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.