Hubbard insisted that the principles of Dianetics had nothing to do with ‘any mumbo-jumbo of mysticism or spiritualism or religion’. He assured readers that ‘Dianetics is a science; as such, it has no opinion about religion, for sciences are based on natural laws.’ Throughout the United States, people formed Dianetics clubs and helped each other to become ‘clear’: in this state, they would be free of all compulsions, neuroses and delusions, see colours vividly for the first time, appreciate melody, perform complex mathematical calculations and recall every moment of their lives. Hubbard was so confident of the merits of his electro-psychometer, a device used to detect hidden trauma by measuring galvanic skin response, that he asked the American Medical Association to investigate his new tool. The medical establishment showed no interest. In a review in the Nation, the kindest thing the psychiatrist Milton Sapirstein could say about Dianetics was that ‘the author seems honestly to believe what he has written.’
Hubbard took the rejection badly. When his followers were arrested for practising medicine without a licence, he complained that the United States made it ‘illegal to heal or cure anything’. He began to reconsider the distinction he’d made between psychology and spiritual practice. In a 1953 newsletter he wrote that the process of uncovering repressed memories through auditing is ‘perhaps allied with religion, perhaps a mystic practice and possibly just another form of Christian Science or plain Hubbardian nonsense’. The following year, embracing what he called the ‘religious angle’, he opened the first church of Scientology in Los Angeles. The electro-psychometer was no longer used as a diagnostic tool but became instead a ‘valid religious instrument, used in Confessionals’.
In The Church of Scientology, one of only a handful of academic treatments of the subject, Hugh Urban is less interested in the experiences of Scientologists than in the legal processes and semantic twists through which a set of beliefs becomes a religion. A professor of religious studies at Ohio State, Urban is interested in secrecy in religion, and in this book he chronicles the way Hubbard reacted to legal and political challenges to his authority by attempting (largely successfully) to conceal his theories from the public. Had he stuck with his original conception of Dianetics, his practices could have been investigated and judged according to scientific standards. A religion, on the other hand, can turn self-help platitudes into a scarce and privileged resource; criticism can be dismissed as intolerance, or persecution.
Like any therapy, Scientology appealed to people searching for a story that would explain why they hadn’t made the most of their lives. Hubbard’s disavowal of medicine required only slight adjustments. He replaced the term ‘brain’ (and tentative references to its architecture) with ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’, and expanded his concept of time. If a patient (called a ‘pre-clear’) couldn’t remember being abused, an auditor would encourage her to think about her experience in the womb; if she couldn’t recall any trauma there, she was urged to reflect on previous lives, in other galaxies, spanning hundreds or thousands of years. Through their recovered memories, pre-clears were initiated into the Scientology mythos, which hinges on the story of an intergalactic dictator called Xenu who 75 million years ago collaborated with psychiatrists to massacre a population of aliens whose tortured essences now inhabit the bodies of humans.
Scientology quickly became one of the loudest (and least articulate) voices in the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s – a time when doctors still had unfettered authority to administer drugs to unwilling patients. (The first international edition of the Scientology magazine, Freedom, showed horned devils performing lobotomies.) To Scientologists the ‘psychs’ were conspirators who wanted to take over the world. The new church’s survival depended on the claim – born of rejection and disappointment – that only religion is equipped to study the mind.
But Hubbard never let go of the dream that the world would become explicable through science. Since he lacked credentials, he defined his practice in the vaguest terms: ‘All we want is something with a high degree of workability, that’s all any scientist needs.’ Science was a perspective rather than a method. The proof that Scientology worked was Hubbard’s own life. In his book Mission into Time, he claimed he had finally triumphed over his unconscious; he now remembered ‘with certainty’ every moment of his existence. ‘The small details of it like what I ate for breakfast two trillion years ago are liable to go astray here and there,’ he wrote, ‘but otherwise it’s no mystery.’
Hubbard had begun exploring the redemptive possibilities of science in the 1930s and 1940s, when he was writing the voluminous short stories that appeared – he produced nearly 100,000 words a month – in Astounding Science Fiction, the most popular US magazine of its kind. His stories were crass, overdetermined and breezy; his heroes morally, mentally and physically superior to the rest of humanity. He had an exalted sense of his creative powers, but in any case held that artists were higher beings, superior to the ‘raw public’, which had been ‘booby-trapped’ into believing in a single reality.
Hubbard’s novel Typewriter in the Sky, published in 1940, tells the story of Horace Hackett, a writer who turns his best friend into a character in his own novel. Every time Hackett makes a creative decision, his friend’s reality changes: he moves helplessly through scenes, ‘swept along by a force which was wholly invisible and untouchable’. At the end of a long day’s work, Hackett muses, glass of Scotch in hand, that ‘the way you feel about stories sometimes. It’s – well, sort of divine.’ The story ‘comes bubbling out of us like music’. ‘When I go knocking out the wordage and really get interested in my characters,’ he continued, ‘it almost makes me feel like – a god or something.’
Soon Hubbard began interpreting that power literally, and many of his colleagues lost interest in his work. An extract from Dianetics was published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1950 and, according to Judith Merril, a frequent contributor, it became a ‘line of demarcation’. She saw it as marking the end of the magazine’s golden era: instead of using fantasy to pose questions that challenged social norms, it now prescribed fantastic solutions that were increasingly out of touch with the world.
Hubbard’s most devoted readers were absorbed into his fan-fiction empire; as they remembered their past lives, they became characters in his catch-all narrative. At each level of the process they attained new knowledge that enriched the fictional universe for them. The promised denouement was ascension on earth, a prospect that Hubbard regularly elaborated by writing new chapters, or ‘doctrine’. The religion would create a supremely rational species capable of all sorts of amazing feats – healing the sick, communicating with plants, levitating…
How To Start A Religion: The History Of Scientology And L. Ron Hubbard
January 21, 2012
LRB:
Empirical study led L. Ron Hubbard to the principles on which Scientology is based. He never claimed to have had a revelation. He spelled the principles out in 1950 inDianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the bestselling self-help treatise in which he presents rationality as our birthright. The human mind, he wrote, is a perfect computer corrupted by ‘incorrect data’. He urged readers to reflect on their lives and ask themselves: ‘Where is the error?’ With the help of a lay therapist, called an ‘auditor’, they could uncover early traumas – mothers who wanted to abort them, or slept with too many men – and become less irrational: ‘Many of the things which Freud thought might exist,’ he wrote, ‘such as “life in the womb”, “birth trauma”, we in Dianetics have … confirmed.’
