Book Review : Worshiping at a Shrine of Agnosticism

The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science by Robert Anton Wilson (Falcon Press, Phoenix, Ariz. 85012: $9.95 paperback)

Robert Anton Wilson is more of a rap-master than a philosopher--”My business is intellectual comedy,” he declares--and he may be the only practicing cosmologist whose curriculum vitae includes six years as editor of the Playboy Forum, a punk rock album, numerous works of “Futurist psychology and guerrilla ontology,” as well as a science-fiction trilogy, “Schroedinger’s Cat.” And Wilson predicts that many readers will regard his shrill denunciation of conventional science, and his open-mindedness on the subjects of astrology, ESP, telekinesis, and werewolves, as slightly zany, if not outrightly bizarre. He is absolutely right.

“The New Inquisition” is a chatty, intentionally outrageous but fundamentally serious argument in favor of what Wilson calls “the New Agnosticism.” (The book is laden with jargon, much of it coined by Wilson himself, and he reflexively qualifies his own rhetorical conceits as “New.”) Wilson urges us to break out of the “reality-tunnels” that prevent us from perceiving the ambiguities and contradictions of the world around us: “The agnostic principle refuses total belief or total denial and regards models as tools to be used only and always where appropriate and replaced (by other models) only and always where not appropriate,” Wilson explains. “It does not regard any models . . . as more ‘profound’ than any other models . . . but asks only how a model serves, or fails to serve, those who use it.”

Instrumentalist Philosophy

So far, so good. Wilson is proposing (nothing unprecedented about this) an instrumentalist philosophy of science and doing so in a manner that rules out true belief but not necessarily God. But Wilson brings his considerable intellectual arsenal to bear upon an unlikely target--the scientific Establishment itself, which he dubs “the Citadel” (after J. B. Priestly) and characterizes as an orthodoxy as brutal and relentless as the ones that have burned books and heretics over the centuries. “To deny dogmatically is to say that something is impossible,” Wilson writes, referring to the prevailing scientific skepticism toward various “supernatural” and “paranormal” phenomena. “In a century in which every decade has brought new and astonishing scientific shocks, that is a huge, brave and audacious faith indeed.”

Wilson does not concern himself with the sterile debate between science and religious fundamentalism over the creation of the universe, nor does he do much more than toy with the idea of spirituality in science. Indeed, what Wilson casually refers to as “the ‘God’ concept” is mostly beside the point: the topic is science, not religion. Still, he allows that “the scientific Establishment being satirized here is not nearly as nefarious as various religious Establishments, especially those of Christianity and Islam.”

Wilson styles himself as the champion of every half-baked pseudo-scientific cult, every New Age myth and fairy tale, every self-styled visionary and martyr, from Wilhelm Reich and Nicola Tesla to poltergeist and the Indian Rope Trick. And the villain of his piece is what he calls “materialist/rationalist Fundamentalism,” whose Grand Inquisitor is the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal--a group of scientists who attempt to debunk the various purported manifestations of the supernatural and the paranormal. “The fundamentalist materialist is the modern Idolater; he has made an image of the world, and now he kneels and worships it,” Wilson fumes in a typical burst of fulminatory prose. “Fundamentalist science is similar to other fundamentalisms. Lacking humor, charity and some measure of self-doubt, it behaves intolerantly, fanatically and savagely to all ‘heretics.’ Eventually, like all closed ideological systems, it becomes comical and overtly ridiculous.”

Fancy Verbal Footwork

Wilson’s method is to dazzle us with fancy verbal footwork, to shock us with calculated overstatement, to snare us in our own biases. Thus, for instance, he repeatedly suggests that the denial of the historicity of the Holocaust by “revisionists” is roughly equivalent to the denial of the existence of UFOs by scientists--a rhetorical low blow, I must say, and an example of Wilson’s warped logic. Of course, Wilson insists that he is not arguing for the existence of UFOs; rather, he argues only that it is intellectually dishonest to deny that UFOs might exist. His book “is not, per se, advocating any particular heresies, but only examining why certain ideas are taboo and verboten,” Wilson explains. “I regard this work as mostly a contribution to the . . . sociobiology of panic and stampede behavior among domesticated primates, or--more politely--resistance to bizarre information.”

“The New Inquisition” succeeds as intellectual entertainment, but it is flawed by a curious tunnel vision of its own. Wilson sets up the scientific Establishment as a kind of straw man--vicious, brutal, repressive and essentially obscurantist--and exhorts us to overthrow the scientific dogma that excludes, for instance, the possibility of winged cats and precognition. But Wilson’s own value system enshrines the very principles that oblige the scientific investigator to approach all phenomena with healthy skepticism. To the extent that Wilson detects narrow-mindedness among scientists, he is justified in condemning it--but what he is condemning is bad science, not science itself.