While flying across Canada, I read Roland Barthes’ best-known book, Mythologies. As I waited in Toronto at Pearson International Airport, I read the translator’s note, the two prefaces, and his essay on wrestling. Somewhere over Lake Superior, I read about Roman haircuts in movies from the ’50’s. I waved to the people of Winnipeg as I read about Soap-powders and Detergents, then on to Operation Margarine. Over the prairies, I read about Garbo’s face and Einstein’s brain. Flying in to Calgary, I read about Striptease and the New Citroën. On the stopover in Calgary, I started in on Barthes’s more formal discussion — a semiotic account of the structure of mythology — an explanation of what he had been doing in each of the short essays that had gone before. I finished as we landed in Kamloops, but I couldn’t help pondering something he wrote way back in his original preface. So my mind snapped like a rubber band back to Toronto.
In his first preface, Barthes set out his project:
The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ”naturalness” with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history. In short, in the account given of our contemporary circumstances, I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there.
Barthes sought to expose “the falsely obvious.” His strategy was to reveal the underlying mythologic structure (which he treated as a kind of language) that supported the various cultural artifacts he found within easy reach – mostly artifacts from pop culture.
But near the end of his preface, he wrote: “”Demystification” — to use a word which is beginning to show signs of wear — is not an Olympian operation.” In itself, that sentence is not particularly startling. What is startling is that he wrote it in 1957.
Think about it. Nearly two generations ago, a French academic on the bleeding edge of Western intellectual trends had identified demystification as a fad that had already run its course.
Too bad his observation never trickled down into popular discourse. Here I am in 2010 and still I hear people talking about demystification as if it’s the latest version of Microsoft Word and guaranteed to present documents in a shiny new light. I hear it most frequently in theological circles, although that may be because theology is the latest discipline I’ve dabbled in. Theologians demystify the Bible with text criticism (itself an aging strategy). They demystify God as a reified aspect of our own personalities. They demystify the priest by exposing the priesthood’s origins in an ancient and outmoded cosmogony. Etc.
So why does demystification persist as a strategy, especially in theological circles? Here are three answers. I suspect all three are a little bit right (and maybe a little bit wrong, too).
1. Demystification describes a natural process that we all engage in as we mature. As we grow up, we discover that there is no Santa Claus, nor a tooth fairy. We learn that a mother’s love is never pure because all mothers are human and have emotional needs that tend to get mixed in with expressions of love. We learn about betrayal. And we discover that murkiness is a fact of life because words and the meanings they convey are invariably ambiguous. Demystification is just a fancier word for growing up. And since everyone has to grow up, demystification will be with us for a long time — maybe not as a deliberate strategy, but certainly as the description of a process.
2. Demystification may persist in religious circles because it is, in fact, a new interpretive tool. This is related to the complaint of progressive theologians that there is a huge gap between academic institutions where professors of theology think big thoughts and places of worship where ordinary people gather. It may be that clergy are to blame for this gap; they have failed to act as a conduit between big thoughts and everyday experience. More likely, the reason is fear. People experience great anxiety when their cherished notions are subject to the shattering blows of demystification. They’d rather pretend the blows were never struck.
3. The people who talk about demystification are Peter Pan believers who refuse to grow up. This perhaps is the most damning reason for the persistence of demystification. I see it in the so-called “new atheists”, a group of mostly middle-aged white men who are intellectually mired and appeal to ideas their grandfathers ought to have discarded. They’re the kind of men who tell three-year-olds that Santa Claus doesn’t exist and they justify themselves by saying that it’s a matter of integrity. But most grown ups don’t need to repeat without end that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. They know intuitively that integrity is a concept with reasonable limits and so they move on. And when they have children of their own, they approach the matter of Santa Claus with a sense of fun, maybe even of nostalgia. Grown ups are grown up because they find fresh ways to think about themselves in relation to the world they inhabit.
Growing up never stops. At least it shouldn’t stop. One of the qualities that keeps adulthood from becoming a dead end is intellectual curiosity. When Barthes observed that demystification was showing signs of wear, he didn’t empty his desk and retire. Instead, he asked: “What next?” That engaged him in conversations with Jacques Derrida and deconstructionism. And after that? And after that?
We all must ask: “What next?” Not because we’re engaged in some kind of race. And not because knowing the next next thing will confer on us some kind of status. But because knowledge has an intrinsic value. We’ll never realize its value if we allow ourselves to become stuck in tired patterns of thinking.