Here.
I just finished a devastating and interesting book, Counterknowledge, by Damian Thompson. It's a two-part thesis. (1) Counterknowledge is "misinformation packaged to look like fact--packaged so effectively, indeed, that the twenty-first century is facing a pandemic of credulous thinking." And (2) Science and social progress have, "paradoxically [...] given us almost unlimited access to fake information."
Thompson shines in his rigorous and concussive argument for his first claim. In everything from Christian and Islamic creationism and Dan Brown's anti-catholic pseudohistory to homeopathic cure-alls and 9-11 "truth" memes, Thompson shows just how wrong--and dangerous--these counterknowledge movements are.
But his argument starts to ring a little false in his argument for his second claim. He, you see, puts much of the blame on political correctness and postmodern academia.
Sure, why not. "Aging hippies" (his words, not mine) are pretty terrible people and all. And feminist literary criticism is probably the cause of the 9-11 truth movement. I can see how certain parts of the argument make sense. Afrocentric pseudohistory might indeed have something to do with an over-developed sense of political correctness, but Thompson went much farther than that. He writes:
Our task is not made any easier by the fact that the public institutions that previously acted as the gatekeepers to intellectual orthodoxy are now telling us that we can believe more or less what we like. Universities, government departments and churches were all hugely affected by the upheavals of the 1960s. As the author of The Clash of Civilisations, Samuel Huntington, puts it: "People no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character or talents. While most organizations, discipline eased and differences in status became blurred." This "democratic egalitarianism" greatly increased the self-consciousness of minority groups: students, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, feminists, and political activists. Each of these groups wanted the decide what they believed, including the authority to decide what constituted a fact. ...
University lecturers across the humanities threw themselves into the task of constructing specialist disciplines, such as black history and feminist literary criticism. From there it was just a small jump to shifting the boundaries of fact in order to avoid offending sensibilities.
Of course, some of this is true, but this is a kind of slippery-slope argument that would throw the baby out with the bathwater. Is it true that some of these over-enthusiastic humanities proponents "decided that science was just another textual game"? Of course it is! But there is still much good that these hyper-specialized fields can do, while still working with epistimically responsible modes of inquiry. Indeed, I would argue that most of this stuff is done responsibly. At least it is, as best I can tell, here at Oberlin, one of the most liberal institutions in the country.
I find it intriguing, though, that Thompson, after taking the vast majority of the book to rail against poor arguments and logical fallacy, would spend only one chapter making his most controversial and incendiary claims. He writes:
We must hold to account the greedy, lazy, and politically correct guardians of intellectual orthodoxy who have turned their backs on the methodology that enables us to distinguish fact from fantasy. It will be their fault if the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.
Well, Mr. Thompson, if I meet one of these people, I'll let them know. The fact is, I haven't. The philosophy program here at Oberlin largely eschews the Continental School, and among my many friends in the humanities, you'd be hard-pressed to find one who took postmodernism as gospel.
It seems to me that the criticism of academia may be aimed at the wrong generation. Ours has moved beyond, I'd argue, the excess of hyper postmodernism and into an age of post-posteverything, to be a little too clever. It is with irony and detachment, now, that our generation studies arguments--an irony and detachment that makes it difficult for them to swallow the kind of pseudoscientific swill propagated by the many enemies of reason.
So, Mr. Thompson, let's keep our attacks aimed where the should be: at the Holocaust deniers and creationists, at the 9-11 truth nutjobs and the purveyors of false history. You won't get any argument from me over them.
Interestingly, Thompson ignores one of the great centers of counterknowledge--American Conservatism. One need only look at the last near-eight years of American governance and rise of Governor Palin to see how the American Conservative movement has wholly embraced that cultural-political Pentecostalism, so dangerous to reason. They are the ones, not liberal academics, who are using base identity politics in the place of argument. They are the ones, not liberal academics, who silence scientific discourse at every opportunity. They are the ones, not liberal academics, who pose the greatest threat to the stability of the Public Domain.
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