Worshipping Nothing

R. Fiore has a recent article up about the South Park censorship brouhaha in which he takes a brave, world-weary stand against cowardly corporations, crazy Muslims, and simplistic theists. As always with Fiore, it’s stylishly written…and as sometimes with Fiore, it’s pretty thoroughly vapid. He’s got that just-plain-common-sense-man-on-the-street approach, which involves repeating things everyone already knows, retailing banal prejudices as shocking insights, and patting yourself rhythmically on the back all the while.

Fiore’s argument is basically that we’d all get along better in this old world if we acted as if we didn’t believe anything. Or as Fiore says, “What the West has learned is that even if you do sincerely believe in God, if you want any peace you can’t act that way.” For Fiore, the South Park incident shows the eminent reasonableness of the Western world, and the fact that reasonableness is essentially useless in dealing with nutzo Islamist thugs:

The Danish Jyllands-Posten, lulled into a false sense of security by a period of reason and good fellowship in Europe dating all the way back to 1945, published their suite of cartoons featuring Muhammad on the assumption that no one was crazy enough to sacrifice their lives and liberty or commit horrible crimes over a drawing. The response of the fanatical end of Islam was, in effect, yes as a matter of fact we are crazy enough, and if that wasn’t sufficient please let us know and we’ll be crazier still. The position this places the would-be blasphemer in is that you can visually depict Muhammad, but only if you’re willing to see blood shed over it. Courage will allow you to express yourself, but it won’t prevent the violence. The net result is that the fanatics get their way and the only cost is to brand millions of completely innocent Muslims as murderous barbarians.

I think my favorite part of that quote is the nostalgic harking back to “a period of reason and good fellowship in Europe”, coupled with Fiore’s utter lack of historical or intellectual curiosity. Presuming that this period of reason and good fellowship did exist for a moment — why did it end, precisely? What caused the Muslims to suddenly jump the shark? Is it immigration into Europe that’s the problem — which would lead to certain policy positions that I strongly suspect the carefully enlightened Fiore wants nothing to do with.

Or…as an alternate possibility, could it be that, from the Muslim perspective, there was in fact no “period of reason and good fellowship,” but rather decade upon decade of Western-supported dictatorships, quasi-imperialism, repetitive humiliations, and (in the case of Afghanistan, at least) vicious, unending warfare? Fiore muses with an air of non-plussed good humor at what could have possibly led some Muslims to set themselves against South Park so:

The Mafia is an appropriate comparison because the threats made against South Park are in some ways more akin to extortion than conventional terrorism. A typical terrorist campaign attempts to achieve an absurdly ambitious goal with an absurdly miniscule amount of force. For example, in 40 years of terrorism after 1967, Palestinian terrorists managed to kill something like 2100 Israelis. No one is going to surrender their country to avoid this level of casualties. A modern army can kill that many non-combatants in an afternoon by mistake. The campaign against depictions of the prophet Muhammad on the other hand brings to bear an absurdly disproportionate amount of force to stop something most people in the West don’t have the inclination to do in the first place.

The Mafia analogy carefully obscures the clear conclusion — Muslims have little if any way to address their political grievances to the foreign powers that repetitively kick them in the teeth. Terrorism is largely, as Fiore quite rightly notes, useless. So when you can’t do anything about the big insults, you naturally focus on the small ones. Surely segments of the Muslim world sees depictions of the prophet by the infidels not as the first insult, or the fifth or the 200th, but rather as part of one, long, sustained insult by a bully who has kept his foot on their throat for half a century plus.

Threats against newspaper publishers or television networks are petty and stupid and despicable, obviously — but they’re neither incomprehensible nor evidence of some sort of disconnect between religious thinking and rationality. Given the relationship between the west and the Middle East, the threats are, on the contrary, entirely comprehensible. That doesn’t mean that they should be condoned. In the first place, as Fiore points out, the whole brouhaha definitely makes things worse, not better, for Muslims worldwide. Moreover, while it isn’t as bad as the Taliban’s systematic oppression of women or al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks, threatening to kill innocents for drawing pictures does seem to me to be a fair definition of evil. Still, we can take comfort in the thought that we’ll go tit for tat or better in the near future, whenever the next American drone strike takes out the next Afghani wedding party.

Fiore’s a lefty too, and I doubt he supports the Afghan war any more than I do. But he doesn’t want to talk about it in too much detail because to do so would mess up his nice little binary; rational west as powerless, peaceful victims; nutty religious dickheads as powerful, violent thugs. To give Fiore his due, though, he is willing to follow his simplistic analogy wherever it takes him, no matter how idiotic the end location is. And so in the last paragraph we get this gem:

What the West has learned is that even if you do sincerely believe in God, if you want any peace you can’t act that way. After all, if you truly believed that those who follow the wrong religion will be subjected to eternal torment then you’re doing them no favors by allowing them to do so. For instance, during the Cold War, if you believed as Jesus told you that death is an illusion, and the atheistic regimes of the Soviet bloc were depriving millions of even opportunity to save their souls from eternal damnation, then you would be honor bound to not only risk nuclear war but to engage in it. After all, eternal bliss would compensate the just for any suffering they endured.

To call this a strawman argument is to cast scurrilous aspersions on the structural integrity of straw. Which Christians exactly is it who want to start a worldwide nuclear holocaust for the sake of the souls of atheists? Would that be the many Christians who, on quite good scriptural authority, believe that Jesus enjoined them to pacifism? Would it be the Catholic Church — still the largest Christian denomination — which holds to a just war doctrine that declared the Iraq war anathema? The Niebuhrian realist tradition, which stresses a humane concern for human life and justice? Hell, even wacko Protestant Christian right-wing apocalyptic fantasies like the Left Behind series doesn’t advocate genocide-for-Jesus as far as I know.

There are nutcases everywhere, obviously, and I’m sure there’s the random Christian out there who wants everyone to die in a fiery man-made holocaust — but to suggest that this is especially a hallmark of religious thinking as opposed to the rational atheist philosophies of, say, Pol Pot or Mao or Hitler…it’s nonsense on its face. And that’s to say nothing of our own lovely, rational, harmless, hapless capitalism, which can’t stand up for South Park, but which has, nonetheless, shown itself capable on occasion of a certain ruthlessness, as Chileans, Cambodians, and, for that matter, Native Americans would no doubt be willing to attest.

“What the West has learned is that even if you do sincerely believe in God, if you want any peace you can’t act that way.” I’ve quoted that twice already, and I’m quoting it a third time because it’s central to Fiore’s argument — and, I believe, to his belief. Because it is a belief, right? It’s certainly not a fact. Where, after all, is this peace we’ve found by acting as if we don’t believe in God, precisely? The U.S. is more religious than Europe, certainly, but by world-historical standards we’re a pretty secular society — and, by world-historical standards, we have probably the biggest military of all time. China’s fond of playing with weapons too, and they aren’t noticeably religious last time I checked. And, you know, on the other side, I was under the impression that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi both drew the inspiration for their non-violent resistance movements from their faith. Or does Fiore think that MLK was somehow acting as if he didn’t believe in God?

Fiore ends with a really tiresome roulette wheel analogy which I don’t have the heart to quote. But it’s telling that such vacuous modernity can only end by seeing faith in terms of gambling, money, and yes, capitalism. Fiore believes that believing in nothing will save him…but the truth is that nothing has its own rites and rituals, its own insanities, its own cruelties, and even its own genocidal impulses. The world isn’t divided into believers and non-believers, or into the sane and the insane. The only ones here are us chickens — or, if you prefer, us poor sinners, a long way from home.
_________

Update: R.Fiore has an extremely long response here.

And my short reply to Fiore is here.

52 thoughts on “Worshipping Nothing

  1. “He’s got that just-plain-common-sense-man-on-the-street approach, which involves repeating things everyone already knows, retailing banal prejudices as shocking insights, and patting yourself rhythmically on the back all the while.”

    And that pretty much describes “South Park” as well.

  2. Thanks for this. I was reading that piece and for an moment contemplated writing a comment, but as it went on its absurd short circuit, I just threw up my hands and decided to ignore it. Nice that you made the effort to call BS on it.

  3. I too am pretty disappointed by F’s argument. The whole time I’m reading it I’m thinking, dude, Habermas wants his idea back.

  4. ‘As always with Fiore, it’s stylishly written…and as sometimes with Fiore, it’s pretty thoroughly vapid.’

    thanks for clearly expressing how i’ve felt about fiore’s writing for years.

  5. Is it “stylishly written”? The opening paragraph of this particular essay is 35 lines and 17 sentences long (give or take) and so dense that I couldn’t actually get through it, let alone discern whether the idea was vapid, Habermasian (LOL Nate), or otherwise. I’d demur that prose like that requires the idea be bluntly foregrounded to make it worth people’s time.

    I thought “the perils of blogging; must’ve been writing in a hurry” — but I think Noah put this one together probably even more quickly, in response to my bailing on him today, and Noah’s piece is far more elegant.

  6. Jeez, I thought I’d have Fiore defenders coming out of the woodwork, and instead we’ve got a 5 minute hate.

    I think Fiore writes well. The first sentence of his piece:

    “In the recent censorship incident the producers of South Park are in the position of the district attorney when the Mafia starts killing witnesses.”

    That’s clear and attention-grabbing; it’s got a bite. And I thought he sustained that through the piece; I didn’t find it difficult to understand, certainly.

  7. I think her writes well, too– in prose that’s lean enough I have trouble unpacking it when I disagree.

    His assumption about religions reminds me of this Stephen Prothero essay, in which he takes on the “many paths to one truth” liberal idea. When you don’t share the assumptions, ” the eminent reasonableness of the Western world” looks violent.

  8. Fiore has definitely written some funny stuff over the years. I was glad to see that the Best Comics Criticism book includes his essay on 9/11 comics, since that’s one of my favorites. Another great one was his piece about a non-existent Marvel superhero called The Slingmaster.

  9. I almost phrased my comment to say I thought you were cutting him some slack based on past performance: I don’t mean to say I always think he’s an awful writer. That piece is unusually awkward, I think — if for no other reason that it needs commas and paragraph breaks.

    But I also think it reads even more than usual like he’s talking; I often have to read his stuff out loud but this one I can’t parse at all without vocalizing the words. It’s heavily saturated with vocal rhythm, like it would work really well as a radio script or a speech.

    I don’t generally think of radio scrips and speechwriting in terms of elegant prose; it’s not bad prose, but it may or may not be “stylish” depending on your definition. You really need a writer the caliber of Kipling to manage both oral and written elegance at the same time…

  10. If you want example of someone who legitimately believed in the possibility of nuclear war as a tool to hasten the biblical apocalypse, look no further than our 40th president.

  11. I’m sorry, Tim, that’s just bullshit. Where did Bush ever say that he (a) believed it was his duty to bring about the biblical apocalypse, or (b) that he wanted to unleash the sort of worldwide nuclear holocaust that Fiore seems to be talking about?

    After the actual traitor James Buchanan, Bush is probably about the worst president we’ve ever had, and his nuclear policy was undoubtedly idiotic and scary. And he was a hardcore evangelical nutty Christian, and that certainly influenced many of his decisions. But there’s a way to go between saying that and saying that he actually desired to unleash nuclear was as a tool to hasten the biblical apocalypse. And from there it’s a way to go to get to Fiore’s position, which is that Christians and religious folk in general are inherently more warlike than atheists.

    Having said that…I could be convinced that Bush’s views are in line with what you’re saying, I suppose. Do you have sources?

  12. Gah! Well that shows me. One of those times I’m tempted to go back and edit my comment…but probably best to just leave the evidence of my shame. My apologies Tim.

    Reagan was not actually a hardcore Christian the way Bush was, though, is my understanding. He was happy enough with astrology, for example.

    He thought lots of loopy things, though…and its hard for me not to attribute them more to creeping dementia than to Christianity per se. In any case, I don’t see him as especially warlike in comparison with our other more secular presidents (admittedly, a very low bar.) Imean, for all Reagan’s nutty Star Wars and polluting trees stuff, he actually ended up being surprisingly willing to grab the olive branch when Gorbachev passed it over.

  13. Thank you Noah.

    I wish more people responded to the initial piece written by Mr. Fiore, but I understood when Matthias wrote: “I just threw up my hands and decided to ignore it.”, since I felt that way too.

    It was disbelief.

    I think I could say more as muslim, from Europe, and ex-communist country, but I’ll just skip it.

    Thanks again.

    P.S. You at least admit if you make a mistake, but some people do not even know when they make it.

  14. One of the things that came out of the release of some of Reagan’s diaries in the past few years was the previously unknown fact that, after he was shot, Reagan had a religious epiphany and decided it was his God-given duty to prevent a nuclear war. I might quibble with the way he went about it, but at the same time there wasn’t a nuclear war, but at the same time that doesn’t prove his methods were right. But regardless of any prior beliefs, post-Hinckley he was dead set against nuclear combat.

  15. Huh. I didn’t know that.

    The really good Andy Helfer comics biography of Reagan I read a while back both made me remember what a corrupt, vapid psycho he was…and simultaneously made me more appreciative of his role in getting out of the way and letting Gorbachev end the cold war.

  16. Bill, finally got to reading that Prothero article. It’s interesting in that in some ways it very much refutes Fiore — Prothero certainly wouldn’t draw a line between all believers and all non-believers the way Fiore does. At the same time…his essential perspective is bedrock pragmatist in a way similar to Fiore’s, and, in a similar way, it makes me itch. He wants to understand different religions not so much to evaluate their truth or to learn something as to work out a more effective foreign policy. Again the analogy is telling; he compares different religions to different ball games, and the point seems to be, “look, these all have different rules; I will teach you what they are and then you too can win when playing with the world’s religions!”

  17. I think it’s difficult to divine much about Prothero from his article for The Boston Globe. It is really more factual than opinionated. I haven’t read anything by Prothero but I assume from his credentials that he’s an expert in the field and has studied the essential truths and problems of the world’s religions.

    The article strikes me as a means to drive home a very simple point (that religions are different and knowing this will lead to more effective foreign/social policies) which he presumes eludes a sub-section of the populace and, possibly, U.S. leadership.

    It’s not particularly deep or nuanced because it’s aimed at a general readership. Of course, the very strongly ecumenically inclined or those who hold to the essential unity of all religions will be upset but that’s beside the point. Whether Prothero finds something beautiful in Taoist philosophy or the discipline/spirituality of Islam is also secondary to the aims of his article and certainly not excluded by it.

  18. I get the impression that if the folk behind South Park had expected serious threats they wouldn’t have bothered with this cheap and silly joke on someone else’s faith or fanaticism. It didn’t seem like there was any great goal or point in making fun of Mohammad.

    If you’re going to risk your life, let it not be over something as trivial as a fart joke basically, for dressing him in a bear costume seems to amount to as much.

    Terrorists use real weapons instead indifferent gestures.

    Now it may be a good thing that Americans are indifferent in this way, maybe we have a better, refined sense of humor, or the blade of satire, ridicule is not even dull it’s just recycled plastic. Or maybe it’s indeed a sign of how rotten things have gotten. It shows a profound lack of passion on the part of both audiences and creators, humor is an anesthetic rather than anything to stir the heart and soul or boil the blood?

    Too many Americans just want to be entertained at other people’s expense–maybe they don’t believe in much, too lazy or overworked to bother to care but others believe in reality—reality is not all entertainment.

    It’s as if the South Park creators were not following the news. It tells us how stupid or how indifferent they are to reality—that a fart joke for them could cost them their lives, they could die for something they really didn’t think through, knew or cared enough about much to say anything meaningful, anything of value to real people that would be worth dying for. What they did was not so much brave as stupid.

    South Park fans are perhaps the sycophants of a hypnotic trend or genre that mocks everything and believes nothing. Belief in values requires sacrifice, risk, even death, engagement with reality; these fanatics might be more alive than we are.

    South Park is a sort of new version of the ugly American. We have the right by virtue of might to mock anything we want.

    No complexity, no interest in history, in reality, why, say, so called moderate Islamic believers are so powerless or frightened to speak out against the fanatics…no comment on the oppression of women, homosexuals, it’s all very apolitical because reality is boring. Why not a satire about the conditions of Moslems rather than a cheap shot about their founding father?

    The sponsors hope not to offend anyone with fart jokes, I suppose. Yes, us mocking Mohammad is just a symbolic excuse for all that they hate and hold against Westerners, real or illusory.

    Yet this incident as with Satanic Verses tells us that art high and low is not all in good fun but that art and reality sometimes collide in ways that shows the power of art to be either strong or weak.

    American commercialism, greed cheapens and degrades art by insisting that art not have any moral or social responsibility, that entertainment should not have added civic and social values, it doesn’t have to respect other people’s values, but rather be purely manipulative, expedient, to believe in fact in nothing but the money, the fame. If it sells go as far as you can is the motto.

    At lest challenge these fanatics, say, do a movie about Islam, treat Mohammad with some respect, don’t show Mohammad’s face at all but we’ll see everything from his eyes as his deeds and the history of Islam unfolds—his eyes become the camera’s lens. That would’ve been smarter. We would literally see the contradictions through his own eyes.

    Maybe satire of this sort would’ve jolted some of these fanatics to think for themselves which is the liberal and humanist ideal, the Western revolution in consciousness, the freedom the West has bequeathed to all humanity, or is it a curse, despite the backstabbing and betrayals of this ideal. The last best hope for mankind, indeed, if only we ourselves could live up to it…think for yourself, but instead of trying to get these nuts to think, what amounts to a fart joke offended them–something to die for.

    If mocking them so baldly would’ve done some good, I’d say go for it, risk your life but a tasteless joke could cost the creators their lives, that is if the fanatics are not just kidding.

    Our biggest custom is daily and nightly escapes from reality. Does it matter? American decadence is that civic and religious values are not part of television, films, movies etc because our culture is mostly escapist, people in the West value entertainment and consumption of things more than they value civic duty or their purported values, when we do see people passionate about their values they seem like monsters to us.

    It is odd that liberalism and humanism should lead to a loss of passion and involvement with reality or is it a built in weakness of tolerance? The creators of South Park didn’t know they had any responsibility to either a foreign public or to their own citizens except to entertain them, help them escape from the difficult work of thinking critically.

    How many of us would openly support a war to liberate the minds of these people? How great and daring that would be? Self preservation yes but converting people to Western values of tolerance we take for granted? No, way.

    We’d say how can war do that? Better still we want their oil or the power controlling their oil gives us. Or we’d say let’s try some other more peaceful means of influence. Japan might be an interesting study in this regard. How much Western values was actually imposed on Japanese militaristic culture after its defeat. Irag was more modern under Sadaam, right?

    Of course fate or our own error has played its hand. Perhaps this is what happened to the Romans, the bread and circuses, too many of Romans could watch others, puppets, fight and die, but lacked the courage, desire or passion to fight for anything themselves.

    What now, Batman?

  19. Suat, that’s a generous reading. You may be right. The title of his book also irritated me; it sounded like an easy guide to business management. But that was probably marketers rather than him. It seems reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt anyway.

    Inochi, I think you mijudge the south park creators. I’m sure they would have made the jokes regardless of whether or not they knew threats would result — in fact, surely they knew that threats were a fair possibility. If it were up to them they’d run the thing no matter what, I’d guess; it’s their corporate overlords that demure.

    The Iraq war was justified in part as a way to bring democracy and western values to Iraq. So there was at least some constituency for that.

  20. And you’re quite right that Prothero’s position is opposed to that of Fiore’s. Prothero clearly suggests that understanding the beliefs of other is the correct initial step towards some ill-defined peace. The only thing I detect in Fiore’s article is pure (possibly willful) ignorance.

  21. “What the West has learned is that even if you do sincerely believe in God, if you want any peace you can’t act that way. After all, if you truly believed that those who follow the wrong religion will be subjected to eternal torment then you’re doing them no favors by allowing them to do so. For instance, during the Cold War,” etc.

    The Cold War example is a bad choice. Much better if he had said something about believers all choosing not to act like Jehovah’s Witnesses because they understand that otherwise communal life would be impossible. But he didn’t, of course.

  22. Noah, I’d just read the Prothero (a BU religion prof) before reading your piece and thought it dovetailed. At least his book’s title’s not as bad as “Cod: The Fish That Changed the World.”

    I don’t have much to add, thanks to Suat’s comment. And going back over the Fiore again reminded me that after reading Hans Kung’s takedown of Pope B yesterday, I took a vow not to read about religion for a while. Today, I renew that vow!

  23. Well argued, Noah! (Yes, sometimes I agree with you; though I usually appreciate Fiore.)

    Re this remark of yours:

    —————–
    …Which Christians exactly is it who want to start a worldwide nuclear holocaust for the sake of the souls of atheists?…

    There are nutcases everywhere, obviously, and I’m sure there’s the random Christian out there who wants everyone to die in a fiery man-made holocaust…
    —————-

    …none other than William F. Buckley maintained it was better for the human race to die out in an atomic war than turn Communist. (Which may not exactly equate “nuke ’em to save their souls,” but…)

    Regrettably, could not locate the exact quote again; but at at the following site one may find a description of Buckley’s willingness to risk nuclear war in order to put an end to Communist dictatorships, and that…

    —————–
    …If anything, the foreign policy supported by the Senior Editors of National Review was even worse than Buckley’s. James Burnham, who dominated the foreign policy sections of the journal, called in The Struggle for the World (1947) for preventive nuclear war against Soviet Russia. Frank S. Meyer found classical liberalism entirely compatible with a war of nuclear annihilation. Concerning him Rothbard remarked: “Frank S. Meyer and his fellow anti-Communists look forward almost with enthusiasm to a nuclear holocaust against the Communist nations which would annihilate tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of human beings. The devastation and suffering caused by nuclear war would bring about so many more ‘screams in the night’ as Communism has ever done as to defy comparison.”…As if this were not enough, another of the founding editors, Willi Schlamm, wrote a controversial work that became a best seller in West Germany, Germany and the East-West Crisis, also defending preventive nuclear war…
    —————–
    http://www.lewrockwell.com/gordon/gordon15.htm

    No surprise that WFB was so blithe about combat, when we read of his own wartime “trial by fire”:

    —————–
    Q: Am I wrong in thinking that Mr. Buckley served as an infantry company commander in World War II? If so, in what unit and in which theater of operations did he serve?

    A: He served in the U.S. Army but did not make it overseas. He did, however, oversee a sexual hygiene operation on a base in Texas.
    ——————-
    http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/qa-with-sam-tanenhaus-on-william-f-buckley/

  24. Noah, I’ve watched South Park a few times, there does seem to be some intelligence there but I don’t get that they cared much to do any good with it. Maybe being secure and safe here it was easy for them to mock Mohamed so cheaply and without much brilliance. They were showing off to us?

    The Danish cartoonist was killed, did he laugh off threats vague or explicit? Hopefully or unfortunately the terrorists have more important targets in mind. If it’s a serious symbol of our decadence and disrespect towards their form of madness will some islamic nut out there make an example of the South Park boys? I hope not. It was just a bear costume after all. Did they make him do anything nasty? I haven’t seen the actual show yet.

    In my case it is that 60s film critic’s fear that black comedy (Dr. Strangelove in her case) would make people laugh hard but still not care enough to get off the couch and open the window and shout: I’m mad as Hell and I’m not taking it anymore. That is we laugh at this and that but do nothing? Now what else will you do, was that the point of Network, did the people actually do anything with their outrage after opening those windows.

    South Park’s humor is cynical, right? because we laugh at everything but life and everyone is indeed seemingly insane so it’s okay. If a Moslem did this in an Arab country I’d really be impressed but the totalitarianism in Saudia Arabia, say, that great torture state of ours, is so air-tight we never hear of this except maybe from exiles and I’ve never heard of exiles publicly blaspheming their native religion in this way. What good would it do anyway?

    In America we take our freedom to laugh at everything for granted? We seem to live in an Orwellian world of contradictions, The Reds in China are capitalist but still communists and we’re quite content with their over priced imports despite being the product of cheap slave labor. It is all madness and I guess South Park is wallowing in it and rubbing our faces in it and all for money, too, wow.

    Hitchens by the way is a good example of what you were saying about atheism, his blood thirstiness, his loss of good sense I think in support of the liar war was a direct result of his atheism—his hubris was wishing that despite the corruption and hypocrisy behind the war it would shake things up enough to weaken some part of that theocratic monster which is the Middle East. That’s my best spin on a man I once admired for his intellectual depth.

  25. Maybe you already know this, but Chris Hedges attacks Hitchens and Sam Harris for being “clash-of-civilizations”-obsessed atheists in I Don’t Believe In Atheists. He compares them to a Nietzche character called The Last Man, a cynical asshole who doesn’t believe anything and feels superior to everyone. I don’t agree with everything the book says, but it’s a lot better than the stupid title.

  26. Eagleton wrote a book recently about the new atheism, in which he talks throughout about “Ditchkins,” a portmanteau of Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Its pretty hysterical….

  27. Yeah, I guess I’m not even smart and/or morally centered enough to take a stand on all of this. On the one hand, talking about billions of people like they’re worthless barbarians who deserve to be slaughtered, while ignoring all the horrible shit we’ve done in the Middle East, seems totally insane. On the other hand, I think extremist Islam really is barbaric, I’m sure the Koran does have all kinds of horrible shit in it, and murdering people over cartoons is about as crazy as you can get. So I find it impossible to argue about this stuff without coming across as a squishy, middle-of-the-road pussy; I couldn’t even win an argument with Bosch Fawstin, the Randian douche behind “Pigman,” so someone smart like Hitchens is way out of my league.

  28. I don’t know; that seems a fairly reasonable position. You should read the Eagleton book if you want ammunition against Hitchens, though; it’s pretty devastating.

    What on earth is “Pigman”?

  29. Mike Hunter — I’m a little confused about that Gordon essay. My understanding is that in 1947, when the statements you quote above were being made, nobody was all that worked up about the possible use of nuclear weapons: even Bertrand Russell was advocating pre-emptive threats against the Soviets in the late 1940s to persuade them to participate in “global government.” As late as ’54, Dulles and other US government officials were recommending Eisenhower use atomic weapons in Korea and Indochina. It took awhile, starting in the late 1950s through the Cuban Missle crisis, for people to slowly understand that nuclear attack was never ever again going to be an option, that “the only way to win is not to play.”

    By the late 1950s, increased knowledge of the risks of radiation had even influenced the most callous warmongers: the radiation and ash cloud produced by full scale nuclear attack with ’50s-era weapons were just too likely to affect us. In the late 1940s, the radiation data from Hiroshima was not only incomplete but heavily, heavily classified. US Government training films from as late as the mid-1950s still treat “fall-out” radiation as a temporary, avoidable, and imminently manageable problem. Some of this was fear management, some was willful ignorance, but some of it was also legitimate ignorance, especially among people without security clearances.

    You can argue that the idea of limited war is naive enough as to be unbelievable as sincere policy, that deep down the right still wanted nuclear war and that this was just a snow job to convince the squeamish, but Gordon seems to be saying that the Buckley quote he cites is evidence that he supported nuclear war, and it just isn’t.

    By the ’60s, few (possibly no) mainstream figures were outright and openly advocating we use our nuclear arsenal in any way other than reciprocating an attack. (The logical flaws in that caveat, of course, are the plot of the 1964 movie Fail-Safe.)

  30. If you didn’t click on the link, here’s the passage from Gordon quoting Buckley:

    Indeed; but to achieve this goal, Buckley was quite willing to risk nuclear war: “The Liberals go on: An offensive by Formosa is likely to bring on a third world war, which will be the end of all of us. One replies: In fact, the Soviet Union will not engage in a nuclear war so long as she is convinced that the United States is ready to reply in kind and has the capacity to do so. This is what is generally called the nuclear stalemate, or the balance of terror. It gave birth to the concept of the limited war, and it is that kind of war of liberation which those who would re-enter China favor.” (Rumbles Left and Right, Putnam, 1963, p.58)

  31. Just for comparison, there was Dixie Chicks “controversy”, a few years back. They had difficult time for voicing their opinion.

    My biggest concern here is that people tend to judge everything, without really understanding it, and I’m sure there are plenty of examples, on many sides.

  32. I think you can put too much emphasis on a failure of understanding. People objected to the Dixie Chicks’ comments not because they didn’t understand them, but because they actually disagreed. Similarly, South Park set out to deliberately insult Muslims (humorously, but it was an intentional provocation.) The Muslims who issued death threats didn’t misunderstand the intention, though their response is extreme and unjustifiable.

  33. At least on the basis of the quote from that Gordon essay, Noah; Mike said he’d heard a crazier quote somewhere else.

  34. inochi- Hitchens by the way is a good example of what you were saying about atheism, his blood thirstiness, his loss of good sense I think in support of the liar war was a direct result of his atheism—

    If this were true then it’d have been mostly atheists who supported the war. Actually, one could safely bet that most prominent atheists were against it. Hitchens’ is a more idiosyncratic case. Whatever the source of his blindness, I would ascribe it more to his general arrogance than his aggressive atheism.

    Incidentally, in a recent C-Span “Book TV” segment Hitchens stated his belief that George Orwell of all people would’ve been in support of the Iraq War. Hubris, indeed.

    Goddamit, Noah! I hope the site’s redesign includes a preview function!

  35. A preview function would be cool; I’ll try to remember to mention it.

    I think Hitchens’ particular brand of atheism and his particular brand of neo-con imperialism definitely go together. They’re both impelled by a sense of righteousness — I know where the evil is, and I, Christopher Hitchens, am the only one clear-headed enough to lead the battle against it!

    This is the thing with peopel’s worldviews/faith/etc. It really does impact people’s politics, life-choices, etc., but in different and individual ways.

    Hitchens pretty much believes that Orwell would approve of everything he’s ever thought or done. We all have our idols, I guess.

  36. —————
    Noah Berlatsky says:
    Whoops! I guess I can put Buckley back in the “reasonable conservative” bin again then…at least as far as nuclear policy goes.
    —————

    Well, he “evolved” – partially, anyway – from more extreme positions into more reasonable ones. Yet in his patrician, witty, bon mot-laden style, he frequently glossed over the most horrendous exploitation and atrocities, as long as the ones doing them were Capitalists and Christians…

    —————
    Caro says:
    At least on the basis of the quote from that Gordon essay, Noah; Mike said he’d heard a crazier quote somewhere else.
    —————-

    Yes, and couldn’t find it again. (Oh Google, how can you let me down??)

    …But whilst looking you then felicitously happen across stuff like that info about his military “service” “oversee[ing] a sexual hygiene operation on a base in Texas” for the Army was a riot. (Funny how these sons of rich daddies always just happen to get get safe wartime positions, and go on to become saber-rattling hawks to prove their manhood.)

    This “Noam Chomsky vs. William F. Buckley Debate : Part 1 of 2” video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYlMEVTa-PI ) reminds of how absurdly caricature-worthy his voice and mannerisms were. Imagine him aiming a pointer at a close-up photo of a syphilitic dingus and lecturing the appalled recruits about the importance of wearing rubbers in his “aristocratic drawl, quasi-British pronunciations, and fondness for Latinate vocabulary…”

    (See “Why Did William F. Buckley Jr. Talk Like That?” at http://www.slate.com/id/2185368 .)

    —————
    R. Fiore wrote:
    The problem the West is having with the fanatical end of Islam is that they act as if they actually believe there’s a God. What the West has learned is that even if you do sincerely believe in God, if you want any peace you can’t act that way. After all, if you truly believed that those who follow the wrong religion will be subjected to eternal torment then you’re doing them no favors by allowing them to do so.
    —————-

    Um, not the best phrasing.

    The important point is that in a [i]secular[/i], often multicultural society (the prevalent situation in the West), citizens strive to leave their religious beliefs out of the public sphere,

    Many American Christians may believe Muslims will go to Hell for rejecting Jesus (actually, they revere Him as a prophet, just don’t give Him such importance), but, creatures of our society that they are, they would find persecuting or forcibly converting them an appalling violation of their freedom or religion; no matter what they may think deep down in their heart of hearts.

    —————–
    WFB wrote:
    The sharp edges of the arguments nowadays stress not so much the nuclear war that would abolish mankind, as the senselessness of war…Why the Pentagon? What would be the point of it?

    It used to be, finding oneself in such a corner, that one had merely to reach into one’s quiver and pull out the arrow that had “Freedom” written on it. Touch it down on the skeptic, and he would waste away, like the witch come into contact with water.

    You will have noticed that this does not work anymore. Freedom is increasingly a subjective condition, in the assessment of the thought leaders . Professor Ross Terrill, writing the two most influential articles that have appeared in our time on the subject of Red China, is to be distinguished from the famous apologists for Stalin’s Russia, who made their way by simply denying the crimes imputed to Stalin.

    Terrill denies nothing. Although he does not in fact dwell on the atrocities — the mass executions, the terrorism, that kind of thing — he does not disguise the conditions of life in China today. After informing us that there is no freedom to practice religion there, nor to vote, nor to express oneself freely, nor to read books or periodicals one desires to read, nor to change one’s job, nor to travel to another city or another country, he says ingenuously, “People ask me, Is China free?” He answers them, incredibly, with great difficulty. Depends what you mean by freedom, he says . Freedom is always defined with reference to the limitations of the group, and whereas the operative group in the West is the individual, or the corporation, or the labor union, in China it happens to be the whole state.

    And he illustrates: Consider the writer Kuo Mojo. In the 19305 he wrote books for a mere four or five or at most eight thousand people, and now he is required by the state to write books that will appeal to twenty, thirty, or fifty million people . “Is that wrong?” the young professor asks. Then there is the scientist whose affinity was for abstract science but who was recently directed to concentrate exclusively on pest control . “Is that wrong?” Terrill asks, anaphorically: as we begin to understand the lethal quality of the ideological egalitarianism that rushes in after practical diplomacy, such that Richard Nixon, who went to China to establish a dialogue with Mao Tse-tung, ends by likening Mao’s revolution to America’s revolution — ends by saying that we will have a “long march” together . And there is Nixon seated next to Madame Mao Tse-tung, watching a ballet which has become agitprop, a violation of art as well as of taste ; it was as if we had invited the presidents of the black African republics to the White House to show them a ballet on the theme of Little Black Sambo. And Mr. Nixon, returning to the United States, proclaims the great enthusiasm the Chinese people feel for their government . Indeed. The Chinese government has many ways of generating enthusiasm, and no doubt Mr. Nixon is professionally fascinated by them, even as Henry Regnery would be fascinated by methods of teaching authors how to write books that sell not five thousand but fifty million copies.

    We see then the movement of Western opinion: What, really, is so bad about Red China? Their ways are not our ways, to be sure, but is it seriously proposed that we should be prepared to die if necessary in order to avoid living by their word, rather than by our own — which is in any case corrupt, racist, and decadent?
    —————–

    One can reject the simplistic idea that our particular group possesses the arrow that had “Freedom” written on it, and still reject the “since we’re not perfect, who are we to judge?” abdication of taking any moral stances (much less actions) whatsoever…

    Unfortunately, what we usually get instead is that…

    “The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity”

    – William Butler Yeats

  37. “abdication of taking any moral stances (much less actions) whatsoever…”

    The problem is that there isn’t any action we can take re: China without making life worse for the majority of the people there and here, and that in the absence of action, “moral stances” are mostly kind of hollow.

    This is kind of the thing with foreign policy. In terms of forcing other countries to act in the ways we would like, our options are very limited. I mean, you can invade and take over the country — but as Iraq shows, that really doesn’t work all that well. Sanctions are possible…but unless they have broad support within the country affected (as was the case with South Africa) it’s unclear that they help either. And moral breast-beating so often goes along with self-interested imperialist policies (as with Cuba) that it’s hard to take them seriously — even though, as Buckley points out, forswearing of moral breastbeating tends to be more self-interested than moral as well.

    I wonder what Buckley would have said about the Bush/Cheney torture business….

  38. You know, Mike’s mention that Buckley didn’t see combat reminded me of the famous exchange where Gore Vidal called Buckley a Nazi, Buckley called Vidal a queer, and the briefly argued about Buckley’s WWII service. It’s on Youtube, if you’re interested. Are you allowed to say that you served in the infantry in WWII if you didn’t make it overseas? If not, I wonder why Buckley blurted that out. Here’s a transcript of the exchange I found.

    GV: As far as I am concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Failing that,…

    MODERATOR: Let’s not call names.

    GV: …I would only say that we can’t have the right of assembly…

    WFB: Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi…

    MOD: Let’s stop calling names and let’s get…

    WFB: …or I’ll sock you in the goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.

    MOD: Gentlemen, let’s…

    WFB: Let the author of Myra Breckenridge go back to his pornography and stop making any allusions of Nazism…

    MOD: I beg you to…

    WFB: …to someone who served in the infantry in the last war and…

    GV: You were not in the infantry, as a matter of fact, you didn’t fight…

  39. Noah and Sieg, I saw that Book TV and I would agree Hitchen is a uniquely arrogant fellow even before the war; one got the sense he was full of himself, being really smart can do to that I suppose. He’s a fascinating grotesque. What shocks me now is my own response to him, a man I admired, I find him somewhat repulsive now, too coy, he’s a virtuoso with the language but I find it somehow a dead end, it reminds me of stepping into slush, all because he supported a war, two wars, justified by lies and wasn’t in the anti-war camp!

    Maybe I’ve lost respect for his intelligence bieng someone who respect the intelligent perhaps too much. If they had only said listen we want the oil because we need it either for Europe or ourselves, so we’re going to take it and you and your children are going to pay for it.

    Don’t complain because this is what keeps your standards of living high compared to the rest of the world. Or we want to bring democracy to Irag because we helped corrupt it by helping to keep Sadaam in power and we want to right the wrongs we did in the past. Or we need strategic bases there and in Afghanistan to cover China, Russia and Pakistan if things get out of hand.

    Honest murderous imperialism would be deserving of some horrified respect and awe but these people come across as bumbling idiots and killers and maybe they are if it isn’t some grand conspiracy of hidden rulers in smoked filled rooms!

    If we don’t leave Irag but keep a small force there maybe with up the Kurds or in the Green Zone and don’t leave Afghanistan what will that tell us. None of the people we’re dealing are really that much better than Sadaam so all the deaths was worth it?

    Some Japanese are still trying to get the US bases either out or farther away from their people or their women specifically. Sometimes I wonder if the real conspiracy behinds the wars wasn’t just real time training for future wars—you develop leaders who have actual field experience in Urban and mountain warfare and they can train and lead future troops for the real war that’s coming. Simulation doesn’t do it. Here we may have an actual example of imperial brilliance. Of course they won’t tell us this.

    Jack, I do know of Hedges, I like Hedges as a counter to Hitchens, two giant intellects, I want to read his Empire of Illusion—the little I know of Hedges is that he reminds people that war has reality, consequences that we civilians back home don’t often see. Is one life worth a million—if it’s the person you love, maybe, it’s all so horrible…and wonderful, too.

    Intelligence and morality do they go hand in hand? I’m sure not all atheists, Sieg, are fanatics and on many occasion I feel more like an atheist than an agnostic but there are some atheists that have an edge in their voices that hints of hysteria or you think well if they ever got the power boy they’d put an end to religion and spiritual magical thinking pretty quick. I’m not a big fan of current evolutionary and much mainstream scientific orthodoxy though much of it makes sense.

    But I’m not a fan of religions of a less ecumenical sports-man like sort either but religion is tied to the imagination and any attempts to kill it will also require killing the imaginative in human nature?

    TBN by the way is an example of religion as entertainment and I think atheists should delight in the fact that religion is turning into just another form of escapism—when religion loses its passion to change the world, does it become escapist? Passion as in the Yeats quote above is part of the human condition, hell, we’re all crazy after all–Batman is inside Arkham, too, huh. So the South Parkies did insult them intentionally–I guess they have the money for security and to hide if they have to. It’s seems like wasted effort, ugly Americanism, we can do anything we want here and maybe there, too, thumb our noses as stupid religions but it does no good.

    That stuff quoted on China is fascinating. China is the real thing, Orwell’s 1984 and worse.

  40. By the way, as soon as Buckley calls him a queer, Vidal’s face totally lights up as if he is absolutely overjoyed. It’s pretty funny to watch.

  41. That’s a great exchange, Jack. I guess Fiore and I have a ways to go before we reach that level of bile.

    Inochi, Hitchens’ main reason for going into Iraq is his liberalism; he hates dictatorships, basically. I don’t think he’s hypocritical or deceptive; just (from my point of view) blinded by his own arrogance and self-righteousness.

    It’s essentially Fiore’s arrogance and self-righteousness too, is the thing. The view that Europe and democracy have solved certain problems of the human condition can lead, in the right hands, from Fiore’s relatively innocuous back-patting to violent prosletyzing. Once you’ve figured out the key to peace, it makes sense to export it — by violence, if necessary.

  42. “My biggest concern here is that people tend to judge everything, without really understanding it, and I’m sure there are plenty of examples, on many sides.” was about Mr. Fiore’s text.

  43. Hitchen’s certainly has the passion and sometimes we must act after all and even fail, it is true. It is the stuff tragedy He often seems unhappy to me and never really opens up about himself in warm, basic human terms, you don’t know if the man likes puppies or not for example. Is he in fact an alcoholic? Hitchens is perhaps an example of the limits of intelligence.

    He lost a lot of respect on the left. His opponent on the left in debates proved far wiser. You know I can’t ever recall him joking or laughing in a simply human way. He might understand more than I think but I guess I expected more reason rather than passion. That is he didn’t have to jump on the neo-con bandwagon even if he did support some kind of intervention in Irag, yet he supported a war fabricated on lies that showed no respect for democratic ideals; he must have known that the politicians were liars but he supported it anyway because of his wish to weaken fundamentalism at all cost? It looked like the war strengthened rather than weakened it in any case. Wasted effort.

    Christianity is tamed in the West, it now respects democratic, humanist, liberal values to a certain degree, for the most part—Islam is not tamed—Islam must be for an atheist like Hitchens a powerful symbol of the dangerousness of religious absolutism. And from what I’ve heard moderate Moslems are not so much moderates but people who are too afraid to reject the extremists. So in that he and I probably agree.

    I remember his vicious attack on Mother Theresa—a viciousness that even I thought unnecessary or lacking perhaps a novelistic understanding of human nature. Hitchens perhaps will never write a great novel because he can’t get into the skin of flawed people, deluded people like himself, like all of us at some point might or could be.

    Hitchens is no more a monster than the people he disagrees which speaks to your point. But slaying Sadaam ignored the crimes of Saudia Arabia and other regimes then being supported, say, in Pakistan, another torture state, so what really was this all about, freedom, democracy, peace, there is no peace there now, just relative calm. Americans ended up torturing people themselves.

    To some extent, maybe this only applies to literary fiction, novelists must have sympathy for the human condition, a rather passive position. His shift from being a darling of the left, I remember when he was only heard over WBAI, to being a tool or court jester of the right is itself Orwellian–I wonder if he has noticed this irony. But I can forgive Hitchens, since most of human intentions are often good ones.

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