The Cult Of The Fact

by Liam Hudson

Hardcover in good condition. Superficial marks, light scores and edge wear on jacket. Jacket spine is slightly sunned. Minor tear on jacket spine head. Hardcover spine head is lightly bumped. Page block head is lightly foxed. Pen on a few pages. Text remains clear throughout. Volume is slightly cocked, but binding remains intact. HCW

189 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1972

Reviews

[Tucker]

This book is disorganized and rambling to a degree that makes it difficult to tell what the thesis is. Hudson says he was working on his book Frames of Mind when the ideas behind The Cult of the Fact came to him as a sort of "doppelganger" book that he wished he was writing instead, and eventually he wrote both books. His enthusiasm notwithstanding, The Cult of the Fact is confusing. The memoir part is fine; he tells self-deprecating stories of how he felt that he was a bit of a fraud in landing his prestigious academic career (he recalls stating in a classics translation on an entrance exam to university that Scylla wrote love "littoris" to Charybdis). He is interested in Rilke's sonnet about a unicorn and in Odell Shepard's Lore of the Unicorn, and that's the part that interested me the most, which means I probably should read Shepard's book. Hudson quotes at length some banter from an obscure novel, devoting a whole chapter to it; I did not understand the meaning of this. He talks about the religious epiphany of St. Teresa of Avila and his own psychological epiphany on Welbeck Street in London. He looks extensively and righteously criticizes an article by Arthur Jensen that claimed that white Americans had higher IQs than black Americans.

He explains that he wanted to write a book that was less amorphously "agnostic" than Frames of Mind and instead conveyed more of a sense of being rooted in culture and of passionately caring about something.

“…looking back on it, Frames of Mind has an agnostic air. It is a book that lacks any single, all-embracing credo to unite it and give it direction. However artificial or implausible such credos may be, they give research a good Gestalt. In comparison, the agnostic is a dull dog. He may be lively in passing, but he lacks that primitive conviction that persuades others, and hence himself, that what he is doing is momentous. He lacks even the self-righteous glow that forthright atheism creates. In comparison with the zealot, interdisciplinary man is more a person of kapok, of wadding. And by stepping out of a clear tradition, out of the framework that the divisions between academic subjects create, he can also leave himself feeling vulnerable; perhaps, as the structuralists have suggested, because cultural labels, categories and rituals are the props on which the ordinary mortal’s sense of identity is hung.” (p. 79)

So what exactly is he passionate about? In part, he is passionate about having passion. Somewhat paradoxically, I suppose, he says that we can only be truly objective (that is, "dispassionate") when we acknowledge that we have feelings, motivations, prejudices, and so forth. If we don't acknowledge those things, they will get the better of us, at least within the scope of our academic psychological research. In the Preamble, he says that his book

“expresses a growing dissatisfaction with the self-consciously scientific psychology in which I myself was trained — an activity that, increasingly over the last ten years, has taken on the air of a masquerade. It has been written in the hope that, somewhere behind the paraphernalia of false science and apparent objectivity, there lies the possibility of a more genuinely dispassionate study of human nature and human action." He adds: "Such a book…is bound also to concern itself not simply with the ‘facts’, but with the unspoken assumptions that we all use when deciding which facts are interesting, and which trivial, a bore. … One must question not so much what university teachers think they teach, nor what students think they are learning, but the more subterranean traffic in ideals and prejudices that all powerful teaching institutions create, and that govern thereafter the intellectual lives their products lead.” (p. 11)

A central issue for him is that the purely behavioristic approach to psychology he learned in university treats people too much as objects and not enough as subjects. He wants the psychologist's own subjective experience to inform his or her awareness of the human mind.

"In his sonnet, Rilke deals not only in expectation and belief, but in myth; in symbols that convey intuitively perceived meanings, themselves the outcome of the lengthy processes of cultural accretion....If, as sceptics, we were to ask Rilke to define his terms, and to provide objective data in support of his proposition, we would be philistines — because we would be attempting not merely to dismantle his poem, but also to stifle both its meaning and the experience it embodies." (p. 72)

He put it a little more concretely here:

“Stick, he [the behaviourist] may urge, to the hard facts: age, sex, social class, educational achievement, marriage and divorce rates, fertility, the incidence of disease and crime, rental values, and what have you. The argument is beguiling; and I succumb to it several times a year. But it remains chimerical. There is a profound pleasure to be had in hitching interpretations to data such as these. They form our anchor in times of need. But, in isolation, they are meaningless; and we tend, in any case, to absorb ourselves in playing statistical tunes upon them. Worse, if we are not scrupulous, we find ourselves edging round to the view that such simple facts are in some important sense basic; that people are reducible to the forms of evidence about them that we find it easiest to collect.” (p. 155)

In short, the way we happen to squash people into spreadsheets may not be the correct analysis. A better analysis will involve some admission of our own biases as thinkers and researchers, and it will not necessarily include the goal of jettisoning those biases, either, since they may be integral to our own subjectivity. He proposes that "psychology is relevant inasmuch as it illuminates men’s ideologies," despite the admitted risk of total self-absorption in investigating one's own prejudices. Ideally, "the psychologist and his preoccupations" should be "included as part of what psychologists seek to explain." (p. 161)

Having teased out that argument, there is not much more detail to be found, and it remains the case that the book is structurally disorganized. It is readable if you approach it expecting a memoir in a conversational tone, but it's a challenge if you want to pin down the exact advice he's giving to academics.