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 professor what it contains. The rest is just shamming and like, modern artists, professors are a cabal maintaining the pretense of knowledge without any substance. The intellectual life is a form of ‘bullshit’ and we know what bullshit is for its character is immediately and directly perceivable.

Of course, the crank is also an intellectual but he is the GOOD kind of intellectual. He is the kind of intellectual who cuts through the bullshit and gives us real knowledge. This is because he gives us the truth in the form of a thing we can see and touch and hold. Why does Judaism exist? A middle eastern virus caused it, or toxins in the water, or drugs or the chemical composition of 'Jewish blood'. Culture is not complex but reducible to simple, univocal, present to hand causes. How did Christianity arise? Psychosis, mushrooms or psychosis caused by caused by mushrooms! What is that puzzling image on a piece of ancient art? A cryptid or an alien! Strands of causality and influence do not mesh to produce events but one cause and one only dominates. This cause is blindingly obvious once revealed. It is the ‘real explanation’ of x and as such the only explanation. Clearly, this is a monotheistic hankering for the one simple, self-evident divine cause though displaced in the form of a thing. The crank then appeals to the anti-intellectual by selling a species of idolatry. Like the Hebrews of old needed their Baalim and Ashtaroths we need the mysterious, hidden divine cause in the open form of a simple empirical fact or object that accounts for all we need to know. The crank and especially his fans want a transcendental signified or Lacan's phallus: the ultimate secret, the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, God himself must be produced for them in the simple form of a cryptid or parasite. The stance of the crank is indeed, at the deepest level, religious. 

Especially, we seek from the crank the moment of unveiling, of apocalypse as he reveals the blinding truth before an astounded world. We also feel the righteous glow of anger as the fakes and frauds of the scholarly world gnash their teeth and wail as the mighty are thrown from their high places to be humbled in the dust. And here we find the true ‘secret’. The explanation of the crank is an alternative to the painstaking work of the scholarly interpreter which is a mode of priest-craft. We do not need to explain the aesthetics or imagery of a painting in all its dimensions if we know its symbols are just the secret handshake of a grail cult or a coven. The 'symbologist' of Dan Brown's novels is out to DISPELL the complexity of the symbolic and reduce it to a simple cup. We don’t need to pore over the evidence of early Christianity if we know one man, Paul, created it ALL because he had a hallucination of a mythical person named Jesus (no doubt from something he ate or some unusual chemical he ingested- think of the possibilities if we could discover this chemical!). We don’t NEED hermeneutics if we have the univocal, self-evident, empirical truth and can produce it to the enraptured public as a present to hand object. All is explicable and all is explained in the form we most desire: a thing.  

Part of this dynamic has to do with the lingering prestige of science. When scientists attempt colonize domains OUTSIDE of science they do so, almost without exception, as cranks. This is because explanation in the sciences is a kind of simplification: one finds the underlying cause by eliminating variables. A discipline like history, rather, is all about including the variables to the greatest extent possible. No historian of WW2 thinks a good history of that conflict is the one that reduces it to one or two underlying factors. Historians want to take into account ALL the different factors that fed into the event even though that complicates the narrative. This is why the public thinks that ‘historians’ can ‘justify anything’. History has its abstractions and simplifications (every discipline wants to filter out irrelevancies) but it does not perform the same abstractions science does. This is why it fails in the minds of the general public: it does not produce one truth embodied in one object or force or factor readily identified and apprehended. It does not produce the one true cause and into this gap steps the pseudo-historian to tell us that everything comes down to the virus that caused the plague, the geography of Africa, or who possessed the physical grail.        

And here we get a problem. The crank, like certain iterations of the scientist, is engaged in a kind of reductionism. He is engaged in a form of debunking and to that degree his project is deflationary. What we thought was x was ‘really just’ y and the ‘really just’ is the important bit. We might worry that El Greco was a transcendent artist above our common standards of aesthetic judgment until we learn, to our relief, that his art was ‘really just’ a function of astigmatism. This brings it crashing back down to earth in a way that must be satisfying. We might worry that mystics and visionaries like Plotinus or Rumi see things beyond ordinary consciousness but are relieved to find their visions are ‘really just’ epilepsy or drugs or a parasite in the water. In another, less innocent, way we are thrilled to learn that the genius of Bach or Leonardo is ‘really just’ the product of white European genes. However, I am not sure the appeal of the crank is really deflationary. He is a debunker of others of course but his claims bring a frisson of their own or they would not be popular. People are thrilled to learn that x was really just y all along. There is something almost religious in the experience as bigfoot or ancient alien conspiracies have a sacramental aura about them. The crank offers enchantment as much as disenchantment. He offers us, in the place of the difficult truth, the magic thing that causes everything and this seems to offer both the thrill of debunking AND the aura of an enchanted object at once. For this reason, you will always do well by being a crank.