Currently read­ing Fre­d­er­ick Crews’ Fol­lies of the Wise. If I needed a new motto for this blog it might come from him: “we do not have things to say. We acquire them in the pro­cess of work­ing on def­in­ite prob­lems that catch our attention.”

This is from his intro to Fol­lies:

My aim in telling this story is not to scoff at apo­lo­get­ics for oth­er­worldly belief, though I do regard them as uni­formly feeble, but to call atten­tion to a clash between two intel­lec­tual currents.

One is sci­entific empir­i­cism, which, for bet­ter or worse, has yiel­ded all of the mech­an­ical nov­el­ties that con­tinue to reshape our world and consciousness.

We know, of course, that sci­ence can be twis­ted to greedy and war­like ends. At any given moment, moreover, it may be pur­su­ing a phantom, such as phlo­gis­ton or the ether or, con­ceiv­ably, an eleven-dimensional super­string, that is every bit as fugit­ive as the Holy Ghost.

But sci­ence pos­sesses a key advant­age. It is, at its core, not a body of cor­rect or incor­rect ideas but a col­lect­ive means of gen­er­at­ing and test­ing hypo­theses, and its tri­als even­tu­ally weed out error with unmatched success.

Hav­ing made a large intel­lec­tual mis­step in younger days, I am aware that ration­al­ity isn’t an endow­ment but an achieve­ment that can come undone at any moment.

And that is just why it is prudent, in my opin­ion, to dis­trust sac­rosanct author­it­ies, whether aca­demic or psy­chi­at­ric or eccle­si­astic, and to put one’s faith instead in object­ive pro­ced­ures that can place a check on our never sated appet­ite for self-deception.

Sev­eral dec­ades of untran­quil exper­i­ence in the pub­lic arena, how­ever, have led me to anti­cip­ate only lim­ited suc­cess in get­ting this point across.

To put it mildly, the pub­lic in an age of born-again Rap­ture, Intel­li­gent Design, mis­cel­laneous guru wor­ship, and do-it-yourself “spir­itu­al­ity” isn’t exactly hun­ger­ing for an across-the-board applic­a­tion of rational principles.

And the cul­tur­ally slum­ming, trend-conscious post­mod­ern academy, far from con­sti­tut­ing a stay against pop­u­lar credu­lity, affords a par­odic mir­ror image of it.

In case you think Crews is an elit­ist, here he is on Marx and Freud:

[U]ltimately Freud and Marx are twin the­or­ists of the uncon­scious. For Marx, we are uncon­scious of the interests that shape our con­scious­ness. We think we have these eth­ical val­ues, but what we really have are our class interests based on our pos­i­tion in the struc­ture of man­u­fac­tur­ing and ownership.

For Freud, the uncon­scious is that which har­bours our shame­ful, instinctual life. And so our con­scious life is a com­prom­ise between these feel­ings that we can’t acknow­ledge and all of the influ­ence of the super­ego which tries to deny it.

Well, if you take these two views of the uncon­scious, you’ll find that both of them cast ordin­ary people in a very belittling light. Ordin­ary people are not aware of what’s truly motiv­at­ing them.

They need to be told what’s motiv­at­ing them, which means they need to be ruled.