Tuesday, 26 March 2013
Why I Think Cliff Richard's Music is Profoundly Evil
In the weeks leading up to Christmas I had to endure an endless blare of tacky Christmas songs. On the street I grew up in Listowel they typically bolt a megaphone onto the wall (directly under my bedroom this year), which releases endless reruns of out-of-copyright seasonal jangles. Presumably they must think it encourages consumerism, which of course confirms all my pessimism about "Christmas". Outside from the lost sleep the accosting of my ears brought two positive experiences. In the middle of Cliff Richard's "Mistletoe and Wine" it started to lash rain, and then I got to experience a genuine work of art. The torrent of rain lashing down on the megaphone had a deep melancholy and Sir. Cliffs conning suddenly acquired something deeper when accompanied by hard rain whipping against the pavement. Also, I always found something very evil about Cliff Richard's version of Christianity, there is something evilly self-satisfied and reactionary to it. Cliff Richard seems to think his success and wealth is a reward from God, which logically imply that poverty is a punishment from God, which I think is deeply evil. So, the sudden Biblical deluge was very fitting.
Why DO I love these Reactionary Bond Films?
I'm tempted to go to the new Bond film "Skyfall". I like (guiltily) Bond films because they present an essentially English version of manhood (contrast Eton educated Bond with the more proletarian Rambo or Die Hard's John McClane.) Which, remember, is quite a difficult confession for me to make, considierng the fact my Irish Nationalism is like my Catholicism, something I have strove hard to rationalise away but seems as indelible as skin pigmentation. Although I'm sure the aesthetic/value system is americanised as this stage (which destroys there charm for me.) However despicable movies about a ponce spy saving the world from the commies they had charm and elegance. Funny, I like modern ideals (I'm with the individual over the herd, noble savage over aristocratic custom and reserve, poor over the rich) but I always liked these silly, reactionary Bond films.
Cast a Cold "I"
I think I have stopped hating my friend's success. And voyeuring on facebook (as I have been jadedly doing the last few minutes or so) is a perfect way to test my newfound strength. "Hey look at that fella", facebook, the tempter, teases, ", "ah, look at that friend, he has a full-time lectureship in a University, why haven't you got that you ass?". "And that fella" the tempter declares with glee, "look at his girlfriend, and you don't even have a girlfriend, you plonker." I glance down at the reels of photographs on the monitor, it's a gorgeous, drunk brunette, pattering out of a nightclub with her stilettos dangling from her arm, and the guy whose arm is wrapped around her lovely waist is a friend I haven't seen in years. And no, I'm not overcome with a paroxysm of rage and jealously. Of course I'm still filled with passion and longing, but you have to train yourself to acquire what Yeats called "casting a cold eye on life and death". And for me the "Cold eye" (or the cold "I", as I sometimes like to call it) you have to be accepting and a little cold with life, or else life will destroy you. And this accepting, cold, streak will help you live a bit.
Gerry Adams' Hagiography?
Just finished reading Gerry Adams' autobiography (or "autohagiography", to coin a word) and, guess what, I hated it. Its written in pastiche Angela's Ashes speak, a few swipes at trying to describe what it was like growing up in the Catholic/Nationalist slum know as "Ballymurphy",but, and this struck me from the beginning, the book is principally about Gerry Adams, not Ballmurphy or Divis Block or Anderstown.
I would liked to have know what it was was like to feel the Belfast Winter in a dilapidated public housing complex without sanitation, without adequate heating and with black mould encrusted onto the walls, but, while we get a few heavily controlled glimpses at the injustice and the hardship, the book's raison d'etre is managing and controlling the Republican establishment's version of the so called "troubles".
There is however one memorable highlight. A story about Adam's efforts to organise a cross-community support for traffic lights at a busy road junction, which happened to straddle two warring estates. However, Gerry's first attempt at community reconciliation was doomed, on came a Paisleyite bigot, who I imagine was high on Jesus, Empire, Queen and other amphetamines, and I imagine told his Protestant brethren what the Bible says about upstart Micks who try and pressure the council to build traffic lights, and foiled Gerry's little microcosm of a United Belfast. The moral of the story is this, no matter how despicable Adam's is, and he probably has done some pretty despicable things, we must never loose sight of his historical context. It was interesting to read Adam's hagiography after Ed Maloney's stunning and bleak "The Secret History of the IRA".
Two of Maloney's allegations in particular are difficult to reconcile with the image of the wholesome, avuncular, redeemed man Adam's preposterous book strives to project. 1. Adams organised the botched bombing campaign called "Bloody Friday" from his cell in Long Kesh (a tragic landmark in the war) and was actively involved in the remodelling of the IRA in the 1970s, away from the old British batallion system, in favour of the cellular structure favoured by Gurrilla groups on the Continent. 2. Jean McConville, a single mother of ten living in the Divis flat complex, was hired by the British authorities to spy on the Provisional IRA. For this sin, the IRA killed her and dumped her body in Carlingford Lough. As far as I am aware Maloney's main source is former IRA volunteer Brendan Hughes, who always struck me (along with Bobby Sands) as one of the more sane and introspective of these admittedly highly brutalised men. Hughes alleges Adam's organised this particularly grisly, evil exercise in counter-intelligence, and gave him the order to kill Jean McConville. Hughes, incidentally, (as far as I remember) agreed the impoverished mother of ten should have been killed, but disagreed with the highly disrespectful manner her body was disposed.
Pope Michael
I thought it would be a fitting time to share this documentary I watched a week or so ago. “Pope Michael” claims to be the true Pope and head of the legitimate Catholic Church (which happens to consist of about thirty followers scattered across the globe, most of which, have never met the man, but watch his "sermons" streamed through Skype.) "Pope Michael" has never been ordained a priest, although he did attend a seminary tied to the ultra-traditionalist SSPX (Society Of Pope Pius X) and was expelled, for reasons he leaves suspiciously vague.
The documentary is however well worth watching. There is no analysing director’s god's-eye, just the camera, filming the often mundane everyday life of Pope Michael, his mother, his first and only young seminarian, (Phil) living on a drab farm in Kansas. “Pope Michael” didn't seem as violent or hysterical as some of the sedevacantinist nuts I have came across on the internet, but I did find him dull and narcissistic. When he had Phil give a presentation at a religious department in a Kansas University, they spent the whole time trying to justify his claim that he is the legitimate Pope, while completely neglecting their actual doctrine. Which struck me as a characteristically narcissistic trait, a fixation with his own importance at the expense of everything else (including anything to do with first century Palestine).
Phil, Michael’s thoughtful, sheepish seminarian, who gave up an engineering degree and a girlfriend because he thought “Pope Michael” was the only to redemption, is by far the most likable and impressive person in the documentary. One memorably scene had Phil taking oaths of chastity and obedience as part of his training to be a “priest”, and, when Phil prostrates himself in front of Pope Michael and kisses his hand (after swearing absolute obedience to him), you can’t help thinking Phil needs to be “saved" all right, not from the Devil, no not at all, he needs to be saved from this creepy megalomaniac dressed in a chasuble.
Why Women should love the romantic, impractical, intellectual side to men.
(Just flicked on the below) I really wish women would love the romantic, impractical, intellectual side to men more, and men love the soul of women, because women are all soul. They say feminism undervalues the otherness of women, (the early 60's wave, under the influence of the brilliant but despicable French crank Simone de Beauvoir, did but, in fairness, that does not represent all feminists) but our society is losing its appreciation of the otherness of men too. Characteristically male traits; impractical intellectualism, camaraderie among "the lads", placing an ideal (such as God or country) above survival, and a sort a perfunctory attitude towards one's appearance (perhaps the most distinguishable male trait of all) are under threat in modern society. With regard to the last one men are increasingly pressured to partake in "fashion" and the relentless modern project to beautify oneself, which has now evolved to an hysterical degree. While I know this sounds narrow minded, I'm angry, so I'm going to say it; Real men should have an austere, perfunctory attitude to there appearance, final. The most desirable state for a man will always be complete self-mastery, live your life the way you want to live it, decide what values will determine your life, and make up your own mind.
Worryingly, I think the modern world (in some respects at least) really militates against self-mastery and self-determination, so many people are following the crowd, whether it is how they dress or what values they love their life by, and particularly in the corporate career ladder where most people work, where a real overly competitive , status-orientated mob mentality prevails. We should try and train ourselves to be self-mastering and self-determining, but the question remains should the ideal be pursued by both men and women equally? Now I might be wrong, but I didn't think this ideal of complete self-mastery (which I probably developed from reading Nietzsche) is practical for most women, because women will always be more communally orientated in their thinking than men. I find women emotionally deeper than men (this is partially what I mean by soul, a woman will bring her soul into everything), but complete self-determination is probably a characteristically male aspiration, although what political/social inferences to draw from this I'm not sure. (Perhaps none at all) Whatever conclusions we draw, women should try and love the romantic, impractical, intellectual side to men, and men should love the soul of women, because women are all soul.
Worryingly, I think the modern world (in some respects at least) really militates against self-mastery and self-determination, so many people are following the crowd, whether it is how they dress or what values they love their life by, and particularly in the corporate career ladder where most people work, where a real overly competitive , status-orientated mob mentality prevails. We should try and train ourselves to be self-mastering and self-determining, but the question remains should the ideal be pursued by both men and women equally? Now I might be wrong, but I didn't think this ideal of complete self-mastery (which I probably developed from reading Nietzsche) is practical for most women, because women will always be more communally orientated in their thinking than men. I find women emotionally deeper than men (this is partially what I mean by soul, a woman will bring her soul into everything), but complete self-determination is probably a characteristically male aspiration, although what political/social inferences to draw from this I'm not sure. (Perhaps none at all) Whatever conclusions we draw, women should try and love the romantic, impractical, intellectual side to men, and men should love the soul of women, because women are all soul.
The Wit and Madness of Terry Eagleton
Kantian Scepticism or Metaphysical Anarchy?
Terry Eagleton's book 'Reason, Faith and Revolution; Reflections on the God Debate" is a gold mine (or more appropriately coal mine) of bluster, caricature, conceit, a good deal of dry wit and even more wet (very wet) madness.
My dogma is the starting point for any discussion on the philosophy of religion should be Kant. The Koningsbergian was in spirit a sceptic who thought metaphysical speculations about the real world, the heavens and the nature of God would require a perspective outside space and time, but such an aspatial, atemporal celestial bird's view is impossible for us because our perceptions are “schematised” through space and time. For Kant, metaphysics, defined broadly as speculations about what is real, was the goldfish's attempt to leap out of the bowl, but the audacious fish who wanted to see outside his glassy prison was destined for nothing more than a few seconds of flapping helplessly while its gills expired.
Kant would have shock his head grimly if he heard Richard Dawkins deride the concept "beyond space and time" or any other hubristic goldfish who took his spherical residence as necessarily representative of reality, but he would have equally opposed hubristic, grill breathing vertebrates like Terry Eagleton who want to take their gills where gills cannot breath.
At the end Kant defied his own theories and took a perilous expedition into the glacial Noumenon (Kant's name for the ice plateau beyond space and time) in search of God, beauty and the moral law. A hopeless expedition maybe, but at least what Kant brought back was icy, colourless and rational (noumenol in the truest sense). Beauty was a coolly disinterested judgement neither intellectual or sensual, the moral law was, in the words of Schopenhauer “cold and egoistic" and God was the God of grave but benign German legislators and Judges.
Terry Eagleton has undertaken the same journey. His point is that Dawkins (or rather Ditchens, Eagleton's catchy sobriquet for the Dawkins/Hitchens axis) do not understand religion, they treat it as archaic and discredited science. This seems fair enough. If I went into a Catholic mass on a Sunday (for instance) how many congregants would raise their hands if I asked "how many people are here because science doesn't know where the first self-replicating molecule came from?" or "how many people are here because although natural selection explains the process from which organisms evolve it doesn't explain how such a random process could yield such a fortuitous result?"
Presumably Dawkins and Hitchens wouldn't deny this, and what they mean is the only rational value religion has is as a scientific theory, rather than people believe actually have religious beliefs for scientific reasons. Yet the idea that the only truth is scientific truth is also a narrow minded, dogmatic and surprisingly torturous view to have. Does not science point to our own perceptual and cognitive limitations, four dimensional space in geometrical vectors, spacetime and the concept of physical indeterminacy in Quantum theory, and if the proposition "there is no truth except scientific truth" is true its not something that can be verified by scientific/empirical means, so we are back to the same sort of hopeless circularity that maligned Freddie Ayer’s "verifiability principle".
Terry Eagelton, a Wit and the Cause of Witlessness in Others?
Eagleton does demonstrate "Ditchen's" apparent misunderstanding through weaving a series of charming analogies and metaphysical conceits worthy of a contemporary tongue in cheek disciple of Elizabethan poet John Donne; my own particular favourite is "(treating religion as botched science) is like treating ballet as a botched attempt to run for the bus". All this brilliantly poetic fun-poking is fine, but Eagleton brings more back from his expedition to noumenon pole than Kant's benign German Judge God. Terry Eagleton's version of Christianity (on the basis of this book) is a 1960's, anti-intellectual, occasionally quite sentimental, “dymythologised” version of liberation theology. Swapping Richard Dawkin'spositivistic majisterium for Eagleton's religious stable is swapping one poison for another; its swapping the megalomania of cocaine for the hallucinations of LSD, the power fix of an eighties stockbroker for the chimerical delusions of a sixties hippie.
While I agree Christopher Hitchens, in his entertaining tract "God is not Great", reads the Bible as either archaic cosmology or tribal warfare propaganda, which ignores its moments of ironic doubt (Job or Ecclesiasticus), tragic poetry (psalm 139) and moral sophistication (some of Jesus' sayings) this re-branded, dymythologised Jesus figure of Eagleton's is either a proto-Marxist or even a proto-Nietzschean, does not seem to believe in supernatural entities like demons, the existence of hell, miracles, has very little to say about God, whether we should consider him God's son, whether God is both three and one and so on (Eagleton, for his part does not make it clear that he even believes in God, except for having some vague connection with transcendentally transforming this flawed world the Comintern failed to transform.) At one point he remarks "the antagonism between Ditchens and those like myself then, is quite as much political as theological." This is a fascinating insight into Eagleton’s unreformed and unreconstructed Marxism.
Sure, Dawkins, Grayling and Sam Harris are politically naive, they make the 18th century blooper of equating scientific and technological "progress" with moral progress, which could only be defended if you believed in Victorian canards like the more educated or rational a person is the automatically more moral they are, or a technologically, scientifically advanced society is necessarily more moral or "enlightened" than a more “backward” one. I'm not a fan of Dawkin's naively “progressive” politics (that’s “progressive” in the 1860’s rather than 1960’s sense).
Yet in some blustery passages Eagleton suggests that belief in God is necessarily incompatible with a belief in progress, liberal values, free markets or any other articles on the North Oxford credo. The following has to be one of the most hair splitting mid-boglers Yale University press have ever committed to print; "It is hard to imagine informing some hard bitten political lobbyist in a Washington bar that only through a tragic process of loss, nothingness and self-dispossession can humanity come into its own. In such civilised circles God talk is not really any more acceptable than talk about socialism." Hasn't Eagelton ever heard of the proverbial wall street bell that is ceremonially accompanied by a prayer of thanks to the Lord?Of course he probably has but goes on to make that self-deluded, indefensible and intellectually short sighted assumption that the God he believes in is the only God, and the God believed in by George W Bush, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, Sarah Palin and William F. Buckley is some nefarious demiurge. True devotees proscribe to a masochistic sounding "process of loss, nothingness and self-dispossession" while devotees of that other demiurge believe in greedy capitalism, nuclear warfare and write shamelessly narcissistic, self-gloating, and bristling with the eighteen year old jock’s need to project onto something big, phallic and powerful, books like "No Apology; The Case for American Greatness."
What God means to religious believers may be just as difficult to define as what their loved ones mean to them, but Christian liturgy has always visualised God as a heavenly father who promises to protect and reward his children on the condition they obey his commands and perform certain necessary worshipful rituals. Why doesn't George W Bush believe in this? Eagleton remarks "the advanced capitalist system is inherently atheistic. It is Godless in its actual material practices, and in the values and beliefs implicit in them." Now obviously Eagleton doesn't mean God in the general conceptual sense, then the assertion would make no sense, as George W. Bush believes in God and clearly does not find the capitalist system “inherently atheistic”, (and surely the best way to determine how "atheistic" something is is the testimonies of religious believers) but more narrowly the Christian God, or more narrowly again is own peculiar Marxian, intellectually narrow version of Christianity.
Eagleton mentions his ancestor Dr. John Eagelton died of Typhoid during the Great Irish Famine, does Eagleton not know that Lord Russel's Whig government justified the laissez faire dogma of withdrawing poor relief by appealing to the providential theology of the day? The invisible laws of the market (that's the market Eagleton thinks is "inherently atheistic") reflect the inscrutable plans and wisdom of God put in place for man and the devastating potato blight was this God's way of punishing the Irish for their adherence to the papish religion. If one wants to understand belief in God surely devout believers like Lord Russell and George Bush have to be considered. And perhaps Dawkins science/religion analogy stands in one important respect, both science and belief in God can't explain why people behave morally, science can be a force for good (penicillin) as well as evil (the hydrogen bomb) while acts of evil (the inquisition) as well as acts of good (the abolition of slavery) are justified by appeals to the deity and his commandments. Saying the capitalist system is "inherently atheistic" is like saying Cameron Todd Williingham (the Texan serial arsonist who killed his three sons after he burned down their house) was not a father. There are as many versions of God-devotion out there as fatherhood, but how can Eagleton deny that the splendid variety of religious believers are worshiping and praying to the same entity?
Of course what Eagleton really wants to say is the "capitalist system is inherentlydevoid of my version of religious worship. Of my version of belief in God.". And the fact that the vast majority of Christians accept the capitalist system, either tolerate or for the most part enthusiastically partake in its "material practises" and happily, and religiously, proscribe with the "beliefs and values implicit in them" doesn't seem to matter to Eagleton. This self-delusion is characteristic of some of the most robustly intellectual and self-assured Christian apologists, they fail to realise (or aren't troubled by the fact) that their sunny, sophisticated, wholesomely moral version of Christianity is extraordinarily rare.
Yet what about the possible Biblical basis for Eagleton's weird beliefs? Eagelton is legendary for marxian extrapolations of Christianity, although at one point his Jesus seems more proto-Nietzsche that proto-Marx; "the Gospel calls 'eternal' life, life at its most richly and exuberantly human, intoxicated with its own high spirits and self-delight". "Intoxicated with its own high spirits and self-delight" sounds more like a citation from Nietzsche's Dionysian prophecy “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” than the synoptic gospels. How anyone can reconcile such heady life-affirmation with "if anyone wishes to come after, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me", is beyond me.
Terry Eagleton and the Philosopher's Blender
There is a chance readers will find Eagleton's journalistic garbling of the history of philosophy more interesting than the above post-mo apologia. He makes the predictable observation that Dawkins is captive to Cartesian subjectivism, or in other words he sees the human mind as a static, analysing, collecting and dominating "subject" acting on dumb, mute objects. Eagleton suggests this typical enlightenment picture is misleading, the cold analysing subject is too removed from bodily and lived experience, the subject should be considered a perpetually fluid activity rather than a static entity; "Being for Aquinas is an act rather than an entity. Even God for him is more of a verb than a noun. The body itself dismantles the duality between subject and object....as a participatory agent in the world I find myself in the midst of it, rather than peering dispassionately at it out of the corner of my eye sockets."
Criticism of Cartesian metaphysics is a very serious debate in philosophy, (it is one incidentally very close to my heart), so it’s a shame its treated in such a shamelessly name dropping (if occasionally sharp and amusing) way by Eagelton, clumsily stewing every philosophical idea, intellectual movement and abstract concept into one tasteless and unsatisfactory pottage. The idea that we are "participatory agents in the world" rather than removed subjects is straight out of Heidegger. Perhaps its more Kierkegaard, as Heidegger's existential Tengwar ensured you either agreed with him fully or not at all and Heidegger's strategy wasn't to "dismantle the duality between subject and object" it was to pretend it didn't exist. However It has absolutely nothing to do with the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
Actually Eagleton’s intellectual instinct to always drop everything into a journalistic blender is at times hair splitting. Consider the following; "For Aquinas, as for Heidegger and Wittgenstein, our experience of the world is a function of our bodily engagement in it". Some would call that encyclopedic (I would call itwikipaedic). Thomas Aquinas was an Aristotelian, for all Aristotelians motion is perfection, so motion (activity) is unsurprisingly central to his theology and psychology. Yet Aquinas's thought is still essentially anthropocentric, while Heidegger's is essentially anti-humanistic and anti-anthropocentric.
"Dasein", the being of existing in(or “thrown in”) the world rather than existing as a removed analysing subject may be "our" being, but we exist to reveal the “Dasein” not the other way around. Heidegger deserves to be called a radical anti-humanist as he tried to subvert the subject-centred metaphysics that Aquinas for all his subtlety and brilliance is captive too. And Heidegger probably invented the mysterious Tengwar because he anticipated Terry Eageltons would come along and try and stick him into the leveling out blender, whenever someone attributed something like "our experience of the world is a function of our bodily engagement with it" initiates could come along and substitute the defiled language with the sacred idioms.
And Wittgenstein thought that if language didn't exist philosophical problems wouldn't exist, it’s a characteristic attitude of "analytic philosophy", and while Wittgenstein was responsible for interrupting the naively self-satisfied Fregean chess and billiards by knocking over the billiard boards and chess boards at the analytic philosophy party he never retired for tea on the Aristotelian floor or joined the motley of poets and eccentrics at the Heideggeran floor of being.
Of course Eagleton knows this, the chapter on the Bavarian master in his book "The Ideology of the Aesthetic", is a fascinating if not exactly rigorous critique. Yet for some reason “Terry Lecture” audiences and Richard Dawkins gets the blender Why, I don't know. What a depressingly intellectual world philosophy would be if Aquinas, Heidegger, Wittgenstein (and Adorno, Charles Taylor and of course Marx are chopped up for the blender as well) more or less agreed on the nature of the human subject and its relation to the external world. Surely a good scholar relishes and lives for fine subtle difference while a flat, average one finds vague and superficial similarities, a good scholar loves nuance, differences and argument while a bad one settles for similarities and agreement. It would have been more interesting if Eagelton chose one philosophical idea to champion (say Aquinas) rather than stinking the room with a potpourri of dried and dead philosophies.
Oxford Atheism or Haight Ashbury Christianity?
You may ask what do I prefer, Dawkin's positivistic atheism or Eagleton's transcendent Marxism/ Marxist Christianity. I find both a little unsatisfactory. I think religion has something to do with our inescapable mortality, we are the only species that know we are going to die, which necessities the need to commemorate death and provide answers to life’s mysteries. Religion also provides an invaluable ceremonial function, it can't be surprising that the only two Catholic sacraments that can command almost absolute punctuality are weddings and funerals; death and marriage are occasions where people thirst for ceremony and tradition. It is in regard to these uniquely commemorative and ceremonial functions that religion and science represent "non-overlapping magestaria". The relationship between ceremony and the sense of the sacred is quite mysterious, difficult to verbalise but probably indispensible.
Also, while Eagleton’s Christianity is fatally non-representative and dymythologised, Dawkin's idea of rationality is as narrow as a test tubes flared lip. Surely the most potent religious-spell-breaker is not scientific rationality but introspection. Old atheists like Nietzsche and Freud, (who could easily be called "introspective atheists") see the origin of religion is fear and emotional needs, however sublime the doctrine or beautifully ceremonialised the liturgy it comes from what Yeats called "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart".
What challenge can abiogenesis in cosmology or natural selection in biology pose for someone who believes flying Boeings into the trade center towers is acquiescing to the will of God or toting around in gas guzzlers and residing in a spacious Mcmansion in the Hamptons is a "Christian life"? Perhaps appeals to any kind on intelligence aren't powerful enough to brake the psychological barriers and intellectual paralysis, but surely the most effective strategy is to shed light on why someone really wants to believe in a blood thirsty God who isn't satisfied until worshiping followers crush and incinerate thousands of infidels who refused to obey his commands or why people have a need to delude themselves into thinking their comfy, gas guzzling, gluttonously materialistic life is typical of a "Christian family" (especially since, considering the undeniable social radicalism of the Bible, it’s precisely the opposite.)
A more robust, broader understanding of rationality stands a better chance of saving us, not from death and evil, but from these exalting fantasies harder to detect because of their abuse of the justified prestige of science. Yet its important this rationality also saves us from Terry Eagelton. How are we supposed to react when we hear implausible, maudlin maxims like "that only through a tragic process of loss, nothingness and self-dispossession can humanity come into its own" or delusional simplifications like "the capitalist system is inherently atheistic"? Shall we 1. Except them as impossible and make good out of what is possible, or shall we 2. Like Terry Eagleton see these archaic wisdom sayings as resplendent and glittering with hopeless dreams of human and cosmological perfection.
The problem with dreams and chimeras is they can without warning turn into nightmares. I'm sure Terry Eagleton's sleep is routinely disturbed by several nightmares; the Tea Party getting into the Whithouse, a Muslim brotherhood dictatorship in Egypt, a thousand year geo-political conflict between Whabbist Islam and cruel, hard man Texan capitalism. All these nightmares started in dreams, and the only for us to stop the dreams and nightmares is to wake up and console ourselves with some introspective coffee.
Will Criminal Profiling Help us Find Out Who Larry Murphy has Allegedly Killed?
The Beast of Baltinglass
There should be little to say about the sleepy Wicklow hamlet of Baltinglass,. Nothing more than quite sloping streets, slate roofed terraces, cattle dozily munching grass, a moss covered stone Abbey and the softly ebbing camel hump foothills of the Wicklow Mountains. It has all the indispensable features of an Irish town, a Gardai Station, a Chipper, a Chinese Restaurant, pubs, a graveyard and a church. Providing for the all the necessary needs of the Irish homo urbanus; law, fast food, drink and consolations for death. They should be nothing to say about this place, unless someone follows John Updike's maxim to "give the mundane its beautiful due".
It is often speculated (without substantive physical evidence) that Murphy is also behind a number of unsolved cases (known colloquially as "Ireland's vanished women") ; a harrowing list of mostly young, vanished women. People are familiar with from fogged images, as cold and worn as the gravestones in Balntinglass cemetery, of which frequently appear in current affairs programs and somber documentaries often filmed years after the events.
The criminal profiler of lore (most memorably,Jack Crowford from Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lectuer series of books/films) treats a murder scene like an art critic treats a painting, scanning between the yellow tape with his psychological microscope, trying to detect psychological fingerprints.
Ireland's Vanished Women
It is undeniable such scientific soothsaying can be enormously effective. The person who many consider the founder of criminal profiling, psychoanalyist James Brussell, profiler of the notorious Con Ed bomber (or Mad Bomber) profile led to the capture of George Metesky. Even his oracle that when the police finally captured the embittered ex-marine he would be wearing a buttoned double breasted suit turned out to be true.
Criminal Profiling is also a highly fallible, statistically questionable if occasionally oracular investigative tool. Some of its limitations are characteristic of the limitations of psychology in general. While psychology is an indispensable art, its inconceivable to return to that post-Freudian, post-Nietzschean world where people's own self-descriptions are treated unsuspiciously and dreams are silly, chaste and harmless fairy tales, James Brussell's thoughts on George Metesky are about as "scientific" as Robert Hughes's reflections on Da Vinci.
It's one of the most shocking stories I have ever heard. What psychologists/psychiatrists call "Bipolar disorder" is an extremely serious condition, treatment often consists of proscribing drugs like SSRIs, who's effectiveness is disputed and whose side effects can leave long emotional and psychological scars. And once diagnosed you will have the "Bipolar" tag stapled onto you for life. A stigma for life on the basis of an interview where you were overly loquacious, your unfortunate enough to be born with an Ed Gein facial expression and you happen to have a psychiatrist less intelligent than yourself who can't believe you could learn a myriad of difficult languages.
Bipolar disorder is arguably a lot more serious than Diabetes, the excepted medical treatments are a lot more risky, but before you are diagnosed with Diabetes the doctor would take a blood sample and check for plasma glucose levels. Its a rigorous test that gives a scientific foundation to the diagnosis. The psychiatrist doesn't have these privileges, there is no sample that can be send off to a laboratory to confirm or contradict the doctor's suspicions, tell-tale physical signs like brain tissue damage don't appear until the disease has advanced. This should mean psychiatrists are a lot more careful in making diagnoses than other medical professionals, since their diagnosis can't be empirically validated means far greater room for error, but on the evidence of the shocking anecdote above the opposite is the case.
Criminal profiling is even more belabored by scientific inadequacies and reliant on social stigmas. You may notice the vast majority of offender profiles imagine the unknown salient as a "loner", which reflects the old Freudian prejudice against individualism; Freud, like Hegel, thought people were happiest when they accepted social structures and norms; oddness, dissent and refusal to assimilate are greeted with the psychotherapist's suspicious grimace.
However, they are numerous serial killers and serial rapists who are the opposite of the stereotypical loner. Ted Bundy was the most prolific serial killer in American history, yet he had the Rock Hudson hunkish good looks of the Hollywood golden age, was a successful business man, an active campaigner for the Republican Party, had no difficulty in seducing attractive women; he was in other words, any socially conscious mother or overly protective father's dream. John Wayne Gacy (a democrat rather than a Republican) was a wealthy contractor, community volunteer and clown at children's parties; Andrei Chikatilo, arguably the most prolific serial killer in history, was a married Russian teacher.
John Douglas, (the FBI profiler responsible for the "organised"/"disorganised" distinction) received acclaim recently for his book "Inside the Mind of BTK" (the aconymn BTK, bind, torture, kill, is the alias of Kansas serial killer Dennis Rader. Pictured above) However, as Malcolm Gladwell, in a readable and incisive piece for the New Yorker Magazine on criminal profiling points out, Douglas and the consortium of profilers hired by the FBI for the "BTK" case got Rader's personality dramatically wrong. While they disagreed on details all of them agreed "BTK" would be a loner and have difficulty forming relationships with women.
However, Dennis Rader was married with two kids and everything the loner of urban folklore was not. Could you get more sunnily and wholesomely upstanding than dependable electrician, local scout leader and president of the local Lutheran church?
They are also serious scientific flaws in offender profiling techniques. As I mentioned psychotherapy is based on the analysis of behavior, the therapists's role is to to make psychological deductions from his clients testimonsies and behavioural patterns. Therefore its heavily reliant on theory, classification and fallible human interpretation. Psychotherapy is trying to spy on the psychological party through a very narrow behavioral keyhole. A Profiler's job is to cajole distinguishing quirks, demographical facts and a personality type of a criminal from a crime scene. The clink is even narrower. Gladwell in his essay quotes from a study done by a group of pyschologists from the University of Liverpool. Consider the following;
“You’ve got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he doesn’t want to see her. It could mean he doesn’t want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can’t just look at one behavior in isolation.”
Profiling therefore depends on angle, position, interpretation; its an attempt to classify the color of an iridescent shell. Gladwell goes further and even makes a comparison between the tendentiously scientific methods of profilers and the paranormal methods of psychics often employed by police. (His piece is titled "Real Psychics") Listing out the various fraudulent techniques sceptics allege psychics use, "The Rainbow Ruse" (ascribing two contradictory character traits), "The Jacques Statement" (organises the predictions to fit the age of the person). "The Barnum Statement" (a generalsied assertion that can't be untrue), "The Fuzzy Fact" (a ruse, the psychic makes a vague statement that can be used to tease out of the client a more specific fact) etc, he then compares these methods to the BTK profiling notes often to quite devastating effect. For instance, Rader's profilers speculated that he would find it difficult to have relationships with women but may have women friends, is that not a "Rainbow Ruse" (ascribing two contradictory character traits, therefore covering almost any personality.)
Larry Murphy may well be responsible for Ireland's vanished women, but we should be wary of the dangers of criminal profiling.
The case of Dennis Rader (BTK) was one of the most difficult cases in American serial killer history. The role of criminal profiling in the case is still controversial
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