Steven Parmenius

  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

            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

               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