The Devil You Know
When I was an undergraduate majoring in Religion, one of my favorite professors1 enjoyed lightening the mood by sometimes invoking one of her own Ten Commandments, which is to say, the tablets any good religious studies student should keep in mind at all times. Many of these were perfectly fair:
“5. Put your own faith in brackets for the classroom duration” is a good way to avoid hurt theological feelings, it is true;
“3. Read canonical texts with suspicion, and try to find out what they are hiding” is a level of healthy paranoia I have tried to bring to my own research;
It never hurts to remember, “4. ‘They’ are smarter than you are, which means: there is always something to learn from a text tradition;”
And I think often of, “7. Due to the danger of totalitarianism, do not remain an idealist past the age of 37” as I approach the year of decision.
But, as in the original 10, the most important one is #1:
Know that religion is often nasty business; it is not always ‘nice.’
I had this venerable obligation in mind this week when reading a recent Politico article about efforts to convert the Jonestown site in Guyana into a proper tourist attraction. It is a short article, but the gist is that a tour operator in Guyana with government backing is interested in refurbishing the remote Peoples Temple compound, now in disrepair, in favor of it becoming a “dark tourism” site, where “tourists could say they visited a place where more than 900 people died on the same day.” There are, accordingly, criticisms raised by a professor at the University of Guyana who finds such retrospective voyeurism to be “ghoulish and bizarre,” as well as (perhaps quixotic) hopes from a near-survivor of Jonestown — a woman who had the good luck to be away in Georgetown when the critical event occurred — that the tour will “provide context and explain why so many people went to Guyana trusting they would find a better life.”
In any case, it is unlikely that concerns over atrocity tourism will be able to halt the inevitable. The Guyanese government has begun to “clear the area ‘to ensure a better product can be marketed,’” for, “after all, we have seen what Rwanda has done with that awful tragedy as an example.”2 The director of “Wonderlust Adventures,” currently planning expeditions to strike out into the rough roads from Port Kaituma, has said that “we think it is about time…it happens all over the world. We have multiple examples of dark, morbid tourism around the world, including Auschwitz and the Holocaust museum.” Politico even got the pilot of Leo Ryan’s plane to go on the record that the old compound should be a “heritage site” (despite some misgivings from the government about “morbid tourism”).
In fairness, it is true that plenty of historical tourism is a form of “morbid tourism.” Even if their results did not nearly reach the horrific levels of the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, plenty of fine forts and castles that now are charming relics were once places from which to project brutal force. But I read something differently into the designator of “morbid tourism” altogether, particularly in the case of Jonestown: the desire to place certain historical sites outside of history altogether, rendered unimaginable and sensational, and thus incomparable. In this I am reminded of an essay (which I am sure I have invoked before) on Jonestown by JZ Smith titled, “The Devil in Mr. Jones.”3
"Nothing Human is Foreign to Me”
While purporting to be a piece finding relevant, historical analogies to the events of Jonestown — and it does accomplish this — the essay of Smith4 is equally an attempt to lay out what, exactly, the post-Enlightenment field “religious studies” is meant to achieve. The opening of the essay is a brief history of the development of a religious studies field which broke from a previous situation — in which to be a student of religion was to be a theology student in a divinity school or seminary — in order to stand up “a humanistic mode within the secular academy” (103). Religious studies would be not the “cultivation of polemics” but “an integral part of the University organization…treated like any other subject.” Smith’s point, as you can guess, is that this polemic-free religious studies, in which you disinterestedly view the history of religions through a humanistic and rationalistic lens, is veiling its own polemical position:
Simply put, the academic study of religion is a child of the Enlightenment. This intellectual heritage is revealed in the notion of generic religion as opposed to historical, believing communities.
To put the matter succinctly, religion was domesticated; it was transformed from pathos to ethos. (104)
The desire to subject religions to rational inquiry is to demand a goal of “achieving intelligibility,” and to defer on this goal — to say that certain events in history are beyond understanding despite their being the products of human actors — is to “leave the study of religion open to the charge of incivility and intolerance.” And for this reason, Smith made the (again, polemical) charge that “one might claim that Jonestown was the most important single event in the history of religions” because of the risk of scholars of religion themselves leaving it “ununderstandable” (ibid.).5
This preface is necessary because Smith then notes all sorts of ways in which Jim Jones and the Guyana compound are described which make no effort to translate them into understandable symbols whatsoever. Jones became merely a “fraud,” a “self-proclaimed messiah,” “fanatical,” a “wrathful, lustful giant” — in other words, merely a “cult leader” who made the mistake of believing what he said and gave in to the temptations of megalomania and the passions. These are not techniques of understanding but of dismissal, as once one has been labelled a “fanatic” or “cult leader,” any further investigation can be stopped by whichever thought-killing cliche is being used.6 These are closer, for Smith, to the “language of religious polemics,” the lurid descriptions of misdeeds in an heresiography, which is to say, the theological approach which is precisely what the academic study of religion in the Euro-American academy was meant to supplant.
Smith — also reminding his reader that “religion has rarely been a positive, liberal force” (and “not nice”) — was concerned that this refusal to truly, intellectually grapple with Jonestown was to “accept prematurely the option of declaring that it is unintelligible and, hence, in some profound sense inhuman” (110-11). The alternative would be to consider whether Jonestown was not “exotic” or the “act of a madman,” but a recognizable human phenomenon with historical parallels. To do otherwise, in this conception, would be to focus only on the “pornography of Jonestown” in the horrific photos, the true-crime details of the “White Night,” the personal behavior of its charismatic leader, and to shirk one’s duty as a good post-Enlightenment scholar.
The first and particularly resonant parallel offered by Smith is that of the Dionysian woman-cult of the Bacchae of Euripides. Dionysus begins by recruiting his followers within the city of Thebes, swaying the women to his cause and serving as “an invasion, as a contagious plague.” Smith notes the pattern of the followers of Dionysus first being rejected by the city by virtue of their “impostures and unruliness,” that there is “no room for this sort of religion within civil space” (113). But when the womanly followers of Dionysus retreat to “their own space,” they are able to live in a “paradise of their own making” (the followers of Dionysus also being a “mixture of ethnic origins,” and thus presenting a supra-ethnic “universality”), inhabiting a “utopian space,” taming nature through the suckling of wild beasts and drawing out wine and milk from the soil (114). That is, until the new Dionysian commune is spied-upon by Pentheus — an “invader,” an outside investigator — at which point the spy is ripped apart by a group including his own mother.
Dionysian cults would not have only existed in drama, but in the world of human society, and they were suppressed by the Roman Senate in 186 B.C.E. For Smith, it is of key importance that these Bacchae were not operating by having removed themselves into a contained utopian space (which may nonetheless be breached by invading forces of curiosity), but lived within the polis in a subversive space, a counterpolis, subject-to but apart-from the civil space of Rome (114-15). Their presence may be addressed by the technologies of the civic sphere — through “trials, executions, banishments, and laws for their suppression” — but the Dionysians are interwoven with the very civic space against which they were likewise a distinct body.
Those familiar with the Jonestown narrative will recognize that Smith is ready to see in the Peoples Temple movement a chronological inversion of these two spatial relationships. Their earlier phases of development saw the Peoples Templars still working within the civil society of the United States, and yet with their own internal hierarchy flowing down from Jones (and with it a parallel system of justice and incentives). Jones likewise would have seen himself as one working to “overcome distinctions” in U.S. society, projecting from the Peoples Temple a vision of actively-cultivated racial harmony that was targeted at that particular third rail in American culture of race relations. Careful readers may note that Jones was something of a darling of the Bay Area Democratic machine, appointed to the San Francisco Housing Authority by George Moscone, but even in those heady days the reports and investigations of harsh dealings within the Jonesian counterpolis were on the horizon (107).
And, indeed, it was the pressure of highly-critical press attention that pushed the movement from its counter-cultural space to its utopian space in Jonestown:
What a miracle it is! Over eight hundred acres of jungle have been cleared since 1974, most of it within the last year…what we found at the collective was a loving community in the true New Testament sense…Jonestown offers a rare opportunity for deep relationships between men and women, young and old, who come from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. (116)
And as it went with the Bachhae, so it went with the Jonestownites: an “invasion from the city” in Congressman Leo Ryan, a “rapid shift from peace to terror” and a hair-spring shift to aggression, fury, and murder. With the utopian space besmirched — and lacking the “supernatural weapons" of the Maenads — there was nowhere else on Earth for the devotees to go to grow their new garden of Eden.7 If you have listened to any sections of the Jonestown tapes (and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing so — not every curious itch needs to be scratched), the message is constantly and hypnotically recurring: there is nowhere else to go. For Smith, the White Night is the culmination of this logic in the frequently-repeated refrains to “step over” from the tainted utopia into whatever paradise (“the green scene thing”) was meant to follow.
Briefly, the second example invoked by Smith — the Oceanic “cargo cult” — is brought in to illuminate not only the statements of Jones around the mass suicide, but the mass destruction of even livestock, pets, and fishponds. For the early 20th century cargo cults cited by Smith would tend to not only work in expectation of the delivery of goods but destroy their own property. The reasoning here would be that the conflagration would evoke a feeling of guilt on the other party, a “gesture designed to elicit shame” (for the cargo cults, the European presence in their midst; for the Peoples Temple, American society). Hence the “revolutionary suicide” of the Jonestown movement, a feeling that “they’ll pay for this…I leave destiny to them,” “them” being the American society that was not convinced of the Jones mission and could not be reformed into his vision (120).
From this, the essay concludes with both a hope for future research, and a plea:
For if we do not persist in the quest for intelligibility, there can be no human sciences, let alone, any place for the study of religion within them.
This is a fitting place to end, as I suspect a main criticism of Smith (particularly in this day and age) would be a question of whether his Enlightenment is a place to find “intelligibility” and the “human sciences.” There are multiple directions from which this reservation might come. If someone has really been getting into post-colonialism, they may argue that the rationalism of the Enlightenment is a mere façade for a Eurocentric worldview, that the idea of objective truth is a myth in the face of conflicting cultural constructions of “truth,” that the very idea of a secular, academic approach to “religion” as a concept is a pet project of European Protestantism in a particular moment-in-time and thus has limited explanatory value for historical or non-European “religions.”8 One could also imagine (as I have written about before) what would be considered more conservative critiques of the Enlightenment being envisioned here, whether from the perspective that the Enlightenment-rationalist approach to religion is insufficient in capturing the driving force of religion in human affairs;9 and/or that to suggest there is a political-religious dichotomy, that a (rationalist) civic sphere can be broken off from (irrational/suprarational?) metaphysical underpinnings, is already off base. In general, I wonder if such an essay as Smith’s would be written today simply because of cultural (really, civilizational) exhaustion towards the very stakes and concepts that the work suggests require urgent attention.
Without trying to resolve the question of the Enlightenment any further, I’d like to return to modern Guyana. In the Politico article above, notice how much is focused on the “pornography of Jonestown,” as Smith would put it: the idea of “morbid tourism,” the hope of allowing “tourists to get a first-hand understanding[!] of its layout and what had happened,” a “prurient interest in tragedy” (an interest to what end, one might ask). This does not strike me as a real effort to understand Jonestown as a phenomenon, so much as to sensationalize the event in much the same way that Smith criticizes throughout his essay. To visit in such a manner would be to feel a rush of adrenaline, to indulge one’s voyeruistic feelings of standing on cursed ground —essentially, entertainment.
There are other voices quoted in the article, though, which I think speak to another avenue of meaning in reconstructing such a site, such as Jordan Vilchez who, herself, narrowly missed attending the White Night. The article tellingly notes her hope that “any situation where people were manipulated into their deaths should be treated with respect.” I think it is fair to wonder whether “Wonderlust Adventures” is the sort of organization which allow a site of tragedy the gravity it deserves, but note the reference to “any situation.”
This strikes me as the balancing act for any site commemorating something that is viewed as particularly tragic. On the one hand, the very creation of the memorial is a recognition of the exceptional, of suffering that happened in a way that was “unusual,” or at such a scale that we as human society feel that it cannot be ignored. But on the other, these are events carried out by humans, against humans, and therefore— as uncomfortable as it is to acknowledge — we, as humans, could just as well be in the role of perpetrators or followers. Consider the quote included by Smith from a Methodist preacher in Reno who lost two daughters in the White Night:
Jonestown people were human beings. Except for the caring relationship with us, Jonestown would be names, “cultists,” “fanatics,” “kooks.” Our children are real to you, because you knew [us]. [My wife] and I could describe for you many of the dead. You would think that we were describing people whom you know, members of our church. (111)
This is the sort of reflection on the humanity of the whole situation which is much less comfortable to consider, and as such, is much harder to bring to mind than the sensationalism of lurid details or the condemnation of “cult.” It demands a look into something that is human to the core, but which is “nasty business” nonetheless.
A list which largely encompassed the entire department, in fairness.
I promise I am not embellishing these quotes.
The title is a play on a 1973 adult film The Devil in Miss Jones, which also, incredibly, includes an homage to Sartre’s No Exit. To quote an anonymous YouTube commenter on the trailer for the film, “Even porn films were philosophical and more intelligent back then lol. Everything has been dumbed down.” We all confront the slippage of cultural standards in our own way.
I’ll include page numbers from my copy in case anyone else wants to take a look at the essay in full: Smith, Jonathan Z. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Smith also distinguishes between “tolerance” and “relativism” — for “tolerance” is the ability to recognize that a culture different than one’s own cannot be judged in reference to one’s own, but against a more “universal” criteria such as the “rules of reason.” This is in contradistinction to a relativism which states that “what counts as true in my language may not even be able to be described in yours,” that translatability across cultures (and with it the humanistic enterprise itself) is impossible. One might claim this is itself an Enlightenment claim to a “reason” which is not universal, but I have read appeals to rationally demonstrated proofs (burhan) as a guidepost for intellectual inquiry in, for example, Ibn Rushd, who, I am certain, slightly predated the Enlightenment.
This is not exclusive to “cult,” and applies to other loaded terminology which one could see in media descriptions of unsavory events. “Terrorist” is likely the most dominant one of our age, as it is used not only to designate violence directed against innocent civilians in the name of a political cause, but also to suggest that further inquiry into such an evil group is not really necessary (or that a neutral and academic approach to them would itself be immoral). One could imagine that attempts to historicize such activity, to consider their membership sociologically, or merely to discuss them without immediate invocations of good and evil, could be met with accusations of sympathizing with said militant movement. I would invite people who would consider the contextualization of terrorism as sympathy with said militants’ political aims to see that it is not sympathizing, but humanizing, and these are not synonymous. To humanize is not to suggest moral approval given what we know about the history of humanity, and to suggest that putting “terrorist” movements under humanistic inquiry is to approve of them is to have a very rosy idea of what it means to be human. If anything, a way to build one’s moral discipline and retain one’s moral humility is to remember that the perpetrators of even what we consider horrific crimes are all-too-human.
It was an agricultural commune in (relatively) unspoiled backcountry, after all.
I’m not wholly convinced of this given the distinction between din and dunya, “religion” and “the world” (used in this sense in “the worldly” or, by implication in certain contexts, “the political”) which is discussed in pre-modern Islamic texts. While there is often philological hair-splitting about whether the din in the dichotomy can really be understood as “religion,” and whether dunya can encompass “worldly affairs/politics” — as with any loaded terms, these have plenty of baggage with them — I think it is perfectly fair to see their usage as approximating the religious sciences in contradistinction to the political or social sciences. Follow-up objections might be that these are fuzzy boundaries, for one (fair enough — sounds like human categories, to me); and for two, they operate within a particular theological worldview, and thus the dunya-sciences are not fully “secular.” While I think this doesn’t necessarily have to follow (do you have to be an atheist to have the humanistic sciences?), it is a valid critique of the European Enlightenment also leveled by European conservatives, as I will discuss in the next sentence above.
(Spengler talks about this in the second volume of the Decline.)