News
I’m going to be on vacation and away from the internets starting tomorrow…thus this early and short Utilitarian Review. The blog will resume regular posting next Tuesday, August 28.
On HU
Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on Archie’s hideous transformation.
Me on the mysterious black metal evil of Funeral Mist.
Me on how Philip K. Dick anticipated his own crappy remaking.
Jaime Green on how the play Clybourne Park is lying to you about race.
Me on the Dark Knight Rises and the pleasures of self-actualizing billionaires.
Vom Marlowe reviews the Glades.
Me on the small as life pleasures of Say Anything.
Utilitarians Everywhere
At Splice I talk about Obama and the audacity of cravenness.
Also at Splice I weigh in on negative book reviews vs. positive book reviews.
Other Links
Robert Stanley Martin on John Cheever’s “The Country Husband.
Jeff Spross on how DKR is not really conservative.
Sarah Kendzior on how academia exploits its adjuncts.
The Atlantic sneers satisfyingly at Joe Paterno.
Ben Saunders is curating a exhibit of Charles Schulz’s drawings at the University of Oregon.
And of course forgot to do the promised “what are you reading section.” But if anyone’s interested; this week I finished Nana, read Jason Dittmer’s forthcoming “Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero” for a review, and started Chris Hedges’ “When Atheism Becomes Religion.”
Re your “Obama’s Betrayed Promises” ( http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/obama-s-betrayed-promises ) article and its enumeration of ways Obama caters to Wall Street and the wealthy, I disgustedly agree.
Yet, here’s the twist; looks like he’s not sufficiently catering to the rich! From the latest “New Yorker”:
“Obama doesn’t like cozying up to billionaires. Could it cost him the election?”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/08/27/120827fa_fact_mayer
And, that book, “When Atheism Becomes Religion“? Might as well title a work “When Science Becomes Religion.” Though atheism or science might share some aspects of religion, such as a range of beliefs being held in common by members of each group, religion is in a whole class by itself: utterly dismissing (indeed, attacking as blasphemy) any need for “reality-based” confirmation of its basic premises, making blind, unquestioning faith in its most absurd assertions a cardinal virtue.
No wonder that the easiest predictor of those who will guzzle wholeheartedly the pack of outrageous, pernicious lies of the GOP platform is…regular church attendance.
Hedges it talking about the new atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins, and the way they are similar to the fundamentalists they decry.
I’m still working on the Brautigan bio (damn it’s huge), and now I’m rereading Bart Beaty’s “Unpopular Culture,” as I suspected (and now have confirmed) that it shares a nice connection with “Comics Versus Art” (which I also finished rereading this week).
I also just started Leanne Shapton’s “Swimming Studies” which is collection of short autobiographical vignettes related around swimming. She swam professionally as a youth and tried out for the Olympics. The book is mostly text but there are a few wonderful sequences of illustrations/comics, which is what really attracted me to the book. You can see small versions of a lot of the images here: http://leanneshapton.com/swimmingstudies.html Her writing is nicely tuned to sensory data (lots of smells) but without being overdone or tedious.
Noah — First of all, enjoy the vacation.
Regarding “Nana,” as a pre-1960s paperback collector, over the years I’ve picked up several different printings of the 1940s Pocketbook version, but I’ve never read it. All I know about it is it was written by Emile Zola and has a nifty cover painting. Is it worth the read?
As far as the book, “When Aethism Becomes a Religion,” it sounds like exactly what I’ve been arguing for years. I think movements like aethism, animal rights, and environmental preservation, when taken to extremes by very vocal activist minorities in their ranks, become like religions, and any viewpoint that falls outside of their rigidly established doctrine is looked upon as blasphemy. For example, I love animals, but I view much of the doctrine and many of the activists at PETA as loonatic fringe — not all that much different than the people who were members of, say, the “Heavens Gate” cult.
The same goes for extremists on either ends of the political spectrum, in my opinion. Reason ceases to matter, as doctrine trumps everything. These extremists do not judge their candidates on things like problem-solving ability or intelligence, but on the number of key ideology boxes that the candidates have checked off, such as stance on abortion, stance on gay marriage, stance on religious issues, stance on unions, stance on taxation, etc. This “ideolological halo effect” ignores much of everything else, which is why, I think, there seems to be more polarization in politics than ever. You can be a crook and an idiot, but if you have those ideological boxes checked off, your party faithful will almost always rally around you and find some way to rationalize away your dumb remarks and behavior.
R. Maheras: Noah is actually referring to Nana by Ai Yazawa, a manga series.
Derik — Can you tell I’m o-l-d?
Well it’s ambiguous here, but in last week’s post he was more specific.
First, I buy the argument that the behaviors/rhetorics of some of the new atheists (including Dawkins and Hitchens) are close to that of fundamentalists.
That said, I am a little wary of making too close an analogy, however, as it seems to me that with radical fundamentalists you’re dealing with the fringe end of an already politically powerful block. With the new atheists you’re dealing with people who are truly isolated, and widely distrusted by N. American society writ large. On any given Sunday I can stumble onto a hard core fundamentalist TV preacher. I can’t remember the last time I channel surfed past Dawkins.
Russ, there’s no possible way you would like “When Atheism Becomes a Religion” (which I read when it was published under the considerably stupider title “I Don’t Believe in Atheists”). Hedges’ politics are far left. His basic argument is that the “new atheists” are glib, shallow assholes and “suburban mutations” whose combination of ignorance and arrogance mirrors that of religious fundamentalists and is reminiscent of Nietche’s (sp) “Last Man.” He complains about stuff like Sam Harris suggesting that it might be necessary to nuke Islamic countries since they’re nuts (Harris denies that he ever said this) and Dawkins saying that the conflict in Ireland boils down to Catholicism vs. Protestantism. Hedges also complains about how Christopher Hitchens once reacted to Hedges’ suggestion that “despair” was a factor in Palestinian suicide bombers by screaming that Hedges is an apologist for suicide bombings (there’s a clip of this on Youtube, and I agree that Hitchens probably deserved to be punched in the face repeatedly for his outburst). Hitchens further gets called out for believing in the possibility of building a better world through violence, both when he was a Trotskyite and when he supported the Iraq invasion, and for commenting on Islam and Middle Eastern history without knowing Arabic. I thought the book worked pretty well as an attack on the type of smug know-it-all bloviating that you often see on the internet from ideologues of all stripes, including atheists, but a lot of it was pretty unconvincing.
Thanks for the synopsis, Jack!
A radical is a radical is a radical — it doesn’t matter what the cause is. Once they’ve reached the point of radicalism, their brains are shut off towards everything that deviates from their doctrine.
I may be a stubborn curmudgeon at times, and I may be very blunt, but I have friends and acquaintances of all stripes, and we usually can carry on some sort of relatively reasonable discussion — even when we have divergent philosophies (right OR left). If I don’t talk to someone at all, it’s probably because I think they are too far gone — but it could also be that I’m just too damn tired to argue.
Russ, I’ve said this to you before and you’re obviously never going to agree with me, but your view that radicals=close-minded brainwashing victims while moderates=independent critical thinkers just strikes me as total nonsense. Many of the “moderate” opinions you’ve expressed here and on the tcj.com board–Bush’s “enhanced interrogation” policies were questionable but not all that bad, bombing Hiroshima was justified, the “Ground Zero Mosque” was bad, etc–only seem moderate to you because they happen to be the status quo at the moment. The CIA said that as many of 50% of the guys sent to Guantanamo didn’t belong there–I’m sure that to those guys, your (and the Democrats’ and the Republicans’) acceptance of indefinite detention would not seem moderate and reasonable but radical and insane. Much of the radicalism of the past, whether from the Founding Fathers, the abolitionists (some of whom, like John Brown, were literally nuts), or the Civil Rights movement, is now accepted as reasonable. Assuming that humanity is still around in a couple of hundred years, I think that some of today’s radicalism will seem the same way.
“Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. […] When it comes to theology, […] any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.”
Terry Eagleton, reviewing The God Delusion.
Nonetheless, I think it’s a good thing that, as well as well-informed critics and hard-working social scientists who are genuinely interested in understanding the psychological/historical/sociological/etc. basis for religion, we have vociferous idiots and rhetorically shoddy nitwits like Hitchens, Harris et al. Why should the other side get all the vociferous idiots?
(And, yes, I’m being serious)
Are there any “new Atheists” other than the 4 always cited? Their numbers have just been reduced by 25%! There’s a movement as dangerous as Christian fundamentalists, for sure.
In place of this “debate,” I’d suggest reading Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism, After Finitude, which makes a persuasive argument that in a worldview where everything is reduced to faiths outside of human “finitiude” or our cognitive limitation, what you get is nothing more than an impoverished fideism, which justifies the religious ideologues (so much for feel good postmodernism). Anyway, I’ve been reading the speculative materialists and realists lately. They’re a lot of fun and pretty good writers, too.
Also: speaking of atheists, Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco is great. Not sure about Gene Wolfe’s New Sun. And Steven Erikson’s Malazon series turned out to be really awful (gave up after about 200 pages). It’s a lot easier to find good SF than good fantasy.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Hedges it talking about the new atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins, and the way they are similar to the fundamentalists they decry.
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I thought it likely that might be the situation. I have no problem with someone making the case that those types of atheists are “similar to the fundamentalists they decry,” or, as Russ puts it, that “…movements like atheism, animal rights, and environmental preservation, when taken to extremes by very vocal activist minorities in their ranks, become like religions.” (Emphases added.)
All defensible arguments, and a dangerous (in varying ways; from art teachers in past decades dismissing pupils’ interest in figurative art because “abstract expressionism is the way for art to go,” to actions which can cause deaths (see the “success” the “HIV does not cause AIDS” crowd has achieved in Africa) for any group to go.
If that’s the argument the book makes, though, what a disgrace that they went for a commercially more pithy title that drastically distorts a more nuanced and accurate premise into FOX “News” absurdity.
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Nate says:
…it seems to me that with radical fundamentalists you’re dealing with the fringe end of an already politically powerful block. With the new atheists you’re dealing with people who are truly isolated, and widely distrusted by N. American society writ large.
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Yeah:
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The 2006 University of Minnesota study made a lot news about its revelation of how atheists are the most despised minority in America, but this wasn’t news to atheists…
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More studies and polls at http://atheism.about.com/od/atheistbigotryprejudice/a/AtheistSurveys.htm
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R. Maheras says:
…A radical is a radical is a radical — it doesn’t matter what the cause is. Once they’ve reached the point of radicalism, their brains are shut off towards everything that deviates from their doctrine.
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It’s not just a matter of those involved in “causes”; it’s a common psychological phenomenon that people who have a certain strongly-held belief (i.e., “I am a totally worthless person and no one could ever care for me”; or, Crumb fashion, that women prefer men who are pushy, macho, arrogant assholes) strongly focus their attention on events and situations which reinforce those beliefs, while ignoring or dismissing that which casts doubt on their validity
In the former example, the thinking involved would be “Yeah, my family and people around me act as if they care about me; but either they’re faking it, or if they knew what I’m really like they wouldn’t care.”
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Jack says:
Russ…your view that radicals=close-minded brainwashing victims while moderates=independent critical thinkers just strikes me as total nonsense.
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Alas, virtually no one is wholly an “independent critical thinker.” Even overall intelligent, perceptive folks have their “problem areas.”
Certainly middle-of-the-road, “moderate” people are every bit as adept as ignoring or dismissing ugly, “inconvenient truths” as any “Truther” or Intelligent Design advocate. Widely-shared delusions are”Both political parties are basically run by well-meaning, honest people”; “we can raise the entire world to an American-style standard of living”; “progress will keep on making things better and better”; “we can have our cake and eat it too”…
But even if Russ does unduly focus upon radicals, I think he’s got a point. Extremists do tend to put far too much weight upon their pet “cause” or belief, demonize the opposition, while middle-of-the-roaders (actually far more “liberal” than depicted by the Right and “liberal media”) are able to accept a far greater range of beliefs; do not believe that, say, “Demon Rum” or eating meat or the Jewish Cabal or Liberals or “Enviro-Nazis” or Collectivism or Capitalism or improper toilet training are behind all the world’s evils, and that fixing that problem will usher in a Paradise.
Some food for thought (and a handy term for the beliefs listed immediately above) in “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism”:
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The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. This sacredness is evident in the prohibition (whether or not explicit) against the questioning of basic assumptions, and in the reverence which is demanded for the originators of the Word, the present bearers of the Word, and the Word itself. While thus transcending ordinary concerns of logic, however, the milieu at the same time makes an exaggerated claim of airtight logic, of absolute “scientific” precision. Thus the ultimate moral vision becomes an ultimate science; and the man who dares to criticize it, or to harbor even unspoken alternative ideas, becomes not only immoral and irreverent, but also “unscientific.” In this way, the philosopher kings of modern ideological totalism reinforce their authority by claiming to share in the rich and respected heritage of natural science.
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Much more, at http://www.rickross.com/reference/brainwashing/brainwashing19.html
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Embracing the Radical: How Uncertainty Breeds Extremism
When in doubt, people shift toward extreme points of view
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Article at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=embracing-the-radical
The weird thing about Hitchens and Dawkins as “religious fundamentalists” is that they essentially reject 100 years of “religious humanism”.
I haven’t read Felix Adler or any of the other early Humanist (“secular humanist”, “religious humanist, etc) writings in over a decade. But a big part of the appeal of the humanist project seemed to me to be a rational understanding of morality without a deity. That rational understanding rejected the notion that sinful acts are committed by sinful people, and that good acts are committed by the blessed. One of Adler’s basic arguments was that one should attempt to “elicit the best” from everyone regardless of creed.
Ian Buruma’s review of “Hitch 22”, pretty much sums up Hitchens:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/believer/?page=1
” What this suggests is that to Hitchens politics is essentially a matter of character. Politicians do bad things, because they are bad men. The idea that good men can do terrible things (even for good reasons), and bad men good things, does not enter into this particular moral universe.”
Hitchens’ irrational “moral” doctrine and Hitchens/Dawkins insistence that creed and behavior can’t be decoupled (as opposed to Adler philosophy of “deed above creed”) is everything that religious humanism has argued against for the last century.
Thanks for the NYRB link re Hitchens, Alex. From the article:
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Like many people who count “Hitch” among their friends, I have watched with a certain degree of dismay how this lifelong champion of left-wing, anti-imperialist causes, this scourge of armed American hubris, this erstwhile booster of Vietcong and Sandinistas, this ex-Trot who delighted in calling his friends and allies “comrades,” ended up as a loud drummer boy for President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, a tub-thumper for neoconservatism, and a strident American patriot. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the prime movers behind the Iraq war, became his new comrade. Michael Chertoff, head of the Homeland Security Department under Bush, presided over his citizenship ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.
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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/believer/?page=1
His behavior — and that of fellow far-leftists who just “flipped” to become neocons — amusingly confirms your “to Hitchens politics is essentially a matter of character” remark. For those like him, favoring a “totalist” attitude, the idea of becoming a moderate, of conceding that another side may possibly have some valid points in their arguments or premises, is unthinkable.
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The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic dogma, holding it out as an ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence…
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http://www.rickross.com/reference/brainwashing/brainwashing19.html
I just listened to a podcast of Chris Hedges speaking at the Free Library in Philadelphia about his new book with Joe Sacco, and one of his main topics was how the history of radicalism has been buried in the U.S. “They want us to think they gave us our rights out of generosity.” When an audience member asked Hedges’ favorite Founding Father, he shot back, “Sitting Bull.”
http://libwww.freelibrary.org/authorevents/podcast.cfm?podcastID=997
2007 debate between Hedges and Hitchens.
I’ll take Hitchens if these are my only choices.
I don’t know whether or not suicide bombers are driven by despair, but Hitchens’ idea that attributing despair to them equals justifying their actions is moronic.
Hedges’ point re: hitchens, et. al., is that they believe that reason can lead to a pure secular politics; thus their willingness to attribute all evil to irrational religion (and their eagerness to argue that Hitler and Stalin are religious and MLK Jr. is not (which Hitchens actually says, because he is a glib and shallow asshole.)) Eagleton’s book about the new atheists is better overall though (can’t remember the name of it right now, alas….)
The point being, this is not a minority, marginalized position that has no effect on policy. On the contrary, Hitchens, Dawkins, et. al. are way closer to the mainstream American policy consensus than are fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are visible precisely because they’re outliers…not without influence, or anything, but not the ones in the drivers seat. The rational utopian pragmatism that Dawkins/Harris etc. champion is extremely influential; it’s the mainstream American ideology, and it controls the world.
Hedges also accuses Hitchens of being essentially an entertainer, which I think is about right.
The problem with the book is that it ends up being a less rigorous gloss on Niebuhr, in a lot of ways. He might have done better to focus more on Hitchens, etc., ignorance of the people and religions they condemn. But it’s an enjoyable read, and I think many of his points about Hitchens et al. is sound.
The thing is, when you’re talking about religion’s factual claims, I think maybe it is okay to adopt the attitude of a smirking teenage know-it-all. One of Hitchen’s main anti-Christian points is that it wouldn’t make much sense for God to send humanity’s savior to Bronze Age Palestine, thousands of years after the dawn of humanity and over a thousand years before the Good News would reach much of the world. I realize that St. Augustine and plenty of other Christian theologians throughout history have been a lot smarter than Hitchens, but can any of them convincingly dismiss that glib, sophmoric point? Both Terry Eagleton (in the review Jones linked to) and Hedges get very vague when they talk about their religious beliefs–Eagleton says God is “the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves,” and Hedges says “God is a verb.” If they’re going to back that far away from religion’s factual claims, I think they might as well just say, “Christianity is a beautiful myth from which I draw a lot of inspiration,” and call it a day.
Well, neither Hedges nor Eagleton is a Christian, is the thing, so it’s sort of weird to expect them to back Christianity’s claims in a thoroughly convincing way.
The baseline response I guess is that religion is in no small part about rejecting the idea that human reason can make sense of the world in a systematic way. Responding to that by arguing that religion doesn’t make sense rationally in a systematic way is just begging the question. That’s why it’s sophomoric; Hitchens assumes the thing that he’s trying to prove, and then preens himself on delivering a knock-out blow when he hasn’t even been able to find the gloves that he thinks he’s putting on.
Well, I’ll have to think about that one, Noah. I think Eagleton and Hedges both call themselves Christians, though.
Eagleton is absolutely not a Christian; I am 100% sure of that. He’s a Marxist atheist.
And yeah…I just read a review of Hedges book which says he’s not a Christian either (though can’t find it now…) — but yeah, my strong impression is that he’s a secular agnostic.
I’ve definitely heard Hedges say that he considers himself a Christian, but also a doubter. I think he said it on Bill Moyers recently.
I’m not sure whether Eagleton still considers himself an atheist. In this interview, he was asked if he’s “a Christian per se, or a person who happens to like and be inspired by Christianity.” He says, “I don’t think the pope will consider me a Christian… Quite what my relation to it now is hard to say.”
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/09/17/religion-for-radicals-an-interview-with-terry-eagleton/
Sorry to use this thread as my personal blog.
Not at all. That’s interesting about Eagleton. I guess my 100% is over certain, since even he’s not 100% certain what he is!
I think my basic point stands, though; neither Eagleton nor Hedges are full-throated Christian apologists, so it’s no surprise that you don’t get a full-throated Christian apology from either of them.
Oh, and a great comment by Eagleton problematizing my argument above about faith and reason:
What happened to people’s reading lists?
Read the first comment! We’ve been talking about them this whole thread….
Noah wrote-
“The point being, this is not a minority, marginalized position that has no effect on policy. On the contrary, Hitchens, Dawkins, et. al. are way closer to the mainstream American policy consensus than are fundamentalists.”
I’m not sure I buy this one. If you’re talking the top tier of American foreign policy making elite I might buy it, as many (though by no means all) have bought into some version of the clash of civilizations hypothesis. But they were on that horse before Hitch and Dawkins got vocal about their atheism. These are positions influenced by Huntington and Kissinger, and not the new atheists.
As for this one:
Fundamentalists are visible precisely because they’re outliers…not without influence, or anything, but not the ones in the drivers seat.
I assume you mean that the isolationist foreign policy views of some of its members (eg. Pat Robertson) are ignored, but they’ve got plenty of truck when it comes to social issues.
This, though, I can pretty much get behind:
The rational utopian pragmatism that Dawkins/Harris etc. champion is extremely influential; it’s the mainstream American ideology, and it controls the world.
As for the reading list, I’m in the first third “Infinite Jest,” which gets better by the page. And I’m finishing up I.A. Richards’s “Philosophy of Rhetoric,” which is much funnier (and smarter) than I remember it being.
I wasn’t claiming that the new Atheists influenced or created the policy consensus; on the contrary, I think they’re just a particularly polemical outgrowth of enlightenment pragmatism.
I like the idea that Kissinger is in some sense the main intellectual forefather of Hitchens’ latter-day diatribes. He’d obviously be apoplectic at the suggestion, but I think there’s a lot of truth to it.
Fundamentalists obviously have power when it comes to social issues — but they’ve also been pretty steadily losing ground on them for the past century, at least.
I should probably read Hedges’ fundamentalism book. I think he argues that a lot of the power of that movement in modern times comes from people’s increasing disempowerment — sort of a more nuanced version of Obama’s clinging to gods and guns argument, I guess. I’d at least be interested in seeing what Hedges does with it….
I did read the beginning of the thread….but then it became about atheism (your reading list!…not other people’s too!)
People have been sharing still; go ahead if you’d like!
I’m still working my way through the same books I was last week.
The only thing I have to add is that I read the first couple chapters Some Facets of King Lear (Colie and Flahiff, editors). It’s very good so far.
I also read some comics for the first time in a while. I read The Hidden, by Richard Sala. It’s a decent homage to Frankenstein, but I didn’t appreciated it as much as ’13 O’clock.’ Also read some of the non-Krazy Kat Herriman strips in the Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (good) and the first chapter of Apollo’s Song (I like the art and it’s very fast-paced, but the preachiness of the story and the way the characters are just pawns so far bothers me).
Other than Hitchens being an asshole, none of that has a lick of truth to it. His related points in God Is Not Great about Stalin and MLK Jr. are two sides of the truth that Plato delivered to civilization before Christianity began: morality and religion aren’t necessarily related. It wasn’t that Stalin was religious (and Hitchens states this pretty clearly), it was that his totalitarian rule was structurally similar to the hierarchical domination used by Christianity. Thus, contrary to the interpretation that Stalin was being claimed simply religious, Hitchens’ point was that you could have the same sort of cultish control in a secular political system. The evil here derives from submission to some absolutist authority. As for MLK Jr., Hedges has a willfully crude and overly literal reading of Hitchens: what separates his “real” (Hitchens’ word) legacy from the “nominal” Christian interpretation (that is, that MLK Jr. was acting in any literal sense as a by-the-book Christian) is that the man never “hint[ed] that those who injured and reviled him were to be threatened with any revenge or punishment, in this world or the next, save the consequences of their own brute selfishness and stupidity.” MLK Jr. chose for rhetorical purposes the biblical parts served his moral purpose, not the other way around. In reference to King’s last speech, Hitchens suggests that other stories could’ve served the same purpose had more people been familiar with them. There are those who might object that the Bible’s not to be taken in any literal sense, but I’m with Hitchens and rednecked Baptists in asking what makes one a Christian in any meaningful sense if that’s the case? There has to be some line demarcating my atheistic admiration for some biblical teachings and the way a Christian would take them to heart. I don’t worship Kafka or Ballard.
Likewise, I get really tired of the bullshit defense that Christianity is responsible for our modern conception of individualism, liberty, free will, etc., as if no notion of any of that pre-existed the religion. This seems to be Hedges primary line of defense. All of those things were hotly debated within theology — that is, being a Christian didn’t really help decide the issue any. Of course, Christians did contribute to the ongoing discourse, but that’s not much of an argument for the aspects that make them uniquely Christian. And that’s the central problem with Hedges’ view in the debate that I linked to. He never does address Hitchens’ central question: name one moral claim that you need to be a Christian in order to discover or believe. At best, Hedges’s whole defense falls under the genetic fallacy.
“but I’m with Hitchens and rednecked Baptists in asking what makes one a Christian in any meaningful sense if that’s the case?”
You’ve said this before, and it’s utter nonsense. Christianity isn’t a set of propositions; it’s a tradition and a faith. If MLK says he’s a Christian, and that his pacifism was in large part tied to his Christianity, it’s incredibly disrespectful, not to mention willfully idiotic, to say, well, he didn’t *have* to be a Christian.
His entire life and work sprang out of the black church. His Christianity had theological, intellectual, institutional, and traditional roots. To arbitrarily say, “well that doesn’t matter because he doesn’t believe in hell” is just silliness.
And again, why should Hedges answer the central question of naming one moral claim that you need to be in order to be Christian when that question is so thoroughly beside the point? Christianity’s a faith, not a logical theorem. Yes, if you already accept Hitchens’ logic, then his logic is irrefutable. If, however, you have a slightly more complicated view of how ethics works (like, say, Alastair Macintyre’s) then Hitchens is just elaborately begging the question.
I mean, why not argue that Hitchens could just as easily be a Christian? Lots of Christians hate Muslims; lots of Christians criticize the church; lot of Christians are assholes. Name one moral proposition that you can find in atheism that you couldn’t believe as a Christian. There are none, so obviously his atheism doesn’t matter and he should really be claimed by Christians, right? Except that arguing that is idiotic.
Oh…and Hedges doesn’t mention Stalin; I had seen Hitchens say that somewhere else. I’ll take your word for it that his argument is more subtle than I remember…though I’m not sure what the point is then. If atheists can be just as hierarchical and evil as Christians (or moreso, really, considering Stalin) why blame evil on religion? If the point is just that you can be a bad person if you’re an atheist or a believer, that seems both banal and non-controversial (or at least you’d think so.)
Hitchens wasn’t really denying that MLK Jr. was a Christian, though. He was arguing that morality drives the way a Christian will understand the Bible, which parts he chooses and how he interprets and uses them. Basically, the Christian stuff is philosophically perfunctory. He acknowledges that it’s rhetorically powerful.
I don’t much get your basic position on tradition and morality: Americans believe in, or at least use, a certain discourse in liberty, but is it necessary for liberty that one be an American? One might compare this discourse to another people’s and find it wanting or better. To do the same with the moral claims of Christianity means including all the stuff that no one much cares about when admiring MLK Jr.. Was the good that he did lessened because of all the nasty shit in his religious tradition?
I don’t much get from Hitchens, even though his was a throat-cutting sort of polemic, that Christians didn’t pass on moral teaching to their offspring only that a lot of unnecessary padding was used *and* that padding has had a lot of deleterious effects on people acting morally. He uses the papal crackdown on some liberation theologists at one point relative to the limpwristed approach taken to fascists. I forget the details of his analogy, but one could also look at the recent absurdly disproportionate treatment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious — feminist nuns — relative to the hiding of male pedophiles in Catholic ranks. Fresh Air had an interview with one of the LCWR’s leaders, and she explained that Catholicism was her tradition, so she couldn’t just ditch it. I think Hitchens’ view would be that the feminist values she holds dear aren’t really coming from the Catholic tradition, but are being used in an attempt to change that tradition. (He’d be a lot nastier about stating that, though.)
His use of Stalin wasn’t meant to be dismissive of the latter’s evil, but to demonstrate that the existence of Christianity doesn’t curtail such evil. In the sense that Christianity has been just as evil and that Stalin, like Hitler, actually used the church for the purpose of domination. Yeah, this should be uncontroversial, but what’s the point in being Christian at all? Other than being raised as Christian, I mean.
Recently, I was surprised to read this article about what a liberal theology MLK had: http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/nov_dec_09_scofield Apparently, he didn’t even believe in a literal resurrection.
Well, the point would be that you believe in God, I think. Why bother being an atheist when morality isn’t tied to atheism? The assumption I guess is that atheism is the default, but I don’t see why that should be either historically or theoretically the case. Again, it just seems like assuming the stuff you’re trying to prove.
Any tradition, whether theist or not, has horrible bits. That includes the refutation of any tradition, incidentally. Again, the assumption seems to be that there’s some place where you can stand that isn’t implicated in evil. I just don’t think that’s the case…and indeed, the view from nowhere is a very powerful ideology itself which is quite soaked in blood.
The point of being a Christian in terms of morality (as opposed to belief) is that (per MacIntyre) morality isn’t an abstract system that has meaning disconnected from a tradition and a practice and a community. Being a Christian doesn’t mean assenting to a list of propositions (hell is real, or whatever). It means, or can mean, situating yourself in a tradition and a practice and a history. That means, emphatically, acknowledging and dealing with the evil in that tradition…rather than pretending that one is untouched by history or by evil.
America does have a great tradition of liberty…as well as of hypocrisy and totalitarianism and oppression. That isn’t negated by the fact that other people also believe in liberty. But dealing with the tradition you have, acknolwedging that you belong to it, is a way to admit ownership, belonging, and community — and to struggle with the wrong as well as with the right. Liberty, like pacifism, or love, or belief, needs a context to take on meaning. That context doesn’t have to be American — but it has to be somewhere. Saying you believe in liberty without explaining where that belief comes from, where it goes to, or how it works in practice is just empty sloganeering — of which Hitchens does a great deal, I’d argue.
Or, if you want a shorter version…claiming that the morality came first and the Christianity wasn’t needed by MLK Jr. is really presumptuous, and again, assumes that morality and faith are logical propositions, which is the thing that Hitchens is attempting to prove.
Again, sorry if I’m commenting too much, but I thought I’d mention that I’m a big fan of Hedges’s weekly column on truthdig.com, and my impression is that nothing enrages him so much as moral disengagement. In his view, Americans are currently confronted with several near-apocalyptic moral crises, including global warming, war, corporate domination of the political system, and extreme economic injustice, and he just can’t stand people who are sitting back and smirking or retreating into lives of comfort. Some of his memorable targets over the past couple of years have included Goldman Sachs office workers, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Arianna Huffington, and mainline Protestant churches. His attack on “the New Atheists” definitely fits in with this overall tendency. I think he’d probably disapprove of most of the commenters on this site, including me, for many of the same reasons he disapproves of Hitchens et al.
Hedges collaborates with Joe Sacco sometimes, right?
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Jack says:
…my impression is that nothing enrages [Hedges] so much as moral disengagement. In his view, Americans are currently confronted with several near-apocalyptic moral crises, including global warming, war, corporate domination of the political system, and extreme economic injustice, and he just can’t stand people who are sitting back and smirking or retreating into lives of comfort….I think he’d probably disapprove of most of the commenters on this site, including me, for many of the same reasons he disapproves of Hitchens et al.
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(????) Because most everybody here at HU are such don’t give a shit, smugly cynical amoral types?
Well, Mike, I think he’d see you as kind of smug and complacent (I’m not saying he’s right). “This jerk is merrily chirping away on the internet with a bunch of cutesy bullshit about how art teachers are supposedly enforcing abstract expressionism while vegatarians believe that meat is behind the world’s evils, and meanwhile, his country is raping the entire motherfucking planet! Go live in Camden for a few months and then tell me that posting on comics blogs is a worthwhile use of time!”
I don’t know, maybe Hedges is nuts. Recently, I sent one of his columns to my younger brother, who has a political science degree and is considerably smarter than me, and my brother replied with a 1,000-word email that began, “What a lying sack of shit that guy is.”
But Hedges is a compelling writer, if nothing else–his style has been compared to that of an Old Testament prophet. A few of my favorite columns:
“Finding Freedom in Hancuffs” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/finding_freedom_in_handcuffs_20111107/
“The Man in the Mirror”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090713_the_man_in_the_mirror/
“The Phantom Left”:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_phantom_left_20101031/
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Jack says:
[Hedges would say] “This jerk is merrily chirping away on the internet with a bunch of cutesy bullshit about how art teachers are supposedly enforcing abstract expressionism while vegatarians believe that meat is behind the world’s evils, and meanwhile, his country is raping the entire motherfucking planet! Go live in Camden for a few months and then tell me that posting on comics blogs is a worthwhile use of time!”
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Ah, yes, I know the type: “professional wearer of the hair-shirt.” That “his style has been compared to that of an Old Testament prophet” description fitting in.
Alas, I’m all too well aware of the countless ways in which the world is going to hell; and is in hell, in many areas.
But have realized that most people don’t give a shit, and my own powers in the public sphere being limited to arguing on message boards, where despite posting mountains of evidence to far-smarter-than-average people, not a single mind has ever been changed about anything of substance (unless it’s a “oh, I see I got that date wrong” minimal correction), and a voting system where you get to cast a ballot for the lesser evil, leads to lowering of the “pulling your hair out over the world’s problems” attitude.
But, I guess I oughtta read some Hedges; so far, all I’ve gotten is others’ impressions (and, thanks for the links!).
[ReadReadReadRead…]
Why, in those three columns, he’s certainly reasonable and makes his arguments well! (And is positively mellow compared to, say, Matt Taibi.) I find nothing of substance to disagree with here, at first quick reading, and heartily share his viewpoints. Where be the “What a lying sack of shit”?
Noah,
If i were going to defend Christianity, I’d either argue that it’s a true depiction of the world, regardless of any practical benefits, or that we’re better off with it, regardless of the truth value to its claims. I don’t much see a good argument for either approach.
As for morality, if it isn’t capable of being abstracted from particular contexts, then how do you know this, since you’re trapped in your own context and can’t really determine whether the other practices and communities are different. If you’re capable of determining that they’re in fact different due to their traditions, then you’re abstracting their moral claims in order to compare them with your own.
Additionally, is every member of a particular tradition reducible to that tradition? Traditions change because members bring in new ideas, sometimes from other contexts and traditions. A religion that makes no better claims towards the Truth than any other tradition isn’t much of a religion — why not just call it literary, and be done with it? No one really achieves much power that way, though. That is, MacIntyre’s relativism doesn’t really serve religion qua religion.
Hitchens certainly doesn’t mind treating the Bible as a story among many other stories — that’s not his problem at all. Nor does he disagree it’s a tradition among many other traditions. He does think some traditions as they currently manifest themselves in present-day life are worse than others, though.
(To my memory, the purpose of Hitchens’ book wasn’t really to look at the way theology and philosophy have developed and were intertwined throughout history. Maybe he would’ve been pigheaded and denied any Christian ever added any intelligent contribution, but I kind of doubt that.)
“As for morality, if it isn’t capable of being abstracted from particular contexts, then how do you know this, since you’re trapped in your own context and can’t really determine whether the other practices and communities are different.”
Yeah…that’s clever as a formal logical procedure, but also pretty empty as such. Different contexts don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and the fact that moralities have context doesn’t mean that you can’t think about other contexts…in part because everyone is of course embedded in many contexts and many communities. It’s as a member of the community that claims “morality” is abstractable that I call bullshit, not as the member of some other community.
Macintyre’s not a relativist, incidentally. Have you read him? Arguing that morality has a context isn’t the same as saying that all moralities are equivalent. On the contrary, the argument is that the absolutist/relativist split is mostly gobbledygook, created by the claims to a view from nowhere which Macintyre rejects.
“If i were going to defend Christianity, I’d either argue that it’s a true depiction of the world, regardless of any practical benefits, or that we’re better off with it, regardless of the truth value to its claims.”
So who is the “we” supposed to be there?
RE: “Lying sack of shit.” Hedges wrote several columns about the “Authorization for Use of Military Force” provision in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act. He claimed that it would allow the government to indefinitely detain American reporters for interviewing “terrorists” such as Hamas officials and that its real purpose was to thwart domestic movements like Occupy. Hedges, Noam Chomsky, and Daniel Ellsberg (the left’s answer to The Traveling Wilburys) sued Obama and Leon Panetta to challenge the provision, and apparently, a New York judge has responded with a temporary injunction that invalidates it. Anyway, my brother’s lengthy take on it was that, while the provision is bad, Hedges completely distorts its implications and his linking it with Occupy is ridiculous.
I think it’s hard for leftists to admit that Occupy just didn’t really matter that much. It’s main legacy will probably be a stupid Christopher Nolan movie. Depressing, but what can you do.
…An article on the Occupy Wall Street’s origins told how one meeting was bogged down by a performance artist from Greece who refused to follow the rules for debate, continuously held and dominated the floor for over three hours while attacking and suggesting countless changes on the movement’s planned website — though totally ignorant on website creation herself — eventually driving away the guy who was actually going to create the website, and making many others finally leave in disgust.
But then, that kind of weakness was built into the movement:
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Consensus—the agreed-upon method of decision-making—wasn’t easy among hundreds of self-identified ninety-nine-per-centers, whose politics ranged from “Daily Show” liberalism to insurrectionary anarchism. Because of the ground rules …no decision could be made without giving everyone in attendance the chance to cross his or her arms and bring the meeting to a halt. According to the G.A.’s rules, a nine-tenths vote could override a block, but only after each block had explained his or her objections and the facilitators had responded. The least reasonable people often got the most time to speak.
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Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_schwartz#ixzz254QMtoqs
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People grew frustrated with the endless general assembly meetings, in which anyone who showed up had an equal right to speak and consensus decision-making became an impractical and dispiriting slog. At Occupy Portland, I met a professional stand-up comedian named Arlo Stone. He had sharp, daggerlike sideburns and was raising his children as anarcho-primitivists: largely off the grid, home-schooled, no vaccines. When I asked him if he’d written any Occupy jokes, he said, “Oh, sure. ‘How many Occupiers does it take to change a light bulb? I don’t know – we’re still looking for consensus on if the room is dark, but we’re putting together a light-bulb-changing working group and we anticipate a detailed press release sometime over the next week.'”
…As one of the mildest winters in recent memory wafted on, Occupy, incredibly, seemed to fade away. Some of the sympathetic observers who’d watched in awe as the activists so savvily reclaimed the terms of debate felt betrayed by the movement’s apparent lack of staying power. It wasn’t fair, of course, to demand instant, structural fortitude of what was, by definition, a leaderless and vaguely defined uprising. Still, the infighting and an absence of discipline emerging from OWS felt symptomatic, to some, of the left’s perennial ability to internally debate itself out of seemingly unsquanderable opportunities.
“That’s what I’m most afraid of, that this fucking old loony left will reassert itself and destroy us,” says Lasn, who just turned 70, and who speaks with an Estonian accent that has the gleefully miserable quality of a Werner Herzog voice-over. “For all of their wrongheaded ideas, the Tea Party had a certain ability to get things done,” he continues. “Whereas the left is always in danger of talking itself into the ground. Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty meeting knows you go there full of hope, then after three hours of everyone having their moment in the sun, you walk out feeling more hopeless than ever.”
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Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-battle-for-the-soul-of-occupy-wall-street-20120621#ixzz254Rm2PJS
Noah,
Kept meaning to get back to this, so:
You can generally tell a relativist by his sounding like one while denying that he is one, but also by being anti-anti-relativism. MacIntyre fits all those criteria. I actually like a lot of relativists — I’m not dismissive of their concerns, since I have my leanings — so that’s not a big deal to me. I had read a wee bit of him a good while ago when his name came up in relativist books, so I took this opportunity to read his essay, “Relativism, Power and Philosophy” in the collection Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (highly recommended!). I know that his relativism is a contested issue, but he does argue for a variant of relativism where we’re constrained by a tradition of “canonical texts” that results in partial untranslatability between traditions. He does say that relativism is something we should strive to overcome, but the way he suggests we can do that is through a particularized rationality that realizes the shortcomings in its own tradition. At some point an alien tradition might become more plausible, in which case we reject our tradition and accept the new one. This runs counter to his notion of partial untranslatability, it seems to me, and it poses problem for the evaluative relativism that he does subscribe to (i.e., that we don’t have a base line with which to judge one tradition as better than another). Anyway, I don’t see how any of this is going to help a defense of religion as truth, since it pretty much loses its value as religion in a multiple world scenario (it can still be valued pragmatically or whatnot).
I’m just reading some Hauerwas (who is a big fan of MacIntyre’s.)
I think the point is that the demand to defend religion as abstract truth already rests on a contested enlightenment vision of how truth works. Hauerwas argues that truth is embedded in narrative and character. The calling of Christians is not to defend truth against intellectual challenge; it is to witness to it in their lives (specifically and centrally by their commitment to peace, in Hauerwas’ view.)
I’d much prefer to have that kind of Christianity in the ascendancy, since it would be easy to ignore. But it tends to be quashed by the major power systems, doesn’t it? This was one of Hitchens’ reasons for dismissing liberal and radical theology from his concerns.
Hauerwas is as often considered conservative as liberal, actually.
Power quashes; that’s what it does. It quashed Hitchens, who by the end of his life was reduced to being an unctuous apologist for imperial hegemony, basically betraying everything he ever claimed to stand for while denouncing his opponents as heretics. It’s just not clear to me what ground exactly he would stand on to chastise others for powerlessness given his own fate. Being a tool of power doesn’t make you powerful; it makes you a tool.
MLK wasn’t exactly easily ignored; nor was Gandhi. Nor was Christ, really. Meaningful change is hard with peace…but it’s hard anyway. Pragmatism’s touting of its own effectiveness makes good marketing copy, but isn’t especially convincing otherwise, as far as I can tell.