Notes on ‘The Guru Effect’ by Dan Sperber (2010)

Read in Dec 2021

This short but superb essay by the French cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber breaks down the social phenomenon of the over-appreciation of obscurely written, difficult-to-grasp pseudo-profound BS, very common in the so-called Continental philosophical tradition, and the bread and butter of the PoMo tradition (as made famously clear by Sokal and Bricmont). He explicitly cites as examples Heidegger, Sartre, McLuhan, Derrida and Lacan. His focus is on the “honest gurus”, defined as the gurus who are not deliberately trying to deceive their audiences.

Sperber identifies the causes of the over-appreciation of profound-sounding obscure BS in the complex interplay between the ‘authority’ and the ‘argumentation’ reasons to accept claims, that makes it possible for gurus to use obscure prose to force a shift from ‘evaluation’ to ‘interpretation’ (once it’s impossible to evaluate an argument, the shift is forced to interpretation), and to create a vicious circle (generated by their proselytes) in which their own obscurity increases their relevance.

It’s a two-sided social game: the guru has fun with word games, and the proselytes have fun participating in the interpretation game.
Both parties involved gain from the game: once it clicks, gurus gain from an auto-feeding loop that makes them more authoritative and relevant, and their proselytes get the benefit of a social-intellectual recognition for the mere fact of being participants and contributors to the game.
The enthusiasm of the proselytes to jump on the interpretation train seems to also fulfill a similar psychological need of the one traditionally fulfilled by religious mysteries.

For most believers, the existence of mysteries is, in fact, more relevant than their actual content. Because of the authority they grant religion, believers are convinced that the content of mysteries would be extraordinarily relevant to them if only they could grasp it. The fragmentary interpretations of mysteries that lay and clerical believers arrive at are wholly guided by this certainty of relevance. The existence of barely glimpsed hyper-relevant content is yet another confirmation of the supreme authority of religion.

Obscurity need not be held against an author—after all, it may just reflect the limits of my own understanding—, but how could it be held in her favour? An obvious risk in upgrading the authority of a source because of the obscurity of its pronouncements is that of running into the vicious circle I mentioned: the favourable interpretation I give of an obscure text is based on the prior authority I grant its source; if I then use this interpretation to value up this authority, and then this enhanced authority to interpret even more favourably the next obscure text from the same source, a string of obscure texts (or, for that matter, reinterpretations of just one of them) might cause me to grant near-absolute authority to a source just because I don’t understand it. Are individuals on their own predisposed to commit this kind of fallacy? I see no reason to believe they are, or at least, not systematically. On the other hand something of the sort happens in the collective recognition of authorities.

Authority in a group goes with reputation. The reputation of a person is the more or less consensual view of her competence and reliability that spreads through repeated acts of communication across a social group. Individuals may just state that So-and-so is knowledgeable or wise, or they may give examples of this knowledge and wisdom. They may also discuss the interpretation and the value of specific pronouncements. Clear statements and easy arguments may become the objects of a collective evaluation, but only obscure statements and difficult arguments are likely to become the objects of a collective endeavour of interpretation.
As long as the interpretation of a text is not settled, its evaluation is likely to be based on external rather than internal criteria. We don’t know what X meant in making some obscure statement, but, given the authority we recognise him, we have reasons to think that he was expressing a very important idea. In fact, if we did not think this, we would not be involved in trying to comprehend that statement.
Participating in a collective process of interpretation amounts to publicly vouching for the value of what is being interpreted. Moreover, it seems sensible to take the amount of attention paid to thinkers and their thought as a rough indication of their importance—and it would be sensible if it were not for the fact that these individual evaluations build on one another and together spiral into ever greater devotion.
Participants in a collective process of interpretation have a double stake in the value of the text they are working on and in the authority of its author. The greater this value and this authority, the more they are justified in joining the process, and the less the tentative and partial character of their interpretations can be seen as a negative reflection on their own intellectual abilities. Moreover, participating in such a collective process involves not just an intellectual but also— and more surely— a social benefit, that of belonging, of getting recognition as a person in the know,
capable of appreciating the importance of a difficult great thinker.

Where we had the slow back-and-forth of solitary reading between favourable interpretation and increased confidence in authority, now we have a competition among disciples for an interpretation that best displays the genius of the master, an interpretation that, for this purpose, may be just as obscure as the thought it is meant to interpret. Thus a thinker is made into a guru and her best disciples in gurus-apprentices.