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Any thoughts from you about this, Gordon Campbell?
Dear Republic:
How long is The Republic going to continue so shamelessly publishing the intellectually kitschy and new-agey spiritual drivel that Michael Nenonen persists in palming off on the public? I'm surprised you do not carry an astrology column or print stories about haunted houses in Vancouver. Your willingness to pander to the philosophically and scientifically uninformed public with such egregious claptrap is deeply depressing.
In the current issue (Issue 96) Nenonen continues to exhibit his own ignorance and gullibility in his oxymoronic article “Fundamentaslist secularism.” As is normal for such productions, it contains vastly more nonsense than could be cleared up in an article several times the length of his. It would require a moderately lengthy book. I shall focus on three matters, and all too briefly at that.
1. Nenonen adopts a distinction from Karen Armstrong between "logos" and "mythos", characterizing logos as "practical reason, the knowledge of cause and effect that allows us to succeed in our everyday lives, and that guides both science and politics." He seems to mean what most people would call common sense, which is the most common degree of rationality. Mythos ". . . is a form of psychological wisdom that uses systems of metaphor and ritual to help us manage our emotional lives", and quotes Armstrong's claim that in creating mythos our early ancestors ". . . were bringing to light the obscure regions of the unconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect on our experience and behavior."
This is a rat's nest. The whole idea that there is such a dimension of the mind as "the unconscious" has in the last decade or so been completely discredited as empty of any meaningful content. That there exists such a dimension of the mind has been investigated thoroughly and the consensus among scientific psychologists is that the idea of the unconscious is entirely an artifact of theory (primarily Freudian), not a datum that can be theorized about. The "unconscious" has a similar relation to psychological theory that phlogiston has to chemical theory. So, one might ask, how can Armstrong and Nenonen possibly know that "the unconscious" has any effect, on our behavior and experience, or that "mythos" is anything more than the rag-bag of primitive superstitions and practices it appears to be to rational people? The fact is, they cannot. Because Nenonen's so-called mythos depends essentially on there being such a thing as the unconscious, it is, and ought to be, as disreputable as pseudo-scientific charlatanry ought always to be.
2. Nenonen claims that a civilization based on "logos" or reason, without mythos, inevitably leads to nihilism, anomie and dysphoria. He offers as evidence for this claim that "It's no coincidence that the European Enlightenment coincided with the bloody Witch Craze. As the old mythos was disrupted, the malignant psychological forces that it kept in check were catastrophically unleashed."
This is pig-ignorance on stilts. The Witch Craze took place in the Seventeenth Century. The European Enlightenment was the glorious achievement of the mid-to-late Eighteenth Century. The Enlightenment was the cure for the disease of witch crazes, and the Witch Craze was certainly part-and-parcel of the "mythos" of the Seventeenth Century. As for nihilism, anomie and dysphoria, these uncomfortable psychological states have been around from time immemorial. Greek, Roman, and Medieval literature are full of them. They are not products of modernity and rationality as the intellectually provincial Nenonen claims. Nenonen, or anyone who thinks he might be on to something, should read Robert Burton's (1577-1640) Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). He'll stop writing such rubbish if he has an intellectually honest bone in his body.
3. Nenonen's broad brush attack on Marxism as a kind of mythos in rationalist drag is cheap and unbecoming of anyone who wants to be taken seriously. In the first place, he does not make it clear whether his remarks are intended to apply to Karl Marx himself, or to some, or all, of those who style themselves Marxist. It is lamentably true that some of Marx's followers have exhibited characteristics that might reasonably be called essentially religious in nature, and this has allowed numerous second-rate reactionary writers to condemn all forms of Marxism as a new and false religion, and Marx as a false prophet. Marx himself famously remarked that "I am not a Marxist". He was rejecting such cultish treatment of his thought. Most Marxists have not been mythos-mongers in drag, and Marx himself was on any account a great, but certainly not infallible, thinker, and very self-conscious about both his materialist methodology and the conceptual character of his social thought.
After passing through a mis-spent intellectual adolescence engaged with the philosophy of the mythos-monger Hegel, he emerged in his maturity as a thoroughly scientific thinker with a healthy respect for empirical inquiry and evidence. More than any other Nineteenth Century thinker he has the right to claim to be the founder of modern scientific sociology. Marx made his mistakes; all original thinkers standing at the beginning of a body of serious thought do. But he cannot be dismissed as breezily as Nenonen does. Nenonen's remarks say more about him than about Marx or even most Marxists, and what they say ain't pretty.
- Donald Todd, Vancouver
Michael Nenonen responds:
Donald Todd makes a series of implicit and explicit claims in his letter. First, he claims that my articles are somehow affiliated with the New Age movement. Given that the defining feature of the New Age movement is a belief in such occult phenomena as telepathy and channeling, and given that I neither believe in nor promote the belief in such phenomena, I'm hard pressed to see how my material can be called "New Age". I assume, therefore, that he's using the term as a way of intensifying the personal invective colouring his letter.
Second, he suggests that the study of spiritual matters is a mark of low intelligence. Thus, he implies that scholars like Ian Barbour, Huston Smith, William James, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, David Bohm, Theodore Roszak, Martin Buber, Harold Bloom, and other such luminaries are inherently foolish. While Todd is free to believe this, I see no reason to agree with him.
Third, he claims that the concept of the unconscious mind is thoroughly discredited. This will, of course, be news to the psychology departments of universities worldwide, where the topic is still a matter of some debate. Whether Todd likes it or not, psychoanalysis-—which is founded upon the concept of the unconscious mind—remains an influential scholarly field.
Fourth, he argues that in my article I attacked Marxism in its entirety. Those who read my article will know that I wrote "Marxists who pride themselves on their rejection of mythos. . . “ Rather than dealing with Marxism in its entirety, I was talking about a rather clearly-defined subset of Marxists.
There are many Marxists who don't pride themselves on the rejection of mythos, and Marxism itself doesn't require such a rejection. Todd is therefore attacking a straw man.
Fifth, he claims that my timetable for the Enlightenment is off. His criticism here is closer to the mark, but he misses the bull's eye. The witch trials ended in the eighteenth century. England's last witch trial occurred in 1722; in Prussia, the trials officially ended in 1793. Though witch hunts began in the early Middle Ages, the last two hundred years of the witch trials are generally acknowledged to have been the bloodiest.
The Enlightenment, meanwhile, is generally believed to have begun around 1690 and to have ended sometime before 1800. Thus, there is considerable overlap between the witch hunts and the period technically known as the Enlightenment.
Having said this, I will admit to having confused the start of the Enlightenment with the early Scientific Revolution and its foremost philosophers—people like Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and Rene Descartes (1596-1658). The Enlightenment was the culmination of the scientific revolution, which was itself the culmination of a process of increasing societal rationalization. These processes overturned the agrarian foundations of Western civilization, and thereby overturned the mythos they supported. The bloodiest period of the witch hunts directly coincides with the rise of logos in the West, which was, after all, my point.
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