Umberto Eco's latest novel 'The Prague Cemetery' is a wonderfully readable narrative where history and fiction blend seamlessly leaving reader agape at the inspired twisting of fact and fiction that incapacitates him to locate where history begins and fictions ends.
It is worth our while to recall that Eco is among the few academics who is capable of coming out of the cloistered class room and strike a chord with lay readers in the role of a virtuoso storyteller. And as we know a great story teller always portrays himself in his characters, Eco claims that all the characters in ' The Prague Cemetery' are real historical figures save the narrator whose identity is shrouded with mystery-sometimes posing as a split personality contradicting himself( Do I contradict myself? yes I contradict myself because I contain multitude). We have every reason to believe that it is none other than Eco himself who is all set (re)construct seemingly non-existent conspiracy theory that dates back to the time of Barruel or maybe before.
While reading 'The Prague Cemetery', I came across the following statement made by a character that made me reflect deeply as the statement rings a bell and assumes extraordinary significance in the context of the trajectory of human evolution from Homo Riligiosus to Homo Economicus. The statement is :' Man's principal trait is readiness to believe anything.Otherwise , how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absence of universal gullibility?'
The birth of Christ as we understand by 'Immaculate Conception' is hard to believe. Any person with a scientific bent of mind fails to understand how a virgin without coming into contact with the member of an opposite sex can conceive. Yet we believed. Inquisitions happened.Crusade happened. Christianity shaped our world and civilization to a very large extent.
The Islamic sacred book The Koran is believed to have been dictated by the archangel Gabriel. Who was Gabriel? Did any body see him? But The Koran touched all aspects of human existence including matters of doctrine,social organization and legislation.
The propensity to pass myths as history is rampant in hinduism. The classic example is the Ramjanmabhoomi case that still comes back to haunt us like bubonic plague.
Astrology has survived. A planet that orbits hundreds of light years away(Light travels at a speed of 299,792 Km per second) shapes the destiny of a baby who is born out of a cesarean section in an ICU in Downtown Hospital. Can any one explain this? yet we believe.
Those who are reading newspapers these days are bound to come across how fly-by-nights NGOs and finance companies are duping common men promising double or treble the amount they put by with them. Unipay- to- you is a discourse now. Yet we believed and our money went down the drain.
The list will go on. These are nothing ;but quintessence of 'Universal Gullibility'.
Viva Gullibility.
( As I said it was the lines from Eco's 'The Prague Cemetery' that triggered my ideas. My wish is not to disrespect religion or beliefs.)
It all depends on the frame you adopt for a particular argument. It is convenient for "science" for instance to lambast anything that appears "unscientific" in the name of reason. At one level, such exercises are nothing but acts of self-delusion. Look at the history of "knowledge" and "civilization": it has been a series of revisions and modifications, a series of plays on the same theme of improvement. Newton was superseded by Einstein, now that has given way to concepts that appeared unimaginable - Brian Greene's tenth-dimension theory is one example - so-called "science" is a revisionary act, and will continue to be so. So, if you adopt the "contemporary" scientific approach to knowledge, is is convenient to debunk religion, very easy, but the whole method used by Eco to deconstruct the worldviews that fall under the rubric of "faith" is trapped by its own logic. "Quintessence," "Universal," "Gullibility" - all of these three terms are driven by a foundational condition - an arrogance that we today associate with European and American thought, processed and programmed under a variety of heads such as "enlightenment" and "modernity" - but such a culture of scepticism and arrogance can get us nowhere, we have actually come this far because of "faith" and not otherwise. Two books that counter this supremacy of civilizational discourse which Eco seems to be foregrounding here are "Ideas and Opinions" by Einstein and "Physics and Philosophy" by Werner Heisenberg. Another challenge to the logic of Western reason is succinctly argued in Sigmund Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents."
ReplyDeleteIt is a very interesting observation that 'faith' has driven us thus far. so finally I exclaimed: 'Viva Gullibility'!However, How do you foresee the role of faith in the days ahead? Will it continue to drive us forward? Will some one at a given point of time emerge to tell us that 'Faith' equals 'Gullibility'?
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