Guerrilla Ontology and Factoids in Action
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Guerrilla Ontology and Factoids in Action The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. By Robert Anton Wilson. Falcon Press, Phoenix, Ariz., 1987. 240 pp. Paper, $9.95. Robert Sheaffer HERE IS a "New Inquisition" loose in the land, says Robert Anton Wilson, Tcoauthor of the llluminatus trilogy, author of Cosmic Trigger, Schroedinger's Cat, and many other works, a witty man who has a virtual cult following. The group allegedly suppressing dissent to preserve its orthodoxy is what Wilson calls the "Citadel" of science, by which he means what some people call the "military- industrial complex." He depicts this as an unholy alliance of scientists and government- sponsored defense firms, universities, and laboratories, whose job it is to devise more efficient ways to murder people. He calls the doctrine of these closed-minded and wicked people "fundamentalist materialism." And the inquisitors doing the dirty work of this sinister group are those whose names you see on the inside cover of this magazine, for to Wilson CSICOP represents the very head of materialist wickedness, the apex of the sinister pyramid. "One does not have to be a dogmatic Marxist to . wonder if the priests of the Citadel have a vested economic interest in supporting the axioms of their employers and of imperialist-materialist philosophy in general." Wilson sees the scientific world-view as a form of Western "mental imperialism," a means by which selfish and greedy white males oppress women and non-Western peoples. (Try convincing the people of modern-day Japan, Taiwan, or Singapore that science is an arbitrary expression of a Western world-view!) Conspiratorial thinking comes naturally to Robert Anton Wilson, probably the world's leading yarn-spinner about vast global conspiracies. Elsewhere he has suggested halfway in jest—although apparently only halfway—that a sinister conspiratorial organization such as the secret Illuminati really might be controlling the unfolding of history. If it is not the Illuminati, then it may be the bankers of the Vatican and/or the Knights of Malta, some of whom may have had something to do with the assassination of John Kennedy, or the sudden death of Pope John Paul I. While some people see history as driven by technological developments, and others by economic forces or social classes, Wilson sees a conspirator hiding behind every Bush (who is, of course, a Trilateralist). Do not mistake Wilson for a Marxist. He poses as an anarcho-libertarian, although of a very weird kind. (How many libertarians approve of a guaranteed annual wage?) Indeed, it is this very weirdness that so delights his fans. Wilson practices what he calls "guerrilla ontology," a technique similar to Charles Fort's practice of peppering the reader with an unending stream of bizarre and outrageous but highly entertaining claims, some of which are plausible, while others are so bizarre that you would have to throw out much of your brain to make room for them. Wilson announces quite candidly that not everything he says is to be taken seriously, but leaves the Robert Sheaffer's latest book is Resentment Against Achievement (Prometheus Books). 78 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 14 reader to guess which parts are and which are not. One suspects that he has not answered the question himself and that anyone who attempted to pin him down about it would be denounced as humorless. He regales us with tales of Fortean "Fafrotskies" (things that allegedly fall from the skies), and a yarn about a man who thought he was a dog, taken from a tabloid whose current headline reads: "Space shuttle was invaded by aliens." Should you catch Wilson in an embarrassing howler, he just laughs at you, hinting that the part you object to was not supposed to be taken seriously. Apparently Wilson operates on the principle that all claims should be treated as equal, whether prosaic or bizarre, and that only the dogmatic discriminate against something merely because it makes no sense. If you doubt literal sightings of a centaur, it is only because you are blinded by the conventions of your "reality tunnel." Tune in, turn on, and believe all manner of things; you might even see a "man with warty green skin and pointy ears, dancing," as Wilson did on the day following one of his "trips" on peyote (Cosmic Trigger, 1977). The surprising thing about such a wild and woolly book by a free-shooting author is that there is actually quite a sophisticated understanding of philosophy behind it. Wilson has gone far beyond the freshman-level philosophy some authors employ to create a veneer of wisdom, who pull a few overused and largely irrelevant quotations. Wilson reveals a knowledge of many philosophers, but especially Nietzsche. In this book of 240 pages, I counted 31 separate references, direct or implicit, to Nietzsche or Nietzschean thought. (There is, alas, no index.) Wilson displays an excellent knowledge of Nietzsche, and not the caricature of Nietzsche popularly imagined to embody a supreme wickedness, but of Nietzsche the serious epistemologist. Wilson has clearly stumbled on the little-known twentieth-century shortcut for being proclaimed a genius: Drink deeply from the fountain of Nietzsche, and spew back some portion of it, in a form vastly easier to understand. Among the others making this discovery were Sigmund Freud, H. L. Mencken, Ortega y Gassett, Eric Hoffer, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ayn Rand. Wilson expounds the Nietzschean notion of the inexhaustible richness of reality, with the accompanying impossibility of ever reducing it to any single observational paradigm. He also employs the Nietzschean notion of language as "metaphor," whose roots he quite plausibly traces to Emerson. This, of course, poses a formidable difficulty to anyone who might want to claim absolute and certain knowledge of the "nature of things" based on observations, a claim he imagines CSICOP to make. Wilson stresses the need for continual Nietzschean "self-overcoming" of one's own limitations and prejudices. He repeats Nietzsche's pronouncements of the need for continual skepticism of accepted ideas, and of the dangers of blind belief. Another philosopher Wilson brings in to support his position is David Hume. He correctly explains Hume's demonstration of the impossibility of ever arriving at certain knowledge of causality from observations of objects in the physical world. Again, he imagines that CSICOP claims absolute and certain knowledge of cause and effect, that professional philosophers like Paul Kurtz, Antony Flew, Paul Edwards, and Sidney Hook are unaware of Hume's critique, and that a few well- known quotations from Hume will stop CSICOP dead in its tracks. Wilson sails on, blissfully unaware that his beloved David Hume wrote what is probably the most devastating work of hard-nosed debunking in the entire history of philosophy. Hume's essay "Of Miracles," in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, urges that claims of alleged paranormal occurrences be viewed with the maximum possible suspicion. Since "the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena," Fall 1989 79 Hume concludes that "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments. " T h u s while Wilson thinks that Hume's critique of empirical certainty should lead us to welcome with open arms any and all yarns about miraculous events, Hume himself thought it implied one should toss out the window all claims of the miraculous that are supported by testimony alone. A similar irony occurs when Wilson confronts the thought of the noted physicist John Archibald Wheeler, whose "multiple universe" interpretation of quantum mechanics seems to Wilson to make psychic happenings and "non-local connections" a virtual certainty. What Wilson either doesn't know, or doesn't tell us if he does, is that Wheeler himself vehemently disagrees. Wheeler terms parapsychology "a pretentious pseudoscience" that was given undeserved recognition by the AAAS during the 1960s "decade of permissiveness" (SI, vol. 3, no. 3, Spring 1979, p. 3). Wheeler publicly called for the Parapsychological Association to be ousted from the AAAS unless it could come up with a repeatable experiment within one year. Similarly, Wilson discusses physicist Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel laureate and CSICOP Fellow, whose theory of quarks Wilson tries to link with psychic phenomena. Once again, Wilson seems not to know that Gell-Mann has sharply criticized the very thing he is doing and insists that quantum mechanical theory is not compatible with alleged "psychic effects" (SI, vol. 11, no. 1, Fall 1986, p. 9). It is really quite funny how Wilson keeps trying to enlist the most hardened skeptics as allies in his crusade for crackpottery. James Randi, as depicted by Wilson, is a pig-headed man who keeps his head buried in the sand. Each time Randi hears talk of something that "shouldn't" be, he just waves his arms and shouts to his followers that "it can't be," and they, like the blind fools they are, believe him. Wilson's insipid analysis of the Randi- Geller-SRI matter, in its entirety, is this: "See especially the interminable diatribes of CSICOP's James Randi against Drs. Puthoff and Targ, physicists of Stanford Research Institute (Palo Alto [actually Menlo Park]) who allowed Uri Geller into their laboratory and then reported that which Mr. Randi, who was not there, knows passionately could not have happened." This not only grossly misrepresents Randi's methodology, but indicates that Wilson knows nothing about Randi's investigation of Geller. If Wilson, before writing this diatribe, had bothered to read, or even peruse, Randi's Flim-Flam or The Truth About Uri Geller, he would have known how Randi had dogged Geller's trail over a period of years, and how Geller's deceptions were gradually revealed, despite Targ and Puthoffs inexcusable refusal to cooperate with other investigators.