Archive for January, 2008
Open letter to Damian Thompson on reading a bit of his wretched new book
Dear Damian
I was flipping through Counterknowledge: how we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history in Waterstones, Trafalgar Square, earlier today, quickly but carefully and with a slight intention to buy, but since reading up on your oeuvre I’ve put off paying for it until I can pick up a used copy. I’d hate to encourage you.
I find it anything but astonishing that a person of faith takes the trouble to publish a book damning all but the big narratives of culture and science. This sort of thing happens all the time. And it’s anything but startling to see someone bandy the word ‘reason’ around and adduce science simply in an attempt to scatter the opposition and pre-emptively shut up those who don’t hold the same tenets of faith that they do, who don’t presume to start from Enlightenment reason — anything but — and who don’t base their knowledge on the last word in science.
It would be more interesting to take the argument to the opposition by examining the ideological ground on which they stand, if it’s apparent, and put aside for a book’s space the preconceptions borne of dualism, under which reason automatically, naturally and without prejudice cannot help but oppose wild unreason. If it seems to you that there are enough “What ifs” without you adding to their number, perhaps you’re missing the point of scientific inquiry. What if the straight median line of progress through reason running through the idea of God, slave-owning democracies, hierarchical meritocracies, the dispassionate science of economics, and all the rest of it, touches affective narrative waymarkers either sides of the line in its inexorable linearity, rather than existing simply as a forward-moving thing ever-present and immanent?
With science being, as you imply, a relentless ongoing process of inquiry with no knowledge gap untested, leaving only reason in its indisputable wake, and since history is just the one full, true story, leaving no one ignorant of its veracity, surely we are, as you contend, replete with precisely the positive knowledge we require. However, you don’t start from such a positive position. You argue that we should not tolerate counterknowledge and must destroy it because it is non-knowledge. In fact, you go further and suggest that counterknowledge is worse than ignorance because it purposefully seeks to negate knowledge’s true other. It is precisely the beyondness and independence of that anti-ignorance strategy that makes it so attractive to freethinkers and so dangerous from your point of view.
What could it be in counterknowledge that so unites sceptics and true believers?
Reason
And what of those dangerous people who benefit from the progression of true knowledge but insist on negating its reasonable provenance? I denounce your attempt to divide a world of thinking people into those who’ve failed to embrace reason/science and those who remain true to the one true story you narrate. Yours is a mean–spirited, ugly, divisive sort of discourse.
Although I’m with you in detesting the New Age and conspiracism knowledge markets, I can’t go that extra mile with you and label all unincorporated counterknowledge as moribund. Why? I’m not certain that all known counterfactuals — not to mention the unknown ones — have been disproved or illuminated by scientists or that one history, the true one you’re advancing in opposition to the ‘fake’ ones you mention — not even the history of science or the story of God — is capable of describing all the truth of human experience now and in the past.
Do I accept ‘reason’ and ‘Enlightenment’ as facts? No, because I’ve read widely. Do I accept that science is a dispassionate search for true facts, a thing apart? No, because fallible humans make it. Do I accept that history can be faked? Yes, because all stories are part fiction, even the true ones. Do I accept there is danger in people reconsidering history, science or culture in the light of their own experience? No, because that’s exactly how those things are made. Can I conceive of a turning point in human affairs at which ‘reason’ supported by faith-in-ritual — including faith in rituals of knowledge acquisition and transmission — triumphs over counteractive heterogeneity and productive, interactive experiential differences, whether reasonable? Yes, I’m afraid I can. And that is why I’m not supporting you by buying your book.
Thanks for doing me and the reading/thinking public the courtesy of being accessible to criticism. I wish more writers would do the same.
All the best
Neil Palmer
Feastofpalmer.com
Edit: I wrote this to post in the contact form linked to on http://www.damianthompson.net/. But the web form does not work, so I’ve posted it here. And I retract the last paragraph.
Posted by Neil
on January 8, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Tags: Counterculture, Individualism, The Unexplained, hauntiquarianism
11 comments | Permalink