Misusing Nonsense
Nonsense draws evil after it.
C. S. Lewis
A few individuals misappropriate the powers of nonsense to manipulate others. The theory developed in this book makes it easier to recognize misuses of nonsense and to blunt their ill effects. This chapter will examine six common patterns or contexts of misusing nonsense. Specifically, nonsense has been used for imposture, bogus prophecies, totalitarian control, mock profundity, pseudoscientific theories, and self-deception.
Imposture
Impostors are colorful, charismatic figures who sometimes come to the attention of forensic psychiatrists and law enforcement officers. Impostors beguile others with fabricated tales of their supposed personal accomplishments and adventures. Impostors pretend to be intelligence agents, military heroes, royalty, or, in one case, a space shuttle pilot. Nonsense is one of impostors’ favorite tools for fooling their gullible admirers.
In 1701 a blond, blue-eyed Frenchman who was only seventeen years old appeared in England. He identified himself as Psalmanazar, although nobody ever learned his real name. Psalmanazar told everyone he was a Christianized cannibal from the recently discovered island of Formosa. He ate raw meat and went around semi nude in public. Psalmanazar’s fabricated descriptions of his supposed homeland held people spellbound, and he soon gathered a large following. In 1704 Psalmanazar published an illustrated book describing the customs, religion, and architecture of Formosa, and the book quickly became a major bestseller.
Psalmanazar told his enthralled audiences that Formosans sacrificed eighteen thousand male infants annually as a religious rite. He said that great herds of elephants and giraffes roamed his homeland. He claimed that Formosans lived to be a hundred years old and were rich in gold and silver.
To support the character he invented, Psalmanazar devised a meaningless mock language, complete with a nonsense alphabet, which he claimed was “Formosan.” He made a prayer book and carried it as a prop. Inside were crude drawings of the sun, moon, and stars, together with passages written in his mock language. He pretended to read from the book as he muttered his nonsensical “Formosan prayers.”
Psalmanazar’s nonsense impressed the Bishop of London, who sent the young man to Oxford University to teach his mock language to seminarians. The seminarians were preparing to sail to Formosa as missionaries, so Psalmanazar translated the catechism into “Formosan.” When distinguished linguists examined the document, they declared that Psalmanazar’s nonsense was a real language; they reasoned that such a young man could not have made it up.
A Jesuit who had recently returned from traveling in Asia happened into one of Psalmanazar’s lectures and challenged the impostor. Psalmanazar denounced the priest as a liar and quickly turned the audience on the priest. Psalmanazar fooled the public for a decade until someone exposed him. Impostors attract followers who have low self-esteem. Seeing an impostor exude boundless self-confidence makes his followers forget their own insecurity for a while. Hence, exposing an impostor doesn’t immediately change his followers’ minds. Instead, followers vent their anger on the person who reveals the truth. An impostor’s fans must be left alone until they dream themselves out.
Sometimes impostors pass themselves off as members of professions that the public tends to glamorize, such as medical doctors or attorneys. When they do, they use mock professional jargon to create an illusion. Only an expert can distinguish an impostor’s nonsense from actual professional terminology.
Bogus Prophecies
Nonsense has been used for bogus prophecies and fortune telling. While there are true psychics in this world, people’s eagerness to read meaning into nonsense is a prime factor in the success of bogus fortunetellers. Hence, nonsense and prophecy have always gone hand in hand. For instance, unintelligible nonsense was the stock-in-trade of the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi. A prophetess sat on a bronze tripod that stood over a hole in the floor of a subterranean chamber. Ethylene gas rose through the hole, escaping from fissures deep in the earth beneath the oracle, and filled the chamber.
Oracle seekers stood outside the chamber and addressed their questions to the god Apollo. The prophetess, who was the presumed mouthpiece of Apollo, heard the questions and then inhaled ethylene. When she did, she drifted into a mildly intoxicated, trancelike state.
Ethylene is a hydrocarbon gas that was once commonly used for anesthesia. Inhaling it makes people jabber in incoherent nonsense. Hence, the prophetesses at Delphi uttered meaningless, unintelligible verbiage in response to petitioners’ questions.
Resident expert interpreters were stationed outside the chamber. They listened intently, trying their best to make sense of what Apollo was saying, and then they reworked the prophetess’s meaningless nonsense into semi-intelligible verses known as enigmas, or riddles. The enigmas left petitioners wondering what they meant. Hence, Delphi oracles became a watchword for obscurity. Nevertheless, the oracle was a major force in history, and it directly influenced decisions that shaped Western civilization. Evidently it is important to understand the role of nonsense in prophecy.
The typology of nonsense helps explain the prophecies of some renowned seers. We have identified and described multiple types of deliberate nonsense. Therefore, we can now identify those types, even when they occur in prophetic writings, which are purportedly meaningful and intelligible. This technique reveals the truth about one of the most famous fortune-tellers of history: Nostradamus.
Some claimed that Nostradamus’s prophecies were nonsense, even during his lifetime. That is still a standard criticism of Nostradamus’s writings, although until now, there has been no rational method to definitively prove it. The typology of nonsense provides such a method. Specifically, analysis of the selections below demonstrates that Nostradamus’s writings used categorical nonsense, nonsense names, non-referential pronouns, figurative nonsense, non-junctive nonsense, and numerative nonsense, all indicated in italics.
Categorical nonsense:
The divine word will give to the substance,
Including heaven, earth, gold hidden in the mystic milk65
Nonsense name:
The Religion of the name of the seas will win out
Against the sect of the son of “Adaluncatif”66
“Samarobryn” one hundred leagues from the hemisphere67
A just one will be sent back again into exile,
Through pestilence to the confines of “Nonseggle”68
Non-referential pronoun:
They will live without law exempt from politics.69
To near the Lake of Geneva will it be conducted,
By the foreign maiden wishing to betray the city.70
Figurative nonsense and non-junctive nonsense:
His replay to the red one will cause him to be misled,
The King withdrawing to the Frog and the Eagle.71
Numerative nonsense:
The blood of the just will commit a fault at London,
Burnt through lightning of twenty threes the six72
Of Paris bridge, Lyons wall Montpellier,
After six hundreds and seven score three pairs.73
Non-junctive nonsense:
The stubborn, lamented sect will be afraid
Of the two wounded by A and A.74
The mental effect of these verses is like that of other nonsense writings we have studied. They stimulate a flow of odd mental images, half-formed ideas, and fragmentary chains of thought. Such nonsense verses taunt the mind. Hence, Nostradamus’s prophecies inspired volume upon volume of learned interpretations, yet Nostradamians seldom agree in their interpretations of particular prophecies.
One Nostradamian maintained that the nonsense name “Samorobryn” referred to Sam R. O’Brien, an American space station astronaut of the 1970s. Other commentators were intrigued with “supelman,” another of Nostradamus’s nonsense names. Apparently, they conjectured that it might refer to Superman, the cartoon character.
Nostradamus wrote other prophecies that are intelligible but vague. Such prophecies are abstract formulas that invite readers to use their own imagination to fill in the blanks.
These vague prophecies are so nonspecific that they are bound to come true eventually. The two prophecies below are examples:
Two royal brothers will wage war so fiercely
That between them the war will be so mortal
That both will occupy the strong places:
Their great quarrel will fill realm and life.75
Some of those most lettered in the celestial facts
Will be condemned by illiterate princes:
Punished by Edict, hunted, like criminals,
And put to death wherever they will be found.76
This is a highly effective method for writing tantalizing prophecies, for when a vague but meaningful prophecy comes true, it lends credibility to the nonsensical prophecies. Apparent confirmation of a vague prophecy drives Nostradamians to work harder to uncover the “true meaning” of the unintelligible prophecies.
Accordingly, this is additional evidence that nonsense interacts dynamically with meaningful language. That is, nonsense sometimes acts synergistically with meaningful language to produce enhanced, combined effects. For instance, earlier we saw that this effect occurs in nursery rhymes like “Hickory Dickory Dock.” The nonsense line is placed at the beginning and end, and when the nursery rhyme is recited without its nonsensical part, it falls flat. Hence, in nursery rhymes, the nonsense energizes the meaningful part. In Nostradamus’s writings, though, the meaningful prophecies energize the nonsensical ones.
Other prophets employed this same technique of mixing nonsensical and meaningful language. For example, Robert Nixon was born in England in 1467. He was an illiterate farmhand who had a habit of talking nonsense to himself as he plowed the fields. One day he suddenly stopped plowing and began giving a blow-by-blow account of a heated battle. Everyone assumed that it was a battle in his own mind that was bothering him. Later, however, the bystanders learned that a battle that matched Nixon’s description had been taking place at the same time far away. So, thereafter, Nixon was regarded as a seer. Some of his recorded prophecies are displayed below. Here we see the same interweaving of vague but meaningful prophecies with others that are nonsense.
Vague but meaningful:
A great man shall come into England,
But the son of a King
Shall take from him the victory.77
Figurative nonsense:
The cock of the North shall be made to flee,
And his feather be plucked for his pride,
That he shall almost curse the day that he was born.78
Vague but meaningful:
Through our own money and our men,
Shall a dreadful war begin.79
Non-junctive nonsense:
Between the sickle and the suck,
All England shall have a pluck.80
Numerative nonsense:
Between seven, eight, and nine,81
Numerative nonsense:
In England wonders shall be seen;
Between nine and thirteen
All sorrow shall be done!82
In an exercise, my students wrote their own nonsense prophecies after studying those of Nostradamus and Robert Nixon. Often, the students’ nonsensical prognostications were indistinguishable from those of renowned seers. Completing the exercise enabled the students to reflect on how the mind processes prophetic writings.
Totalitarian Control
Nonsense has been used for enforcing totalitarian rule. The idea of governments using nonsense to repress people is better known as a literary theme than as historical reality. George Orwell wrote two novels in which dictatorships employed nonsensical formulas for political control. In 1984, an authoritarian figure known as Big Brother indoctrinated the public with meaningless slogans such as “War is Peace,” “Love is Hate,” and “Freedom is Slavery.” The nonsensical proclamations induced a mental state known as doublethink, in which people would assent to two directly opposite and contradictory ideas at the same time. Apparently, bombarding people with nonsense numbed their minds into submission.
In Orwell’s Animal Farm, barnyard animals took over after a farmer died and instituted a government among themselves. The liberated animals’ charter for self-government began by stating, “All animals are equal.” However, pigs gradually outmaneuvered other creatures and gained political control. They amended the charter to say, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Marxist ideology, which dominated the Soviet Union for seventy years, was built partly on formulaic precepts that made no sense. For instance, the slogan “Property is theft!” —coined by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon—became a popular slogan among members of the Communist Party, yet the words of the statement simply cancel each other out in a memorable self-contradiction. That is, equating property with theft destroys the meanings of both terms. Nevertheless, the meaningless slogan resonated strongly with fiery revolutionary sentiments that were prevalent at the time.
Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy used nonsensical chants at mass rallies to promote social bonding. People would recite a chant of nonsense syllables. The chant was unintelligible nonsense, but it supposedly helped bind Fascists to their leader and to the state.
Even in free democratic societies, officials may lapse into talking nonsense when they are under pressure to downplay embarrassing bungles. For example, after a seemingly senseless attack on a village in Vietnam, the United States Army needed to explain the action. A spokesman said, “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”
Mock Profundity
Nonsense has been used for projecting an illusion of profundity. Some eminent intellectuals had a knack for writing nonsense that sounds profound. For example, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) started an academic craze known as deconstruction, which was based solely on nonsense definitions and obscure, meaningless verbiage. Derrida gained legions of swooning followers who were impressed by his nonsensical pronouncements such as “Thinking is what we already know we have not yet begun.”83 He laced his lectures with enigmatic nonsense like “Oh, my friends, there is no friend.”84
Professors at major American universities fell under Derrida’s spell. Graduate students wrote profound-sounding dissertations to elucidate his incoherent musings. Pretty soon, aspiring students had to master this kind of nonsense writing to get their degrees. In other words, Derrida and his followers talked nonsense as a technique of intellectual posturing.
Purportedly, deconstruction invalidated all literary, philosophical, political, and historical works. Derrida explained that such works were devoid of truth or meaning because of inherent confusions and contradictions in language. Deconstruction got caught up in its own sweeping generalization, for Derrida’s work itself is a literary, historical, and philosophical text, such as deconstruction attacks. That means that deconstruction itself is devoid of truth and meaning. In other words, deconstruction invalidated itself.
Deconstruction was based solely on nonsense definitions, and Derrida and his devotees were never able to give a coherent, meaningful definition of it. For example, he tried once again in 1993 when he lectured at a law school in New York. He said, “Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible.”85
Pseudo-profound nonsense can also be created by capitalizing abstract words and putting them together into grammatical sentences. Words like “being,” “pure,” “absolute,” “unity,” “the One,” “transcendent,” “immanent,” and “essence” work well for writing this type of profound-sounding nonsense. Throwing in phrases like “in itself” helps, too. The formula results in sentences like “Being-in-itself is the pure essence of transcendent Unity.” Or “The Absolute is immanent in pure being.” Such sentences sound profound, but the sound of profoundness is all there is to them. Hegel and Heidegger are examples of philosophers who gained fame by mastering that kind of nonsense writing.
In my courses on nonsense, I explained this pattern to my students. Then, in an exercise, they tried writing nonsense of this type. Once they learned the rules of formulation, they were able to write sentences of pseudo-profound nonsense that were indistinguishable from those of eminent philosophers.
Even so, reading pseudo-profound nonsense gives some readers an agreeable experience of thinking deep thoughts. That experience may even sometimes stimulate their minds to come up with a worthwhile idea. For example, a friend of mine who is a renowned psychotherapist and scholar of world religions reported that very effect. In graduate school he read many tomes by famous authors of pseudo-profound nonsense. Even then, he said, he realized that the writings were unintelligible nonsense, yet he also acknowledged that reading those authors played an important role in his intellectual development. As C. J. Lichtenberg said, “Trying to make sense of impenetrable nonsense sometimes inspires exciting new ideas.”
Pseudoscientific Theories
Pseudoscience is a form of mock professional jargon. Specifically, pseudoscience is nonsense that is modeled on scientific discourse. The works of George F. Gillette (1875–1948), one of America’s great crackpots, are a prime example of pseudoscientific writings. Gillette’s self-published books, including Orthodox Oxen and Rational, Non-Mystical Cosmos, are filled with nonsense definitions, categorical nonsense, and numerative nonsense.
Gillette was insanely jealous of Albert Einstein and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Gillette propounded his own competing theory of the spiral universe and “back screwing theory of gravity.” Gillette never defined the fundamental unit of his theory—the indivisible “unimote.” Instead, he built on the notion by claiming that the universe is a “supraunimote,” while the cosmos is the “maximote.”
Gillette went on to add that the “ultimote” is the “Nth sub-universe plane.” Gillette also said, “Gravitation is naught but that reaction in the form of sub-planar solar systems screwing through higher plane masses.” Furthermore, he held that “each ultimote is simultaneously an integral part of zillions of otherplane units and only thus is its infinite allplane velocity and energy subdivided into zillions of finite planar quotas of velocity and energy.”
Gillette was convinced that his nonsensical musings made perfect sense. While they may sound like scientific writings to a layperson, scientists would understand that Gillette’s theory is unintelligible nonsense, although they might be unable to prove it. However, the typology developed in this book provides a rational method of demonstrating that Gillette’s works contain nonsense definitions, categorical nonsense, and numerative nonsense.
Self-Deception
As Robert Frost said with self-depreciating humor, “Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.” John Kenneth Galbraith said with sarcastic irony that “it is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to set out on the troubled seas of thought.” Jacques Barzun said with dark foreboding that “intellect deteriorates after every surrender to folly. Unless we consciously resist, the nonsense does not pass by us, but into us.” All three authors said the same thing: namely, that people sometimes use nonsense to deceive themselves. Literary critic A. S. Byatt elaborated on that theme in her novel Babel Tower. A male character reflecting on his male relatives’ religious obsessions concluded that
It is possible for human beings to spend the whole of their lives on nonsense. And not only that, but perhaps there was a trap, a quirk, a temptation in the nature of language itself that led people, that induced them to spend the whole of their lives on nonsense.
Others might maintain that the notion of self-deception is self-contradictory. After all, the idea of deceiving somebody seems to involve keeping something secret from that person. How, though, could one keep a secret from oneself? The concept does not seem to make sense.
Even so, as a psychiatrist and people-watcher, I concede that people do sometimes seem to deceive themselves. That is, people have mental mechanisms whereby they keep themselves in the dark about things that they are clearly in a position to know.
Perhaps self-deception also plays a role in other misuses of nonsense: imposture, fortunetelling, totalitarian control, intellectual posturing, and pseudoscience. Evidently, nonsense sometimes hijacks mental machinery that is ordinarily responsible for logical thinking and intelligent judgment. In that regard, the theory of nonsense can be a useful adjunct for guiding critical thinking.
65. Leoni, Nostradamus and His Prophecies, 193.
66. Leoni, Nostradamus and His Prophecies, 441.
67. Ibid., 281.
68. Ibid., 293.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., 253.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid., 177.
73. Leoni, Nostradamus and His Prophecies, 207.
74. Ibid., 441.
75. Leoni, Nostradamus and His Prophecies, 219.
76. Ibid., 225.
77. Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 199.
78. Ibid., 199–200.
79. Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 200.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 93.
84. Powell, Jacques Derrida, 200.
85. Kandell, “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74.”