Most people in the humanities study ideas that inspire them, books and paintings they love, cultures they can identify with, beliefs they adhere to. Most scholars do not spend years doing research on people they hate or ideas they detest. On the contrary, much scholarship is hagiographic. You don't write a political biography of Mandela if you consider him an overrated rebel. You don't do fieldwork in Iceland if you cannot stand cold weather. You don't write a lengthy discussion of Nietzsche's ideas if you think they are boring. People studying religious, literary or philosophical texts usually feel a strong affinity to those texts, emotional if not spiritual.
Why am I different? Why do I enjoy studying the religious and political ideas that annoy me most? Why do I feel simultaneously excited, frustrated and intellectually challenged when I come across blatant nationalist mythmaking, essentialist East-West discourse, or radical religious exclusivism? Why do I enjoy reading texts and engaging with ideas that violate my personal moral and political values? Is it for the same reason I read every single article I come across that discusses Wilders, in spite of the shallowness of his as well as most of his opponents' ideas: engaged masochism? Or is it simply because I enjoy studying and contemplating ideas that I can contextualise and criticise?
Even when I study a topic I initially sympathise with - such as, say, 'Zen' aesthetics, or religious environmentalism - I end up deconstructing it, and analysing its underlying political subtexts. For instance, I cannot simply agree with those who say that the Japanese love of nature may serve as an ideological blueprint for a substantial environmental ethics, as I recognise how their ideas are rooted in romantic Orientalism, nationalist identity politics, or simply innovative religious marketing. I know I have a point, but of course the accusation of scepticism (or even, God forbid, post-modernist relativism) is easily made. As somebody personally sympathising with environmentalist politics, I would love to wholeheartedly subscribe to idealistic views arguing for using religion to establish deep ecological awareness - but I know reality is more complicated, I know such a view overlooks the multiple political agendas of religious institutions and ideologues, and I know religious environmentalism does not make economic interests disappear.
Perhaps this sort of critical deconstruction is inevitable, at least if you want to take the political and sociological dimensions of the texts and practices you study seriously. If you have a critical mind, studying texts you sympathise with inevitably leads to the loss of the initial love; that is, the loss of your initial naïveté. Students of Japan who still lyrically praise everything Japanese after several years of study do not have what it takes to be a good scholar: the ability to critically detach oneself from the object of study, at least temporarily. Incidentally, they also tend to take their own sympathies a bit too seriously, obsessively limiting themselves to the study of Japanese popular culture without familiarising themselves with the critical theory that could provide them with the vocabulary necessary to adequately interpret their object of study.
If you love your Bible, don't study it - not seriously, at least, not historically. You will end up with a bunch of ancient origin and election myths, written in the course of several centuries by members of a politically and geographically marginal tribe as a strategy for symbolic empowerment. Highly political, and highly human. It is similar to the experience of the professional musician, who nostalgically longs for the time she could still be touched and inspired by a concert. Now, she cannot attend a musical performance without hearing the little mistakes, the choices the conductor has made, and the underlying structures. She has forgotten how to sit back and enjoy. Yet, if she had to choose, she probably would not want to lose the ability to hear these underlying structures.
I always wonder what the astronomer thinks when he is confronted with the unimaginable size and grandness of the universe. Can he still see the star behind the scientific formulas? For historians and sociologists, analysing the political agendas and economical interests underlying myths - ancient as well as contemporary - remains of crucial importance. However, by thus demystifying them we do risk losing the magic, the sense of awe and the beauty they convey - as well as, perhaps, the gods behind them.
Mooi stuk!! Goed neergezet, die spanning.
ReplyDelete"Je kunt wel met een verrekijker naar de maan kijken en hem bestuderen, maar als je niet in het maanlicht loopt en ervan geniet, mis je de essentie" zei de romanticus tegen de wetenschapper. :)
"However, by thus demystifying them we do risk losing the magic, the sense of awe and the beauty they convey - as well as, perhaps, the gods behind them. "
ReplyDeleteAs a geologist I can tell you demystifying the mechanisms and loosing the gods doesn't take away the sense of awe nor the beauty. If anything it adds to it. Six thousand years become 6 billion years. How is that for awesomeness?
"Je kunt wel met een verrekijker naar de maan kijken en hem bestuderen, maar als je niet in het maanlicht loopt en ervan geniet, mis je de essentie" zei de romanticus tegen de wetenschapper.
Waarom denk je dat de wetenschapper de maan met een verrekijker bekijkt? Zou het misschien zijn omdat hij in het maanlicht liep, er van genoot, en realiseerde dat hij de diepere essentie mist?