The Slow Work: Why The Village Will Never Work

1.

In 2004, M. Night Shyamalan released a movie called The Village.  Critical reception was not great, but I enjoyed it a great deal when I saw it in the theatre.  I have thought about this movie a number of times since then, and it I think it fundamentally a fable about a certain kind of attitude that we see commonly, especially in religious circles.  To explain this, I need to spoil the movie, and in particular the twist that is the key to the whole thing, so if you want to watch the movie stop reading now.

At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to the 19th Century Pennsylvania village of Covington.  We are told two things--that "the towns," from which the elders of the village come, is full of wickedness, and that the forest is inhabited by monsters.  We get a scene early on where the monster stalks through the village at night while the villagers hide in their homes.  Eventually, Ivy (the blind daughter of the head of the village, played by Bryce Dallas Howard) declares that she loves Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix).  This results in Noah (Adrien Brody), the man with an unspecified developmental disability, stabbing Lucius out of jealousy.

After a great deal of hand-wringing among the village elders, the decision is made to send Ivy to "the towns" to get medicine for Lucius.  Prior to departing, in order to reassure her that she will be able to make it through the woods, the elders tell Ivy the truth--the monsters in the forest are costumes worn by the elders to scare the villagers and dissuade them from exploring outside of the village.  Ivy makes her way through the forest, confronts and causes Noah (who has stolen the monster costume) to fall to his death, and arrives at a wall.  After climbing the wall, the viewer realizes that we are in the modern day.  Covington is in a nature preserve, bought and paid for by the village elders who fled the modern world because they are families of crime victims.  Ivy encounters a park ranger, hands him the list of medicines, takes the medicines from the ranger, and returns to the village.  At which point we realize why Ivy was sent--because she was blind, she wouldn't realize that something was weird about the outside world.  Even the death of Noah was worked into the narrative by the elders--a victim of the monsters, and an object lesson why you can't leave the village.  The secret will be preserved.

2.

One of the criticisms of The Village is that the plan that the elders of Covington had come up with to preserve their town from modern influences was incoherent and would never work.  That's right, though I think that's intentional on the part of Shyamalan, and it is worth thinking thorough why it won't work.  The fundamental problem for the elders of Covington is knowledge, and more specifically their own knowledge.  They may be pretending that they have access only to 19th Century technology, but they know better.  When Lucius gets stabbed, they know exactly what antibiotics are needed to fight the infection, and so this creates a moral dilemma between their rejection of the modern and the desire to use the benefits of the modern to save lives or achieve some other beneficial end.  It requires a deep, almost sociopathic, commitment to your abstract anti-modern principles to let people die in service of those principles.  Our elders are not sociopathic, and so they break down and re-establish contact with the outside world.

When they do so, they think they are being clever.  They think Ivy's blindness allows them to get the benefits of the modern world without having to expose the fundamental Big Lie at the heart of their village.  But, the problem going forward is that Ivy already knows half of the Big Lie, that the monsters aren't real.  How willing is she going to be to play along with the dog-and-pony show of hiding in the basement from the monsters when she knows its just the elders wearing costumes?  What incentive does she have to maintain the Big Lie?  And if the story from the elders is "we must maintain the fiction of the monsters so that people won't go to the towns, because the towns are bad," why would Ivy buy into that agenda?  Her only experience of the towns is that they gave her the medicine that saved her fiance, no questions asked.  How bad can the towns be?

My sense is that the long-term plan of the elders was that the secret of the Big Lie would die with them, and the rest of Covington would then live as if it were true.  But that, too, was never going to work.  When the elders went away, so would the monsters.  Eventually, someone would want to go to the towns, monsters or no monsters, and discover the truth.  Maybe more to the point, some slice of the population, who maybe were not particularly inclined to go to the towns, are going to be furious when the find out that they were lied to about the monsters.  The collapse of the lie about the monsters is going to undermine belief in the evil of the towns, accelerating the collapse of the whole project.  No, the whole thing only works if the elders raise up an ideologically committed cadre who (for some reason) are willing to maintain the Big Lie in total and in perpetuity, and only if at no point in this process does any of that cadre defect for any one of a host of reasons (curiosity about the towns, moral crises a la the Lucius situation, some unrelated feud with other members of the cadre, etc.).  It's not just keeping Ivy on board, it's keeping everyone in the leadership cadre on board, forever.  One defector is all it takes to bring the whole thing down.

The two lessons of the doomed project of The Village, for me, are (1) once you know certain things, you can't ever un-know them, and that knowledge breaks through even the strongest ideological positions; and (2) once you start the Big Lie to preserve your ideological edifice, you can never stop with the Big Lie.  

3.

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase "the Masters of Suspicion" to refer to Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche in his book Freud and Philosophy.  In giving them this title, Ricoeur is pointing us away from what people tend to focus on when considering these thinkers.  When you think of Freud, you likely think about things like the Oedipus Complex as an explanation for how identity and consciousness come to into being.  No one really believes in the Oedipus Complex anymore, least of all psychiatric and counseling professionals, so it might be easy to conclude that Freud is irrelevant.  But the fact that the constructive program of someone like Freud is irrelevant is not the whole story, because there is also the deconstructive piece of what Freud is doing.  You may not believe that a man comes to understand himself as male because he fears his father with castrate him, but that's doesn't mean you reject the idea that there are unconscious elements in your psyche that can have profound effects on how your internal psychological processes work.  

That's where the suspicion part comes in.  We may not be Marxists or a Freudians in a constructive sense, but all of us have the deconstructive part of Marx and Freud rattling around in our brains.  When we hear people describe their subjective experiences, we can't help but wonder what sorts of internal processes have formed those positions, and thus we can't really take those subjective experiences at face value anymore.  Likewise, once you understand the notion that economic realities at the very least inform if not dictate our political and social relationships, it is natural to at least ask the question what economic agenda is behind some political or social development or proposition.  We are suspicious of our experiences in a way that people prior to Marx and Freud generally were not, and that suspicion colors the way we approach problems in a subtle but pervasive way.

I'm reading a very interesting theology book by Tripp Fuller of Homebrewed Christianity fame (the title is Divine Self-Investment: An Open and Relational Constructive Christology).  I'm not done with the book yet, but there was a short section in the introduction that really struck me, which was the prompting for this post.  In it, Fuller develops a theme that he has explored in other places, which is the degree to which our modern situation shapes all theological investigations.  As Fuller says (page 9):

"The battle for truth in our age is no longer between atheists and theists duking it out with rational reflection and facts to argue their fitting conclusions, but truth is rather a predicament that cuts through the individual.  We are all skeptics and believers and the theologian is a believing-skeptic." 

Fuller is, I think, pointing to the theological manifestation of the masters of suspicion phenomenon.  No matter how committed, how faithful the modern believer is, or tries to be, he or she is informed by a set of intellectual propositions that were not available to our ancestors in faith.  Those propositions, even if we ultimately reject them, make it so that our encounter with elements of the faith different in character than the encounter in the past.

4.

Let's take an example--demons and demon possession.  The New Testament has stories of Jesus exorcising demons from people.  How does a modern person read this story?  The vast majority of modern people who read the account of the Gerasene Demonaic do so through the lens of medical psychiatry, looking at the symptoms described in the text and noting some meaningful similarities between them and the symptoms of psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia.  Through that lens, Jesus's exorcism is the functional equivalent of giving the demonaic an anti-psychotic, a divine Clozapine.

No, no, you might say.  That's way too reductionist.   You reject the idea that all demonic possession can be reduced to medical psychiatric manifestations.  Sure.  You may reject the idea that all accounts of demonic possession are susceptible to medical explanation, but it is unlikely that you reject the idea that some accounts that would have been attributed to demonic possession are actually medical in nature.  The Roman Catholic Church, for example, requires anyone who seeks exorcism to essentially exhaust all possible psychiatric remedies before undergoing the ritual.  Said another way, the Roman Catholic Church accepts the psychiatric origin of much of what was once attributed to demonic possession every bit as much as the most committed skeptic, disagreeing only on whether psychiatry can explain all cases or most cases.  It's the same fundamental continuum of skepticism, with the players landing on different points on the spectrum.  And the skepticism is wholly modern, driven by a body of modern knowledge, not by any internal logic of the faith.     

But let's say you want to go further.  You view yourself as a "traditionalist" and you don't want your faith to be watered down by modernity and its categories and concerns, and thus you reject psychiatry.  Well, you immediately have a problem.  How can you explain the fact that people who exhibit the symptoms of the Gerasene Demonaic get better when they take Clozapine, absent any exorcism or other religious intervention?  The problem with modern medicine, including psychiatric medicine, is that it works--not always, not perfectly, but enough that its effectiveness cannot be denied.  And because it works, the person who wants to be a "traditionalist" with regard to demon possession now has to construct some new, and thus by definition not "traditional," explanatory edifice for why people who are taking Clozapine and receiving relief from their symptoms are not really getting relief, or whatever.

In any event, the point is that no one, no matter how committed to the narrative in the New Testament and the reality of demons, looks at the issue in the way our pre-psychiatry ancestors did.  Most of us are skeptics to one degree or another; the rest have built this weird, thoroughly modern shield to protect themselves from skepticism.  Either way, none of us is really a traditionalist.

5.

A while back, I gave this as a definition of fundamentalism:

[Karen] Armstrong argues that [fundamentalism] has three basic components--a substantive component, a political or social component, and a rhetorical component.  The substantive component is a whole-cloth rejection of the values of the broader society in which it finds itself--in most cases, secular Western modern (or post-modern) societies.  The political or social component is the push/pull of two competing instincts--retreating from this broader culture to preserve purity in tension with trying to overturn or overcome the hated overculture.  Finally, the rhetorical component is the claim that both the substantive and political/social components are being done in the name of, and in reference to, a return to a prior, more pristine society that lacks the offensive elements of the broader culture.

Armstrong's key insight, or at least what I took away from the book, is that the rhetorical elements of fundamentalism are just that, rhetorical.  Fundamentalism is not really about the past at all, but about the present and a rejection of the present.  The specific issues that exercise a fundamentalist now would be unintelligible to their co-religionists of 200 or 500 years ago, because the issues they care about are entirely products of the modern situation.  The vision of the past that fundamentalists use as their rallying cry is a construction that is designed to buttress their deeply modern program.  Bottom line:  while fundamentalists will always try to frame the debate as between the past and the present, the real debate is always between two competing visions of the present.

I think that's still right, but now I would say that this fundamentalist dynamic is ultimately driven by an inherent problem within the rhetorical turn to the past.  It's not simply that the outer culture is different (and, on this view, worse) than this constructed reality of the past, but that they, the would-be fundamentalists, are different.  There is a push/pull between the protected retreats and engagement with the broader culture stems from the fact that the would-be fundamentalist is, on a deep level, every bit as much a product of broader culture as the most committed cheerleader for the culture.

So, what to do?  Well, eventually the idea of The Village is going to occur to someone.  In its modern form, it has its cheerleaders like Rod Dreher.  Let's separate ourselves completely from the broader culture so that we can try to write the challenging elements of the culture out of the equation.  And that will work, in the end, exactly the way it is shown to work in The Village.  Maybe, maybe you can get a "first generation" of people to buy in to an ideologically driven program of pretending they don't know what they in fact know.  But how do you pass that on?  The enemy of the Benedict Option and all of its permutations is not the outside elements, but what's inside you, in your own head.  And, deep down, the Benedict Option stans know this, which is why the temptation toward the Big Lie is going to be all but overwhelming.  If we can just get by hook or by crook a generation who is genuinely ignorant, who isn't "poisoned" by modernity, then our real problem will be solved.

But it's not solved, because now you have to keep servicing the Big Lie.  You're still circling around the same knowledge, even if now it acts as a kind of negative space.  And here The Village becomes a cautionary tale for the Benedict Option stans.  It's all fun and games to reject modernity to preserve your faith, until you need something that modernity provides, likely for legitimately good and salutary ends like saving life.  At that point, you have a full-on moral crisis.  But suppose you stay strong, and prioritize your purity over the life and welfare of those in your community.  You need everyone else to stay strong as well, because a single crack in the armor is going to cause the whole thing to come crashing down.  Once people see that the Big Lie is in fact a Lie, then everything else you are trying to do is going to be lost.  No one likes to learn that the life, and especially their sacrifices, are for a lie.

6.

Going back to Fuller, I think the question for Christians and other religious believers in 2020 is not "is traditionalism, however that is conceived in a particular context, good?"  I think the more relevant question is "is traditionalism actually possible, or is it inevitably going to turn into some form of fundamentalism?"  Fuller seems to say, and I think I agree, that we have to accept our modern position and find a way to engage with faith on those terms, not because that is desirable, but because it is our only real choice.  The only alternative is to build a village in a nature preserve and cosplay as people of the past.  And that isn't going to work for long.