A LOOKING-GLASS VERSION OF MODERN THOUGHT

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32298, 16 May 1970, Page 4

A LOOKING-GLASS VERSION OF MODERN THOUGHT

The Phoenix Lectures. By L. Ron Hubbard. The Publications Organization World Wide. 320 pp.

Reviewed by R.A.M.G. This is stated to be the text of a series of lectures given first in 1954, and reissued under the auspices of the Church of Scientology. As is probably well known, Scientology is an international movement whose activities have recently been the subject of adverse criticism in New Zealand and overseas. In some countries firm legal restraints have been imposed on the activities of the movement, which only recently started calling itself a church. As this book was published in 1968, but is described as “the material from which are derived the fantastic power and forward expansion of Scientology” one may deduce that there is a strong continuity in the theories of the movement extending back to before it began to call itself a church. It is further claimed that “Scientology possesses the first workable technology for the increase of capability beyond expected human capacity, and from that advanced point by exact known steps to total individual freedom.” This is a very strong claim: the book must be examined by the uncommitted reviewer to see if it could really live up to it.

Someone who had read extensively in modern philosophy, psychology, or the social sciences might think that he could come to this book with the advantage that he would know some of it already. In fact, the only advantage he would have is that he could more quickly recognise parts of it to be nonsensical, and see that practically all of its claims taken at their face value were trivial or empty of meaning. Yet at the same time it has a certain familiarity, and an undeniable appeal to many people. How does Hubbard achieve this?

First the style. Hubbard is not arguing a case, he is inventing words and defining them as he goes along by using other more familiar words in new and peculiar senses. The terminology of serious thought is used, and we have axioms (fifty of them), conditions of existence (four), and twentyfive chapters which move from background ard fundamental assumptions to practical considerations of applying Scientology: for instance chapter 22 is called “Remedy of Havingness and Spotting Spots in Space.” The style is racy, even breathless, and so constructed that the reader is constantly tripped up by bizarre references and anecdotes, and by name-dropping which is about as uninformative as it could be. It is a style which is found characteristically in the writings of the reasonably intelligent but insane, and sometimes to a lesser degree in the

publications of minority religious groups. Second, what is being said? As Hubbard writes by a process of looselycontrolled free association, and repeatedly slips in half-remembered and inchoate references to lectures which he has heard, things he has read of, and processes he claims to have witnessed or directed, the net result is not to sustain an argument but to hide the fact that there is little continuous rational argument present. The main thesis is that man perceives the world in a wrong-headed fashion, but that by extensive processing to resee and rethink carried out within the framework of Scientology he will have a better understanding of his own nature and its place in reality. The uniqueness of Ulis lies not in the instruction to us to rethink, but in the claims made for Scientology. Everyone from Mao Tse-tung to Billy Graham wants us to rethink our position, so we are reduced to asking what is the unique irreducible hard core of Scientology, if such a core exists.

Unfortunately the answer is not tersely put; anything that Hubbard thinks is true is part of Scientology because Scientology embraces all that is true by definition. He writes: “Comparing the Axioms of Scientology with axioms in another subject, these are certainly as self-evident as those of, for instance, geometry, which is actually a relatively crude subject in that it proves itself by itself, which is a limitation that Scientology does not have. The Axioms of Scientology prove themselves by all of life.” Life, we are told, is “a space-energy-object production and placement unit because that is what it does. Life is basically a static. You can't measure the static, it has no mass, no motion, no wave-length, no location in space or in time. It has the ability to postulate and to perceive.” The Axioms build up from this. Axiom four, of which Hubbard seems rather fond (he tells us that its use saved a nuclear installation from destruction), is, “Spice is a viewpoint of dimension.” Thus Scientology knows what Physics does not know. By the time the iong-

suffering reader gets to Axiom 35, he learns “the ultimate truth is a static. This has the technical name of ,’Basic Truth’.” Lest you, dear reader, are beginning to feel you are not with it, Axiom 38 may cheer you on: “Stupidity is the unknownness of consideration.” The significance of all this for the community in which Scientologists live, and wish to practise their processing, is that it is believed that individuals have made a healthy adjustment when they have been brought by processing to see the truth of Hubbard’s ideas. If you do not go along with Hubbard, the fault is in yourselves. Hubbard is held up as a model of the best that man can achieve in pure intellectual activity. It is true that there have been great thinkers who were mad some of the time: Cantor, Newton, and Berkeley were all cases in point. But they did manage at some time in their lives to write coherent and sustained rational arguments, and they produced ideas which could be checked for their internal consistency or their agreement with other men’s observations. Hubbard is perhaps a product of our timg, one in which our knowledge of problems which intimately concern man is now so complex as to be for ever beyond the reach of people of good will but limited education and intelligence: the consequent frustration in people who would like to be the masters of their own lives, and for some reason cannot, may express itself in anti-scientific or blatantly irrational beliefs. The Nazis in Germany publicly burnt books of which they did not approve; Stalin ordered the rewriting of recent history. Scientology has gone one stage further and produced a sort of non-book in which truth is always standing on its head. Hubbard has written a lookingglass version of modern thought, which the frustrated and insecure can fancy they may use to hit back at “them” by knowing something which “they” cannot know. It does not really matter whether or not Hubbard is actually mad, just as it does not matter whether or not the Pied Piper was mad, but we have to decide how we are to protect children from the activities of such persons.