Black Helicopters over America

I'm a sucker for highbrow magazines. Delectable prose, nuanced thoughts, what's not to like? Sometimes even the poems are palatable. Sure, the authors are usually orthodox Leftists, but I've become adept at ignoring their hatred of God, country, religious people, children, rich people, white people, and Jews. Once in a while, though, the Left comes up with a whopper that even the Right couldn't match.

Like this one, from E.L. Doctorow's essay, "Notes on the History of Fiction," from the "Fiction Issue 2006" of The Atlantic:

"In the Iliad there are many gods; in the Bible, the God to whom the Biblical writers cede authorship. But under many gods or one God, the stories told during this time were presumed to be true by the fact of being told. The very act of telling a story carried
a presumption of truth."

This seems more a description of Doctorow's audience than an observation concerning Bronze Age peoples. Doctorow's readers seem remarkably credulous toward statements made, for example, by The New York Times or CNN. These enlightened persons do precisely what Doctorow describes Bronze Agers doing: believing a story because it is told. If anything, Bronze Agers were less credulous than Posters: the stories believed and accepted by the ancient peoples (even if they were as naively accepted as Doctorow imagines, which I doubt) were generated by trusted members of the community, not by highly-paid employees of capitalist corporations.

Doctorow seems to be indulging in an epistomological wet dream that even John Locke considered far-fetched: the ideal of a deeply incredulous sovereign individual who examines every belief he entertains, measuring its relation to the indubitable, foundational truths of sensory perception. Locke, as much as he did to advance the popularity of this ideal, didn't think it possible, at least not for most people. 300 years later, nobody seriously entertains this as an epistemological model; the reason being the obvious, common-sense one (cf. Thomas Reid) that human persons are compelled by both inclination and experience to exercise credulity toward certain sources. The issue, contra Doctorow, is not credulity; credulity is a necessary and inescapable feature of human consciousness. The issue is rather the directedness of credulity. And, faced with a choice to believe American literati or the apostles and prophets, I think I'll hedge my bets.