When 'The Science' Becomes Poe's Narrator

COVID and Climate have shown us the madness beneath the Reason

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence-whether much that is glorious-whether all that is profound-does not spring from disease of thought-from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.”

Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora.

In 2002 I concluded four years of studying the work of Edgar Allan Poe. In that period I read every surviving Poe poem, short story, essay, letter and newspaper article. I read every single thing accepted today as having been authored by Edgar Allan Poe, every major biography of Poe then written, and a fair amount of other commentary and analysis of Poe written in his lifetime or since his death. I read every article once attributed to him too, including a few controversial essays on slavery now considered to have never been his. And I wrote 120,000 words of my own on Poe, cutting it down to 80,000 words for my doctoral thesis (The Insecure Art of Edgar Allan Poe…a work that has probably been read by no more than 6 people).

I was a Poe scholar.

Back then, I believed in the university, in the life of the mind, and in the purpose and authority of educational institutions. I became aware of academic disciplines suffused with what I considered to be pure nonsense, even then, and aware too of a deep political bias in my tutors and professors that I didn’t share. But the thing as a whole was still respectable. It was still what I wanted to be part of.

My own field of literature, and certainly disciplines outside the humanities in the hard science departments, rested on real scholarship and rational facts. The political and ideological conformity had not yet entirely swamped the solid bedrock or washed away the foundations.

Some 22 years later, having never worked in the academia I was trained to join except as a graduate student, my view on all of it has soured to the point where I could not name a single university anywhere on the globe I regard with respect, or a single academic discipline I would consider a trustworthy enterprise. The distinctions between the subjective but still scholarly reflections on art and literature in the humanities, and the more objective but often less profound work of pragmatic applications derived from understanding the laws and mechanisms of the universe in the sciences, has been swept away since both, in slightly different ways, are now twin branches of a shared, barbaric ideology.

The humanities fill young minds with a set of nonsense attitudes, and the sciences find ways to apply this ideological construct for the profit of vested interests. In both cases what is happening is neither scholarship nor science, not the investigation of the nature of man or the investigation of physical objective reality. What is happening is not the imparting of the love of knowledge, but indoctrination in a new form of barbarism. It is not the exploration of our consciousness and creativity and the truths of the external world that the university enables today, but the chaining of future generations to an already owned vision that serves the least benign interests in our society.

As someone who spent an unusually long time in the academic world, and once intended to spend a lot longer there too, I was witness to the slow process of that world going mad. The collective mind of the university, the average mind of the average graduate, has been going mad for a very long time (read the student interaction passages in Mr Sammler’s Planet).

Since I was inherently something of an outsider even when I was within it (due to class, background and political affiliation), and since I was thinking and writing psychologically about one of the best literary examiners of the deteriorating mind there has ever been, I might have been better placed than most people to see and be aware of how the western world went mad, beginning in the university and spreading to society as a whole.

Madness of course, is one of Poe’s great topics, perhaps his most identifying and essential topic. The standard template of a Poe short story is a tale about a person going mad, usually the narrator but if not then at least someone the narrator closely observes. But it’s even more focused than this description suggests, because quite often the first act of madness is in the narrator’s past. Some stories follow a standard chronology of madness common to many horror writers before and after Poe. In The Cask of Amontillado for example we move towards the horror of one man entombing alive his supposed friendly rival. But in others the shocking act of madness occurs relatively early (like the murder of the old neighbor in The Tell Tale Heart). Whether we see the violent act that represents madness at its peak early or late, we are usually receiving a narration which is the result of obsessively thinking about that act.

What we see is madness thinking about madness. The insane mind examining its own actions, and recollecting and describing the experience of being mad.

Poe therefore presents us with the repeated encounter between the reader and the ultimate in unreliable narrators, which is what happens when we read a text from a madman talking about his madness. His narrators are caught reflecting on their sanity or lack of it, and this reflection itself becomes a proof of their insanity and an undermining of their claims to sanity.

Poe is the literary master of every device connected to the theme of the disintegration of a mind. He examines monomania (The Black Cat). He describes solipsism (producing his own mystical theory of solipsism in the extraordinary science/literature hybrid that is Eureka). He covers both calculated murders and sudden explosions of rage. He describes, in detail, the inner thought processes of the person devoid of personality (The Man of the Crowd) as much as he describes, with equal thoroughness, the glee and the despair (and the fluctuations between the two) in what we today call a manic-depressive (the dreamlike, moving Eleonora, or almost any of the poems). He understands the psychology of egoism, sadism and masochism better than the Marquis de Sade and before Freud or Jung.

Previous Gothic horror was as interested in madness as Poe was. Novels like Vathek or The Monk or stories like The Castle of Otranto, a significant portion of the entire genre of gothic fiction in fact, are built on the twin pillars of madness and the supernatural. There was nothing new in key characters being insane. But it’s a particular feature of Poe for this madness to be described from within, and for this madness to be trying to persuade us (and itself) that it is sane. Those who did this before, never did it so well. The Marquis de Sade categorized and revelled in perversity, but it’s Poe who provides more than a mere lexicon of fetishes. It’s Poe that talks about the perverse in a truly analytical fashion as an instinct with psychological triggers (The Imp of the Perverse), before the discipline of psychology as we know it today has been fully created.

What a post Enlightenment thinker calls madness, what might be defined by a psychologist or therapist as a particular mental disorder, often of course covers a specific patch of a broader area the traditional moralist condemns as evil. Poe’s narrators are very often killers and serial killers reflecting on their crimes. So he is a poet of the human capacity for evil as much as he is a student of the fragility of the human mind. He is an artist whose topic is madness, which inevitably means an interaction with the problem of evil, both pragmatically and philosophically speaking.

Tellingly, he is also the most obvious founding father of modern detective fiction. Poe’s brilliant, eccentric, somewhat misanthropic detective C. Auguste Dupin, a detective with an almost supernatural capacity to read clues and infer realities from minute physical signs and a chain of logical deductions, appears in The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841. Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story (A Study in Scarlet) appears in July 1887, some 46 years later. While the word ratiocination was first coined in 1532 (then meaning ‘sense’ in terms of conscious awareness) its use as a descriptor of what a detective does (as a “reasoned train of thought” or a “process of exact thinking”) came in Poe’s sequel to The Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1842’s The Mystery of Marie Roget.

In other words, Poe created the detective as the perfect logical thinker, a character type on which all subsequent detective fiction has been based, AND specified a name for the particular kind of thinking the detective engages in (a kind of thinking linked to the scientific process by this manner of thought even before the increasing reliance of police investigations on forensic evidence). He covered extreme states of Reason (both at their most destructive and criminal and at their most restorative and just) knowing that the positive detective and the negative killer are two faces of the same psychological coin, that the style of thinking that creates monomania, obsession, and irrational violence can also be the same style of thinking that restores justice, catches criminals, and discovers hidden truth.

Those of you used to my articles being political rather than literary ones may be wondering why I’ve gone back over 20 years to bore you all with the literary focus I studied a generation ago. Well, here is the political link. What Poe says about the psychology of the insane killer and the brilliant detective is the best description there is of much broader things, like the consequences of the Enlightenment and the current turn of the western mind collectively (but particularly amongst fanatical ‘followers of The Science’) towards madness.

The positive interpretation of The Enlightenment (the cultural zeitgeist and frenetic, rapid development of western science, technology, art, literature, politics and morality in the 18th century) is of a period where old regimes and old theology was shaken off by a new spirit of individualism, liberty and intellectual rigor. The Enlightenment is Newton understanding the movement of the planets or the force of gravity. It is Descartes delivering hard science advances in optics, or greater philosophical insights like cogito ergo sum. It is the power of the Catholic Church and the tyrannical French ancien regime being replaced with a systemized acknowledgement of human rights which, for the first time in history, were to be founded not in the assertions of one class against another (such as nobles forcing restraints on a King, or a growing merchant class doing so) but on universal values founded in philosophy, in human Reason discovering better and more egalitarian truths.

The Enlightenment was a cultural shift encompassing both scientific advance and political change. The new science was said to be in accord with the new politics, and both were only made possible and had as their uniting purpose the improvement of society by the breaking of old systems, ideas, powers and traditions. Both the science and the cultural zeitgeist were politically Radical. All of it claimed to be the triumph of human Reason over old Superstition.

Everything was to be catalogued and redefined, inventoried and systemised, everything could be ordered and comprehended, scientifically quantified, evaluated and repurposed. The great French love of theory and intellectualism was unleashed, no longer held back by the timidity or the oppression of old rules. There were no old moral limits on this, and there was no danger to it either. It was inherently part of the progress to a better world. It could not go wrong. It was Reason. It was The Science.

And the reality was that this Enlightenment, celebrating Reason, deifying Reason (as Robespierre’s period of authority did in a completely literal fashion with Reason worshipped as a new, State mandated God in a Catholic cathedral) was also the same period that produced the gleeful perversions, fetishes and cruelties that de Sade listed and loved. It turned out that the tyrannical ancien regime had, by the end, imprisoned hardly anyone except sadistic perverts like de Sade, who was essentially a personally loathsome propagandist for disgusting and morally depraved acts. When the Bastille fell, there was hardly anyone in it. But the supposedly more Reasonable, more Progressive, more Enlightened and more Scientific revolutionary citizens promptly set about the business of The Terror, of slaughtering men, women and children in an orgy of bestial destruction which included acts like parading an innocent woman’s head on a pike before a horrified Marie Antionette because the murdered woman had been the Queen’s friend .

But this sort of bestial destruction and pathological cruelty was now one that considered itself ordered and enlightened and founded in philosophy and science.

Nothing represents this better than the guillotine. A new invention. A scientific advance. Supposedly progressive, since it would dispatch the executed more quickly. But actually horrific, a thing that only Reason in the service of fanaticism and evil would celebrate as an advance.

The French Revolution wrote out in living history what Poe would later explain in both fiction and theory, what he would show in his unreliable narrators. That the ultimate excess of Reason is not more reasonable behavior or a better society, but rather the reverse, that the excess of Reason is itself a species of the irrational, a particular kind of madness that leads to social collapse, mass hysteria, and savage violence. We should think of the Enlightenment as one of Poe’s narrators, claiming perfect sanity whilst moving towards perfect madness, and the French Revolution, the revolutionary Terror of ‘enlightened’ rationalist tyrants like Robespierre and naive idealists like Danton and all the deaths beneath the ‘humane’ blade of the guillotine as the historic crime telling us where the excess of Reason goes.

Telling us, in effect, that the completely unshackled mind is not only one that throws off superstition and ignorance, but also one that throws off wisdom, self-restraint, societal restraint, and sometimes vitally necessary taboos. The completely open mind is the completely empty mind, where old but true morality has dribbled out, or where any kind of nonsense no matter how evil can be poured in.

Including by scientists who are themselves devoid of all the old restraints.

It’s in this context, in the context both of the horrors of the French Revolution conducted by the most enlightened Europeans of the day and of the lessons of Poe’s narrators telling us how very, very sane they are, that we should view current political developments, media biases, and utopian promises either of wonderful new technologies or of more progressive political systems.

Our contemporary scientists seem unrestrained by old ethical considerations. COVID showed us just how ethics free our scientists, doctors and politicians are prepared to be, just how much their pursuit of new solutions encompasses the wrecking and abandonment of our old rights. Whether its transition mutilation of our children, or the authoritarian trespass of mandated experiments, or astonishingly reckless Net Zero policies, or climate change professionals siding with Green Apocalypse hysteria, Science is compromised everywhere today with irrational ideology, unscientific, counter-factual bias, and distorting and corrupt chains of funding and patronage.

Look at climatologists telling us that a month we just experienced and know to have been wet and cold was the hottest and driest in history and that kind of absurd gaslighting shows us in the most obvious way possible that what is being presented is a political agenda rather than a scientific fact. What is being shown to us is, like Poe’s narrator, the man who is insane telling us how sane he is, and reordering objective reality we have experienced to do so.

Look at the celebration of anti-social perversions and the justification even of horrendous evils like child abuse as things to be sympathised with (look, here’s a study explaining why you should pity a child rapist…) and we see an Enlightenment that is itself a moral crime. Contemporary sexual politics and what the alleged science of sexuality tells us today is after all largely based on the work of Alfred Kinsey, who was himself a pervert who used experiments to obtain sexual gratification and who based his understanding of average or normal human sexuality on sympathetic conversations with a child molester.

But even that isn’t the sum of how dark the shadows cast by the alleged light of Reason have become. Today, we see it being considered perfectly normal and scientific for people to be creating viruses that could wipe out the entire human race. This goes on in labs funded by western governments, labs which we know can suffer leaks. If a foreign enemy regime does it in a movie we consider those fictional leaders to be Bond villains or psychopaths. But our governments and our scientists are doing it for real in the name of preventing it (“men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled-whether much that is glorious-whether all that is profound-does not spring from disease of thought”).

What we see in billionaires like Bill Gates funding globe spanning experiments to adjust the climate or ‘end pandemics’ is a science that itself threatens the global climate and itself threatens a far more horrific pandemic than the ones which emerge in nature, outside of the labs they control. Just as what we see with mRNA technology was a vaccine supposed to prevent millions of deaths actually causing millions of deaths while the media, the world and the scientific community pretend that those who want caution and sanity in science are the lunatics.

All of the authorities and respectable figures who pretend that any of this is rational are the vested interests who personally put profit before restraint or respect for other human lives, or the people for whom the excess of Reason has become the engine of madness. All those saying ‘this is necessary’ and ‘this is normal’ especially if they invent a spurious pseudo-scientific basis for that, are Poe’s narrator.

I cannot be mad, because I am describing my madness so sanely. Look how meticulously I planned these murders. A madman could never do that. “Would a madman be so wise as this?” claims the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart. I can’t be the only one who now reads such a line and thinks of the curious wisdom of ‘flattening the curve’ or wearing two rubber branches on your head to maintain social distancing.

It may have felt cold, but really it was very warm.

It may look like this technology is dangerous, but really if we don’t do it you will all die. Trust my Science. It seems quite mad, but its perfectly sane.

The reality of course is that if it wasn’t backed by institutional respectability and authority in a post Enlightenment that has forgotten old morality ALL of us would be better at spotting the madness. Foucault is a sort of last wave Enlightenment thinker, telling us that even insanity is simply a label used by the powerful to demonize attitudes they don’t approve of….which is convenient to think if you are yourself insane. By the 21st century, the lesson of the Terror had been forgotten and even the lesson of Nazi Science too, so people really could believe BOTH Foucaultian cynical relativism AND credulous Enlightenment Scientism simultaneously. They could believe BOTH that there are no authoritative claims to truth AND that the authorities must be obeyed if they wear a white coat.

Poe described the psychological truth that the very worst lunatics consider themselves more sane than the rest of us. The modern mainstream is living it out and the result is a repeat of Poe’s most obvious speculation on the nature of the kind of madness that insists on its sanity (The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether).