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 culture is ‘propaganda’
for those ‘in power’ and to be a true revolutionary is to see through all the
deceit and lies. This hermeneutic of paranoia in many instances is a product of
the consumption of niche media (much of which actually IS propaganda!). Certain
others, though, think they are aping their betters in taking the
hyper-skeptical attitude they attribute to ‘academics’ who unmask the duplicity
and deceit that can be inherent in institutional structures, particularly ones
set up to privilege one group of people over another.
The hermeneutic
of paranoia is, however, quite a distinct thing from what has been called the
hermeneutic of suspicion. For someone like Marx or Foucault public ideologies
mask underlying relations or dispositions of power that pre-structure our
thinking about the world. Critical thinking exposes these relations to the
light so we can be free with respect to them. The hermeneutic of paranoia,
however, is the crude bastard child of these thinkers. This is because it
reverts to the hoary view that things like religions,
metaphysical views and so on are modes of ‘priestcraft’. They are conscious
deceptions, deliberate fabrications or conspiracies. Culture and its realm of
signs doesn’t occur, it is ‘made up’ whole cloth from ‘nothing’ by ‘con
artists’ trying to fleece the public. If we throw these ‘ideologies’ out, we
can look directly at the world and ‘see it as it is’ through ‘common sense’.
The antidote to ‘brainwashing’ is naïve realism! Here lies the dividing line
between the culture of critique and pre-critical naivete. Yet any visit to
Twitter or Facebook will show you that, however cringy, the hermeneutic of
paranoia may well be one of the dominant views of culture in our day: to the
chagrin of academics whose careful lessons in critical thinking have now been
turned against THEM to feed a new anti-intellectualism perhaps cruder than any
than has yet existed.
Part of the problem is
that, on its own terms, nothing can refute the standpoint of the paranoid. One
can’t tell the paranoid to read the great books, say, as he will only read them
through the lens of universal suspicion. One cannot tell him to take up
philosophy. He will NEVER take anything in Descartes or Plato or Augustine in
any sense but what will confirm his initial bias. As for history, well, he
cannot do any for all sources are systematic lies. Radical skepticism about
sources annihilates the science of history which depends on sources. Habituated
to see bullshit in everything he will find these subjects and all others to be
replete with it. The slightest crux, aporia or interpretive difficulty will be
triumphantly produced as proof The Oresteia or The Gospel of John
is meaningless gibberish. A single inaccuracy in a historical source, renders
it useless and heaven help a philosopher if he should ever make a mistake or
express himself clumsily or (gasp!) have a moral blind-spot!. Confirmation bias, along with poor interpretive
skills, will ensure that the ‘bullshit’ sought for is found on literally every
page of every source or text. Of course, the reason that reading will do the
paranoid no good is that reading is a product of a culture and a habit. There
is reading and there is good reading. Scholars are habituated to the
second by being introduced into a hermeneutic culture. Without this benefit the
paranoid will read in a haphazard, undisciplined way that serves no purpose but
to confirm all his dreary biases over and over.[1]
He will pronounce on The Quran or The Book of Exodus in a tone of
infallibility that no doubt or qualification can ever touch. This is a function
of naïve realism when applied to text: only the paranoid has the courage to
call a spade a spade and openly declare what the text ‘really says’ when
mediated by simple common sense and blunt honesty. Thus we have a view of culture whose banality
is only matched by the view that world historical movements are founded on one or
two easily corrigible ‘mistakes’ which the critic is the first person in history
to have noticed!
The problem here
is that the mature reader knows this is all childishly wrong by familiarity or,
as the medieval philosophers would have said, connaturality. She is familiar
with the material through working on it in the context of a reading
culture and it is this familiarity which is the clinching argument in any
dispute. Alas, this is the very thing which the paranoid lacks and the very
thing which cannot be conveyed even though it is the most decisive factor in
forming an educated judgment. Of course, the paranoid will take this argument
as circular: what I am calling being initiated into a reading culture is
exactly what he will call indoctrination or brainwashing. For the un-indoctrinated
mind a talking snake is a talking snake for that is SEEING and SAYING what is
literally THERE which is the only defense against propaganda and lies and the
web of universal deceit. This the paranoid knows from having scanned one or two
passages of Orwell! Meaning, real meaning, is seen by looking not reading or
interpreting. This is why the paranoid thinks he has little to nothing to learn
and why he knows all about the historical Jesus or how vaccines work by skimming
Wikipedia on the subject. Indeed, this is why he so angry with
people who try to snow him into thinking the simplest matters of life are
actually many, many shades of grey. Alas, this desperate stab at some solid
reality must founder the way any naïve realism founders: there are fictions and
founding fictions and at the heart of any culture we have the latter. Founding
fictions cannot be resolved into facts because any determinate fact assumes
them. Even the paranoid retains such foundational mythic, religious or metaphysical
patterns in his thinking for without them he can tell no story and come to no
conclusion.
Say, reader, you
are in this trap. It is a stultifying, repetitious and ultimately boring trap
which you would see if only you could get out of it. I, alas, cannot get you
out of it: you can only do that for yourself. I can, though, explain why it has
zero temptations for me personally. This involves telling you what I am
familiar with and that is for you to make of what you will. I cannot persuade
you but I can, perhaps, tell you what you are missing. I can tell you what the
COST of your stance is in terms of the enrichment and growth you forego when
you bunker down into the tiny silo of your own ego. I can tell you what it
costs you to be incapable of learning from others because you assume they are
all out to con you. All growth involves risk and one such risk is trust without
which you will never leave the Platonic cave of your parents’ basement (where I
suspect a certain number of you dwell not only metaphorically but literally). Let me talk about the great poets and
thinkers as of things I know and love. If I am in the company of Dante, or
Milton or Spenser, or of Augustine or Dionysius, I am in the company of people
who are Christian. If I am in the company of Isaiah or Ezekiel I am in the
company of ancient Jews. If I am in the company of Ashvaghosha or Rumi I am in
the company of Buddhists and Muslims. When I read these authors here is what I
discover: make the origins of Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Buddhism as
adventitious or arbitrary or even conspiratorial as you please it does not
matter to these texts or impinge in any way on the value of what they contain. The
traditions have been elevated and transformed by these great artists and
thinkers into living wisdom and incandescent creativity. The converse of this
is also true: the form of these traditions has elevated the minds and expanded
the perceptions of these creators into the realm of transformative visions of
life (THAT is precisely the quality that sets them apart from the everyday
banality of mass culture and makes them world-transformative). The artist and
the material mutually condition each other. When I read Rumi I do not care
what an empirical Mohammed may have literally scratched on a tablet because it no
longer matters. The material has been transformed by the alchemy of art into
spiritual vision. The crude externality of the empirical has been overcome and
wisdom has taken its place. This is what great artists and thinkers do. This is
why I study them and why I think YOU might profit from studying them too if you
approach them with the proper humility and openness. I have found this to be so
as a matter of direct experience.
For this reason,
I am completely unimpressed when entire wisdom traditions are dismissed as
‘propaganda’ and ‘mind control’. To me this can only be the position of
adolescents or cranks of diminished intellect or stunted imagination. It is a
form of the genetic fallacy for however a thing may have started (and there is
always a certain mystery to that- one we may wish to dispel with some crudely
reductive story) the truth of that thing lies in what it becomes and how it
ramifies and develops in the story of human culture. To put it another way, the
author dies to be reborn in the reader. The original event is transformed in
the process of its transmission. Christianity, in fact, has a symbol for this
very thing. There may be great interest in the empirical individual Jesus of
Nazareth and what he may have thought or what may have motivated him. This can
be the basis of a legitimate scholarly endeavor. However, the Jesus
appropriated in faith by the Christian churches is NOT this empirical
individual. It is the resurrected, ascended, transformed Christ. Make the two
as contiguous as you please, the one is a transformation, even perhaps a
translation, of the other. The earthly life of Christ is a sign of something
greater in eternity. It is the spirit immanent in the world, the spirit
released at Pentecost, which elevates the mind of a Dante or Blake into eternal
wisdom and generates the uttering of it in images of profundity and majesty.
The same goes for the modes of mysticism and philosophy and the discourses THEY
generate. The Word is born anew and, even in the necessary failure of the human
image, handed on to be renewed once more (possibly in a radically new form!).
Other traditions may have symbols for the same thing: indeed, in the realm of
secular criticism, we have the whole discourse of the death of the author!
Of
course, not a word of this is meant to convince anyone of anything. I am not an
apologist and have no interest in converting anyone into anything but a more
perceptive reader and a more discriminating judge. I am not anticipating any
conclusions one may or may not draw. I am only trying to indicate what I think
an educated mind is and how it operates. The educated mind is indeed a sort of
bullshit detector (I believe ‘everything is bullshit’ to be a species of
bullshit for instance). This, however, is only a secondary function. Its
primary function is to see things at their true worth and to dismiss something
good is every bit as bad, in fact probably worse, than to be fooled by
something bad. Developing this latter faculty is all the more important given
that the flip side of malignant skepticism is child like credulity. Even the
malignant skeptic needs an anchor, a source of truth, of some kind and THIS
will be chosen whimsically and granted total blind credence. A capacity must be
developed not only to see the evil or the ugly but to see the beautiful or the
good. This what I try to attune myself to when I read and teach certain texts. It
is the ability I try to hand on to students even if, at the end of the day,
they come to find the true or the good in ways I can’t anticipate. Indeed, the
true teacher, like the true parent, works for his own obsolescence. At any rate ALL the positions I have adverted
to here and in the past few essays involve one basic motif: the nostalgic
desire for simplicity. Cranks, paranoids and the rest don’t want the complexity
of signs but something else. Signs are messy: they reveal and veil. They liberate
and enhance yet imprison and confine. They mesh with power yet escape its full control. Signs demand to be read and re-read from
multiple angles and when we are done reading them, we are exactly in the place
to start over again. Meaning will not arrive quickly or easily enough unless
the sign is dispelled into the simplest of signifieds: a conspiracy, a hoax, a clumsy
error, a virus mental or even physical. In all these forms we want meaning to stand
forth as the simplest of present to hand things.
[1]
Here we face the problem of the autodidact. The autodidact can be a person of
remarkable energy and ability. However, ‘doing your own research’ presents the same
problem for the talented self-educator as for the anti-vaxxer. Such people are unaccustomed
to having a check on their subjectivity and caprice. For this reason, for all their
reading, they may form no balanced perspective on anything or ever see any
problem in its just proportions. The autodidact will give himself over completely
to a ‘pet idea’ and borrow down, often arrogantly and angrily, in the finitude
of a mere opinion. In other words, they have not an educated habit of mind but
a set of ‘views’. Indeed, vanity and hubris are the two biggest temptations for
autodidacts. They often never learn the vital lessons concerning how little one
human can really know.
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