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 opinionated in the radical sense: his
life is staked on an opinion and this opinion demarcates good from evil and
wisdom from folly. This opinion is usually crystalized in the form of a pet theory over
which the crank will grind axes without limit or stint. This theory is always
earth shattering and of revolutionary significance. It radically overturns all received
wisdom. This received wisdom is held by ‘scholars and experts’ and, as such, is
held in false consciousness. All critics of the pet theory are dishonest or
stupid. They are pedestrian and too bound by convention to judge the work of
the crank. Indeed, their criticism and disapproval are THE validating signs that
prove the crank is correct. The crank is too far beyond them to be judged by ordinary
standards and indeed, if such people think the crank is wrong, this proves that
the crank has touched a nerve and is on the right track. This is because the
crank sees his leaps and inferences as so intuitively obvious, once he has
explained them, that they could provoke no honest opposition. The experts
are frauds or liars if not blind. They are paid off or otherwise compromised.
Hence the crank is a victim and martyr. He is hounded by a self-interested cabal.
The stance of the crank is, then, inherently agonistic and implicitly or explicitly paranoid.
Another
thing one must note is that the pet theory of the crank is monocausal. The
complicated history of x is reduced to one simple and previously hidden cause
which the crank has brought to light. This might be a hoax or a psychological
mechanism or a virus or lead in the water. THIS is the REAL cause of x for x,
whatever it is, has one and one only ‘true’ cause. This is because the crank
has to have one leading idea that cuts the Gordian knot and reduces previous
complexity and nuance to the simple truth.[1]
This holds however byzantine the crank’s idea appears on the surface.
Underneath it must be profoundly simple and without ambiguity. Behind a complex
myth must be an ancient alien say. This is, also, the result of a kind of
literalism about myth and religion that reduces it to a material cause like an
asteroid or cryptid. The pet theory of the crank, if it is historical in focus,
must fly in the face of any culture of hermeneutic complexity: the ancient myth
or text must have that ONE simple meaning the crank has uncovered for the crank
eschews any and all nuance or complexity. Again, this is because it is in his
nature to only accommodate one single strong idea at a time. He is dominated by
this one idea which becomes the key to unlocking the universal fraud and deceit
perpetrated by ‘experts’ and ‘scholars’ who, by the way, never make mistakes
but only ‘tell lies’ and ‘con people’. Indeed, this attitude involves, paradoxically,
some notion that the expert is in fact infallible. He secretly KNOWS the crank
is right just because he IS an expert. Thus, he must be a con man out to bamboozle
the public or a pedant desperate to defend the tottering authority and privilege
of his guild. Either way the crank has found him out and exposed his dishonesty
to the light.
The
crank appears formidable to outsiders as he rarely (if ever) loses an argument.
Experts know not to debate cranks because they can never win. The crank is
obsessed with one thing and one thing only and has far more energy and
determination than people with lives who don’t obsess over Atlantis or the one
true explanation of the pyramids. He has more details at his command to
manipulate and distort and often has so many ‘arguments and facts’ that
addressing all of them is a literal impossibility. Plus, he does this FASTER
than most of us can keep up with. While you are googling one claim the crank
makes 20 more! The crank can ALWAYS claim that his core points have not been
addressed. Plus, the crank, obsessive as he is, can simply outlast people who
get bored with the subject. The field, then, is always left to the crank. The
crank, for this reason, always thinks he has won as do his acolytes. The
anger and annoyance he provokes convince him he has hit a nerve. They feed his
sense of persecution and, with that, his sense of personal righteousness. When
people get bored and cease to engage him he interprets this as conceding
defeat. Plus, these ‘arguments and facts’ are subject to constant drift and retroactive
reinterpretation. This allows the crank to constantly move the goal posts and
claim his point has been distorted and misunderstood and his arguments unanswered. This means, of course, that
the crank cannot be stupid or lazy. To keep up these fictions up in the face of
constant opposition requires energy and determination and more than a bit of
cunning.
Finally,
for the crank everything is personal. His investment in his pet idea is
unreserved and total. This means an attack on his theory is an attack on him.
His being is at stake in every argument hence his penchant for invective,
insult and sometimes rage. Is the crank insecure or implacably vain? Is he both
at once? Plus, can the crank, in spite of himself, be sometimes useful? Remember
the crank can, in spite of all his efforts to the contrary, occasionally stumble
on the truth. Yet he is wrong even when he is right for he is right without epistemic
virtue. Still, we may have a use for the crank from time to time. Mill makes a powerful case for keeping fringes
alive for all the annoyance they cause as something might come from the margin
to the center. Cranks may play a role in the ecology of knowledge production.
Usually this role is negative but at some points it may be positive. The crank can
keep certain possibilities alive even though his activity is founded on intellectual
vices not virtues. The Lord shaves with a razor that is hired as a Hebrew prophet
said. Plus, there is the following problem, the personality of an authentic scholar
may have cranky components raising the difficult, and perhaps unanswerable
question of the threshold for genuine crankiness. We know it when we see it may
the best answer we can muster in many instances.
[1] If one might put the error of the
crank logically it might be the over-application of Occam’s razor. Reducing the
history of Rome to lead pipes or the rise of Christianity to a particular
hallucination seems to invoke the simplest, most direct explanation. However,
this is in vain for Occam’s principle, when it is useful, invokes the simplest
explanation of the material at hand which
may be quite complex and require a multi-faceted, multi causal analysis.
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