Wednesday
Today I continue summarizing a fascinating article on the power of rumor by my longtime Slovenian friend Mladen Dolar. It’s a piece that has significant implications for negotiating our fact-challenged world.
Yesterday I observed how Mladen sees rumor defeating Socrates’s truth and Ophelia’s innocence. Mladen begins the next section of the article, however, by showing Figaro and Count Almaviva (in Barber of Seville) triumphing over rumor, defeating Rosina’s guardian so that the count can marry her. Citing Rossini’s 1816 opera version of Beaumarchais’s 1775 comedy, Mladen notes that the rumor receives a remarkably upbeat (and therefore chilling?) treatment by Basilio. The guardian’s ally plans to use “calumny” to ruin Count Almaviva in Rosina’s eyes:
Calumny is a little breeze,
a gentle zephyr,
which insensibly, subtly,
lightly and sweetly,
commences to whisper.
Softly softly, here and there,
sotto voce, sibilant,
it goes gliding, it goes rambling.
Into the ears of the people,
it penetrates slyly
and the head and the brains
it stuns and it swells.
From the mouth re-emerging
the noise grows crescendo,
gathers force little by little,
runs its course from place to place,
seems the thunder of the tempest
which from the depths of the forest
comes whistling, muttering,
freezing everyone in horror.
Finally with crack and crash,
it spreads afield, its force redoubled,
and produces an explosion
like the outburst of a cannon,
an earthquake, a whirlwind,
a general uproar,
which makes the air resound.
And the poor slandered wretch,
vilified, trampled down,
sunk beneath the public lash,
by good fortune, falls to death
“If calumny ever had a eulogy, a panegyric, a song of praise, an anthem,” Mladen observes dryly, “then this is the one.”
Because Beaumarchais is writing in “the Age of Reason,” however, rumor does not win this time, and the lovers are reconciled and happily married. As Mladen notes,
[G]iven the optimism of the age, the power of calumny and rumors fails for once. The great irony of this piece is that, after extolling so persuasively the gigantic powers of calumny, this acclaimed calumny miserably fails in the end. True love wins. The pernicious and malicious stratagems of the depraved ancien régime are defeated – also with the help of the skills and intrigues of the shrewd servant Figaro, a self-made man for the new age. Where Socrates failed, there Figaro succeeded; Socrates couldn’t fight the slanderous shadows, but Figaro could. The servant can defeat the Master; shrewdness and cleverness can defeat rank. The message is: calumny and rumors can be outwitted. And, no doubt, one can detect in this the ultimate faith in the triumphant powers of reason, which can be the match even for the invincible forces of calumny and gossip (associated with the forces of the ancien régime).
Fast forward a century, however, and things are not so rosy. Mladen quotes the famous opening sentence of Kafka’s Trial (1914-15):
Someone must have been spreading rumors about Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.
Mladen observes that we have circled back to Socrates:
The peculiar thing with Josef K. is that we never learn what the allegations were, nor what he was charged with; indeed, he was never even charged and there was actually no trial (apart from one curious interrogation, with the title being a spectacular misnomer). Josef K. never had an opportunity to present his apology before the court, like Socrates. But, their separate fates come together in the end, at the point of execution, Socrates drinking the hemlock and Josef K. being slaughtered with a knife ‘like a dog’. They were both killed in the end on the basis of something that started as a mere rumour….There is the stark discrepancy between cause and effect.
And it gets worse—and more worrisome for those of us tracking U.S. politics—because Kafka shows how the rumor metastasizes. “What was a mere slander, a very slender slander,” Mladen points out, “is magnified by the Law, by the Court, becoming a whirlwind, against which there is no possible defense.” In our case, there are already signs that some of our reactionary Supreme Court justices are buying Trump’s “big lie” about election fraud and ruling on cases accordingly. Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, for instance, appear sympathetic to the January 6 insurrectionists. Mladen shows the danger of such a development:
The Court [in The Trial] is the institution which is supposed to be based on Law, and ultimately on logos, the harbinger of logos in chaotic social turmoil, the impartial big Other to resolve any dispute. Yet the Court is entirely taken hostage by the other side of logos, hostage of rumors. It is a receding entity, massively omnipresent but nowhere to be seen (like the Castle – both the Court and the Castle are ‘subject to rumors’, emphatically so).
Believe it or not, it gets even worse as Mladen’s article takes an unexpected twist, this time courtesy of Cervantes. In the Spanish author’s “Dialogue of the Dogs,” we are told that the primary function of language is not truth-telling at all but exchanging gossip and rumors. The dogs Scipio and Berganza, suddenly discovering that they can speak, begin reflecting on the nature of speech. When Scipio rebukes Berganza for engaging in slanderous gossip, Berganza replies,
To be sure, Scipio, one has to be very wise and very circumspect if one wants to sustain two hours’ conversation without one’s words bordering on gossip. For I find in myself, although I’m an animal, that I’ve only to open my mouth a few times before the words come rushing to my tongue like flies to wine, and all of them malicious and slanderous.
Building on this observation, Mladen concludes that
gossip (rumours, slander, etc.) is not some minor deplorable deviation from what speech usually is and should properly be but, rather, pertains to the basic function of speech and sneaks in already at its origin. There is no speech without gossip, from the moment one opens one’s mouth.
What we have, Mladen extrapolates, is “the opposite of what is taken for granted.” The basic function of speech is not “communication and information” but gossip:
To speak is to speak maliciously, to speak is to gossip and to spread rumors, to speak is to denigrate. Indeed, where would we be if we were only to proffer confirmed information and sound statements? We wouldn’t last a minute if we were confined to sentences like ‘The cat is on the mat’ that analytical philosophy is so fond of. Actually, we might well cease to be human.
Mladen adds that, in Slovenian, the word for rumor and language are actually the same, another indication that rumor, not the search for truth, is language’s deepest purpose. He even wonders if philosophy itself is but “a higher kind of gossip, gossip in disguise, pretending to be morally elevated and well founded.”
So where does that leave us with Donald Trump and his election-denying, truth-bending, alternate-fact espousing disciples? At first glance, it’s discouraging to think that made-up stories come more naturally to us than truth-telling. As the saying goes, “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
I find it useful, however, to have a clear description of what we’re up against. As a professor, of course, I am thoroughly a creature of the Enlightenment, and I strive to be reasonable and fact-based in all of my interactions—with my students, with friends and family, with total strangers. Although I am not immune to self-serving biases, I aspire to something higher.
And this is when I recall an Adam Gopnik observation in a New Yorker article on the Enlightenment. (You can read my account of it here.) As Gopnik sees it, a commitment to reason, truth, tolerance, and justice is the exception in history, not the rule. The rule of law has always been fighting an uphill battle. Or as he puts it,
“Illiberalism” is the permanent fact of life. Moments of social peace and coexistence, however troubled and imperfect, are the brief miracle that needs explaining, and protecting.
In short, liberals like myself shouldn’t be surprised when others prove deaf to our appeals to reason. When we see right-wingers guilty of inconsistency or hypocrisy or prejudice—in other words, twisting language to serve their ends—we should stop thinking that pointing this out will have any effect whatsoever. If, as Berganza the dog puts it, “words come rushing to my tongue like flies to wine, and all of them malicious and slanderous,” then we will be clear that language’s natural proclivities are not on our side.
That, however, just means we need to fight harder for a tolerant and truth-seeking world. We can’t allow Socrates’s death to have been in vain.
Further thought: As I write this, I am learning that the charismatic, lie-spewing, Trump clone Kari Lake has just lost her governor’s race to the colorless but diligent Katie Hobbs in purple state Arizona. So reason can win out upon occasion.
Related post: Virgil on Rumor and Trump’s Rage Tweeting