"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."Recently, I have been reading Hubbard's first Scientology-related book, Dianetics, not with some aim to improve myself but with the aim of understanding both more about the man & the organization he created, the Church of Scientology (hereafter CoS). And by preforming what is called a close reading of this text, it is possible to draw out certain things the text reveals that the author did not consciously intend to say.
from the note at the beginning of the 1992 edition of Dianetics
Close reading is not some new, arcane art. It was first described by the New Critics of the Thirties, & is very similar to the practices of philology, which examines the choice of Greek or Latin words in Classical texts. A version of close reading has been used since by every school of literary criticism since the New Critics - the Structuralists, the Poststructuralists, & the Deconstructionists - all have based their critiques on a close examination of the text; what they do with their findings from that point is another matter entirely.
An example of the act of close reading can be seen in Caroline Spurgeon's book, Shakespeare's Imagery (1935). In this book, Spurgeon carefully examines the types of imagery of several Elizabethan writers for clues about their personality. Her research is careful enough that it is presented in tables in the back listing the frequency of various types of imagery, which conclusively show that neither Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe - nor several other important contemporary playwrights - wrote the plays of William Shakespeare.
One might say that this is identical to the CoS practice of "word clearing" or checking for "misunderstood words". The Scieno practice limits this to finding words that the reader does not understand, then consulting a reference about them. It appears that sometimes the reader is further asked to paraphrase the definition to the auditor; this is insufficient for a proper close reading. In a close reading, the reader not only examines every word & determines their meaning (not only from references but also from the context the word is found in), as well as ponders alternative word choices & the implications.
As a result, the process is a slow one, & requires much care. And although I'm not quite finished with reading this book, I have already begun to accumulate some results, a few of which I'd like to share with the NG.
Since "misunderstood words" is an important topic to the CoS, I feel this is the best topic to begin with in presenting a close reading of this book. The quote at the top of this post comes from an "Important Note" at the beginning of this edition of Dianetics, which the reader will see before the Table of Contents. Ample footnotes are supplied to gloss - or define - words thru the book (184 in the first 100 pages). When I bought the book at a local CoS office, I was warned not to pass over any misunderstood word that I encountered. As I have a college degree in English, & have taken several post graduate classes in literature, I felt that I didn't need these cribs & crutches that the CoS offered. But I was curious about their usefulness.
Their effectiveness can be better evaluated if we divide them into several categories. First, there are the words that received no explanation. Obviously, there are some words that never require a definition, but on the same page as the above quote, I found the word "datum", the singular form of the word "data", which I feel, based on reading an average of several thousand pages a year, to be obsolescent. Except for this book, the only places I have found this usage in the last 20 years has been in the TNX mailing list, & in the name of a collection of the longitude, latitude & altitude of each benchmark in North America, that is periodically released for traverse & surveying purposes by the USGS. I would have glossed this word.
Another word that is not glossed is "mind." The reason for this is not because the context fails to define it ("the human mind, that vast and hitherto unknown realm half an inch back of our foreheads"), but because if it is defined one way - as a synonym for "brain" - it implies a materialistic philosophy, which would harmonize with the rest of the book, while another way - as the seat of perception or reasoning - would imply a spiritual or ideational philosophy, which is in more harmony with the avowed teachings of the Scienos. This difference is not easily reconcilable: it is the equivalent of trying to harmonize the political rhetoric of Monarchism & Anarchism!
At the risk of a pointless digression, I would like to point out that Hubbard himself appears unaware of the philosophical implications of this word. (And perhaps this explains how the philosophy he first presented in Dianetics drifted from using a materialistic ideology to an ideational one.) Although he frequently tries to relate his ideas of the personality to the physical body (e.g., in the Chapter "The Cell and the Organism" he argues at one point that the reactive mind & engrams are encoded in the non-neural cells), Hubbard clearly states that "several theories could be postulated as to why the human mind evolved exactly as it did, but these are theories, and Dianetics is not conerned with structure."(p.101) This is consistent with a statement at the beginning of his chapter on the Analytical Mind, where although stating that it "may live in the prefrontal lobes", he dismisses the physical placement of the Analytical Mind as being "a problem of structure, and nobody really knows about structure."(p.65)
Moving to another category, I found several words were badly defined. One example of this is the word "gregarious" (appearing on p.51 of my version); Hubbard states that man is "a gregarious being", & our editor explains gregarious as "living in herds or flocks." I never thought of myself as living in a herd or flock, but as in a house & as part of a community - & I've thought of gregarious as meaning "sociable". From the context I would assume Hubbard did too. Another example is "excreta" (p.71), which gives the editor a certain problem due to prudery; he is content to define it as "waste matter excreted from the body, as sweat or urine" - although Hubbard has already used urine in the sentence annotated. Why the editor is unable to use the word "feces" (the medical synonym for "shit"), is odd - even more so when one considers that earlier in the book, Hubbard devotes a long passage to how Christian morality impared the ancient's pursuit of pleasure, which resulted in "a considerable reduction of survival indeed."(p.41)
The editor also has a problem defining psychological terminology. For example, when faced with the word "schizophrenic" (p.76), he uses an older, discredited definition of the word - "an individual is two people madly inside of himself" - whereas for at least the last 20 years medical science defines schizophrenia more broadly as showing a lack of contact with the environment & a disintegration of personality. Multiple personality disorder is not schizophrenia.
Other definitions that show poor writing include "neurotic" (p.16), "odor" (p.40), & "audio-semantic" (p.69). One last one I will look at in detail is "pine tar", used on page 24. Hubbard writes,
These people, thinking about a ship, would see a specific ship, feel the motion of her if they thought of being aboard her, smell the pine tar or even less savory odors [...]The gloss explains carefully what pine tar is, & how it is made, but fails to even mention why a person would associate it with a sailing ship! (It is used to protect the unpainted wood of the ship.) The ineptness of this definition surprises me, & questions the ability of this organization to effectively communicate.
Then, I found there are a group of glosses that serve no clear reason. By this, I mean that by defining the chosen word they do not add any further light to Hubbard's text. Does it matter in the following sentence from page 3, "And `scholar', you would not enjoy being burdened with the summation signs and the Lorenz-FitzGerald-Einstein equations" if we know just what the LFGE equations are? From the context, the reader can determine that this refers to a complex piece of mathematics or physics; knowing this refers to relativistic phenomena is secondary.
Likewise defining common words like "pagan" (p.41), "well-nigh" (p.44), "Dark Ages" (p.42), "intelligence officer" (p.67), "arthritis" (p.75), & "hypochondriac" (p.84) fail to aid to the reader's comprehension. These words are part of the common, every-day vocabulary everyone uses. If a reader is too sheltered to have encountered one or more of these before, then wouldn't it be correct to assume the burden is on the reader to amend her or his ignorance?
A further group are words glossed with the apparent attempt to hide Hubbard's own misuse of language. By this, I mean that there are words which are used nonidomatically or peculiarly in the text, & yet at the bottom of the page appears a definition for the word, without any attempt to justify Hubbard's possible misuse of language.
I first noticed this category when Hubbard wrote: "And like a derelict battalion, careless of how many allied ranks it exposed to destruction by the enemy, studies of the mind lagged behind."(p.43) The word "derelict" is defined as "neglectful of duty; delinquent; negligent." And yet at first glance I thought the word "derelict" here meant "abandoned" or "leaderless" (much as we would understand the word in the phrase "derelict ship"). My Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary does not note Hubbard's usage, although the Oxford Etymological Dictionary lists the meaning "reprehensible neglect (of duty, etc.)" as a secondary usage that is first attested in the 18th century - & I assume is now archaic outside of military circles, if used in those circles at all. Another word is "evolutes" (p.37), which he used when the perfectly good word "evolves" would suffice. I know of no other use of the word "evolute" than as a noun for part of a geometric curve, & neither does my dictionary.
A third example is his consistent misuse of the word "analogy", which is defined on page 32 as an "explanation of something by comparing it point by point with something similar." An analogy is actually a comparison of similar features between one thing & another with the intent of explaining the first; the subtle difference between the two definitions is that in the Scieno's definition, if one makes an analogy of two objects - say the human mind & computers - it would appear that the similarities can - & should be - enumerated indefinitely, whereas my definition suggests that there may be no more than one similarity.
In either case, Hubbard frequently misuses this word, sometimes employing it instead of "figure of speech"(p.65). This continuous misuse of the word muddies the meaning of his language time & again, & I hope to explain in detail how this affects his poor abstract reasoning skills in another post.
A last category I will single out are words that did not have a gloss in the text, but did have one in the appendix in the back. The first one is "technology"(p.43), an important word to Scienos. Hubbard used this in a context that clearly is not conventional, & should have been glossed on its first appearance: "But every life form has its own technology, formed to resolve the problems of food, protection and procreation."
The second word is "demon"(p.76) - although the synonym "gnome" is defined (p.48). I was very interested in how he approached demons & demonology, since one thing I have been looking for in Hubbard's writings are any clear signs of Neoplatonic philosophy, & one possible indication would be in how he deals with supernatural beings - such as demons or Body Thetans. I have found some interesting clues, but a proper answer will unfortunately have to wait for another post.
All in all, I have discussed or mentioned 20 glosses, about 10% of the footnotes to the first hundred pages of Dianetics. I would not hesitate to say that these glosses are, for one reason or another, unsuitable & would not help a serious student to better understand the text in front of him. Further, the 90% I have not touched are not necessarily acceptable. First, I suspect that a careful reading would reveal an equal number of unsatisfactory definitions; in glancing back over this untouched mass, I find several definitions that show some of the weaknesses I have described here. Second, from reading a selection of these definitions, I find their quality are very uneven. Some actually present useful & insightful information that deepens the reader's knowledge of the text: e.g., I liked the definition of "school ties"(p.103); but too many are the uninspired work of hacks who were apparently given a marked-up copy of Dianetics & told to come up with definitions on an upstat basis. (By "upstat basis", I mean they had to meet an ever-increasing quota of production - hardly the environment one can create useful & informative definitions in.) They clearly seem to be the work of either different authors, or of different editorial guidelines: some will have a note on the origin of the word (e.g., "slang", "folklore", "French"); some will spend a sentence or two explaining a difficult idea or providing a brief biography; & some tersely define a word without a spare article, noun or preposition. A future scholar might want to compare these definitions - both in the footnotes, & in the appendix - with various dictionaries of the 1950's & 1960's - to see how much, if any, borrowing went on.
To conclude, I found the pedagogical value of these glosses negligible. From the examples I have provided, it is clear that these definitions are inept, careless or otherwise useless. This offers evidence that suggest the CoS are less than sincere even in teaching their own philosophy to people eager to understand it.
Geoff
NOTE: I know I am not the first person to subject the writings of Hubbard to close scrutiny, & many of his odd uses of words have been noted or discussed before me. Despite this, by organizing my observations on this book - & perhaps others in the future - I hope to move the criticism of this book out of the realm of subjective comments & into a more objective one.
Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard is published in North America by Bridge Publications, Inc. and in the rest of the world by New Era Publications, Inc. The cover design is (c) Religious Technology Center. Click on the cover to go to the Church of Scientology's Dianetics site. The volcano is supposed to re-stimulate your memories of the OT3 incident.