Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism

6. The Truth is Out There: Apocalyptism and Conspiracy

165 Lee Quinby recommends a Foucauldian brand of skepticism as an antidote to apocalyptic thinking. This brand of skepticism “encourages analysis of how truths are culturally established and embodied as experience. Millennial skepticism specifically questions truth claims that are authorized through faith alone” (Millennial 8). This approach challenges the situation of apocalyptist belief in a supernatural foundation, pointing up its contingency and confronting the ways in which “the empirical claims of these various sources of authority are framed, looking to their historical constitution to track the relations of power and the cultural conditions that built such edifices of knowledge” (Millennial 8). That is, Foucauldian skepticism exposes the worldly and therefore contingent sources of apocalyptist belief. Quinby pursues this project because “many of the obstacles U.S. democracy has faced and currently confronts are rooted in its millennialism ” (Millennial 6). At the same time, she argues, “the strengths of U.S. democracy stem from the skepticism that is also present in the founding documents” (Millennial 6). While I wholly agree with Quinby’s analysis , I would distinguish between the liberal skepticism enshrined in the founding documents and the Foucauldian skepticism she forwards and practices. Quinby rightly notes that skepticism is “built into the Constitution ’s Bill of Rights, especially the separation of church and state, its system of checks and balances, and provisions for amendment” (Millen6 the truth is Out there Apocalyptism and Conspiracy 166 the tRuth is Out theRe nial 6). The founders installed these features in the Constitution because they doubted that human beings can be trusted always to behave according to the dictates of reason and the evidence of their senses (Popkin and Stroll 246–53). Their moral and political skepticism is related historically to the development of scientific skepticism, where dependence on reason and the quality of sensory experience renders necessary a certain mistrust of any claim that cannot be established by those means (Shermer 16–17). Foucauldian skepticism, on the other hand, informs the intellectual work that many academics in the humanities now do, and it produces provocative critiques, such as Quinby’s, that are useful to people who want good arguments to substantiate their disbelief in commonsense assumptions. That is to say, Foucauldian skeptical analyses are ordinarily convincing only to other skeptics. Few committed apocalyptists will be persuaded by any skeptical reading—liberal, scientific, or postmodern—that attacks the super-rational foundation of their belief system. In fact apocalyptists are on the lookout for skepticism, and they furiously police the borders of their belief system against invasion by it. Here is one of Tim LaHaye’s rants about secular humanism: It is no overstatement to declare that most of today’s evils can be traced to Secular Humanism, which already has taken over our government, the United Nations, education, television, and most of the other power centers of life. Secular Humanism —whether it calls itself Marxist Humanism, Cosmic Humanism, Scientific Humanism, Planetary Humanism, Postmodern Humanism, or sports some other label—is driven by a flaming hatred for Jesus Christ that seeks to eradicate the Christian world view from the media, the government, and especially public education. Secularists scorn creationism, design in nature, man in the image of God, the Fall, traditional or biblical morality, the natural family of father and mother, and the religious and political faith of the majority of America’s Founding Fathers. (LaHaye and Noebel 35) Aside from LaHaye’s irritating habit of reading secular disinterest as active opposition, the point to notice in this passage is that skeptics don’t believe in anything, or at least not anything important. LaHaye hasn’t yet realized that there is a difference between liberal humanism and postmodern skepticism . But he or some other of his ilk will soon figure out that while liberal humanism is scandalous from their point of view because it takes human reason rather than God’s word as its foundation, postmodern skepticism is more scandalous yet in its refusal to privilege anything at all, or rather, in its insistence on privileging everything provisionally and contingently. the tRuth is Out theRe 167 Such a skepticism posits that systemic reflexive relations among history, culture, and selves are always differing and deferring, always changing. God is not in this picture, although discourse about God is very much on the table as a subject of investigation, as Quinby’s studies demonstrate. Which further irritates apocalyptists, who are outraged that anyone can look...