[lit-ideas] Urban's Scientology and Schpayer-Makov's Sherlock Holmes

From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Lit-Ideas " <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2012 10:57:59 -0800
The 26 January 2012 issue of the London Review of Books has two reviews that
seem related.  The first is a review entitled ?Religion, grrrr? by Rachel
Aviv of Hugh Urban?s The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion.
Urban, as all historians strive to be, is objective in his analysis of
Scientology, too much so to suit Aviv.  ?Urban takes no position on whether
or not Scientology should qualify as a religion.  Also, ?Urban avoids the
controversies and crimes that have shaped Scientology?s public image ? he
doesn?t consider them part of his remit ? but in leaving out details about
the church?s more sordid traditions, he gives only an incomplete view of the
afterlife of Hubbard?s ?rather postmodern view of the self and of reality.?

 

?Urban details Hubbard?s obsession with surveillance, and attributes his
paranoia to the influence of the Cold War. . .  But Hubbard suffered from
paranoia before it became fashionable.  In the 1940s and 1950s he sent
letters to the FBI, complaining that Communists were going to attack him,
that Russians were stealing his work, that a stranger had broken into his
apartment and given him a 100-volt electric shock.  ?Appear mental,? an FBI
agent wrote on his file.  His paranoia created a world in which nothing was
trivial.  The paranoid person ?logically weaves all events, all persons, all
chance remarks and happenings, into his system?, a character in Philip K.
Dick?s story ?Shell game? explains.  Paranoia functioned as a religious
worldview, and bound his followers into a community.?

 

Aviv tells us that ?Hubbard told a group of doctoral students in
Philadelphia in 1954 that his followers were more convinced of Scientology?s
cosmology than he was.?  Hubbard is conscious of having created a cosmology,
and is the paranoid truly mad if he realizes that he has created his own
reality?  His followers on the other hand are not paranoid but have been
convinced to accept Hubbard?s.  We hasten to call them naïve, dupes, fools,
etc. but as Pragmatists we recognize that some of these followers derive
benefit.  William Burroughs for example testified that Scientology had
allowed him to ?become a more imaginative writer.?  Burroughs later
criticized Scientology not because it encouraged him to believe in his own
reality but because ?Scientology? had become ?a model control system, a
state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.  It is
based on a tight in-group like the CIA.?  

 

Six pages after we leave Tom Cruise, John Travolta and the others who
demonstrate that the acceptance of Hubbard?s cosmology has made them better
at what they want to do, we find John Pemble?s ?Gaslight and Fog,? a review
of The Ascent of the detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian
England by Haia Shpayer-Makov.  Just as Hubbard?s followers believed more in
the cosmology he created than he did; so did Doyle?s followers believe more
in the world of Sherlock Holmes than he.  One gathers that Doyle didn?t
believe in Holmes at all.  He wrote A Study in Scarlet as a pot-boiler
because he needed the money, and Pemble tells us ?It?s gone on boiling ever
since.  We?ve had reprints, pastiches, parodies and adaptations galore.
Holmes migrates effortlessly between cultures and languages because, like
Robinson Crusoe, he?s fiction that?s become myth.  ?Fictions,? according to
Frank Kermode, ?can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously
held to be fictive.??

 

To add credence to this fiction-becoming-myth hypothesis, Pemble tells us
?The fictiveness of Sherlock Holmes was uncertain from the start.  The
letters addressed to him sent to Conan Doyle for redirection, the landladies
who wanted to keep house for him when he retired, the tourists who came to
baker Street looking for his lodgings: these are more than mythical, they
are legendary.  And addicts who know he?s fictive pretend that they don?t.
There?s a whole archive of mock research in pseudo-academic publications
dedicated to his life and work.  In 1954, when the BBC broadcast a
100th-birthday tribute, the contributors all said they hoped he was
listening. . . .?

 

Scientology allows its followers to work more effectively if they embrace
the myth as reality.  The Holmes myth presents us with an intellectual who
can solve all our social mysteries.  These are two major choices available
to the Post-Christian who seeks to fill his void, a system that works, and a
Guru that does.  

 

Those not willing to leave reality far enough behind to embrace fictive
systems or heroes are faced with depressing alternatives.  Some of us might
argue that neither Communism nor Fascism avoided fictiveness to any marked
degree, but huge numbers embraced it and made it real in the same way that
Scientology has become so for its followers.  Stalin and Hitler were as
paranoid, and they believed in their fiction more single-mindedly than
Hubbard did.  

 

Standing apart and skeptically striving to find ?the truth? as Nietzsche did
can drive us mad.  It is much better, the post-Christian tells himself, to
accept some paranoid?s reality, preferably a benign one, but beggars can?t
always be choosers:  The poor indeed we have with us, and their numbers are
on the increase.

 

Lawrence
[lit-ideas] Urban's Scientology and Schpayer-Makov's Sherlock Holmes

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