- Are some truths dangerous and should therefore be hidden?
- Are some truths incomprehensible and therefore rightly obscured?
- Do some truths cause immorality if not understood or applied ‘properly’?
If so, who should the guardian be? And with what legitimacy do they claim this right?
Related to:
- Gnosticism
- Gatekeeping
- Mansplaining
- Infantilisation / patronising
- Political freedom
- Equality and class
Why should it matter to me?
I’m motivated by an egalitarian value to make facts, theories and ideas easy to access and understand. It could be considered pro-plebeian or even populist. It is clear that some forms of knowledge occlusion are about protecting and rationing access to privilege
That said, in the era of the internet, there is more knowledge available than there has ever been, so is it just a kind of language game? (not to misuse Wittgenstein’s term).
Esotericism
Similar to occultism (that which is hidden), esotericism is the revelation of the inside of things. That is, that there are secrets hidden in plain sight that only those with certain methods can reveal.
There are many practices and knowledges that can be considered esoteric, I have selected a few that have been major themes of my study:
Numerology
This attracts me as I have much exposure to the Christian Bible due to my upbringing, and was early entranced by what mathematics can do in its application to computing. I started Programming at a very young age and also studied maths and statistics in university for my undergraduate.
I discuss numerology in detail in my book A Critical Introduction to Tarot, particularly Ch. 2 Pythagoras and Kabbalah, Ch. 3 Layers of Meaning and Ch. 7 Randomness and Projection. My conclusion was that numerology is only valid when it reveals intentionally planted secrets in encodings by human authors. This is a materialist conclusion to be sure. There are examples of such encodings and it is quite interesting to reveal them. Others are coincidental accidents that are imbued with meaning and become well-known. But much is as a framework.
Unlike some other esoteric practices that have some plausibility (depending though on some controversial ontological assumptions), numerology is a much more clear example of a misunderstanding of meaning-collision, what I have called (and originally coined) in one of my Articles syndesiophilia, or the love of connection.
(Note that even coining a word such as syndesiophilia is a kind of Obscurantism in language that I often find trite and a form of gatekeeping! That I did it in that essay was intended to be playful and also to ‘play that game’, to try it on as a style.)
Obscurantism in language
Especially academic and other technical language.
A good example of this is the Ologies podcast in which academics and experts are interviewed on their field of study (what the suffix ology means) for a popular audience. I came across it when a researcher in Trinity College Dublin (and associated with the ADAPT Centre where I work) Dr. Abeba Birhane, was interviewed recently on the ‘ology’ of Artificial Intelligence Ethicology.
Looking at some of the other more obscure ‘ologies’ of previous episodes, we find ones that don’t even have a wikipedia page such as salugenology (well-being), canistrumology (basket making) and ambystomology (family of amphibians including the famed axolotl). There are, of course, more usual ones such as cardiology and post-viral epidemiology as well as neologisms more easily parsable, such as confectionology (sweets, candy).
Ancient and classical Greek and Roman culture cast a long shadow on the intellectual world even to the present, especially in the West, so this is hardly surprising. And it is clear that the Ologies podcast is having some fun here, perhaps even poking fun at this very tradition (I’ll admit that I have not listened widely enough of it to know).
But it seems right to question if these obscure uses are really more correct, which seems to me to be the general sentiment. It persists, for example, in the idea that the true name for an animal is its Latin Linnaean taxonomic designation, or the binomial nomenclature.
This is all due, of course, to Latin being the lingua franca (again, it seems we cannot escape it) of scholarship of Europe in the Middle Ages. This will have been distinct from Arabic scholars at the same time. (I don’t really know enough about this interaction to comment further, one for a Pin 📌).
These considerations also recall to me the preference of Tolkien (see Headcanon) for Germanic words in English for his writing, not Latinate words, such as we find in technical academic language but also in many words imported from French. (I’ve read this somewhere but should find its reference—Pin 📌).
Finally, for me personally, the bristle is largely the gatekeeping aspect and the sneering insistence that one uses the right words for things. I do ‘play this game’ sometimes in my writing as a matter of matching a certain tone, but it is something that often causes me to reflect on this state of affairs.