Friday, Sep 5, 2008
L. Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics" is a fantastically dull, terribly written, crackpot rant -- it's also the founding text of Scientology. So, what does it actually say?
Jun 28, 2005 | 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.
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