Umberto Eco: In Defense of Stupidity, Faith in Fakeness and How Falsehoods Shaped History
‘There are no mistakes, just happy accidents’ — Bob Ross
It’s believed that when Christopher Columbus first went out to find a way to reach Asia in a world that he believed to be flat, he accidentally ended up discovering what we now call the ‘Americas.’
This is what the ferocious Italian writer and critic, Umberto Eco calls a ‘serendipity’ or discovery by happy chance. According to him, our history amounts to nothing but a long winding stretch of happy accidents. From the moment Homo erectus discovered fire to the creation of the modern Internet, mistakes, beautiful mistakes have been at the heart of all of it.
In his essay, ‘The Power of Falsehood’, Umberto Eco goes as far as to suggest that it is falsehood, not truth, that has been the key driver of human history. From false ideas about gods and stars, we got our enthralling ancient tales, from false ideas about the natural world, we got our elegant scientific theories from Corpuncus to Galileo to Darwin, and from our false ideas about language and art, we got new and rich interpretations of our most prized cultural icons. From example, the not-so-perfect translations from other languages into English has given many native works a unique touch and height that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible. From Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat that was translated from Persian to English by Edward FitzGerald which completely changed the meaning and rhyme of the original poem nevertheless turned out to be better than the original, to Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore which when translated in English loses many aspects of the original poem, but also gains many things. Same is true for most other great works of literature and poetry.
You can see why Umberto Eco said that ‘Translation is the art of failure.’
He was obsessed with how cultures talk to each other. But more so he was obsessed with how cultures get each other wrong. In his extensive works on language and signs, he talks about the mistakes of early translators when interpreting works from other languages and how it had an impact on our world which is carried to the present day.
But it’s not just translation which is an art of failure. If you think about it, then biological evolution too is nothing but a series of ‘art of failures’ or happy accidents accumulated over long periods of time. Serendipity then is at the heart of our very existence.
But Umberto Eco knew about the dark side of falsehood. He wrote about manufactured falsehoods, fake news, outright lies. He wrote about how falsehoods contributed to the rise of fascism in the 20th century, about the false promises of the communist Soviet, about false hopes of the French revolution and even before that, about the falsehoods of religion which had given us a history full of blood and tears.
He writes that:
falsehoods acted “as narratives, seemed plausible, more than every day or historical reality, which is far more complex and less credible. The stories seemed to explain something that was otherwise hard to understand” adding that, “False tales are, first of all, tales, and tales, like myths, are always persuasive”.
And because they are so persuasive is why they can be so dangerous at times.
But Umberto’s obsession with falsehood did not stop there.
He was interested in falsehood of everyday things. In his essay, ‘Faith in Fakeness’ he takes us on a journey into the spirit of our consumer culture and it’s obsession with fake things that look real. He is talking about a culture where a bottle of Coke is the ‘real thing’, where lip injections and butt implants seem more real than real bodies, where Disneylands and holograms give rise to what he calls ‘hyper-reality’.
He writes:
To speak of things that one wants to connote as real, these things must seem real. The ‘completely real’ becomes identified with ‘completely fake’. Absolute unreality is offered as real presence…The sign aims to be the thing, to abolish the distinction of the reference, the mechanism of replacement…
Now, of course, he is referring to the idea of the postmodern world, where hyper-reality takes the place of reality, an idea proposed by Jean Baudrillard in his 1981 book, Simulacra and Simulation in which he describes a world where simulation of something looks more real than the actual thing.
A good example of this is pornography. And not just any pornography but HD 1080p studio pornography which is so real that even the most real of the most real sex looks less real in front of it. It is, after all, a simulation but if you ask certain people. they will tell you that they would prefer the simulation any day over real sex.
Today’s audience wants sex, sex, and more sex. In
every shape and form. — Umberto Eco
And not just porn, but our everyday consumer goods. There was an interesting experiment at the CBC marketplace about which orange juice people liked best. The participants were given orange juices of different companies along with the real orange juice and they were asked to rate the taste of these orange juices. Most people liked a company’s premium orange juice instead of the real orange juice which they reported to be more ‘orangy’ than actual oranges. This, in a twisted way, means that the company’s simulated orange taste tasted more orange than an actual orange juice. Nothing could define the postmodern condition more than this tiny little experiment with orange juices. The ‘hyper-real’ that Umberto Eco talks about is perfectly captured by people’s ability to seek more realness than reality itself.
According to Umberto Eco, a culture’s faith in fakeness can be diagnosed as follows:
We can identify it through two typical slogans that pervade American advertisement. The first, widely used by Coca Cola but also frequent as a hyperbolic formula in everyday speech, is the ‘real thing’; the second, found in print and on TV, is “more” — in the sense of “extra.” The announcer does not say, for example, that “the programme will continue” but rather that there is “more to come.” In America, you don’t say “Give me another coffee,” you ask for “more coffee”; you don’t say that cigarette A is longer than cigarette B, but that there’s “more of it”, more than you are used to having, more than you might want, leaving a surplus to throw away — that’s prosperity.
He argues that our faith in fakeness is not new, but goes back as far as history. For example, a present-day salesman and God have more in common than people think. He writes:
“Beware of faking: people will believe you. People believe those who sell lotions that make lost hair grow back. They sense instinctively that the salesman is putting together truths that don’t go together, that he’s not being logical, that he’s not speaking in good faith. But they’ve been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. The farfetched is the closest thing to miracle.”
But Umberto Eco was not only concerned about fakeness in consumer culture but in every tiny aspect of our lives, whether it’s love or relationships, art or meaning, or the idea of the very self.
He writes:
“I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her “I love you madly” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly”. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.”
Regarding the falsehoods of our individual meanings, he writes:
“After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Essentially saying that the great heroes of Western literature and history died for ‘nothing.’
Further adding that:
“The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.”
But even in ‘an age of lost innocence’ or the one riled with meaninglessness, Umberto argues that there is one truth and nothing but the truth which he argues, like many others like him, to be true love. Not passionate love, not love of things or self, but just ‘love’ which is encapsulated into exceedingly rare moments on our time on earth.
He writes:
“I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she’s always dreamed of you…
The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
It’s interesting that Umberto Eco arrived at pretty much the same conclusion in his narrative that so many other writers, poets and artists before him had arrived.
He has been called the ‘modern Renaissance’ man because he left nothing, absolutely nothing from language, to history, to art, to environment, to science, to religion, penning hundreds of essays and columns taking apart every fabric of our existence. This post discussed just a fraction of the vast intellectual universe he had left behind.
“How peaceful life would be without Love, Adso. How Safe. How Tranquil. And how Dull.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
