The website of Associate Professor of Philosophy M R. X. Dentith
Except there isn’t much of note to say about this issue; the only reference to the Celtic New Zealand Thesis is the following ad for the Franklin 2008 Yearbook:
It’s a little disturbing just how important Myklejon must think these three articles to be, given that it’s part of the advertising, but otherwise the issue is free of wackiness…
Well, aside from the wackiness of advertising masquerading as journalism. That’s just bog standard wack these days.
So, Summer School is over, Semester One is now in session (I believe the kids say ‘is in the house’ these days; crazy!) and I am trying to work out what it is I think about Mark Fenster and his ‘Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture.’
You see, my problem is that I both like it yet find it a little too… post-modern.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not one of those anti-post modern philosophers who thinks ‘Post-Modernity’ simply means ‘utter garbage.’ I think post-modernism is a useful tool for the interpretation of certain corpuses of literature, and I increasingly think that the corpus of Conspiracy Theories should be treated as a very specific kind of literature, to whit historical-cum-political explanations.
But, and there is always a but here, isn’t there, I’m still just a little put off by phrases like ‘hyperactive semiosis’ and the like. They just don’t ring true to me ((Actually, I blame writing my MA thesis on G. W. F. Hegel. It turned me not just against Hegel and his dialectic; it destroyed any love I had for the florid philosophical style that he, some might say, perfected.)).
Which is a pity; Fenster is the perfect antidote to the Daniel Pipes’ book. I thought better of Pipes’ book when I read it back at Christmas time than I do now (when I trouble myself tp remember it); this is possibly because I have spent some time reading Pipes’ blog (and its associated articles) and I’m now quite convinced Christopher Hitchen’s attack on Pipes and his Islamic view is entirely justified.
Which is another matter entirely.
So, Fenster. His book (I’m only halfway through, I might add) is a critique of Hofstadter’s ‘Paranoid Style’ analysis of Conspiracy Theories. Fenster’s thesis is that Hoftstadter (and his successors, like Pipes) oversimplifies the Conspiracy Theory dialectic ((I’m not so antipathetic to some of the traditional Hegelian terminology, it seems…)). Hofstadter characterises belief in Conspiracy Theories as being like paranoia; it is important to note, as Fenster does, that Hoftstadter does not think that belief in Conspiracy Theories is a species of paranoia but rather that belief in Conspiracy Theories is pathologically similar to paranoia. Belief in Conspiracy Theories engenders a belief in an ‘Other’ who is out to get you/someone but this belief is not irrational in the way that paranoia is. Indeed, history tells us that sometimes (and there is a debate here as to whether ‘sometimes’ can mean ‘often’) Conspiracies do occur. Hoftstadter’s error (and given that I’m only halfway through the book this could all be revised in the next few chapters) is to buy into the idea that Conspiracy Theories posit an ‘Other’ that is Manichean.
Fenster disagrees. He finds that Hofstadter and his cronies take a populist view of Conspiracy Theories, making them out to be ‘us’ vs. ‘them,’ where ‘them’ are the people who succumb to the paranoid style and the ‘us’ are the well-educated ones who know that, really, Conspiracies aren’t really all that prevalent. Yet this view ignores the fact that sometimes the suspicion that drives Conspiracy Theorising might be on to something.
What I like about Fenster is the notion that we cannot simply characterise belief in Conspiracy Theories as utterly suspicious (although we might well be justified in being prima facie suspicious about such beliefs. He writes:
“The fact that complex, secret conspiracies might occur makes the evaluation of any somewhat plausible conspiracy theory exceedingly difficult, as no a priori grounds exist for distinguishing correct, or at least warranted, conspiracy theories from incorrect or unwarranted ones.” (p. 10)
and
“As with clinical paranoia, the interpretative practices of conspiracy threory are in many instances delusional but are structured in a manner that is internally consistent and logical.” (p. 95)
He also (like Pipes to a certain extent) thinks that Chomsky, et al, deal with the existence of belief in Conspiracy Theories in an overly simplistic (and Fenster thinks dangerously so) way. He writes:
“Instead, their [Noam Chomsky, Chip Berlet and Michael Albert] emphasis is on drawing distinctions between conspiracy theory and what they see as proper progressive inquiry along three axes; the analysis of power, the gathering of information about covert power, and properly progressive political activism.” (p. 45)
Fenster argues that Chomsky et al are no different to the grandfather of the ‘Paranoid Style’ analysis of Conspiracy Theories, Richard Hofstadter; they all tend to rely on the same simplistic psychological explanations that refer to status anxiety and political pathology. In essence, they continue to believe that political beliefs are the result of manipulation and crisis rather than legitimate reactions to the political world.
This doesn’t, of course, make belief in Conspiracy Theories suddenly legitimate; rather, it makes such beliefs understandable and not as irrational as some would like to have it.
I’m going to end now with a lengthy quote to which I will add no commentary. In part I do this because I have more to say and will say it soon and, in part, I do it because I have work to do. Mostly, however, I do it because I did write something more and then the internet ‘stopped’ and I lost it. Conspiracy? No. But it does make one paranoid.
“Conspiracy Theory as a populist theory of power, then, is an ideological misrecognition of power relations, calling believers and audiences together, and into being as “the people” opposed to a relatively secret, elite “power bloc.” Three important insights about conspiracy theory flow from this conceptualization–insights that the remainder of this book develops. First, if populist movements and logic must produce political identities and movements rather than merely take advantage of behavioural reflexes or social circumstances, then the communicative aspect of conspiracy theory–its form as well as its content, its reception as well as its texts–is fundamental to its political significance and effects. Hofstadter saw this, of course, and that insight explains why his concept of “paranoid style” was and remains so influential. Second, if populist logic is an inevitable and necessary part of a democratic political order, a challenge produced by the democratic promise of popular sovereignty and self-rule, then conspiracy theory, as a mode of populist logic, is not foreign to democracy. It can in fact play the role of a productive challenge to an existing order–albeit one that can excessively simplify complex political and historical events. At the same time, like populism generally, conspiracy theory can play a destructive role by manipulating overly majoritarian, racist or antidemocratic tendencies among the public. This neutral or ambivalent vision of populism and conspiracy theory, which cautions against a a priori normative conclusions about the rationality and effects of a radical challenge to the political order, is one that Hofstadter and any paranoid style”-inflected approach rejects. The third important insight that a reconceptualization of populism provides flows from this unwillingness to reject conspiracy theory tout court. A populist movement may correctly or at least not inaccurately describe a political order in which power is concentrated and unaccountable. Similarly, overarching conspiracy theories may be wrong or overly simplistic, but they may sometimes be on to something. Specifically, they may well address real structural inequities, albeit ideologically, and they may well constitute a response, albeit in a simplistic and decidedly unpragmatic form, to an unjust political order, a barren or dysfunctional civil society, and/or an exploitative economic system.” (p. 89-90)
Martin Doutré’s ‘Uncensored’ article is long, rambling and very difficult to critique. Not because it is filled with interesting claims backed up with good arguments but because it meanders, it conflates and is generally obtuse, ill-thought out and badly written. The first page alone commits several fallacies and fails to make a case for an alternative pre-history of Aotearoa.
Yet, it was published.
Why?
I can’t really speculate as to why Jonathan Eisen, the editor of ‘Uncensored,’ felt that this piece was worth publishing; given what else I’ve read of ‘Uncensored’ I can’t really tell what method they have for deciding what is printable and what is not; it may well be that ‘Uncensored’ is purely a contrarian magazine, designed to publish the material that is normally considered unpublishable.
Yet that seems too clever a motivation; ‘Uncensored’ seems more like the gutter of the gutter press than some clever, post-modern attempt to air alternative views.
Anyway, that is really beside the point; given the largeness of Doutré’s article I cannot, for the love of all that I hold dear, deal with it in one post. So I’ll just do it piecemeal and we can all hope that, eventually, I get to the end of it. In a few months time the next one will be out; by then I might have written a book by way of commentary on the first.
Preamble over.
Doutré starts his article with the assertion that it is common knowledge amongst Maori that when they got here there was a large, pre-established caucasoid population who were known as the Patu-pairehe, the Turehu and the Pakapakeha. He then claims that these people taught the Maori arts and crafts and lived among them until hostilities broke out and the original inhabitants were enslaved. Traces of the Patu-pairehe were still evident in the early twentieth century, known as the Waka-blonds, red-haired, freckled faced ‘Maori.’
What is interesting about Doutré’s ‘historical’ account is how it so easily mixes fact with not just fiction but some weird elaborations.
Stories of the tangata whenua, the people of the land, are told in respect to the arriving of the first (major) migration; when the waka arrived there was a reported established population already living in Aotearoa. Now, we do not know if it was a large population but it is fairly clear that whoever they were, they were of th same people that we now know of as Maori; the oral traditions tell us that the newly arrived Maori could not only communicate with the tangata whenua but that some of them were family members. This suggests that the most plausible explanation for this tangata whenua is that they were the people who not only managed to navigate to Aotearoa but were also able to send home of its location and thus start the process that lead to the major wave of colonisation by their people.
Doutré, however, asserts that this tangata whenua population was caucasoid. He then refers to them by their ‘tribal’ names of the Patu-pairehe, the Turehu and the Pakapakeha. This makes it clear that he is conflating the tangata whenua story with the local myths of what Pakeha might call the fey folk, the fairy peoples of Maori mythology. The Patu-pairehe, the Turehu and the Pakapakeha are the names given to mythological human-like entities. They had pale skin, red hair and red eyes (something Doutré fails to mention). They share the same kind of characteristics as fey folk from other cultures ((I suspect that the appearance of the Patu-pairehe, the Turehu and the Pakapakeha can be explained away as by the rare occurrence of albinos in the Polynesian population. A recent Fortean Times article, dealing with the albino population in Nigeria, made a similar claim; this is something that, if I had more time., I’d like to look into.)). What is more important to note here is that these Patu-pairehe, Turehu and Pakapakeha are treated as being mythological by Maori; the notion that they represent very real hapu or iwi in Aotearoa is European. It is likely that the first Europeans in this country simply took talk of the fey folk as representing talk of real peoples, in that same respect that some people will take talk of the Irish fey folk as referring to some ancient demi-human population.
Anyway.
The claim that this population was then wiped out by the Maori is, at best, hearsay and, at worst, fabrication. ((Doutré may have some ‘documentary’ support, in that there are two south island iwi, the Waitaha and Ngati-Mamoe who have stories associated with them claiming a longer pre-history than the conventional wisdom tells us. However, these alternative histories are hotly disputed even by the iwi themselves.)) Doutré also claims the Patu-pairehe were known as the people of the mist but this seems to be conflating the mythological origin of the people of Tuhoe with the Patu-pairehe, et al. I imagine that Doutré isn’t very conversant with Maori history; his sources are mostly the writings of the early European ‘anthropologists’ and he spends a lot of time trying to justify using these early accounts on some weird naive empiricist notion that the early Pakeha were only interested in reporting the truth rather than being interested in, you know, providing justification for the occupying and colonising of Aotearoa.
But I digress into my race traitorousness.
Doutré claims that the proof of this old and established caucasoid population can be found in the reports of the so-called ‘waka-blonds,’ remembered by some (unnamed and unreferenced) ‘old timers.’ The waka-blonds are/were the red-haired, freckle faced ‘Maori’ ‘known’ to exist in the early twentieth century ((Now, given just how well the Pakeha and the Maori got on (carnally) it’s not surprising that there were a lot of red haired, freckled face Maori. I blame the Irish, personally. I have Irish ancestry and it shows (Irish hair). Certainly, this is a much more plausible rationale for these ‘waka blonds’ than them being the remnants of some much older caucasoid population.)). Reports at the turn of the twentieth century are not useful, however; by that time the Maori and Pakeha populations were intermingled; what you would need to make this claim even slightly suggest his hypothesis is reportage of ‘caucasoid’ Maori at first contact, and even then that won’t do as much work as Doutré would expect it to because Maori are not homogenous in their skin tone or morphology (I am beginning to sound like a Victorian racist; I apologise). Members of Kai Tahu, for example, are very pale in comparison to their more northern kin, but that doesn’t mean that they are caucasian in origin. It just means the environment in which they live (the cold, not so bright South Island) isn’t conducive to high melanin levels ((Doutré does refer to earlier accounts; reports of fair-haired, pale-skinned Polynesians and the like, but the accounts themselves are vague (pale in comparison to other Polynesians or pale like a Palagi?). However, anecdotes do not an argument make.)).
As it stands, Doutré’s account of Aotearoa’s pre-history is fatally flawed from the get go. Still, there is a lot more to say about his article, especially his claims about the Egyptian god Bes.
Well, I’m now waiting on my tutors to finish the marking so I can then do the magic activity of signing off on the grades and generally closing the book on PHIL105. Then, thesis.
Hopefully.
In vague relation to the thesis, the journal Episteme (which seems to mostly publish articles I want to have the time to read) has devoted an issue to Wikipedia. You can read it for free (for the time being) here.
Well, the teaching component of my summer school class is now over; only the exam and then sweet sweet release for about a week. Then it’s back to teaching again.
In Semester One I am teaching up at the Med School again (thus ensuring that future medical professionals will be… well, who knows) and am engaging in a pilot e-learning version of my CCE Critical Thinking course. We’re incorporating an online component to the six week lectures and either it is going to be very exciting or a dismal flop (I can’t really see a third option at this point in time, but I am very tired and need about fifteen minutes prep time to have a single thought).
Anyway, at some point new thesis materials will appear online. I’ve also got a curious tale to tell about refereeing, but I may have to be cautious in just how it gets told.
Be Seeing You.
So, I was informed yesterday that I’m now in a list of the Top 50 Philosophy Blogs, which sounds pretty exciting and pretty scam-alicious all at the same time, right?
Maybe not.
I’ve had a look through the list of Philosophy blogs and quite a few are ones I know of (respect, even); some are even written by tenured (and thus ‘legitimate’) philosophers. So, overall, a list that isn’t just a random collection of sites but something that looks researched and, dare I say it, designed based on some fundamental and philosophical principle.
The site hosting the list is run by one Kelly Sonora, who is actually the pseudonym of someone else entirely. Details here for those interested in what might be going on. Long story short; this seems to be a legit list of interesting Philosophy blogs (although whilst it is gratifying to be listed in a Top 50 listing I’m not entirely sure that my academic peers would agree; still, you never know) and it’s possible you may learn something interesting from perusing it.
Thanks Kelly.
Tally.