Tuesday
The past week I reconnected with my dear friend and favorite Slovenian intellectual Mladen Dolar, and one of many rewards from our talk was getting to see a recent chapter, which appears in Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, a collection produced by Slovenian colleagues. Mladen’s contribution explores the nature of rumor, which makes it only too relevant given the way that rumor, in the form of unhinged conspiracies, have taken over large segments of America (and not only America). In the course of his exploration, Mladen cites Socrates, Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, and Kafka.
Mladen begins by pitting Socratic logic and truth against opinion. At the core of Socrates’s philosophic mission, of course, is the search for truth:
Knowledge aims at truth – this is its ambition – and truth is binding and universal, not a matter of mere opinion. Knowledge has to be legitimized, it has to be based on sound argument, factual evidence and impartial objectivity, with all this to be ultimately grounded in logos.
Socrates’s aim, in his questioning, was to
dismantl[e] people’s opinions, destroying them, showing their lack of foundation, their ungrounded arbitrary nature. All it took was asking a couple of awkward questions; that was his favorite occupation.
Mladen then moves from opinion to rumor, which he says ranks even lower than opinion. He becomes positively lyrical as he describes how rumors grow and spread, and one can’t help think of all the rumors we have encountered in this past election season:
[W]hat defines rumors is that nobody quite subscribes to them. ‘I heard that . . .,’ ‘people say that . . .,’ ‘it has been suggested that . . .,’ ‘rumor has it . . .’1 Rumors have no author. They just circulate, anonymously, as if by themselves, impersonally, as the breeze of air stemming from nowhere and enveloping us, then passing on. And, on the way, the breeze easily turns into a tempest, a whirlwind – this metaphor actually became a running cliché about rumors throughout history. Their expansion seems to present the case of creatio ex almost nihilo, a tiny speck grows into a magnificent creature by the mere movement. There is no assignable origin of a rumor. One just hears it and passes it on, as a relay, and it augments by being passed on.
A rumor that has been spreading through Republican circles in recent years is that there is rampant voter fraud. Those who study the matter—in other words, who insist on evidence and logic—tells us that voter fraud occurs so rarely that it plays no role in election. Nevertheless, the rumor has become so deeply embedded in GOP circles that their politicians do everything possible to make voting harder and to ferret out cheaters. Unfortunately, as Mladen points out, the lack of evidence doesn’t undermine such rumors in the least. In fact, just the opposite is the case:
There is something like a mysterious conversion, a transubstantiation, that takes place with rumors: there is no proof, no origin, no author, no guarantee, but, nevertheless, they are ‘mystically’ transformed into a formidable force that is very hard, virtually impossible, to combat. Being without foundation, they nevertheless work, with their efficiency standing in stark contrast to their lack of ground or support. ‘Everybody knows’ that this is a mere rumor, based on thin air, but one cannot stop oneself from lending it an ear and allowing it to work.
Socrates, with his faith in philosophy, felt he was helpless in the face of rumor. In fact, it was rumor that caused him to be condemned to death by the Athenian assembly. As he noted in his defense (in The Apology),
There have been many who have accused me to you for many years now, and none of their accusations are true. These I fear much more than I fear Anytus and his friends [the present and identifiable accusers] [. . .]. Those who spread the rumors, gentlemen, are my dangerous accusers [. . .]. Moreover, these accusers are numerous, and have been at it a long time [. . .]. What is most absurd in all this is that one cannot even know or mention their names [. . .]. Those who maliciously and slanderously persuaded you [. . .], all those are most difficult to deal with: one cannot bring one of them into court or refute him; one must simply fight with shadows, as it were, in making one’s defense, and cross-examine when no one answers.
Many canvassers in this past election will tell you that talking with certain voters felt indeed like fighting shadows. The same is true of people who have lost family members to QAnon or the Trump cult (often the same). Mladen sees Socrates’s battle with rumor as our own condition:
Socrates, who fought false opinions and promoted the way to truth based on logos more than anyone else in history, to the point that he became the model and the beacon of this struggle, this same Socrates was powerless against the power of rumors that had been spreading against him for many years, rumors that had no basis whatsoever, yet resulted in the indictment, the trial, the sentence and death. He could easily fight the visible opponents. But, the ones he couldn’t fight were the invisible ones who paved the way for the visible ones. It’s like fighting shadows, but shadows won the day in the end. [R]umors, hearsay and slander got the upper hand over [the] glorious face of logos, truth and epistemology. It turned out that logos was helpless against rumors; the faceless anonymous avalanche won against the best of arguments.
Mladen draws his first literary example from Hamlet where, in one of the most unpleasant scenes in that great play, Hamlet says that Ophelia will not escape the rumor (or calumny) that she’s a whore:
Hamlet talks to Ophelia after the grand scene of his soliloquy in a most peculiar dialogue where he keeps insulting and humiliating her. Among other things he says the following: ‘If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, farewell’ (3.1.135–9). This is a very harsh line: no amount of chastity and purity will save her; there is no way she could protect herself against calumny and rumors; and this is the only dowry that Hamlet can think of to give her for her possible future marriage. You shall be stained if you stay in this filthy world, stained by calumnious words and rumors…
Mladen points out that Hamlet’s injunction—“Get thee to a nunnery”—is itself “ambiguous and double-edged”:
[I]t appears that the nunnery would then present a safe haven against this ubiquitous stain. But…does he really want to protect her innocence from calumnious filth, or isn’t it rather that, by the very way of addressing her, he himself produces the calumny, the very stain that he is warning her about, the stain from which she will never recover? Isn’t it rather that he, her lover, is the source of calumny he allegedly wants to protect her from? Treating her implicitly like a whore and sending her to a nunnery – how could she ever escape her fate? Nunnery, mentioned five times in the scene, functioned at the time as a euphemistic term for brothel, hence the utter ambiguity. Can one detect the allusive subtext that he may be sending her to the whorehouse where she allegedly belongs?
I’ll share the rest of the article in tomorrow’s post. For the present, however, just think of how many people in our political world find insidious ways to spread false rumors. I think especially of Fox pundit Tucker Carlson, who often claims to be, not accusing, but merely asking questions—and then challenging people to prove themselves innocent of what he has hinted.
Note how, if you defend yourself in these instances, you give the rumor a certain amount of air. Defending yourself, therefore, becomes a sucker’s game. It’s why candidate for Arizona governor Katie Hobbs refused to publicly debate the former television host Kari Lake, a 2020 election denier who lies as frequently as Trump. As Trump said approvingly of Lake, “If they say, ‘How is your family?’ she says, ‘The election was rigged and stolen.’”
But if logic, reason and truth are excluded from the get-go, then the debate cannot be a debate and those who favor truth and logic automatically lose. Hillary Clinton learned this when she debated Trump, which could well have been the lesson that Hobbs learned. It also appears, as of this writing, that Hobbs will win what has been a very close race.
I’ll take up what Mladen says about Beaumarchais’s Figaro and Kafka’s K (from The Trial) in tomorrow’s post. To give you a teaser, however, Mladen observes that Beaumarchais (and Rossini in his Figaro opera) represent a European Enlightenment view of the matter. Kafka, not so much.