Most
of us respond instinctively to “Dianetics.” We glimpse the covers (for
some reason, you only see this book in battalions of copies), with their
lurid pictures of spouting volcanoes emblazoned with screaming,
foil-stamp lettering, and as if by reflex, our steps quicken, our eyes
avert and our faces compose themselves into the expression of someone
who would never, ever have time to fill out a 500-question “personality
assessment.” But then, last week, under cover of darkness, a copy of
“Dianetics” was delivered to my doorstep with the terse order, “Review
this.” It was time, as they say on bad TV shows, to face my fears.
The first thing you notice about “Dianetics” is that it is
spectacularly dull. L. Ron Hubbard promises, in this seemingly endless
treatise, that his “modern science of mental health” will cure
everything from schizophrenia to arthritis, claims for which he presents
no credible evidence whatsoever — unless you consider merely insisting
that you’ve got evidence to be the same thing as offering it. But I am
here to testify that “Dianetics” is a phenomenal remedy for at least one
widespread affliction: insomnia.
“Dianetics” belongs to a
category of books that will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s done
time reading the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts for a book
publisher. This kind of book is typically an explanation of life, the
universe and everything written by a choleric gentleman (often a retired
military officer) who has holed up in a converted basement or former
kid’s bedroom to hammer out his ideas about how the world works — ideas
that have for too long been disregarded by the incompetents and assholes
around him. (If you are not familiar with this sort of book, know that
you have the slush pile readers of America to thank for that.)
In a way, it’s impressive. Hubbard not only managed to get one of these
books published, it actually became a bestseller and the founding text
for
Scientology. It’s
not your garden-variety crank who can take a crackpot rant, turn it
into a creepy gazillion-dollar church with the scariest lawyers around,
and set himself up as the “Commodore” of a small fleet of ships, waited
on hand and foot by teenage girls in white hot pants. But, I digress.
“Dianetics” begins with a stern admonition: “Important Note: In reading
this book, be very certain that you never go past a word you do not
fully understand. The only reason a person gives up a study or
becomes confused or unable to learn is because he or she has gone past a
word that was not understood.” This seems a bit punctilious, as
everyone knows that one of the main ways people learn the meanings of
new words is by hearing or reading them in context. Since only a few
pages later, we’re promised that only “basic language” will be used in
“Dianetics,” how tough is this going to be?
Alas, it is not only
individual words that can cause confusion. Perfectly clear words can be
dragooned into sentences so grammatically torturous and incoherent that
any meaning once inhabiting those words runs screaming from the
wreckage. Context only helps you figure out a word’s definition when the
context itself makes sense, and in “Dianetics,” it often doesn’t.
Still, there’s a certain twisted panache to preemptively scolding your
readers for not trying hard enough to grasp your point before you
bedevil them with logic-defying exercises in the hanging modifier and
the passive voice. You don’t get it? That’s because you didn’t look up
enough words! What did I tell you, idiot?
By the way, all
that stuff about “basic language”? That’s a bald-face lie. No sooner
does Hubbard get going with whatever it is he’s trying to do, than he
starts mangling and making up words willy-nilly. Visual memories are
rechristened “visio”; “evolute,” a term that used to refer to the center
of a curvature, serves as an entirely unnecessary synonym for
“develop”; and sense impressions become “perceptics.” Footnotes offer
helpful definitions of commonplace idioms like “a far cry: only remotely
related” and the sublimely tautological “present time: the time which
is now.”
Obviously, Hubbard is keen to depict Dianetics as “an
organized science of thought built on definite axioms (statements of
natural laws on the order of those of the physical sciences),” and so he
wraps his “technology” in a cloak of impressive-sounding jargon and
crams the bottoms of his pages with inane footnotes in order to create
the impression of research. This doesn’t keep him from sneering at
doctors for obfuscating when (according to him) they call a cold a
“catarrhal disorder of the respiratory tract,” or from condemning the
pretensions of a (hypothetical) “scholar” enamored of “Hegelian
grammar.” Then, with blithe hypocrisy, Hubbard proceeds to lard
“Dianetics” with faux-learned name-droppings from the Western Civ. grab
bag (Lucretius, Dante, Schopenhauer, etc.) — all of it patently cribbed
from Will and Ariel Durant’s multivolume middlebrow classic, “The Story
of Civilization.”
So what is this guy on about? The premise of
“Dianetics” is that the brain remembers everything we experience and is
“utterly incapable of error” except for an evolutionary holdover called
the “reactive mind.” This portion of the mind, usually inaccessible to
the reasoning or “analytical” mind, takes over when we are
“unconscious.” By “unconscious,” Hubbard means not just the conventional
sense of the word, but any condition of pain or fear. When you are
“unconscious” and also suffering some kind of pain or discomfort, the
reactive mind seizes upon all your sensory impressions at that moment
and melds them together into an “engram.” The engram is then “soldered”
into the circuitry of the mind and, when retriggered by a combination of
factors, causes people to think and behave in irrational and
destructive ways.
The average person supposedly has thousands of
these engrams gumming up his or her works, but with the help of
Dianetics’ “science of mind,” and a process called “auditing,” anyone
can have them removed from the reactive mind and become a “Clear.”
Clears are “optimum individuals,” devoid of engrams and other
“aberrations” and furthermore blessed with “full color-visio,
tone-sonic, tactile, olfactory, rhythmic, kinesthetic, thermal and
organic imagination,” in addition to other qualities akin to
superpowers.
Auditing is the repetitive reliving of the
engram-creating experience with the aid of a Dianetics auditor and while
in a mild hypnotic trance. (The auditor is instructed to say “When I
count from one to seven, your eyes will close.” Hubbard maintains that
the resulting state is “vastly different” from hypnosis because the
subject isn’t “asleep” and knows what’s happening around him, but this
just doesn’t sound that different from what most hypnotherapists do.)
The most significant engrams, the theory holds, are formed prenatally,
starting with the moment of conception. Any words overheard in an
“unconscious” state, even pleasant ones, will become a particularly
tenacious and unpredictable part of the engram, which is why you must
never ever speak to a woman who has, for example, just fallen down in
the street. Help her up, but don’t say a word! She might be pregnant!
It shouldn’t take anyone 700 pages of gobbledygook to cover this
material, so along the way it’s easy to be distracted by Hubbard’s
numerous personal and writerly eccentricities. I kept scouting the book
for hints of something I’d heard about, the wacky science fiction
mythology that lies at the inner sanctum of Scientology, though I knew
it wouldn’t appear per se in “Dianetics.” That’s reserved only for those
who have undergone the church’s intensive training and indoctrination.
Scientologists say they withhold this information because learning it
can drive the unprepared person insane and give you pneumonia, but it’s
all over the Web, and it strikes me as far less likely to cause
suffering than Hubbard’s prose.
Critics say the church hushes up
this story — it involves an evil demiurge who, 75 million years ago,
blew up 178 billion souls with hydrogen bombs planted in Earth’s
volcanoes, trapped them on “electrical strips,” brainwashed them and
packaged them into clusters that now cling to every human being and mess
with our bodies and heads — for two reasons. One is that the church
needs a sufficiently dramatic payoff after stringing members along
through years of courses and trainings, all costing upward of a quarter
of a million dollars. The other reason is fear that revealing this
fantasia of kooky stories might turn off potential converts — but, hey,
that never hurt the Old Testament.
Not only does “Dianetics”
offer precious little sideshow appeal, it’s impossible to read much of
it without realizing that it’s the work of a very disturbed man. (Here’s
where things get less entertaining.) Hubbard’s grandiose preoccupation
with “an answer to the goal of all thought,” the reiteration of
fantasies of perfect mastery foiled by invasive, alien forces (engrams
are described as “parasites”), the determination to envision the mind as
a machine that can be brought under absolute control if only these
enemies can be ejected — all these are classic forms of paranoid
thinking. The alarm bells really start to ring when Hubbard describes
colorblindness as caused by a “circuit” in a person’s mind that “behaves
as though it were someone or something separate from him and that
either talks to him or goes into action of its own accord, and may even,
if severe enough, take control of him while it operates.”
All
self-help books — and for all its attempts at intellectual hauteur,
“Dianetics” is just that — resort to examples and case studies, and
those examples tend to reflect the values of their time and the author.
When “Dianetics” was first published in 1950, pop psychology books were
still widely read by men (now, it’s mostly a women’s genre), and they
often tackled such problems as how to get ahead at the office and deal
with wives who nagged or withheld sex — the concerns of the average
middle-class ’50s guy.
“Dianetics” is way off the reservation in
this department. Certain motifs keep recurring with a compulsive
regularity that suggests Hubbard himself was anything but clear of past
traumas. Eventually, these recurring images and examples gel into a sad
and scary narrative that must have had particular power for Hubbard,
since it keeps cropping up throughout the book.
It involves an
adulterous wife and a brutal husband. The wife becomes pregnant
(presumably by her lover) and fears discovery of the affair. She tries
repeatedly to abort the pregnancy on her own, using orange sticks and
other household objects. Her husband, suspecting the truth, beats her,
punching her pregnant belly, calling her a “whore” and “no good.” When
the child is born, the parents pretend it was wanted, but the child’s
only true ally is a grandmother, who thwarted the mother’s attempt to
abort him and cares for the child when he’s sick. Eventually, the mother
starts beating the child, using many of the same insults her husband
has flung at her.
This horrific tale never appears in its
entirety in “Dianetics,” but the book is haunted by it. Every time
Hubbard reached into his mind for an example of how a fetus might come
to feel pain, or how an engram “keys in,” or how engrams are passed on
through generations, he came up with a piece of this story.
The prevalence of physical violence — almost exclusively domestic
violence — in “Dianetics” makes itself felt early on. Among the first
examples in the book (meant to illustrate the condition of
“unconsciousness”) describes a woman being knocked down and kicked by
her husband, and beaten women appear throughout with bizarre regularity.
Hubbard also seemed to be obsessed with attempted abortion, which he
believed to be widespread. Admittedly, when “Dianetics” was written,
legal medical abortion wasn’t available in the U.S., but even so, the
assertion that “twenty or thirty abortion attempts is not uncommon”
among women who aren’t Clears is simply demented.
From reading
“Dianetics” alone, you can glean a picture of Hubbard as a man wrestling
with mental illness, who saw his mind as a potentially superhuman
machine beset by invaders and parasites. Without knowing anything about
his life, you can tell that this is someone raised in an environment of
betrayal, secrecy, bullying and violence, someone who stands a good
chance of re-creating the same conditions in his adult life if he’s not
careful. You can figure out all of this just from reading “Dianetics,”
like I did. Then, afterward, you can go on the Web and check out the
many sites devoted to critiquing Scientology and documenting the truth
about Hubbard. Chances are what you find there won’t surprise you at
all.
is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site,
.
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. Tuesday, Jun 28, 2005 09:51 AM EDT
No comments:
Post a Comment