (159) is an intoxicating brew, but it is unlikely to inspire coherent or constructive contributions to addressing the pressing problems of our age: climate change, poverty, inequality and the ethical crisis that underpins them all. Indeed, it is very likely to do the opposite. The neoliberal cadres of the OECD or World Bank, along with nationalist autocrats from Beijing to Budapest, will be more than happy for ‘critical scholars’ to fulminate against a vaguely-defined ‘West’ while embracing ‘epistemological diffidence’ (Takayama, Sriprakash, and Connell Citation2017, S18). As one critic of ‘postmodernism’ has put it, the promotion of ‘epistemological pluralism,’ combined with rejection of any ‘settled external viewpoint,’ means that, ‘so far as real-life ongoing politics is concerned,’ postmodernists, along with de-constructivists, decolonialists and their ilk, tend to be ‘passively conservative in effect’ (Butler Citation2002, 61). If ‘decoloniality’ promotes a balkanisation of the Comparative Education field into identity-based cliques that prize ‘opacity,’ the risk is that in practice this will only serve to buttress the status quo. What is urgently needed instead is a rebalancing of the field towards an engagement with the comparative history of colonialism and imperialism.Footnote16 Challenging unreflective Eurocentrism is important, not least in helping to jolt self-styled liberal progressives out of any lingering, ill-founded complacency. But when it involves ahistorical, anti-Western essentialism, decolonial discourse actually threatens the respect for our common humanity necessary to effective scholarly collaboration across cultural boundaries. In the face of the manifold crises today confronting our educational institutions, societies, and the very planet upon which they subsist, we need constantly to remind ourselves that the capacity for evil, or just plain stupidity, is a quality that unites us all, and resolve to confront it together.