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Suspicious: The Hermeneutic of Paranoia

  Religions, mythologies, ontologies, aesthetic movements, revolutions social or scientific, philosophical arguments and political institutions are all central for the program I teach in at Grenfell Campus (Interdisciplinary Humanities). These are what we study and we study them on the assumption (which I have rarely known to be defeated) that they repay close and serious examination. This means we proceed on the opposite basis to what many people seem to think is an educated attitude to the world. I refer here to what I have previously written about the hermeneutic of paranoia. This is the popular attitude that the purpose of education is not appreciation of the complexity of human culture but rather the rote ‘debunking’ of ‘claims’. For this view culture is all ‘bullshit’. Education, as we practice it, is ‘indoctrination’ or ‘brainwashing’. In the popular mind this attitude is what is thought of as ‘bold’ or ‘iconoclastic’ and is the attitude of ‘free-thinkers’. This is because cultu
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Liar!

            We currently live in the throes of what I call a hermeneutic of paranoia or what a friend of mine has referred to as ‘malignant skepticism’. As educators, of course, we want to teach people to be skeptical, but it seems that something has gone seriously awry in this project. The skepticism we have sought to engender has, seemingly, consumed all standards of discourse and allowed conspiratorial, dangerous nonsense to proliferate. Skepticism has, seemingly, fulfilled the worst fears of critics of relativism and dissolved the very reason and public order on which a culture of intelligent critique rests. Worse, any return to older forms of dogmatism, whether religious or scientific, seems clumsy and forced, hopelessly compromised or even cringingly naïve. We can all see the effects of saying God, reason, or science in a louder voice to be null and, indeed, apt to breed their own kind of extremism. The result of all this is a world where greats swathes of people have lost any se
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Cranks IV: The Fan Boy

               T he crank, typically, writes in brutal prose and has all the personal charm of a rutting gnu. Why, then, do so many people revere the crank? The answer may in be in Milton. Beelzebub in Paradise Lost subordinates himself to Satan (HE will never be a rebel angel) as the easiest way of getting out from under God. This is the exact logic by which the fan boy kowtows to the crank or, indeed, by which the demos submits to a tyrant. This takes a bit of unpacking though perhaps not too much. The fan boy has an anxiety and, like so many anxieties in our world, it concerns the certification of personal narratives. These narratives involve the self, of course, but the self as situated in group narratives which often involve historical or literary or other claims. These are narratives that structure people’s lives in an immediate and satisfying way and THIS puts people at odds with potential counter narratives. Often these counter narratives come from specific elite settings like
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Cranks III

  In my last piece I alluded to a kind of crankiness that perhaps deserves more comment. This is the crankiness exhibited by scientists who comment on matters outside the domain of the sciences whether these be philosophical, religious or historical. The interventions of scientists in these domains are, almost without exception, cranky and it is useful to investigate why. What makes a scientist comment on these subjects in spite of a manifest unfitness to do so? Why do we need physicists commenting on the historicity of Jesus or chemists lecturing on epistemology or archeology? Why do we need the thoughts of ethologists on ‘poetry’ or of nuclear engineers on the ontological argument? Of course, we do not need such things at all yet specialists in THESE areas are deeply, existentially convinced we do. The first thing we must note is that ALL of these people deeply and correctly resent the intrusion of amateurs in THEIR domains. Yet at the same time they are incapable of exercising the s
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Cranks II

               The crank has some connection to the myth of anti-intellectualism. He is an intellectual for anti-intellectuals. The myth of anti-intellectualism takes different forms in different places. In the U.K. it seems bound up with class identity and suspicion of posh people. This is the form of anti-intellectualism one would expect to find in a place where education is traditionally a privilege of the few. American anti-intellectualism, on the contrary, is positive not negative. Intellectuals are an active encumbrance in an egalitarian society for the simple common-sense perceptions of the man on the street are adequate, more than adequate for any important question. Knowledge is not an attainment but a simple possession, a birthright of the people to which education adds only unnecessary complexity and a patina of false sophistication. Want to know what the Quran says about ‘terrorism’? Ask the local grocery clerk for he has read it ‘cover to cover’ and knows beyond any profes
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Cranks

               What is a crank exactly? This is an important question for bad science and atrocious history can look quite persuasive to the outsider who does not understand the standards by which the scientific and historical communities validate claims. This is true especially when the crank presents himself as a persecuted visionary. The possibility that the crank MIGHT be a genius ahead of his time turns easily into the certainty that he is. This is a basic trope of our culture which perceives the crank in terms of the myth of the underdog. It is a difficult question, too, for the exact line between cranks and non-cranks can be challenging to draw. The mere fact that the crank is wrong will not do for the non-crank can equally be wrong. Plus, a crank is still a crank even if, per accidens , he turns out to be right. Crankiness is a way of being in the world and delineating this way of being requires a morphology of crankiness. Crankiness has the following elements. The crank is o
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Notes on the Problem of Violence

The oppressor/oppressed binary is, even as a matter of ordinary observation, the easiest to deconstruct. The latter apes the brutality of the former out of the ‘tragic necessity of struggle’ and out of the same ‘tragic necessity’ comes simply to replace him. Habituated to the ‘tragic necessity’ of violence he can do no other. The man who kills crosses a Rubicon and there may be no way back. Violence is his friend; his trusted tool and he will always be true to it. We need a deeper moral language than is covered by this distinction which blurs so readily even a child can see it. In fact, it may just be a distinction for sentiment, necessary sentiment perhaps but not grounded in the intrinsic reason of things. Give yourself once to butchery and I can’t see, barring miracle, how you can can go back. Once you taste power in the form of power over a life you have crossed a line you can’t simply uncross. You have eaten forbidden fruit and the taste can only get sweeter if it does not dull
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