The Conversion Experience Revisited (Part 1)

In the first entry I wrote for this blog site, I claimed that I wanted to explore who we are and what we have in us to become. On several occasions, I wrote about what I referred to as the “conversion” experience. What I had in mind was that young people of the 60s generation could typically recall or claim some pivotal moment, some encounter or contact that had “opened their eyes,” or, if they considered themselves radical, had “radicalized” them. Younger people that I talk to nowadays, however, cite no such experience. I think that this difference is significant, not necessarily because experience has evolved that much, but because our way of organizing it and interpreting it has changed. Back then, young people thought more of changing themselves and changing the world. Now it seems to me that oppositional-minded young people think more about identity: I am Black or Hispanic; I am gay or transgender. I only need to “come out” and assert my identity, not change myself, and only change the world to the extent that those with my identity should gain in respect and acceptance. A Marxist or missionary wants to convert others and transform society; but it would be worse than nonsense for a gay or Black person to want everyone to be what they are. The notion of conversion pertains to the context of self- and reality-discovery. It has to do with the search for truth. My recent source of philosophical enlightenment has a lot to say about truth and meaning.

This brings me to a concept of Alain Badiou whose writing initially struck me as obscure in the way that French critical theory is often remote from common sense: the simulacrum (= the fake?) as the embodiment of evil. This concept enables me to sum up what I have always sensed as the core of evil embodied in Trump and his supporters. It isn’t where they stand on the political spectrum that is evil. Trump is an enemy of truth, not only a chronic liar but a master in perverting truth. You are not an enemy of truth because you get things wrong, not even because you lie. Evil lies in Trump’s mastery in subverting the substance of truth itself: truth based on logic or evidence. This was clear from the start, when Trump not only began his tenure with manufactured news, but brazenly declared every contradiction of his lies to be the real “fake news.” He turned the idea of truth against itself. There are so many examples that you have to assume that his supporters exult in perverting truth. Truth is after all such an annoying, troublesome, and often disappointing thing. The evil is not the falsehood. This kind of evil needs its own name: simulacrum. Falsehood gets redefined as truth.

Badiou offers another concept which I believe addresses what I am getting at when I talk about the missing conversion experience. It is what he calls l’évènement, the pivotal game-changing “event.” I might disagree with him to the extent that what I call the conversion experience is something that happens in us, whereas Badiou speaks of the event more objectively. Badiou is an atheist, but his examples include Jesus as manifested to the Apostle Paul (a publicly shared phenomenon) alongside the revolutions of 1789, 1917, or the May-June events of 1968. What I mean by “conversion” is less objective, more elicited in us, though how and why this happens is often mysterious. Even the most objective of recent “événements,” the massive public response to the killing of George Floyd, can’t be grasped as a simple event. What about the equally horrific lynchings of Black people? They were public and photographically documented facts, yet they did not elicit anything like the same response. What we register from without is always filtered and edited within us by much else that we know or have heard or read and come to accept. We elaborate key events retrospectively. They are narratives rewritten and amended by and in us. The conversionary encounter with truth contrasts with the falsified simulacrum but it doesn’t have the objectivity of an earthquake or a hurricane. Badiou’s event, or what I call the conversion experience, is similar to the so-called mystical experience which I’ve studied in literature. Badiou also gives the example of falling in love, particularly love at first sight. Someone walks in and everything changes. Badiou considers love, along with science, art, and politics, to be one of four domains of “truth.” I’ll come back to this idea because it anchors one of the deepest philosophical questions in a realm of experience of universal interest, especially for the young: the experience of falling in love. I want to say more about this.

Signed,

Andrew (Weeks)

CLARIFICATION:  Recently I wrote that “Slavery gets an unnecessarily bad press” since it differs from other forms of bondage or servitude by “degree” and “circumstance.”  The circumstances of course include the soul- and life-crushing loss of freedom and a subjugation to every form of abuse. What I meant was that we should not allow the abolition of slavery to suggest that nothing of the kind still exists. Ask anyone whose family carries the institution of slavery in oral tradition whether chattel slavery is worse than wage slavery and one could expect to hear this confirmed. Ask whether loss of freedom and coerced labor ended with slavery, and one could probably expect the opposite reply.