I’m out of town at the moment, so this is going to be briefer than usual.
I have two articles at Splice Today this week, one on the Republican presidential field and one on the comic book Priest.
And that’s it for the moment, till I return and my internet connection gets faster!
I’ll comment on the Priest article here rather at Splice today, I think I’d have to register there.
Noah, you wrote:
“Again, if the Koreans had conquered us at some point I suppose I’d find it presumptuous. ”
Does this mean you find Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to be offensive? (The U.S. did conquer Japan as some point…)
If so, this seems to me to be a pretty silly position to take…
Pallas, I’m not sure I understand your point.Berlasky wrote “presumptous”, not “offensive”.
As for TMNT, it was very much a parody of US appropriation of Japanese popular culture. ‘Priest’ doesn’t have this parodic excuse.
Anyway, ninjas are assholes and deserve whatever they get.
I’M SORRY!! FORGIVE ME!! GOMEN NASAI!!!
Ninjas are the last honorable warrior-kings on Earth!
Please, forget me, I am a worm not worth the killing!
Yeah…the thing about ninjas is, they’re basically fairy tales in the first place. It’d be like getting upset at somebody for appropriating leprechauns or something. It’s pretty different from appropriations of Buddhist religion, which can be uncomfortable…though the exact context matters…
The Priest review reminds me of the Evangelion anime. It had lots of Biblical imagery and the angels of heaven were reimagined as giant monsters. Online fans would wax about the “hidden” meaning of the series, until the creators admitted that they knew fuck-all about Christianity. It was just some weird, exotic shit to put in their monsters vs. robots anime.
Well, the appropriation of Buddhism comment strikes me as odd because of all the Japanese anime and manga that appropriate elements of Christianity. I’m also curious if you find Star Wars offensive, Yoda says a lot of poorly thought out crap in the prequels that appears to be lifted (poorly)from buddhism…
It’s not immediately obvious to me that modern Japanese creators are traumatized by western imperialism and should be seen as victims given a separate set of ethical rules in terms of appropriating religion.
Off the top of my head, elements of japanese scifi appropriating Christianity can be found in:
The manga Immortal Rain
The anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, as Richard states
The anime A certain magical index
The video game Xenosaga (clearly influenced by Evangelion)
The video game La Pucelle
the manga/ video game Chrono Cross
Revolutionary Girl Utena (In this case Gnostic Christianity)
I would say the anime Fate Stay Night and the anime Mai Hime draw from both Christianity and Japanese native religions. (Both feauture evil catholic priests villians at the very least)
Of these examples, The Certain Magical Index series is popular at the moment and also particularly insensitive in terms of turning Christianity into a wacky Japanese RPG superhero setting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toaru_Majutsu_no_Index
This also really isn’t anything different that what the writers of the 1978 Superman films did to Christianity, is it? Or many other examples (I.E. half of Grant Morrison’s career)
I think that’s a reasonable point. Japan, despite being conquered by the U.S., is really not a country particularly subject to U.S. imperialism at the moment. The back and forth between the two cultures is arguably a back and forth between equals.
I do find the pop appropriation of buddhism and/or christianity often really crass and glib and stupid, whoever’s doing it. The pseudo-mystical crap in Star Wars is pretty awful; George Lucas is basically as dumb as a rock, and all his Joseph Campbell shit should absolutely be sneered at. it’s offensively stupid, if nothing else. And it’s especially troubling because Lucas is not above using racial stereotypes in weird ways…you look at Jar Jar Binks and you say, wait, is Yoda supposed to be a Japanese caricature? Why exactly does he talk like that again…is it supposed to be some sort of Asian pidgin?
I thought Morrison’s use of Christianity in All Star Superman was quite irritating, and undermined the Christian message in a way that I think is kind of evil. That definitely played into the fact that I didn’t like that comic all that much.
I think Richard’s right that japanese appropriations are often, hey, this Christianity — cool shit! I can either find that funny or mildly annoying depending on the context. Japanese attitudes towards the west can definitely be disturbing though (as I argued they were in Lady Snowblood.)
I guess the point that I was trying to make is that how the appropriations are used and how the power relations work are important to me in figuring out what I think about something, or how much I enjoy it, or whether I think it’s political or moral points are problematic (all of which can blur into each other.)
pallas – there’s also Hellsing, where the Church of England and the Vatican field rival teams of vampire hunters.
It sounds similar to Priest as Noah described it, in that the writers probably learned everything they know about Christianity from Dracula movies.
Hmm, outside of explicitly “for Christian” entertainment like “The Passion of the Christ,” Christianity is not overtly acknowledged in most American entertainment … except in vampire stories.
Unlike Japan (which has a tiny Christian population and no more interest in understanding the ins and outs of Christianity than the average European or American has in understanding Shinto), roughly one third of South Koreans are Christian and I think most South Koreans have at least a moderate understanding of Christianity. So while the Priest comic might be ostensibly similar to something like Hellsing or Evangelion, I would guess (not having read it) that it’s a bit more knowing – or at least deliberate – in its misuse of Christian imagery and conventions.
“Yeah…the thing about ninjas is, they’re basically fairy tales in the first place.”
As opposed to what religion exactly?
Frankly, I don’t think playing about with other people’s religions in the name of entertainment is inherently any more problematic than playing about with any other mythology (leprechauns included).
Obviously there are occasions on which religion and race or ethnicity are conflated (or on which religion acts as a surrogate for race or ethnicity) and it can obviously be problematic if religion is attacked or mocked under those circumstances. With that proviso though, religion is as much fair game as any other unsubstantiated (and unsubstantiatable) belief (be it UFO abductions, poltergeists, crystal healing, sightings of Elvis Presley or an unshakable faith in the divinity of – all praise his noodly appendages – the Flying Spaghetti Monster).
Religion is not something that is intrinsic to a person or group of people in the way that race, gender or sexuality are; it’s an optional ideology – a belief system that people (at least in the developed world) are free to opt into or out of – and it should be treated as such.
I’m not saying treating religion frivolously can’t offend but I see no reason why religion should be any more deserving than any given political ideology – hell, any given sports team for that matter – of some sort of special exemption from derision or dismissive indifference. If a Japanese or Korean artist wants to gleefully mash up Christian symbolism that’s fine. Likewise if a French or American artist wants to fuck around with Buddhism.
As a North American Buddhist, I feel I should remind the commenters above that unlike most religions I can think of, Buddhism stems from a real person (Siddhartha Gautama) whose life is pretty well documented and who never claimed to have any supernatural abilities, nor wished to be worshipped as a deity. Buddhism is not a religion, it is a philosophy, wushu movies notwithstanding. :)
I am not particularly concerned about storytellers appropriating Buddhist imagery or extracting from dharma passages, though I would prefer that when they do so they demonstrate some understanding of what they are referencing.
“As a North American Buddhist, I feel I should remind the commenters above that unlike most religions I can think of, Buddhism stems from a real person (Siddhartha Gautama) whose life is pretty well documented and who never claimed to have any supernatural abilities”
Scott M, that depends on the sect of Buddhism or Buddhist school. Sects in the Mahayana tradition can embrace a whole cosmology of supernatural (i.e. non empirical) claims, including the concept that Siddhartha Gautama was just a modern reincarnation of a divine being that had achieved enlightenment a long time ago.
I’m curious where you are coming from in terms of your views on Buddhism. Do you identify with a particular branch of Buddhism? Do you believe in reincarnation?
Its also worth pointing out there there’s an enormous tradition of sacrilegious speculative fiction in the west, from Pullman’s His Dark Materials to The Island of Doctor Moreau to The Sandman to Stranger in a Strange land.
I think claiming religion is separable from communal identity, or that it’s a choice, or that it’s no different from any other unsubstantiated belief, is pretty problematic. No one claims ninjas or leprechauns are real; no one sees them as central to their identity or belief system. Lots of people feel that way about christianity or buddhism.
Religion is of course fair game for satire or desecration. Some of my favorite art is satanic black metal. But, again, the way it is used and to what ends matters, and it’s much more charged material than just using ninjas.
I was going to point out that Christianity is important in Korea. I don’t really know what to make of that in terms of Priest, or how it would be seen in a Koean context. It doesn’t feel like satire; it feels much more like just random use of the imagery because it’s cool. Though obviously I don’t really know the Korean context….
@Pallas, I’m well aware of the various sects of Buddhism and their fantastic beliefs. :) Fortunately Buddhism is by definition non-dogmatic. We all gravitate to the flavour that makes sense to us, and as Buddhism has spread around the world, it has been reconsidered and re-framed so as to make it explicable for that time and place. This willingness to self-examine is one of the things I like about it.
I don’t believe in reincarnation, no. I see it as a holdover from Siddhartha’s time; the Hindu people around him assumed that the ultimate payoff for their actions – the karmic payoff – would be to move up or down that ladder to one of the other realms.
I do believe in karma, it’s just common sense: our actions have consequences, and in the long term, our lives have consequences.
I see myself as a zen buddhist. Like many of them, I also don’t believe in enlightenment as some kind of “eureka!” experience; enlightenment is meditation. Others will tell you differently of course, I can only speak for myself.
“I think claiming religion is separable from communal identity, or that it’s a choice, or that it’s no different from any other unsubstantiated belief, is pretty problematic.”
The degree to which it’s separable from communal identity rather depends on the community in question (whether the community is closely associated with a single religion or even defined by that religion and so on), that being why I mentioned that religion can be – whether deliberately or accidentally – conflated with race or ethnicity, with obvious drawbacks.
But that clearly doesn’t apply to the Christians of Priest since Christianity is not restricted to any one community, culture or ethnicity.
Is it a choice? Provided the individual is aware that there are other ways of looking at the world or is capable of coming up with their own, yes, absolutely – and in the developed world pretty much *everybody* is aware that not everybody believes the same things they do (making a refusal to question the faith one was born into an act of extreme intellectual apathy).
Obviously a lot of people are raised in their parents’ faith and grow up thinking that what they believe is somehow natural and obvious but they’re no more obliged to retain those religious beliefs in adulthood than they are their parents’ politics or racial attitudes or love of tinned meat.
And, no, religion isn’t any different from any other unsubstantiated belief except in so far as it gets special treatment (in America particularly) by virtue of being an unsubstantiated belief held, or at least pandered to out of habit, by the majority. Faith is only special if we say it is so often we believe it to be so – there’s no logical basis for considering Christianity to be more special than a belief in fairies at the end of the garden beyond the scarcity of people who believe in the latter.
“Religion is of course fair game for satire or desecration. Some of my favorite art is satanic black metal. But, again, the way it is used and to what ends matters,”
I haven’t listened to any death metal since about 1990 (Obituary were funny…) but isn’t that stuff designed to be as deliberately offensive (to Christians) as possible? I have no problem with cheesy heavy metal and, indeed, can find it as entertainingly stupid as the next person (provided nobody is making me actually listen to it at length or, you know, burning down aesthetically pleasing and historically important Norwegian stave churches and stuff) but how is the deliberately caused religious offence of, say, Deicide better than the inadvertent religious offence we might see when artists from one culture place stories in another culture with which they aren’t really all that familiar?
“and it’s much more charged material than just using ninjas.”
With the caveat that “charged” is not necessarily the same thing as “wrong” or even “inadvisable”, depending on the circumstances, I’d generally agree with you. Though it’s worth noting that in the 1960s and ’70s, some ninja manga were famously very charged with ideas about class struggle and dissent. I’ll grant you I have yet to see a revolutionary Marxist leprechaun comic but I live in hope!
“No one claims ninjas or leprechauns are real; no one sees them as central to their identity or belief system.”
Sadly, somebody, somewhere, probably has centred their life around one or other of those things (probably not both) and made a web page about it…
Incidentally, I’m not sure how you ended up thinking ninja were entirely fictional constructs?
Obviously they didn’t have a lot in common with their modern fictional counterparts but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist historically any more than pirates or cowboys or knights or any other historical group that’s been distorted and romanticised beyond recognition. It’s not like they’re completely made up mythological creatures like leprechauns or whatever.
Noah: “I thought Morrison’s use of Christianity in All Star Superman was quite irritating, and undermined the Christian message in a way that I think is kind of evil.”
How did it manage to do that?
Ian S: “I’ll grant you I have yet to see a revolutionary Marxist leprechaun comic but I live in hope!”
Smurfs?
Hey Ian. I’m actually out of town with a crappy internet connection, so this probably isn’t exactly the right moment to get into this unfortunately, but…the idea that we’re all autonomous rationally-choosing individuals with a smorgasbord of belief options before us is very much embedded in a belief system of its own. It’s the propaganda of post-enlightenment modernity, and can very much be critiqued from various perspectives, including religious ones. Stanley Hauerwas, for example, argues that “Christian” is not a belief but a self embedded in a narrative which is not abstractable from personal history and identity. Seeing it that way has important moral, epistemological, and theological implications, among other things.
Christianity and Buddhism are both quite complicated traditions of thought that are closely tied to various communal identities. You can’t use them without implicating and being implicated in those traditions.
I did some research on ninjas a while back. They’re significantly less real than knights or pirates or cowboys, all of which are well attested to historically. I believe they were first introduced as a literary trope in Japanese drama in the 1800s. There’s a claim that they’re tied to history, but it’s really quite tenuous as far as I could determine.
I find sacrilege in general less irritating/offensive than stupid appropriation. Deicide cares about Christianity and is really involved in the imagery and even the logic of Christianity. Defilement, blood, bodies, hell — those are all things Christianity cares about a lot. It’s just a much more thoughtful response to the tradition than the Priest manga.
Ebster, Morrison presents Superman as a Christ figure in some ways, but he’s also the Nietzschean superman (obviously.) Having a human creature save us all through his physical prowess, or through embodying the best in humanity, turns the Christian message into basic Enlightenment liberalism. Which I think is bad.
I’ve written about metal and christianity a bunch at splice today…my internet connection makes getting the links a pain right now, but you should be able to find me writing about it without much trouble through google….
I wouldn’t say Superman is a Christ figure, pace Umberto Eco. I think it more likely that Jerry Siegel, a Jew, was channeling the legend of the Messiah (moshiach).
In All-Star Superman, Supes does indeed give up his life and is reborn as the Sun. But this strikes me as more pagan than Christian.
Noah: “Ebster, Morrison presents Superman as a Christ figure in some ways, but he’s also the Nietzschean superman (obviously.) Having a human creature save us all through his physical prowess, or through embodying the best in humanity, turns the Christian message into basic Enlightenment liberalism. Which I think is bad.”
Does Morrison create the impression that he is presenting the Christian message?
Symbols are available to people who disagree. An artist can take a central Christian and cultural image: “Jesus = the only way to salvation”; and answer it using that symbolism to suggest something like “the closest thing to the salvation promised by Christianity may come in following an impossible ideal, represented here by Superman,” or “that promise can be realized here on earth, with enlightenment and progress”.
I can certainly understand a Christian taking that as “evil” (personally, I have better things to worry about), but as an atheist and an avid reader of Christian theology, don’t you also try to find ways to relate those themes to your own beliefs?
You wrote in your article: “Christianity was turned into a warrior cult promoting genocide, and the Church’s longstanding commitment to peace was mercilessly mocked in the name of an apparently fascist God. As somebody who reads a fair bit of theology and has respect for many Christian thinkers from Kant to Niebuhr to Martin Luther King, I find that pretty annoying.”
Not to be a jerk, but if you’re out there saying these things you should be aware that those perspectives, while harsh, are well founded in the Old Testament (God and Moses do command genocides) and the history of the Church. Even judging the Church by its ideals and not its behavior, Jesus’s maxim to turn the other cheek can sound good but comes with a lot of ideas you wouldn’t want to follow, like taking no thought for tomorrow, the clothes on your back, or the roof over your head, and a mainstream Christian tradition of interpretation, going back as early as Augustine to my knowledge, has taken such expressions of pacifism as a heavenly ideal, not to be followed in earthly policy. That’s what monasteries are for. And didn’t Obama quote Niebuhr at Oslo in support of the concept of a “just war”?
Norb: “In All-Star Superman, Supes does indeed give up his life and is reborn as the Sun. But this strikes me as more pagan than Christian.”
Morrison, like Gaiman, Moore, and others in that school of British writers, often connects Christian themes with pagan parallels. The trope that “Jesus is just another iteration of the dying/reborn Sun god” or something like that is pretty common in fantasy. The modern fantasy genre has developed a certain “mythological self-consciousness” that relates itself to recurrent themes in world religion, while delicately attempting to suggest that they are also present in Christianity.
I understand it’s not the best time, Noah, so feel free to ignore this (or respond to it once you’re back home).
“the idea that we’re all autonomous rationally-choosing individuals with a smorgasbord of belief options before us is very much embedded in a belief system of its own.”
Do we always choose rationally? Certainly not. Do we have the option to choose in any case (preferably with at least an attempt to be rational but making the choice regardless)? Absolutely.
Obviously some people have more trouble challenging their “built-in” beliefs (religious, political, cultural, whatever) than others, for a whole variety of reasons, but clearly people *can* let go of what they were raised with – for better and for worse – or we’d all be contentedly embracing the exact same beliefs as our grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents’ grandparents and so on back through time.
“Stanley Hauerwas, for example, argues that “Christian” is not a belief but a self embedded in a narrative which is not abstractable from personal history and identity.”
I’m afraid I’m not familiar with him – could be he’s not very well known over here in Britain or it could be I’m just not as well read as I ought to be (probably both) – and I’m afraid it’s difficult to argue with (or even, frankly, fully comprehend) his conclusion without the argument that got him there. Frankly, if you think he’s right, I’d rather hear the argument in your words since I have no idea how he came to (or can support) his first premise (that being Christian is not a belief) let alone what follows it.
“Christianity and Buddhism are both quite complicated traditions of thought that are closely tied to various communal identities. You can’t use them without implicating and being implicated in those traditions.”
I have very little knowledge of Buddhism so I’ll decline to comment on that. Christianity, though, clearly overlaps communal identities but, aside maybe from small rural communities in which everybody actively follows the same subset of the same faith, not necessarily by all that much.
But even if a person’s religion is at the core of their identity (all of their identities I should say, since most of us inhabit more than one milieu), is that a good reason not to question it? And if a powerful belief is risible – harmful even – doesn’t it deserve to be derided, attacked or trivialised?
How does one attack any notion without “implicating” its adherents? And does that mean no notion should be attacked for fear of hurting feelings? Didn’t the other article you linked to – the one about Republican candidates – implicate the people who support those candidates? If so, how does implicating them on the basis of their political beliefs differ from implicating them on the basis of their religious beliefs? Again: why should religious ideology – and *only* religious ideology – get a free pass?
“I find sacrilege in general less irritating/offensive than stupid appropriation.”
I absolutely agree that the ill-conceived appropriation can be really irritating – it’s something anybody whose country’s history provides source material for Hollywood is familiar with after all. But more offensive?
I mean, are Dave Sim’s theories less offensive than some artist drawing a cheesecake pose in a superhero comic just because Sim’s given his misogyny a lot of thought? Is a casually – possibly unconsciously – racist comment made in passing more offensive than the internet site of some nasty little neo-fascist laboriously attempting to engineer evidence to suggest that the Holocaust was a hoax?
Not, you understand, that I’m equating Deicide with Sim (who has more talent but fewer marbles) or with Holocaust deniers but I think that if I were a Christian I’d be more offended by their deliberate hostility than by anything you’ve mentioned in Priest.
“I did some research on ninjas a while back. They’re significantly less real than knights or pirates or cowboys, all of which are well attested to historically. I believe they were first introduced as a literary trope in Japanese drama in the 1800s. There’s a claim that they’re tied to history, but it’s really quite tenuous as far as I could determine.”
I think the word “ninja” is relatively modern – and I’m sure their numbers, importance, appearance and methods have all been vastly exaggerated – but I’m not familiar with any great doubt over the actual existence of “shinobi” in medieval Japan. I’ll readily confess to being no kind of expert on the subject though so I’ll take your word that doubt there is.
“Jesus’s maxim to turn the other cheek can sound good but comes with a lot of ideas you wouldn’t want to follow”
It’s a hard teaching. And yes, Niebuhr, etc., argue that it’s an ideal. But there’s a difference between saying it’s an ideal and you may have to derogate for practical reasons, and using crucifixes as throwing stars while mocking the suggestion that anyone but an idiot might think that peace (with, say, Native Americans) is a good idea. Christianity just isn’t a warrior cult, the crusades notwithstanding. If it were, Nietzsche would have liked it.
The Old Testament is important to Christianity…but the genocides are definitely something that I think can fairly easily be seen as an old wine kind of thing.
Re: all star superman. Yes, Morrison is using the imagery to answer the message. And he’s doing it in an utterly predictable, stupid, and I think morally bankrupt way. What I think is evil there is the idea that human beings are perfectable, or that we should put our faith in man or an overman. I think that leads to really bad places. I don’t think it’s evil because it’s unchristian per se; I think it’s evil on its own merits.
So does Alan Moore, actually, as far as I can tell from his use of Superman, Miracleman, and other superpowered critters.
“Christianity was turned into a warrior cult promoting genocide, and the Church’s longstanding commitment to peace was mercilessly mocked”
Which church? Are we talking about the same church behind the crusades, the mass extermination of Cathars and other “heretics”, the forced conversion of Jews, Muslims and assorted pagans, the genocidal conquest of the Americas, a large part of the slave trade, the inquisition, all manner of pogroms, direct support for every last one of Europe’s and South America’s 20th Century dictatorships and assorted other atrocities stretching right up to the present*?
That’s quite some commitment to peace there.
[*: More than 20 priests and nuns and at least one bishop – subsequently defended by the Vatican of course – directly participating in the Rwandan genocide with assistance from missionary groups offer one relatively recent example. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/aug/23/chrismcgreal%5D
Ian, the doubt re: ninjas is I believe that the historical precedents cited actually have anything at all to do with the way ninjas are used in popular culture. That is, pirates are recognizably pirates (even down to the parrots and the wooden legs, both of which are historically well-verified.) Ninjas in the black outfits sneaking around as assassins with shuriken etc. — it’s all made up.
In terms of sacrilege: I was talking particularly about sacrilege, not necessarily about thinking things through in all cases. It does depend on context. I’m sure lots of Christians (of which I’m not one) find Deicide really offensive. Deicide and metal in general just seem to me to be very much in the Christian tradition in lots of ways…in a way I don’t think that Sim is in the tradition of feminism. Christianity’s kind of weird in that way; the degradation of Christ is not unChristian. Despair and atheism aren’t unChristian; Christ expresses both (“Father, why have you forsaken me?”) That’s why there’s lots of Christian metal which sounds basically exactly like regular metal, even down to the lyrics.
Also, Deicide is really infinitely more talented than Dave Sim. I even find comparing them kind of ridiculous.
In terms of your first comments…I’m not saying anyone should be censored. It’s just that, like I said before, religious beliefs come embedded in long traditions and in communities. If you use them, those traditions and communities become part of what you’re using, and a possible site for critique. It’s not that you shouldn’t talk to them; it’s that picking them up casually can be dumb and (possibly) offensive, depending on how they’re used.
I don’t know…as an example, I found the critique of Christianity in His Dark Materials irritating, stupid, and offensive (a trifecta!) In particular, the books make Christianity responsible for vivisection and unethical experiments, which is completely ass-backwards and duplicitous — Christianity’s done many, many bad things, but vivisection is really not its fault. I also found the general morality expressed fairly vile; you’re supposed to grudgingly admire a guy who murders a child because he’s an independent thinker, fearless genius, etc. etc. The whole thing seemed smug and poorly thought through; a feeble and feeble-minded rebuttal to C.S. Lewis’ science-fiction trilogy (which has its flaws, but is smart enough to lay the sins of science where they belong.)
I talk about Hauerwas on this site some; if you search you’ll find a couple of references. I don’t entirely understand everything he says myself — but as I understand it, he sees “Christian” as an identity, like “Texan.” Christianity is not a set of beliefs that can be abstracted from that identity; it’s not a knowledge. Rather, Christianity is the act of being true to that identity through witness.
Basically, as far as I can tell, he’d contest your entire frame of reference; the idea that there is a self that can judge different viewpoints outside of those viewpoints (even provisionally.) You don’t choose to be a Christian any more than you choose to be a Texan. Being Christian is not the choice; it’s the context in which making choices becomes possible.
Yeah; Christianity’s commitment to peace is often honored in the breach. Priest the movie doesn’t really even hint that it’s ever been an ideal, though; the Church people advocating for peace do so on entirely pragmatic grounds.
If the film had been excoriating the church for its violent history, I would have found that a lot more congenial. Instead, it’s celebrating the church’s violence. I just find that really depressing.
(None of these issues come up at all in the manga.)
“Ninjas in the black outfits sneaking around as assassins with shuriken etc. — it’s all made up.”
This I can well believe.
“Despair and atheism aren’t unChristian; Christ expresses both (“Father, why have you forsaken me?”)”
I’m getting the despair but not the atheism so much. It’s not like he’s purported to have said “Father, why did I imagine you existed?”.
“That’s why there’s lots of Christian metal which sounds basically exactly like regular metal, even down to the lyrics.”
I can kind of see what you mean although the thrash metal I liked back in the day when I was still a fresh-faced youth (Anthrax, Sacred Reich, Acid Reign and such like) was always a bit more socially aware and rather less theatrical and weighed down with symbolism than a lot of the stuff I guess you’re talking about. Hard to imagine Deicide teaming up with Public Enemy but I’ll have fun trying.
Sadly, my knowledge of Christian metal extends no further than laughing at Stryper album covers when I was a teenager. I don’t suppose I’m missing much.
“Also, Deicide is really infinitely more talented than Dave Sim. I even find comparing them kind of ridiculous.”
I’m no great fan of Sim’s work – I picked up used copies of the first six Cerebus collections or so and they’re well worth looking at (if not nearly so spectacular or seminal as Sim’s cheerleaders make out) but the last thing of his I bought (Judenhass) was terrible on every level. Hard to deny his technical ability though. In any case, I could happily go the rest of my life without ever hearing Deicide again.
“religious beliefs come embedded in long traditions and in communities. If you use them, those traditions and communities become part of what you’re using, and a possible site for critique. It’s not that you shouldn’t talk to them; it’s that picking them up casually can be dumb and (possibly) offensive, depending on how they’re used.”
I can see that. But when the community in question is arguably the most privileged and insulated in the world (i.e. white First World Christians) I’m not too sure they need defending from the careless Korean cartoonists. I absolutely get that his carelessness and ignorance are annoying or even that they defeat the suspension of disbelief but I can’t help but think that the only people liable to actually be offended by such things are largely going to be those who actively look for things to be offended by.
“The whole thing seemed smug and poorly thought through”
This surprises me. I’ve not read any of his books but Pullman makes a pretty good impression – smart, committed, articulate – in the articles of his I’ve seen in the papers and the interviews with him I’ve seen on TV. Actually, it’s only the “poorly thought through” bit that surprises me – it seems like outspoken atheist writers are *always* accused of being smug, whether they’re writing fiction or non-fiction. Of course sometimes they are (Dawkins, for example, is insufferably smug and many would say the same of Hitchens though I don’t really see it myself).
“as I understand it, he sees “Christian” as an identity, like “Texan.” Christianity is not a set of beliefs that can be abstracted from that identity; it’s not a knowledge. […] You don’t choose to be a Christian any more than you choose to be a Texan. Being Christian is not the choice; it’s the context in which making choices becomes possible.”
That’s a truly, truly horrible idea. Self-serving and nauseating. If I’m getting this right, he’s saying Christianity is an inevitability for those afflicted – like some kind of pox you catch? – and that it can’t be subjected to any kind of fact-based analysis.
And if Christianity is the (only?) “context in which making choices becomes possible”, where does that leave the billions of non-Christians? Where does it leave me – an atheist with one Christian parent and one Jewish parent from a nominally Christian but effectively secular society?
Most of all though it’s a viewpoint that seems to be easily countered by evidence of what’s really happening, at least from a non-American perspective:
“The primary social research tool in Britain is the British Social Attitudes Survey, an annual mini-census. The latest published results are for 2009 and show that ‘No religion’ was stated by 50.7% of the UK population2. A few years before that, comprehensive professional research in 2006 by Tearfund found that two thirds (66% – 32.2 million people) in the UK have no connection with any religion or church. In 2003 August, only 18% of the British public said they were a practicing member of an organized religion, 25% they were members of a world religion. According to these results, one fifth of self-declared members would also not describe themselves as practicing that religion. Presumably the others remain members for traditional reasons or due to social pressure.
[…]
Those who ‘do not belong’ have first shed the practical and theoretical underpinnings of their religion, before finally overcoming social pressure to state ‘your’ religion. There are many who are not at the later stages of this secularisation process, so they still say they ‘belong’, although they are in the process of forgetting & discarding the physical and mental aspects of what they say they belong to. Sociologists know that if they count heads and ask about beliefs, more people say they belong to a religion, and say they have the beliefs of a particular religion, than actually do. People over-state their own religiosity; that’s why statistics from polls will often give higher percentages of ‘believers’ than will head-counting and deeper investigations.
In a large 2006 August poll of year 9 and 10 teenagers in Cornwall, only 19% said that they ‘have a religious faith’. It seems certain that if these teenagers reflect the future (only 22% said they believe in God), religious affiliation is going to continue to drop. A wider mori poll commissioned by the British Library found that nearly half of teenagers in Britain are atheists (2007).
[…]
Those who do profess religion in the UK are largely inactive. A 2007 poll commissioned by the British Library found that 50% of them “do not practice religion very much, if at all”, with Christians being the most inactive. A running theme of all the statistics we have seen on this page affirm that although many say they are religious they frequently admit they are not practicing.
[…]
Of 41 countries polled, 16 most developed countries have less than 40% of the populace who think religion is important in their lives. The rest (including the US at a very high 60%, and nearly all developing countries) had at least 57% of their populace who said so. Out of all the countries where the majority of the people do not consider religion important, Northern Ireland is the only country which experiences a conflict closely tied with religion. The USA stands as the only developed country that is generally religious.”
(Source: http://www.vexen.co.uk/UK/religion.html )
As the above demonstrates (apologies for the length of the quote – it’s late and I’m getting too lazy to edit), nobody is locked into Christianity or any other religion. People can and do (in ever increasing numbers) choose either to renounce faith altogether or else hold onto the label for tradition’s sake whilst disavowing the substance in its entirety. The US experience of religion is an anomaly in the developed world and Hauerwas’ argument, as I understand it, swims against the statistical evidence.
“I’m not too sure they need defending from the careless Korean cartoonists”
This is what I said in my essay!
There’s lots of great Christian metal bands, starting with Black Sabbath. Frost Like Ashes is awesome, for example. It sounds like you’re not really a fan of the genre though.
In terms of Hauerwas…the thing about him is he’s arguing in part that sweeping generalizations are meaningless, so turning his statements into sweeping generalizations isn’t really the point. He’s talking about the experience of Christianity from a Christian perspective. Making choices is enabled by being a Christian from a Christian perspective and in a Christian community. Being a Christian involves faith, which is a gift, not a choice. Seeing existence and identity as a gift involving faith rather than a choice involving reason is definitely an important part of Hauerwas’ critique of modernity.
In terms of where that leaves atheists like you and me…like I said, it’s not exactly Hauerwas’ project to tell us how choices work or to save enlightenment rationality for the moderns. It’s not Hauerwas who has pretty much destroyed the foundations of enlightenment rationalism — that’s Freud, and Marx, and Nietzsche, and Foucault, and Lacan, and Derrida — enlightenment rationalists all. You’re starting out assuming that the enlightenment project hasn’t been seriously called into question already by its own thinkers.
Citing statistics about how people have changed religious beliefs isn’t the point exactly either; Hauerwas is talking about identity, self as narrative, and faith. He’d say, I think, that the ease with which people change identities is a part of the problem of enlightenment modernity, not a refutation of the idea that there is a problem.
Hauerwas is a radical pacifist, incidentally, and strongly opposed to Christians being in power in the first place, so there’s never any question with him of legislating or imposing Christian beliefs on others. He’s a strong opponent of abortion, for example, but I doubt he’s interested in mounting legislative campaigns to force people not to have abortions, or to imprison people who perform them.
Hi Noah. At least where I’m from, people would laugh at you for calling Nietzsche an enlightenment rationalist, and they’d laugh for a long, long time. But you do it in such an offhand way that I figure either (a) you’re just being playful/contrarian/paradoxical again–which is fine!!–or (b) there’s an established reading of Nietzsche to that effect, which I don’t know about. If (b), can you gesture in the direction of where it comes from?–enquiring minds want to know.
PS: kind of off-topic, but related to metal–do you know the German death jazz band Bohren & Der Club of Gore?
Well, Freud’s not really an enlightenment rationalist either…nor is Derrida or Foucault or Marx or any of the other people I mentioned. They’re all in that tradition though, using rationality against rationality. The point is enlightenment rationality ate itself.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I do find the pop appropriation of buddhism and/or christianity often really crass and glib and stupid, whoever’s doing it…
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Yes; Nicholas D. Wolfwood from “Trigun,” with his cross-shaped machine gun, has gotta be a low point:
http://www.absoluteanime.com/trigun/nicholas.jpg
http://merovelasco.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/nicholas-d-wolfwood.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Y9jlk7KvkBA/TEdDgOkx6bI/AAAAAAAACJY/6OQueTLQH64/s1600/TrigunPlayerNicolasDWolfwood.JPG
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The pseudo-mystical crap in Star Wars is pretty awful; George Lucas is basically as dumb as a rock, and all his Joseph Campbell shit should absolutely be sneered at. it’s offensively stupid, if nothing else.
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It certainly shows you can stick cardboard characters in an archetypal, mythic structure…and they’ll stay cardboard characters.
Lucas is pretty smart, in many ways; yet in others…eesh!
I can’t forget how Joseph Campbell was invited in 1983 to Skywalker Ranch as an honored guest by Lucas, and “treated” to watching the entire “Star Wars” trilogy. Looks like Campbell dug it, though:
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The journalist Bill Moyers was there at the screening, too, and later recalled that Campbell “reveled in the ancient themes and motifs of mythology unfolding on the wide screen in powerful, contemporary images.”
Campbell, Moyers remembered, especially exulted aloud in the fact that Lucas had put an up-to-date spin on the timeless hero/quest. …
Campbell also loved the Darth Vader character – the dark and evil man in the mask – as a staple of mythology dating back to ancient wall scribblings.
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http://talentdevelop.com/screenwriting2.html
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Noah Berlatsky says:
And it’s especially troubling because Lucas is not above using racial stereotypes in weird ways…you look at Jar Jar Binks and you say, wait, is Yoda supposed to be a Japanese caricature? Why exactly does he talk like that again…is it supposed to be some sort of Asian pidgin?
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Clearly! Don’t think there was any ill intent; I believe Lucas was just hearkening back to ethnic stereotypes in the cornball old serials he and Spielberg loved. And all the better to communicate to his audience that Binks was an addlepated doofus, Yoda laden with mysterious spiritual wisdom, using the stereotyping we’d absorbed all our lives.
Look at how James Cameron had the Na’vi elders talk like American Indians; the could have talked in unfamiliar rhythms and allusions, their music could have been a truly alien atonal screeching, but having alien characters remind us of human stereotypes helps the characterization, even if in a simplistic fashion.
Oh, and one reason why Christianity gets used in Manga & Anime; the religion has a clear-cut “good vs. evil” dichotomy, far more so than in Shinto and Buddhism.
And then there’s that “vampires fear the Cross” bit…
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Japan reports that “some 70 to 80 percent of the Japanese regularly tell pollsters they do not consider themselves believers in any religion. )
“In terms of Hauerwas…the thing about him is he’s arguing in part that sweeping generalizations are meaningless, so turning his statements into sweeping generalizations isn’t really the point. He’s talking about the experience of Christianity from a Christian perspective. Making choices is enabled by being a Christian from a Christian perspective and in a Christian community.”
None of which speaks in any meaningful or substantive way to anybody who hasn’t already drunk the Kool-Aid.
“Being a Christian involves faith, which is a gift, not a choice. Seeing existence and identity as a gift involving faith rather than a choice involving reason is definitely an important part of Hauerwas’ critique of modernity.”
I’m not seeing any kind of an argument as to *why* faith is a gift rather than a choice. Nor can there ever really be such an argument since a gift requires a giver: his point only works if one already pre-supposes the existence of God. To anybody else, it is, at best, obscurantism.
“In terms of where that leaves atheists like you and me…like I said, it’s not exactly Hauerwas’ project to tell us how choices work or to save enlightenment rationality for the moderns.”
But if he doesn’t – can’t – speak to anybody outside his faith, what point is there in anybody else considering his thinking?
“You’re starting out assuming that the enlightenment project hasn’t been seriously called into question already by its own thinkers.”
On the contrary – it would never have occurred to me to frame my thoughts in that kind of theoretical framework.
“Citing statistics about how people have changed religious beliefs isn’t the point exactly either;”
You’re forgetting the path that took us here. I suggested that religious faith was a choice and you argued that it wasn’t necessarily so and mentioned Hauerwas as somebody who would argue the point.
The statistics quite clearly indicate that faith *is* a choice – tens of millions of people in this country alone re-appraising, challenging, faulting and, ultimately, discarding the faiths they were born into, all without coercion, comprehensively prove that it’s a choice. What other explanation? And if it does demonstrate choice, it renders any special pleading on behalf of faith (as opposed to any other form of belief – political, cultural, philosophical etc) null and void.
Whether or not Hauerwas would consider that to be beside the point he’s interested in is irrelevant – it’s the point I’m making.
“He’d say, I think, that the ease with which people change identities is a part of the problem of enlightenment modernity, not a refutation of the idea that there is a problem.”
He’d prefer faith to be a prison with the congregation as the inmates?
“I’m not seeing any kind of an argument as to *why* faith is a gift rather than a choice. Nor can there ever really be such an argument since a gift requires a giver: his point only works if one already pre-supposes the existence of God. To anybody else, it is, at best, obscurantism. ”
But you are arguing from an anti-Christian viewpoint, which means that you are deliberately being obtuse toward Christian doxa.
Yes, for Christians, faith is a gift. There is even a specific word for this: grace, which comes from the Latin gratia, ‘given’.
“The statistics quite clearly indicate that faith *is* a choice – tens of millions of people in this country alone re-appraising, challenging, faulting and, ultimately, discarding the faiths they were born into, all without coercion, comprehensively prove that it’s a choice.”
It proves nothing; by definition, the vast majority of these ‘apostates’ did not have faith; they had only belief, which is not the same thing at all.
I suggest you read Kierkegaard on Christianity.
You can’t choose faith; you either have it or you don’t. I suppose you can choose religion, but that always strikes me as a rather pathetic undertaking: shopping for whatever belief system “feels right”, as at a supermarket.
I suggest you read Kierkegaard on this.
On Morrison’s Superman, Noah you wrote
“What I think is evil there is the idea that human beings are perfectable, or that we should put our faith in man or an overman. I think that leads to really bad places. I don’t think it’s evil because it’s unchristian per se; I think it’s evil on its own merits.”
I find it very hard to find any reading of All Star Superman other than Morrison going “Gee wiz, fellow fans! Superman is like, the descendent of all those CRAZY myths and religions old people used to believe in! That makes our CRAZY comic book hobby REALLY AWESOME and deep, don’t you think??!!! I can’t wait to buy more SUPERMAN COMICS!!!!!”
Norb’s basically on the same page as me…but maybe just to clarify slightly further…the problem is that the basic presuppositions you’re working from are very different from those that Hauerwas is working from. An additional problem is that you don’t see your presuppositions as presuppositions. You seem to be assuming that you’re position is neutral, or that you’re coming from a position outside of ideology. However, Hauerwas would argue that this assumption of a position outside ideology is itself an ideology of enlightenment rationality.
It isn’t a question of drinking the kool-aid or not drinking the kool-air. it’s a question of which kool-aid you’re drinking.
As far as speaking to people who are not Christians…I think Hauerwas in general feels that actions, or witness, are a lot more important than argument. It’s a lot more important to live as Jesus told you to live than to argue about how you should live. It’s through living a life that is true to one’s Christian identity and one’s witness that one is most likely to convince others, rather than simply browbeating them.
I think that the thing about choice and identity…unmoored from a community and a morality, as enlightenment rationality is, choice becomes little more than consumer selection; it isn’t grounded; it can’t mean anything. Identity, context, has to precede choice for choice to mean anything. Choosing identity therefore becomes nonsensical.
I should add that, while I’m doing my best to explain where Hauerwas is coming from, I could quite possibly be screwing up things big and small in his thinking…he’s a pretty entertaining writer, so if you’re curious to see what I’m messing up, I’d certainly recommend reading him.
Pallas…I can’t really argue with that.
Norb –
“But you are arguing from an anti-Christian viewpoint, which means that you are deliberately being obtuse toward Christian doxa.”
I’m not deliberately being obtuse – I’m just struggling to understand how one debates anything in any kind of meaningful fashion without both sides embracing at least minimal standards of, well, all the things one usually deploys when debating things: evidence, definitions, logic, a framework of ideas that can be pinned down, pulled apart, attacked, defended, reappraised and so on. This debate, though, is all smoke and mirrors and “well it is because I say it is and if you were one of us you’d understand”. I find it baffling and not a little frustrating – it’s like trying to nail custard to a wall.
“It proves nothing; by definition, the vast majority of these ‘apostates’ did not have faith; they had only belief, which is not the same thing at all.”
So replace “religion” for “faith”. Better yet define faith and explain how it surpasses a mere belief in the unprovable. Otherwise I have nothing to go on here (least of all an understanding of why this faith of which you speak is so much less abundant on one side of the Atlantic than the other, so unevenly divided between rich nations and poor and so much less prevalent now than a century ago).
“You can’t choose faith; you either have it or you don’t.”
Presuming that to be so, is a seemingly random scattering of divine revelation really a more logical explanation for the presence (or lack thereof) of faith in an individual than psychology, socialisation, cultural norms and education?
—
Noah –
“the problem is that the basic presuppositions you’re working from are very different from those that Hauerwas is working from.”
This is becoming painfully apparent.
“An additional problem is that you don’t see your presuppositions as presuppositions. You seem to be assuming that you’re position is neutral”
Surely evidence-based debate is the default variety in modern Western society (or at least the variety we aspire to)?
“I think that the thing about choice and identity…unmoored from a community and a morality, as enlightenment rationality is, choice becomes little more than consumer selection; it isn’t grounded; it can’t mean anything. Identity, context, has to precede choice for choice to mean anything. Choosing identity therefore becomes nonsensical.”
Are you arguing that community and morality are inextricably linked to religion? You, presumably, are a moral person and a member of multiple communities despite your atheism. What gives?
Moreover, in attempting to manoeuvre me into the theoretical pigeon hole you’ve allocated me, you’re assuming that “choice” in this context is of necessity a single, conscious decision whereas, in fact, it’s altogether more likely to be the net result of a near-infinite succession of small choices only some of which we’re even aware of having made.
“Surely evidence-based debate is the default variety in modern Western society (or at least the variety we aspire to)?”
This is the nub…and your brief allusion to “conscious” in the final paragraph points to one of the ways evidence-based debate has become not at all default, but incredibly tendentious. If choices are made for reasons which are not conscious (as Freud argues), what exactly does “evidence-based” debate mean? You can ask similar questions from a Marxist perspective.
As I said before, you’re claiming there’s a neutral position from which to evaluate evidence; that evidence and reason occur outside ideology. That just is not anywhere near as obvious as you seem to think it is. Moreover, the insistence on a neutral position can be (from a Freudian perspective) seen as actually pathological, and (from various perspectives) seen as contributing to various forms of imperialism and destruction.
Hauerwas does in fact argue that community is inextricably linked to religion…and (I think) that morality only makes sense in the context of a religious community and tradition. I, personally, certainly behave as if I’m a moral actor. I don’t know that I have an especially good theoretical way in which to respond to Hauerwas’ argument though (as I understand them.) Hauerwas argues that enlightenment moral claims are essentially parasitic on the Judeo-Christian tradition that they have jettisoned and denigrate. It’s hard to see how to refute that unless you claim there’s some sort of innate human morality…a claim which seems anthropologically fairly dubious.
Re: nailing custard to the wall. Twentieth century philosophy is kind of like that. I’m currently reading a book about Lacan, and nailing custard to the wall is about right. Again, though, I think it’s worth noting that we’ve gotten to the nailing-custard-to-the-wall point basically directly from Descartes trying to pragmatically determine exactly what can be known absent context. It seems like that move of drawing a circle to determine what is and is not solid should leave you on solid ground. That hasn’t been the actual result though.
I don’t see any point in attempting to move Christian themes in pop culture into the realm of unchosen, ineradicable markers of identity like race, gender, and sexuality except to make their usage as offensive.
It’s like C.S. Lewis’ famous either/or proposition about Jesus. I don’t have a problem with coming down on one side of that (assuming Jesus really said all those things) but Lewis set it up and people use it in conversation to the effect that “you can either accept him as your God or spit on my most cherished beliefs.” Equating disagreement with insult is bullying.
Even if you construct your universe in a way that Christianity is not chosen by anybody, that there are only nonbelievers, Christians, and apostates, which has already required the rejection of Enlightenment rationalism, Christianity is an ideology that people actively try to sell. That’s different from ineradicable markers of identity like race, gender, and sexuality. Making it both is saying “you can either convert or insult me.”
Enlightenment rationalism doesn’t assume perfect objectivity on the part of the observer. It assumes an objective reality that we constantly revise our opinions in the imperfect attempt to apprehend. It’s founded on the idea that the subject can be wrong. Christian tenets are not disprovable. The empiricist assumes less reliable founding in truth than the believer, because the empiricist revises his views in the face of opposing evidence.
The ideas of Freud and Nietzsche are not literally taken seriously in the culture today. They’re treated more the way we treat poetry. The scientific method is very active in its literal, intended use. The enlightenment tradition is very much alive, though under assault from religious reactionaries and cynical allies in big business.
“Hauerwas argues that enlightenment moral claims are essentially parasitic on the Judeo-Christian tradition that they have jettisoned and denigrate. It’s hard to see how to refute that unless you claim there’s some sort of innate human morality…a claim which seems anthropologically fairly dubious.”
*Boggle*… without morality, you couldn’t have any culture in the first place. Morality is a common symmetry of agreements about how people deserve to be treated. It didn’t come from the Bible or its interpreters. There isn’t a lot of ethical thought in there.
“This is the nub…and your brief allusion to “conscious” in the final paragraph points to one of the ways evidence-based debate has become not at all default, but incredibly tendentious. If choices are made for reasons which are not conscious (as Freud argues), what exactly does “evidence-based” debate mean? You can ask similar questions from a Marxist perspective.”
This is unfair. Firstly you conflate what I said we aspire to in terms of debate with what I said about gradual, life-altering changes in terms of beliefs and identity. That’s not apples and oranges – it’s apples and hovercraft. Secondly, I certainly did not suggest that *all* choices are unconscious or that making an unconscious choice somehow magically incapacitates one’s ability to carefully weigh evidence to the best of one’s ability when one is of a mind to do so.
“As I said before, you’re claiming there’s a neutral position from which to evaluate evidence; that evidence and reason occur outside ideology.”
Not exactly. I’m suggesting that there are commonly agreed basic standards of debate that allow a useful exchange of ideas – just as our common language and alphabet are allowing us to have this conversation in the first place – and I’m suggesting that, as a society, we tend to place value in rationality rather than irrationality, logic rather than illogic. I would suggest that, for example, the law court – however flawed in implementation – is emblematic of both the values I’m talking about and the presumption of neutrality that attends them in our society.
“Moreover, the insistence on a neutral position can be (from a Freudian perspective) seen as actually pathological, and (from various perspectives) seen as contributing to various forms of imperialism and destruction.”
Good grief. You ask somebody to provide some solid definitions in a conversation about religion and the next thing you know, you just invaded Poland.
Seeking mutually recognised values and a level playing field in order to facilitate a dialogue is the very opposite of the kind of marginalisation of the other that you’re insinuating.
“Hauerwas argues that enlightenment moral claims are essentially parasitic on the Judeo-Christian tradition that they have jettisoned and denigrate.”
Thus designating the billions of people from non Judeo-Christian societies immoral by default. Classy.
“It’s hard to see how to refute that unless you claim there’s some sort of innate human morality…a claim which seems anthropologically fairly dubious.”
It would certainly be foolish to argue that Western societies are not soaked in Judeo-Christian tradition. It would be equally foolish to suggest that pre-monotheistic societies had no values and no moral codes. And, actually, there are perfectly sound anthropological and evolutionary reasons for developing concepts of right and wrong that are entirely divorced from religion given that we live collectively and are mutually dependent on one another.
“Re: nailing custard to the wall. Twentieth century philosophy is kind of like that.”
One might be moved to question the real world utility of such messy theorising.
I’m not entirely on board with Hauerwas here, I don’t think. He’s right that a huge amount of ethical thinking in the West occurred in the Judeo-Christian context, and was dependent on that context, though.
Among other things, one might question whether morality and theory should be judged on the basics of pragmatism, or whether the fact that the most important challenges to enlightenment thinking have mostly been ignored means that those challenges have been met.
“Seeking mutually recognised values and a level playing field in order to facilitate a dialogue is the very opposite of the kind of marginalisation of the other that you’re insinuating.”
So the propaganda goes. And yet our rational, pragmatic government somehow keeps invading various places on rational, pragmatic grounds and pouring more and more and more money into the biggest military the world has ever seen. If our philosophy is so spotlessly pure, why does this keep happening? If mutual dialogue and universal equality are in fact our goals, why do we spend so much money on guns to subjugate the rest of the world?
“The scientific method is very active in its literal, intended use.”
The scientific method, to the extent that such a thing exists outside high school textbooks, has bupkus to say about morality or politics. The contention that it has something to say about morality and politics is ideologically driven, and has done a huge amount of harm.
Noah: “the scientific method” has plenty to say about “morality” (whatever either of those mean).
(1) Sometimes moral judgements depend on the facts, and sometimes we need “science” to tell us what the relevant facts are. E.g. some people choose different types of diet in response to what they see as the evidence about ecological sustainability or the sentience/non-sentience of certain organisms. Some people — mainly American Christian conservatives — think that whether homosexuality is a “choice” or “innate” (again, whatever those mean) makes a difference to whether we ought to condemn or tolerate the gays. Decisions about international aid often turn on empirical studies into the effects of various interventions (should we fund this vaccine or that one?). Etc. etc.
(2) “The scientific method” can also tell us various empirical facts about “moral psychology” — which, more or less, means the determinants of moral judgement and behaviour. There’s been a lot of interesting work in this area in the last decade, on e.g. the influence of emotions on moral judgement, the extent of cross-cultural moral disagreement, the development of morality in children, the evolutionary history of morality etc. etc.
(3) Point (1) shows how “science” can affect our judgements, taking our basic “moral values” as given. Point (2) shows how “science” can tell us about the origins of and influence on those “moral values”. In addition to these, some people have thought that “science” can tell us which “values” we “ought” (in some non-moral sense–usually an epistemic or pragmatic sense) to have…henceforth I’ll drop the scare-quotes, since this is getting Herrimanesque…
It’s highly contentious to claim that science can have this sort of input into morality–on that point you’re right. The vast majority of Anglo-American philosophers since Hume have thought that it can’t, that thinking otherwise is to commit the so-called naturalistic fallacy. Most scientists who study morality tend to agree, and certainly no one except a nitwit like Sam Harris thinks you can read off morality from science.
I don’t know much about political philosophy or psychology, but I would guess that 1-3 apply to them as well, mutatis mutandis.
“So the propaganda goes. And yet our rational, pragmatic government somehow keeps invading various places on rational, pragmatic grounds and pouring more and more and more money into the biggest military the world has ever seen. If our philosophy is so spotlessly pure, why does this keep happening?”
The fact that something is presented as rational doesn’t mean it necessarily is. However, one would need to actually look at the issue rationally in order to determine whether or not that was the case. For example, most of the arguments against the war in Iraq were rational ones that illustrated the irrationality of Bush’s policies.
Even if something has been appraised at least somewhat rationally, it doesn’t mean that it is going to be acted upon rationally since other factors – political expediency, ideology, bias, prejudice, religious conviction, electoral pandering, self-interest and so on – are clearly also at play. We aspire to rationality, we don’t often (in political terms) manage to achieve it.
In any case, what’s the alternative? You’d prefer it if American foreign policy was decided by soothsayers reading entrails?
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ebster says:
…Lewis set it up and people use it in conversation to the effect that “you can either accept him as your God or spit on my most cherished beliefs.” Equating disagreement with insult is bullying. …
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Not to mention, if you reject Jesus, you are then seen by many as placing yourself on the side of Satan… of ultimate evil! “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” thinking.
Looking up more stuff on the C.S. Lewis question, I found:
From a religious perspective: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2010.00625.x/abstract
From the agnostic/atheist viewpoint (though one can be a “believer” and still find Lewis’ tactic spurious:
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…Was Jesus really the Son of God? C.S. Lewis believed so and also believed that he had a very good argument for convincing people to agree: if Jesus was not whom he claimed, then he must be a lunatic, a liar, or worse.
…What we have here is a false dilemma (or trilemma, since there are three options). Several possibilities are presented as if they are the only ones available. One is preferred and defended strongly while the others are presented as weak and inferior. This is a typical tactic for C.S. Lewis, as John Beversluis writes:
“One of Lewis’s most serious weaknesses as an apologist is his fondness for the false dilemma. He habitually confronts his readers with the alleged necessity of choosing between two alternatives when there are in fact other options to be considered. One horn of the dilemma typically sets forth Lewis’s view in all its apparent forcefulness, while the other horn is a ridiculous straw man. Either the universe is the product of a conscious Mind or it is a mere “fluke” (MC. 31). Either morality is a revelation or it is an inexplicable illusion (PP, 22). Either morality is grounded in the supernatural or it is a “mere twist” in the human mind (PP, 20). Either right and wrong are real or they are “mere irrational emotions” (CR, 66). Lewis advances these arguments again and again, and they are all open to the same objection.”
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http://atheism.about.com/od/cslewisnarnia/a/jesustrilemma.htm
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Re: nailing custard to the wall. Twentieth century philosophy is kind of like that…
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Once again we agree on something! (More entertainment value in the custard-nailing, though…)
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“Seeking mutually recognised values and a level playing field in order to facilitate a dialogue is the very opposite of the kind of marginalisation of the other that you’re insinuating.”
So the propaganda goes. And yet our rational, pragmatic government somehow keeps invading various places on rational, pragmatic grounds and pouring more and more and more money into the biggest military the world has ever seen. If our philosophy is so spotlessly pure, why does this keep happening? If mutual dialogue and universal equality are in fact our goals, why do we spend so much money on guns to subjugate the rest of the world?
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On what the government says is “rational, pragmatic grounds.” There’s such a thing as lying; or the even more common self-deception, where actions based on emotion or ignoble motives are masked as logical and morally worthy.
To attack the idea of pragmatism and rationality because of such warped behavior is like attacking the reality of mental illness because Communist Russia imprisoned political dissidents by using the excuse that they were “crazy.”
But, certainly stark pragmatism and rationality by themselves, devoid of other considerations, can lead to horrendous actions or thinking. Some Mensa-nites in L.A. argued that the way to solve the homeless problem was…to kill all the homeless:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/398711/STUPIDITY-CROSSES-ALL-IQ-EDUCATIONAL-LINES.html
Hey Jones. I was pretty much thinking of 3; the idea that the scientific method (which is not the same as rationality, and which has a much more tenuous existence than even “morality”) can tell us what moral choices to make (a la Sam Harris.) I’m really skeptical about 2 in most cases — ev psych really mostly seems like bullshit to me — and I have caveats about 1 (would conservative Christians really change their mind if they found that homosexuality was innate? Is that debate really central to the discussion about homosexuality?) but I see your general point.
“The fact that something is presented as rational doesn’t mean it necessarily is. However, one would need to actually look at the issue rationally in order to determine whether or not that was the case.”
Ian, the thing is, the argument for rationality, and that the U.S. is itself striving for rationality and equality and all those good things, or even that we’re acting pragmatically, is used ideologically to justify our actions. It isn’t that there are mistakes in rationality; it’s that rationality is itself a part of post-enlightenment liberal ideology which is tied into a capitalist, imperialist project. Reason, pragmatism and our religion of economics somehow keeps causing us to invade nation after nation. If that keeps happening, at some point you might have to admit that this is not a bug but a feature.
As one example…the answer to Jim Crow was not purer rationality. The answer was a faith-based movement rooted not in economic policy but in the black church and prophetic nonviolence.
So would I prefer it if American foreign policy were decided on the basis of prophetic faith in nonviolence? You bet your ass I would.
“rationality is itself a part of post-enlightenment liberal ideology which is tied into a capitalist, imperialist project. Reason, pragmatism and our religion of economics somehow keeps causing us to invade nation after nation.”
You’ve apparently bought into the self-aggrandizing propaganda of libertarians, neo-cons and other laissez-faire undesirables that they (and only they) represent reason. But this is not the 18th Century and the whigs are not the only alternative to an archaic world of absolute monarchs and superstitious despots. Sam Harris setting himself up as the voice of reason doesn’t actually make him so.
Socially liberal progressives are no less rational or pragmatic in their basis or their outlook, nor are socialists or various other political groupings hostile to the so-called rationalists you rightly despise.
If you’ll concede, for example, that the government of Sweden is at least as rational as that of the US (which you should) and that Sweden has not participated in any war for a couple of centuries now (which you must), you’ll hopefully also concede that a rational nation is not automatically an aggressive nation. And that’s presuming you think rationalism has actually made anything more than a surface impression on American politics, which is debatable.
“Reason, pragmatism and our religion of economics somehow keeps causing us to invade nation after nation.”
*Religion* of economics is absolutely right. The free market is held up as some sort of magical and divine entity complete with its own dogma and the beliefs of right wing economists seem largely the product of their *faith* rather than any concrete grounding in demonstrable fact. That’s not rationalism.
“at some point you might have to admit that this is not a bug but a feature.”
Garbage in, garbage out as the saying goes. The outcome of a rational decision making process can only be as good as the quality of the arguments and data fed into it. That’s not a bug in the software, it’s a bug in the users.
“As one example…the answer to Jim Crow was not purer rationality. The answer was a faith-based movement rooted not in economic policy but in the black church and prophetic nonviolence.”
Foe every instance you can cite of faith solving a problem I’m fairly confident I can cite you two of faith causing one (including plenty involving slavery and race).
It’s also worth noting that the religious are quite happy to attempt rational argument, if only when they think they have a chance of discrediting their detractors – intelligent design theory, for example, is a clear (if incompetent) attempt at defending religious belief within a supposedly rational framework.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…It isn’t that there are mistakes in rationality; it’s that rationality is itself a part of post-enlightenment liberal ideology which is tied into a capitalist, imperialist project. Reason, pragmatism and our religion of economics somehow keeps causing us to invade nation after nation…
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Well, perfectly rational justifications can be used for utterly vile, amoral goals.
If a person operates under the premise that their immediate sexual gratification is all-important, then rape is a “rational” course of action. If a country takes it for granted that its cushy existence as lavishly wasteful “consumers” is more important than the freedom of other countries, even the survival of life on Earth…
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In June, 1992, the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. At this conference, 153 countries (including the United States) signed treaties to curb the damage to the environment from human economic activities. This conference was attended by George H. W. Bush, then President of the United States of America, who proved resistant to efforts to make deep and lasting changes that could ensure protection of the world on which all nations depend. His reasoning? “The American way of life is not negotiable”…
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http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/GlobalWarning/1024.html
…then the propping-up of dictatorships that will supply us with oil, fighting of any attempts to weaken our Imperial Power (as with a World Court), etc., are perfectly rational — if psychopathically amoral — actions.
In other words, that rationality can be used to justify evil actions does not thereby make rationality poisonous, any more that a hammer is worthy of condemnation because it can be used to batter someone to death.
And, “rationality is itself a part of post-enlightenment liberal ideology”? Why not cast mathematics and chemistry as “ideology,” too?
I’m pretty sure Hauerwas would think intelligent design was a really bad idea. The natural theology tradition is very much a liberal enlightenment project which I’m sure he’d reject.
“You’ve apparently bought into the self-aggrandizing propaganda of libertarians, neo-cons and other laissez-faire undesirables that they (and only they) represent reason.”
Nah; I just think that enlightenment rationalism is a broader phenomena than you do…and am somewhat more skeptical of the claims of progressivism to be an alternative rather than a continuation of modernity’s excesses.
It’s hard to argue against the Scandinavian paradise. I think one could argue that their quality of life is dependent on a resource allocation which is implicated in and made possible by a U.S.-enforced Western imperialism.
Mike, an appeal to science or mathematics to support particular argumentative goals is in fact ideological. And your use of them in that way is hardly unique.
“And yet our rational, pragmatic government somehow keeps invading various places on rational, pragmatic grounds and pouring more and more and more money into the biggest military the world has ever seen. If our philosophy is so spotlessly pure, why does this keep happening?”
I don’t think anybody is claiming it’s the exercise of a spotless, pure philosophy, but to do with having to run a state in this world.
I referred to Christian thinking on “just war” from Augustine through Niebuhr and you characterized it thus: “Niebuhr, etc. argue that [Jesus’s maxim to turn the other cheek] is an ideal… and you may have to derogate for practical reasons.”
Isn’t that the same?
“Reason, pragmatism and our religion of economics somehow keeps causing us to invade nation after nation. If that keeps happening, at some point you might have to admit that this is not a bug but a feature.”
Couldn’t we make all your comments about the history of Christianity? And are you referring to some atheist presidents I didn’t hear about, and large atheist voting blocs that are reliably hawkish?
The behavior you’re talking about- securing resources, stemming real or perceived threats, and asserting dominance- is as old as humanity. There isn’t a single war we’ve been running or environmentally shortsighted policy that can’t be challenged on rational, pragmatic grounds. The influence on policy of supporters of Israeli expansion and believers in the Christian End Times is difficult to defend rationally and relies on appeals to faith and religious identity.
I fail to see how grounding religious ideas more firmly in identity is likely to make the world less violent.
“The scientific method, to the extent that such a thing exists outside high school textbooks, has bupkus to say about morality or politics. The contention that it has something to say about morality and politics is ideologically driven, and has done a huge amount of harm.”
Scientific method is a process of testing hypotheses. It generates information that is always critical to deciding morality and politics, because we don’t live in Plato’s world of forms.
“I’m pretty sure Hauerwas would think intelligent design was a really bad idea. The natural theology tradition is very much a liberal enlightenment project which I’m sure he’d reject.”
It’s a biblical literalist project. Unless you’re calling the Christian fundamentalist movement a “liberal enlightenment project”. It’s a reaction to the enlightenment.
“Mike, an appeal to science or mathematics to support particular argumentative goals is in fact ideological.”
Basing arguments on evidence is ideological?!
EB, Niebuhr is not actually in the just war tradition. He’s a pragmatist, which is quite distinct from just war. Basically, just war provides a series of guidelines for when war is acceptable, including (for example) an absolute prohibition on invading other countries without direct cause. Niebuhr says that force is a necessary component of international relations and that it’s use should be evaluated in terms of the greatest good. Just War is, if applied rigorously, much more pacifist than Niebuhr’s philosophy — and while Niebuhr is aware of Just War, it’s something of a stretch to say that he’s part of that tradition.
Christianity certainly has it’s own bloody history. Hauerwas is directly opposed to Constantianism — that is, the exercise of power by Christian states. The argument for Christianity being an identity rather than an abstracted series of principles is in part an effort to prevent leaders from performing atrocities in the name of Christianity. For Hauerwas, Christianity is radically pacifist, so any use of force by a state is in his terms automatically not Christian.
I’m pretty sure from your comments that you’ve read little theory of science. I don’t know that anyone who’s studied these things would argue that the scientific method exists, or that it has much of anything to do with how science is conducted. The argument that using a purely hypothetical idealized version of collecting knowledge about the natural world will teach us how to rationally set up our lives…this is the kind of hubris that has made modernity such a heap of skulls, even in comparison to the rest of human history, which is itself not pretty.
Intelligent design presumes that you should use reason to prove faith, and that the test of faith is science. It’s totally an enlightenment project; people like Newton and Darwin were deeply involved and affected by natural theology. I’m sure Hauerwas has significantly more contempt for intelligent design than you do. And, yes, I’m pretty sure he thinks American Christian Protestant fundamentalism is part and parcel of the liberal enlightenment project, not opposed to it in any meaningful way. (Fundamentalism argues for a literal reading of the bible outside of tradition; Hauerwas believes that abstracting knowledge from tradition and community is part of the liberal enlightenment project which came out of protestantism.)
Finally…basing an argument on the supposed ideological applicability of mathematics is not basing an argument on evidence; it’s basing an argument on ideology. Math is a powerful and rigorous logical system, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how to conduct your life.
“Intelligent design presumes that you should use reason to prove faith, and that the test of faith is science. It’s totally an enlightenment project;”
No, the teleological argument was around long before the enlightenment. Cf. Aristotle for one.
Aristotle was proving the existence of a Christian god?
…but point taken. Aquinas did teleology too. Intelligent design though goes back particularly to Paley I think, who was very much an enlightenment thinker, especially in his fascination with science and particularly biology.
It’s funny you should appeal to the authority of “theory [i.e. philosophy] of science”…I guess philsci is epistemically privileged over science because…um…it…er…anyway, I just wanted to say, ahem:
I don’t know…as an example, I found the critique of [science] in [Noah’s blog posts] irritating, stupid, and offensive (a trifecta!) In particular, the [posts] make [science] responsible for [shit, I don’t know…the holocaust? eugenics? the atom bomb? Justin Bieber? some other heap of skulls in modernity?], which is completely ass-backwards and duplicitous — [science]’s done many, many bad things, but [Justin Bieber] is really not its fault. I also found the general morality expressed fairly vile; you’re supposed to grudgingly admire/[or at least refrain from criticising] [religious traditions that have condoned the oppression and mutilation of women, homosexuals, infidels et al.] because [“they’re quite complicated traditions of thought that are closely tied to various communal identities”] etc. etc. The whole thing seemed smug and poorly thought through; a feeble and feeble-minded rebuttal to [um, some other posts that were jingoistic about science, I guess?]
In sum: what’s bad for the goose ought also to be bad for the gander. Not to be all ideological or anything…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Mike, an appeal to science or mathematics to support particular argumentative goals is in fact ideological. And your use of them in that way is hardly unique.
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First, a good deal depends on the complexity of what is being argued. If it’s “the way to divide a pie into four equal pieces,” “the temperature that a kettle to be used for boiling water has to withstand,” “the overall best way t protect a population from a disease,” those techniques are clearly far-and-above any others. To bring religion, philosophy, psychology, etc. into the argument (like some quote the Bible to “prove” the “real” age of the Earth) would be thoroughly silly-ass.
But, I’d agree that “an appeal to science or mathematics…is in fact ideological” when the arguments are far more complex (i.e., “what a just society should be like,” “what the purpose of a human life should be,” “does the end always justify the means?”).
In those complex cases, to treat science and math (or logic; sorry, Mr. Spock!) as if they were the argumentative be-all and end-all, and that no other factors were worthy of serious consideration, would be unbalanced in the way that ideologically-warped thinking tends to be.
Too bad HU doesn’t have an “Etc.” category! I guess I could wait for the next trans/gay-related thread to pop up for posting this, but hadda share. From Poppy Z. Brite’s blog ( http://docbrite.livejournal.com/ ):
====================
Gay Shirts
Jun. 13th, 2011 at 9:00 AM
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From: AFA Action Alert
Old Navy selling ‘gay’ shirts – donates profits to activists
How would you feel if you knew that 10% of your Old Navy purchase would be donated directly to a homosexual activist organization?
Dear Poppy,
Old Navy is now selling “gay pride” T-shirts in support of President Obama’s proclamation designating June as “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month.”
Old Navy’s rainbow T-shirts are part of its “Love Proudly: Pride 2011” campaign. The shirts reportedly went on sale June 1 and will be available at select stores throughout the country. Old Navy is donating 10 percent of the proceeds to the “It Gets Better Project,” a pro-LGBT campaign.
The T-shirt designs include a white shirt with “Love Proudly” written in the colors of the rainbow, and a black shirt with rainbow-colored stripes.
According to reports, the T-shirts are being sold at some Old Navy stores until the end of June or until supplies run out. Old Navy is already saying they may increase the number of stores next year.
TAKE ACTION
Homosexual activists are encouraging Old Navy to carry more ‘gay’ shirts in more stores next year.
Let Old Navy president Tim Wyatt know his decision to engage in corporate promotion and financial support of homosexuality is a bad idea, considering the number of mothers buying summer and back-to-school clothes.
Send your letter to Old Navy now!
It is very important that you forward this alert to your friends and family members.
Sincerely,
Tim Wildmon, President
American Family Association
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Dear Tim,
Long time no write! Thanks so much for letting me know about these cool shirts so I can get one and tell my friends about them too! I really appreciate your keeping me apprised of what businesses are dedicated to equality, because I don’t keep up with these things as well as I should and I might miss the chance to support them if you didn’t let me know.
Love,
PZB
====================
See also her June 6th entry re “Trans Bingo”…
Hey Jones. What’s good for the goose *is* good for the gander…and this is why theory tends to be like nailing custard to the wall. Writers like Lacan go to a lot of trouble to try to practice what they preach in terms of questioning authority as they speak authoritatively…and the result is prose which triples back on itself and is really tricky to follow. Basically, it’s very hard to question the bases of knowledge and authority in a conversation. I readily admit to not being up to the task…but that doesn’t mean that the questions are irrelevant. If anything, pointing out that I’m implicit further buttresses the claim that you can’t get out of these dilemmas through simple appeals to reason or authority.
Or, to put it another way…the fact that my use of reason undermines itself is an instance of reason undermining itself, not a datum in support of the argument that reason does not undermine itself.
Pointing out that I’m *implicated*. Though possibly implicit as well….
I totally agree that it’s hard to know what to say about reflexivity. Especially for someone like me who (a) inclines to scepticism at a very abstract level; (b) thinks that reason and argument play very limited roles in generating our beliefs but (c) also finds some scientific and philosophical claims much more plausible than some others (e.g. much of cognitive psychology over Freud and Lacan, or Darwin and Weismann over Lysenko and ID). If you don’t think any claims are epistemically privileged over others, then it seems like you can’t make any kind of honest argument about anything (but you probably shouldn’t feel too bad about continuing to argue, since you shouldn’t believe that doing so is dishonest…)
But the epistemic upshot of a reductio argument against “enlightenment” standards of rationality — which I take it is what you’re gesturing at — needn’t be that we reject those standards. We might instead think there’s something wrong with the argument. To borrow an argument of GE Moore: if your epistemology implies that you don’t know that you have hands, then maybe you don’t know that you have hands. Or maybe *there’s something seriously wrong with your epistemology*. Harman makes kind of a similar argument about belief-revision, which is too technical to relate here.
For what it’s worth, I like the metaphor from Neurath-via-Quine that the pursuit of knowledge (or “knowledge”, if you prefer) is like trying to fix a boat while at sea. That means that you’re just going to have to accept some claims as more stable than others, although even the most stable claims are in theory susceptible to being replaced eventually. (You’ve got to stand on some of the boards while you’re replacing the other ones!)
Quine got at the same idea with his “web of knowledge” metaphor: some claims (e.g. 2+2=4) are at the centre; some (e.g. chimpanzees are the closest living relatives of humans) are closer to the periphery; you can revise peripheral claims without revising too many other claims, but to revise more central claims, you’re going to have to revise a lot more other claims. That doesn’t mean that you should never do it, just that it’s harder.
BTW, scepticism about reason/logic/truth/knowledge doesn’t justify unclear writing. Hume, Stich and Harman are all sceptics but their writing is much, much, much clearer than Lacan’s or Derrida’s (at least from what I’ve read of the latter two).
You’re basically arguing for pragmatism. I think pragmatism is how I actually operate; I’m not convinced it’s ideal though. Basically bracketing larger epistemological claims can leave you (for example) essentially functioning as if Judeo-Christian moral claims are true without allowing yourself to be committed to those claims — which can have profound effects on how your moral system works. Hauerwas argues for example that our medical ethics claim to function pragmatically (on what works) but are actually driven by an overwhelming fear of death which has distorted our entire society and undermines the best aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I like Hume a lot. However, while he’s skeptical of a lot, he’s not really skeptical of reason as reason, at least not as far as I could tell. He’s interesting in limiting reason, in arguing that reason can only tell you things within its compass and not those outside, but he’s not skeptical of the actual functioning of reason; he doesn’t believe that appeals to reason are actually appeals to something else. He’s not, for example, informed by Freud or Marx (how could he be?) Derrida and Lacan are much more skeptical about reason — and much, much more skeptical about the possibility of clear communication — which is something that Freud in particular calls into serious question.
Having said that…Feyerabend is actually extremely clear.
Noah, I have to say if you’re an atheist according to the generally understood meaning then I’m having trouble understanding your angle on what you consistently treat as the disaster of secular society and the overwhelming superiority of Christianity. I can’t discern any point of view from your comments but “we can’t know anything, so let’s go with Christianity”. In such a crisis of any knowledge but Christian revelation why be an atheist?
“I’m pretty sure from your comments that you’ve read little theory of science. I don’t know that anyone who’s studied these things would argue that the scientific method exists, or that it has much of anything to do with how science is conducted.”
What “theory of science”? Postmodernists who think it’s all patriarchy and hegemony? Feyerabend? L. Ron Hubbard? Nobody’s arguing that experimenters can’t be biased, conduct poor experiments, reach flimsy conclusions, etc. It’s still a method of testing hypotheses, and yes, it exists and is in practice. Couldn’t we make just as pointless a declaration that “nobody who’s studied the history of Christianity would argue that Christianity exists, or that it has much of anything to do with how Christianity is conducted” based on its falling short of the ideal?
The information on Just War and Hauerwas is enlightening, but I don’t see how it answers my point: the common Christian view of pacifism is an ideal from which you may have to derogate for practical reasons strikes me as very similar to the claims of any government going to war. Nobody is claiming that we’re seeing a spotless, pure philosophy, but a choice of the best of bad options in an imperfect world. If you agree with Hauerwas that a warlike government can’t be Christian and that government shouldn’t be Christian then your remarks about the body count of “Enlightenment governments” should include the body count of every government in human history, and still be irrelevant because “real Christians” would never attempt to run a state.
“The argument that using a purely hypothetical idealized version of collecting knowledge about the natural world will teach us how to rationally set up our lives…this is the kind of hubris that has made modernity such a heap of skulls, even in comparison to the rest of human history, which is itself not pretty.”
Collecting knowledge about the world and the effects of our actions in it is a critical foundation for decisions and morality. Checking what we think we know and revising our imperfect and culturally bound conclusions in the face of experimental results is the closest we can get to an accurate basis for systems of interpretation unless we’re getting revelation from God. People who think that don’t have a good record. Again: if so spotless & pure, bug, feature, etc.
Maybe true morality, as opposed to enlightened self-interest, can’t come from science, but it certainly requires knowledge from experiential observation, of which science is a more refined system. But if there’s no God then why castigate science for not generating morality either? In my view morality was critical to developing culture and surviving on earth as a highly technically adept species. In it we aspire to the kind of symmetry we aspire to in all our systems. We’re much less religious in our attitudes toward math than we used to be.
Modernity as a heap of skulls: first, life on earth is less violent than ever. We could destroy ourselves through environmental catastrophe or nuclear war. But there’s a distinction between policy determined by science: for example, respecting and acting on the overwhelming consensus of the mainstream scientific community on global warming; and government and industry employing science to build more effective tools for warfare and production with no attention to the consequences. That’s not policy listening to science, that’s policy using science as a tool to serve the same old human impulses, no different from using God to rally support for every war.
Claiming that the Enlightenment project should be thrown out for not meeting an ideal is even more clueless than saying Christianity should be, because it misunderstands its nature more fundamentally. Science is premised on the conditional, subjective nature of all our knowledge.
For scientific method, I just don’t think anyone believes that there’s a scientific method anything like what you see in high school textbooks that could be called the “scientific method”. Real scientists just don’t work by generating hypothesis and then testing them in some sort of ordered way like that. Like most things in high school textbooks, the scientific method is just bullshit.
I think a lot of theorists of science do argue that science is based on falsifiability (from Popper) but that’s pretty different than the scientific method. I’m not really on board with falsifiability either, but it’s at least not completely ridiculous as a theory.
For who has the better record…Christians just don’t have a substantially worse record than people operating from a non-Christian perspective like Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and Truman (who was a pragmatist before he was a Christian, I’m pretty sure). In addition, I think many Christians would agree with the argument that Christianity has massively failed — certainly Hauerwas would. Christianity has entire doctrines about the inability of people to attain to the Christian ideal, along with an absolute demand that they do so. From Hauerwas’ perspective, certainly, “we’re doing the best we can and the other guys have lots of bodies too” is not a sufficient argument.
For pacifism — I’m not sure you’re getting how different Niebuhrian pragmatism is from the traditional just war and pacifist views of war? Just War and pacifist traditions do not say that pacifism is an ideal from which you may need to derogate. That’s what Niebuhr says, but lots of people (Christians and others) disagree with him.
Finally,
“Science is premised on the conditional, subjective nature of all our knowledge.”
This says it nicely. For science, there is a place outside community, outside power, where you can evaluate truth — a place from which you can non-subjectively declare the conditional, subjective nature of all our knowledge.
You can believe anything as long as you don’t really believe it, and are willing to lay it down instantly upon the pronouncement of technocratic experts. And if the experts say we’ll be safer if we invade Iraq…well, off we go to invade Iraq. If the experts say you get information from torture, then, hey, let’s torture. And then the criticism is, well, that was pragmatically the wrong thing to do, rather than questioning whether maybe, possibly, those decisions were actually evil.
Oops one more thing…where do I get off thinking Christianity has something to offer modernity when I’m not even willing to be a Christian? All I can really say is that hypocrisy is based on evidence, and is therefore the one sin modernity is really willing to castigate. However, being a hypocrite is not the same thing as being wrong.
You may be partly right about Hume. I was thinking primarily of his scepticism about (a) whether reason can set non-instrumental goals (“Reason is, and ought to be, only the slave of the passions”) (b) the possibility of empirical knowledge and (c) the possibility of self-knowledge. But there’s Quine, who thought — depending on how you read him — either that words don’t have meanings or that their meanings are radically indeterminate. Stich thinks there’s no value in having true beliefs, and that human belief-formation is massively irrational. They’re both very clear writers, as is Feyerabend.
As for philosophy of science, well…there are still scientists who claim to be falsificationist. But I don’t know any major post-Lakatosian philosopher of science who’s a falsificationist. I can’t really think of any minor ones either. The field has totally splintered since the early 70s.
The big thing in philsci over the last decade, I gather, has been models — the idea that the sciences proceed by offering models for phenomena.
Finally, there’s this paragraph:
“And if the experts say we’ll be safer if we invade Iraq…well, off we go to invade Iraq. If the experts say you get information from torture, then, hey, let’s torture. And then the criticism is, well, that was pragmatically the wrong thing to do, rather than questioning whether maybe, possibly, those decisions were actually evil.”
I’d be impressed by your ability to read the minds of your opponents, except that you do such a lousy job of it…no offence. If you’re a utilitarian, which I mostly am, you judge actions by their consequences. Before 2001, I thought that torture was *morally* wrong because the likely loss to utility outweighs the likely gain to utility. In 2003, I thought that invading Iraq was *morally* wrong for the same reason (although the consequences to be weighed were obviously different). There are plenty of other people who thought so too, and not because they’re Christians. There are even some people who once thought that both torture and the war were morally permissible, but have since changed their mind.
In other words, you can think that there’s a difference between pragmatic and moral normativity without having to be a Christian. This is so obvious that I feel like an idiot for saying it. The reason I’m a vegetarian and vote for redistributive economic policy is certainly not because it’s in my interests; it’s because I think it’s the morally right thing to do.
I was talking about the way the debate tends to play out in the public sphere, rather than about what you in particular think or don’t think.
Even so though…your argument is basic utility. It’s greatest good for the greatest number. It’s pragmatic. You’re explaining the pragmatism at greater length, but that doesn’t stop it from being pragmatic. You still end up dithering about expert opinions as to consequences and likely balances. You’re in an arena in which the ticking time bomb scenario can be argued and debated by experts, and in which morality is a calculation done, presumably, from a place that at least claims provisional access to objective calculation.
Hauerwas in one of his essays talks about Native Americans and Christians, and what exactly Christians should do in relation to converting Indians. He argues that, given the history of power relations and forcible conversion, the thing Christians probably need to do in relation to Native Americans is be silent. But he also suggests that what Christians can do is provide a witness. As an example, he discusses an incident in which a German pacifist Christian community was attacked by Indians in the colonial period. The pacifists did nothing; they let themselves and their children be killed. Years later, the Indians still remembered this community — and not with contempt so much as with curiosity.
So..I don’t think that story is about the greatest good for the greatest number. It suggests, also, that there is a response to torture and to invasion which does not go through balancing expert opinions of utility, and which is not pragmatic. The point about torture, from this perspective is not how many it helps or hurts. The point is (for me…I bet Hauerwas wouldn’t generalize quite this way) that some things are sufficiently evil that you should not do them regardless of the consequences. Are there worse things than death and/or pain and/or unhappiness? Hauerwas argues that post-enlightenment modernity has difficulty answering that question, and that as a result our moral discourse is a mess.
_____
So do Quine and Stitch claim that clear expression is some sort of absolute or even provisional good? On what grounds? And do you similarly feel that Joyce or Mallarme are wrong or invalidated because they didn’t always write like Hemingway?
It’s worth noting that Hume’s Discourse on Natural Religion is a dialogue in which Hume’s own position and motives are not entirely clear. Would the book be better if he had been clearer? Or is his skepticism about belief better served by making his own beliefs ambiguous?
Post-structualists are skeptical about language, among other things. They’re skeptical about authority, too, and often quite skeptical about the idea that there is a clear perspective from which truth can be viewed. Irigary, for example, talks pretty explicitly (for her) about the way that patriarchy inflects language, and about the struggle to find a speech outside of that. In her effort to do so, she has recourse to fiction and to evocative language that is something like poetry, as well as to other tactics. Looking at that and saying, “this should be clearer!” — that’s not a criticism unaddressed in the text; on the contrary, it’s a criticism that the text is about.
I am Noah’s evil twin here, after a fashion, since we mostly agree on these things, but I became a Christian. Which actually happened for me partly as a response to seeing the incredible non-ancestry-based sense of purpose and community a lot of my gay friends shared.
I do have concerns about the hypocrisy issue– I mean, Jesus did, and I think he had good reasons. There is a quasi-Christian tradition of sorts, going back to Hegel and Rudolf Steiner. But overall, sure, I think recognizing the shining perverse core of resistance to our natural desires to harm one another, as offered by a narrative and a group rather than just a concept, is good to accept in principle– even if that does seem to be like having your concept and eating it too.
Kind of like the Eucharist.
I’d much sooner read Joyce than Hemingway, but I’d rather read Hume than Derrida. Apples, oranges; I value clarity in non-fiction. But this is about the least interesting thing we could debate.
“I was talking about the way the debate tends to play out in the public sphere, rather than about what you in particular think or don’t think.”
Maybe. But here and throughout this thread, you’ve been (a) construing as broadly as possible the views with which you disagree so that (b) you can then cherrypick examples of supposed adherents of those views who behave badly and then (c) judge those views by those supposed adherents. (All those skulls!) By contrast, whenever anyone mentions that Christians have done their fair share of, oh I don’t know, promoting the spread of HIV in the developing world, bashing gays, oppressing women, murdering abortionists, starting wars, killing Jews, abusing children etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.s ad infinitum you fall back to saying that this is not true Christianity, or not Hauerwas’ conception of Christianity or…
Again, geese, ganders, etc. If it’s fair to say that we shouldn’t dismiss Christianity on the basis of xyz done by supposed Christians, then it should be equally fair to say that we shouldn’t dismiss…well, hell, I don’t even know what the alternatives on the table are, but anyway…that we shouldn’t dismiss them because of how their supposed adherents behave.
But anyway, man, come on, you know that “utility” is a term of art in ethics. I could equally well have said “welfare” or “well-being”. But if you really want to say that a view whose fundamental moral principle is “promote the greatest good/welfare/well-being for the greatest number” is pragmatic and not ethical…well, we must be using “pragmatic” and “ethical” in different ways. At least in my neck of the woods, a theory that says you should count others’ interests (individually, not jointly) as equally important as yours and e.g. stop eating meat and give almost all of your income and assets to economic aid…counts as an “ethical” theory.
It sounds like what you’re after from an ethical theory is what ethicists call “agent-centred restrictions”, such as you get from rights-based and some deontological theories. These are restrictions on what sorts of actions are permissible, whatever the circumstances. Kant notoriously thought that there were heaps of such restrictions, even on relatively innocuous actions like lying (the famous killer at the door scenario). GEM Anscombe famously expressed the sentiment:
“if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent [or, we might say, torture] should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him [sic]; he shows a corrupt mind.”
In other words, you want a theory that says “never, ever, ever, ever torture, no matter what”. It’s true that you don’t get these kinds of restrictions straightforwardly from utilitarianism. But you can get the same practical effect — never even consider whether it’s okay to torture!! — from certain variants of utilitarianism.
Personally, I think that torture is permissible so very, very rarely that it’s morally corrosive even to consider it, or talk about considering it in public…i.e. that even the very act of debating whether torture could ever be justified tends to decrease utility…and that therefore we shouldn’t do it–neither torture, nor even think about whether to torture.
Anyway, you’re entitled to think that ethics should include agent-centred restrictions. I don’t, since I’m a quasi-utilitarian, but reasonable people can disagree. But even if you think it should, that needn’t mean that views without such restrictions aren’t ethical theories; they’re just ethical theories you would reject.
Incidentally, utilitarians appear to be in the minority in Anglo-American ethics…except in Australia, for some reason (which would explain me).
“For who has the better record…Christians just don’t have a substantially worse record than people operating from a non-Christian perspective like Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and Truman (who was a pragmatist before he was a Christian, I’m pretty sure).”
1) All of those people were raised in religious environments. Pol Pot and Hitler both attended Catholic schools and Stalin was educated in an Orthodox seminary with a view to eventually joining the priesthood. According to your own previous arguments, their early faith can’t be neatly separated from the narrative of their later lives (including the virulent anti-Semitism of both Hitler and Stalin).
Incidentally, a number of the most prominent Nazi mass murderers were deeply religious – Hans Frank was a devout Catholic, so too was Hermann Göring. Heinrich Himmler was also a deeply religious Catholic in his youth – he renounced Catholicism later on in life but re-embraced the faith in 1944 with great fervour, whereupon he adopted a Jesuit priest as his closest advisor. Even Hitler never entirely renounced his Catholicism (even as he encouraged the spread not of reasoned atheism but, rather, of a sort of theatrical, pseudo-historical, faux-paganism).
2) Christendom’s bloodiest rulers would almost certainly have exceeded the death counts of the people you mention had they had access to the same technologies and logistical networks. Indeed, proportionate to the population sizes of their respective times, some of them actually managed to do so even without such modern “advantages”.
3) To quote Dawkins: “Stalin was probably an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t; but even if they were both atheists, the bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism. Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things, in the name of, respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, and an insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ravings. Religious wars really are fought in the name of religion, and they have been horribly frequent in history. I cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism. Why should it? A war might be motivated by economic greed, by political ambition, by ethnic or racial prejudice, by deep grievance or revenge, or by patriotic belief in the destiny of a nation. Even more plausible as a motive for war is an unshakable faith that one’s own religion is the only true one, reinforced by a holy book that explicitly condemns all heretics and followers of rival religions to death, and explicitly promises that the soldiers of God will go straight to a martyrs’ heaven. […] By contrast, why would anyone go to war for the sake of an *absence* of belief?”
I’ve always hated that Dawkins quote, and the frequency with which its cited. No-one goes to war for an ‘absence’ of belief, but then aetheism isn’t an absence of belief, its a faith in reason’s ability to transcend ideology. And while people might not go to war specifically to defend reason and rationalism all the time (though they do some of the time, Orientalism anyone?) at least they go to war under arguments that are couched under the terms and premises of reason and rationalism, the same way some wars are justified by claims of religion. Dawkins is just dodging (or ignoring) the issue by saying atheism (a derivative of rationalism) rather than rationalism itself.
Either way, I really dont see the value of counting skulls on either side. Judging philosophical arguments on how many they kill (while you could argue that that’s always been the case) isn’t really an ideal or desirable scenario, especially from a rationalist perspective surely? I only say this because I was enjoying the philosophical debate so much. Please carry on.
P.S Noah, I’d love to hear your thoughts on Grayling’s ‘Aetheist’s Bible’. I’m sure you’d hate it, but it’d be an entertaining article…
As a Christian, just by the way, owning the evil in Christian history is pretty important. Trying to reconcile profound nonviolent teaching with witch-burning, pogroms, child abuse, all the stuff Jones lists, is, I think, more worthwhile than just washing one’s hands of it by adopting a non-position, and thereby disavowing much of our shared moral, social, and intellectual foundations. That seems like a fantasy– much in the way that white privilege supposedly disappears once one claims to not be racist.
Ben –
“I only say this because I was enjoying the philosophical debate so much.”
Sorry. I’d pretty much decided to bow out of this conversation but Noah’s Hitler/Stalin shot was so cheap (and so easily dismissed) that I felt obliged to comment.
Yeah, Bert’s got my point; I must not be being sufficiently clear. My point, isn’t that Christians get a pass on their history of skulls, but that there’s a fairly strong tradition in Christianity of trying to figure out how to confront that history (Hauerwas arguing that Christians are in no position to try to convert Native Americans, for example.) On the other hand, atheists like Dawkins seem committed to just pretending that the death of religion and the rise of atheist ideologies or even pragmatically defended acts like dropping the atomic bomb have had nothing to do with the extraordinarily bloody twentieth century. (Hitchens I think argued that Stalin and Hitler were essentially religious…which again seems like a really bad faith (ahem) argument.)
Again, this is part of the liberal enlightenment project of saying that you’re tradition is not a tradition; you’re not stained by history. It’s why America’s hymen is constantly regenerating; why we can lose our innocence again and again and be baptised in bodies and lose it again.
Jones, pragmatism is an ethical theory; I wasn’t claiming that it wasn’t. Self-interested pragmatic theories and utilitarian pragmatic theories both presume autonomous rational experts who can balance actions and consequences.
Hauerwas isn’t a Kantian; I think he see Kant as separating morality and faith in a way that’s in line with the enlightenment project and which ends abstracting moral principles from a community and a tradition.
And by that same token, atheists need to own Stalin, Mao, and (yes) Hitler (he was a New Age charismatic leader, atheist enough) just as much as Christians need to deal with the church institutions that accommodated Hitler and most other warlords in European history.
It’s hardly rationalism to choose an intellectual position based on what you think makes your hands less blood-soaked.
I think the point is, though, at least form Hauerwas’ perspective, that enlightenment rationalism can’t own it’s past, because it’s tradition is to have no tradition. The liberal rational reaction to Stalin or Hitler has to be, those people were mistaken — if you thought things through more clearly or rationally, you wouldn’t end up at that place. Therefore the deed has to be attributed to the evils of irrationalism like religion. Rationalism is always spotless because spots are irrational. You can critique everything but the project itself.
I guess it might just be us at this point, bur Ebster at one point suggested that calling evil Christians un-Christian misses the boat, which is undeniable. Christians need to repent for deeds done in their name (just as whites, men, and Americans do)– it’s not the symptom but the very defnintion of the fallen world, but not one that should be borne without not only resistance, but agony.
“that calling evil Christians un-Christian misses the boat”
Hmm; I guess I was coming close to doing that. Mea culpa!
Noah –
“I must not be being sufficiently clear. My point, isn’t that Christians get a pass on their history of skulls, but that there’s a fairly strong tradition in Christianity of trying to figure out how to confront that history”
You aren’t, in all seriousness, going to try and pretend that secular thinkers haven’t addressed the causes, implications and defences against genocide, nuclear war and other such horrors? That would be silly.
“On the other hand, atheists like Dawkins seem committed to just pretending that the death of religion and the rise of atheist ideologies or even pragmatically defended acts like dropping the atomic bomb have had nothing to do with the extraordinarily bloody twentieth century.”
What on Earth makes you think a religious society wouldn’t be as likely to develop (and use) nuclear weapons as a rational one? Can you name a single Christian state that didn’t develop and use weapons to the very best of its ability prior to the Enlightenment?
Putting everything you like least about the modern world in a box marked “reason” and then kicking it may not be the most sensible way to proceed.
“(Hitchens I think argued that Stalin and Hitler were essentially religious…which again seems like a really bad faith (ahem) argument.)”
Thanks for reminding me – I just re-read that passage and got a small jolt of the affection I felt for that book the first time around. He’s actually expanding on what George Orwell said: “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible”. In other words, totalitarian leaders like Stalin and Hitler were presented, essentially, as divine figures – they made a religion of themselves; the *cult* of personality. That doesn’t seem to be particularly contentious. Indeed, if one looks at the veritably mystical official state doctrine of North Korea, the path from the cult of personality to blatant theocracy becomes quite explicit.
Bert –
“And by that same token, atheists need to own Stalin, Mao, and (yes) Hitler”
But atheism is not a club or a church or a political party. Two atheists need not agree on anything more than the unlikelihood of a deity.
It’s a common myth that Hitler was vegetarian. He wasn’t but lets pretend, for the sake of argument, that he was. I’m also a vegetarian. Should I “own” him?
Noah (again) –
“The liberal rational reaction to Stalin or Hitler has to be, those people were mistaken — if you thought things through more clearly or rationally, you wouldn’t end up at that place. Therefore the deed has to be attributed to the evils of irrationalism like religion. Rationalism is always spotless because spots are irrational. You can critique everything but the project itself.”
You’re blaming an inert tool for the actions of the person using it. If somebody cuts you on the street with a scalpel (as opposed to, say, using it to conduct life-saving surgery) the fault is clearly with the wielder not the wielded.
I don’t think anybody is arguing that rationalism leads inevitably to morally positive actions any more than the scalpel leads inevitably to surgery. The usefulness of the scalpel is, nonetheless, difficult to deny.
Of course, in order to even put the scalpel in the hands of Hitler and Stalin, so to speak, you would have to demonstrate that their actions and beliefs were actually rational.
“If somebody cuts you on the street with a scalpel (as opposed to, say, using it to conduct life-saving surgery) the fault is clearly with the wielder not the wielded.”
Yeah, Ebster has your number here too, Ian. If you’re not even goiing to stick up for the philosophical superiority of atheism, but just call everything evil irrational, you’re doing what Noah was doing when evil Christians get to be not Christian. Atheism (I’m just not going to grant you that it’s neutral just because it’s negative) lends itself to totalizing violemce, solipsism, and delusionally “liberated” homogeneity in the same way that Christianity alternately lends itself to fanaticism, perversion, and passivity. For all of its faults, Christianity actively condemns wealth, power, and pride, while Enlightenment ethics generally just demands transactional equity on the basis of universal entitlements.
Hey Ian. You’re demonstrating, at length, the point I made above. Atheists have no beliefs; reason is only used badly when it’s used wrong; reason is an inert tool that is outside ideology. And, of course, from Hitchens, everything bad is religion; atheist monstrosities must in fact be theocracies because theocracies are the only way monstrosities happen. Rinse, wash, repeat.
“What on Earth makes you think a religious society wouldn’t be as likely to develop (and use) nuclear weapons as a rational one? Can you name a single Christian state that didn’t develop and use weapons to the very best of its ability prior to the Enlightenment?”
Not states, but plenty of Christian communities. The German community I mentioned above that allowed itself to be killed wasn’t developing weapons. Quakers don’t either. Early Christians were pretty committed to not developing or using weapons.
Lots of avowedly Christian states have developed weapons. That’s a cause for Christian soul-searching and penance, though. Whereas Truman dropping the bomb is just a cause for rationalists to tut tut at the failures of irrationality, and the atheist Stalin murdering millions is an excuse for bashing the religious. So much for the great scientific tradition of self-critique.
I don’t see why atheists need to own Stalin any more than vegetarians need to own Hitler (granting that he was a vegetarian). Leftists, both atheists and Christians, should come to terms with his legacy, though. The lesson I’ve learned from all this blood-shedding bean-counting is that it doesn’t much matter whether one is a Christian or not, humans are capable of great atrocities. Thus, atheism wins the moral argument, since, as Plato pointed out so long ago, morality isn’t tied to a belief in a god.
“Whereas Truman dropping the bomb is just a cause for rationalists to tut tut at the failures of irrationality, and the atheist Stalin murdering millions is an excuse for bashing the religious. So much for the great scientific tradition of self-critique.”
I’m not sure what science has to do with excusing or ignoring Stalin. I’d say a lot of scientists were dedicated into building a vast array of weapons to keep his ideology from spreading. Truman, for example, claimed to be living in a Christian nation.
“If you’re not even goiing to stick up for the philosophical superiority of atheism, but just call everything evil irrational,”
That’s not quite what I was trying to say. I do stick up for the superiority of atheism – I just don’t think that because atheism is rational it therefore represents the totality of rationalism (any more than I blame Christianity for what I see as the irrationality of, say, market economics).
Nor am I saying that evil men can’t do rational things (do evil things rationally even) and do them in rational ways – I’m querying whether what Hitler and Stalin believed – the beliefs their rational actions served – were themselves rational.
If those beliefs weren’t rational, Noah’s invocation of Godwin’s law is pointless; if they were you have a point.
I think the trap we’re falling into here is in thinking that people – any people – are either wholly rational or wholly irrational. That might make arguing abstract philosophy easier but it clearly isn’t actually true.
“Atheism (I’m just not going to grant you that it’s neutral just because it’s negative) lends itself to totalizing violemce, solipsism, and delusionally “liberated” homogeneity”
Putting aside the neutrality question, I can’t agree. You’re not only conflating atheism with pragmatic political rationalism, you’re also re-writing history.
The various communist totalitarian states of the 20th Century were atheist, so too the Baathist states in the Middle East and we’ll throw the Nazis in there too. But those nations represent a minority of the totalitarian states the world has seen in the last century.
Look at Spain, Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Italy, various pre-war Eastern European regimes, much of post-colonial Africa, pretty well every country in Latin America and states across Asia and the South Pacific from Saudi Arabia to Burma to the Philippines – there have been scores of avowedly religious totalitarian states in the same time period that there have been dozens of atheistic ones. None of those states did as much damage as Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia but that’s because Germany and Russia were superpowers acting without a brake rather than because Pinochet or Franco or Marcos were less murderously oppressive or any less keen on homogeneity.
The idea that totalitarianism and atheism are synonymous simply doesn’t hold water.
Nobody said totalitarianism and atheism were synonymous. We’re saying (I think) that atheism was central to the philosophy of these particular totalitarian states. Thinking about that and owning it is important if you’re claiming a superiority for atheism. It might, for example, lead to humility — which is something atheists such as Hitchens appear to have a great deal of trouble with.
“I think the trap we’re falling into here is in thinking that people – any people – are either wholly rational or wholly irrational. ”
Nope. The argument is that rationalism is a tradition, and that the inability to own it as a tradition is central to the tradition. The question of what is or is not rational is part of the rationalist tradition, as is the unwillingness to talk about anything else.
Charles, I think Hitler’s vegetarianism is quite relevant for vegetarians. Vegetarians often claim a moral superiority on the basis of diet; Hitler seems like a relevant corrective.
Noah –
“Hey Ian. You’re demonstrating, at length, the point I made above. Atheists have no beliefs; reason is only used badly when it’s used wrong; reason is an inert tool that is outside ideology.”
Sure. I don’t deny the argument – I just haven’t seen a reason to stop holding it from you.
“And, of course, from Hitchens, everything bad is religion; atheist monstrosities must in fact be theocracies because theocracies are the only way monstrosities happen. Rinse, wash, repeat.”
That’s neither Hitchens’ position nor mine. Not everything bad need be religious in order for religion to be bad.
“Not states, but plenty of Christian communities. The German community I mentioned above that allowed itself to be killed wasn’t developing weapons. Quakers don’t either.”
One could point out various non-religious groups equally devoted to the ideals of pacifism. On both sides of the faith divide, they’re the exception to the rule. Incidentally, most of those peace-loving Christians who made it to America in time to be slaughtered by the natives were escaping persecution in Europe at the hands of…other Christians.
“Early Christians were pretty committed to not developing or using weapons.”
This is highly debatable.
“Lots of avowedly Christian states have developed weapons. That’s a cause for Christian soul-searching and penance, though.”
Again, though the terminology you use here is religious, introspection and remorse are in no way limited to Christians and genocide, nuclear weapons and suchlike have all resulted in plenty of both amongst a great many humanists. If you want to keep making cases for religious exceptionalism, you have to come up with something that is, in fact, unique to the religious.
“Totalizing” is not the same as “totalitarian,” though there’s an etymological link that means something. The police state and techniques of state repression are absolutely modern utilitarian innovations, which doesn’t mean that evil Christian bastards like Pinochet didn’t use them. In various forms, though, I would say that what both Protestant and Catholic churches (probably Orthodox too) are guilty of is accommodation and perpetuation of mass crimes. Which is no small matter. But the number comparisons really miss the point, since totalitarianism is an institutional rather than an ideological paradigm- but there is an open question about whether atheism or Christianity is more anti-institutional. I’m sure you think science is anti-institutional, but think about whether (despite Leninist rhetoric) communitarian science or scientific communitarianism makes any sense at all.
I’m a vegetarian too, which I also do not find completely unproblematic. Exploited labor and carbon footprint anyone?
Noah –
“Nobody said totalitarianism and atheism were synonymous. We’re saying (I think) that atheism was central to the philosophy of these particular totalitarian states.”
But you haven’t provided so much as a whiff of evidence to support that assertion. Just saying it doesn’t make it so.
“It might, for example, lead to humility — which is something atheists such as Hitchens appear to have a great deal of trouble with.”
With this you’re on stronger ground.
“Charles, I think Hitler’s vegetarianism is quite relevant for vegetarians. Vegetarians often claim a moral superiority on the basis of diet; Hitler seems like a relevant corrective.”
Except that he wasn’t vegetarian.
Bert –
“Exploited labor and carbon footprint anyone?”
Given that the meat industry is one of the industries that produces the very greatest amounts of carbon, the latter is not much of an issue to my mind. The former is…but presumably applies to everybody since not many people eat nothing but meat.
You’re claiming that there is nothing bad in atheism, right? Because atheism doesn’t have any ideological content. Therefore, anything bad must be the result of belief, i.e. religion.
“Again, though the terminology you use here is religious, introspection and remorse are in no way limited to Christians and genocide, nuclear weapons and suchlike have all resulted in plenty of both amongst a great many humanists.”
But not you, right? You’re arguing that dropping the nuclear bomb should in no way cause any soul searching about pragmatism or science or rationality since Truman came from a country which has many Christians in it? Instead, the dropping of the bomb should cause a rededication to scientific pragmatism?
Hauerwas is willing to let Christianity’s bloody history singificantly affect a core Christian belief; Christians need to rethink (as in, provisionally abandon) prosletyzing in light of the Native American genocide done in part in the name of Christ. What core belief of liberal enlightenment rationalism should be reevaluated in light of the dropping of the atom bomb? Anything? Or do we just need shinier, better liberal enlightenment rationalism?
“Vegetarians often claim a moral superiority on the basis of diet; Hitler seems like a relevant corrective.”
Fine, it’s a corrective to an ideological brand of vegetarianism that might suggest a general heightened moral sense obtains to those not eating meat. If atheists claim to have morality on their side because of their atheism, Stalin serves as a corrective. Maybe there are some atheists who make that claim, but I don’t know of them (not even Hitchens or Dawkins). Atheists tend to ground moral claims on something else other than the lack of god: realism, culture, biology, ideology, etc.. If an atheist claimed communism necessarily made for a more moral situation, one could then counter using Stalin. An atheist like Ayn Rand would agree.
“But you haven’t provided so much as a whiff of evidence to support that assertion.”
Communism is avowedly atheist. Nazism was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, who was extremely anti-Christian.
I’d always heard Hitler was a vegetarian! If so, it seems relevant to vegetarians…if not, obviously less so…
Yeah, he wasn’t actually a true-blue vegetarian, but granting that he was serves my purpose, I think.
Charles, enlightenment liberals claim that they’re not implicated in ideology. Therefore they can easily disavow the uncomfortable implications of their traditions. I think your comment is really just restating that in a more positive light.
Nazism was influenced by the same sort of anti-enlightenment views that Nietzsche participated in, but it doesn’t seem that there was much evidence that the latter should be held responsible in any way for the former. Nietzsche’s sister is to blame. Her and anti-enlightenment thinking in general. Heidegger loved Nazism, of course. Rationalists love Heidegger … wait, no they don’t.
“I think your comment is really just restating that in a more positive light.”
Yeah, it was. I like that a certain strain of philosophical libertarianism comes out the enlightenment tradition, that we can think outside our ideologies, can critique our traditions, and that we’re not solely determined by some culture, zeitgeist or spirit.
Nietzsche was pretty fond of reason, as far as I can tell.
I’ve often heard that Nietzsche shouldn’t be held responsible for Hitler. And yet, you read Nietzsche, and he’s a poisonous anti-Semite who hates Christianity because it denigrates war and violence, and who sneers at Germany for being insufficiently violent and virile. The connection with Nazism seems pretty direct to me.
Nazism is definitely romantic and nationalistic and pagan, all of which can be seen as anti-enlightenment in various ways. It was also obsessed with technical efficiency and progress, which are less clearly anti-enlightenment.
Charles– not recognizing (amd pushing against) our own determination is not freedom. It’s what animals do, which is okay for animals, but not humans.
Re: proseletyzing– I never ever do it, because I’m largely Enlightenment liberal in my bones. But the problem comes not with testifying to your beliefs in public, even while delivering medical relief or what have you, but with delivering ideology as the barrel of a coercive apparatus. I don’t think that’s drawing too fine a distinction.
Nietzsche wasn’t anti-semitic as far as anything I’ve read. That was a point of contention between him and Wagner. But maybe the tide has shifted with evidence that I’m not aware of.
Nazi metal is no more surprising in capitalist suburbua than Satanic metal in the Bible belt. Christianity generates Satanism and capitalism generates Nazism and Communism– probably one is an obverse and one is a converse, but I don’t remember the difference.
Yeah, why isn’t anyone talking about capitalism?
I’ve often wondered why people are so eager to let Nietzsche off the hook for the Nazis…I wonder, is it because of his atheism? If Nietzsche is connected to the Nazis, then it’s hard not to see the Holocaust as having something to do with the death of God, which is maybe uncomfortable in some circles.
The most polemical anti-Nietzschean I’m familiar with is C.S. Lewis, whose objections are theological….
Ben, you’ll have to elaborate. That doesn’t make sense to me. Animals seem to accept their situation, don’t they?
No new evidence on Nietzsche; just skepticism that his avowed anti-anti-Semitism actually lets him off the hook for his numerous sneering at Jewish racial characteristics and at the Judaism of Christianity.
“Therefore, anything bad must be the result of belief, i.e. religion.”
So…all beliefs are religious beliefs? What?
“But not you, right? You’re arguing that dropping the nuclear bomb should in no way cause any soul searching about pragmatism or science or rationality since Truman came from a country which has many Christians in it? Instead, the dropping of the bomb should cause a rededication to scientific pragmatism?”
I’m not the one opining that disbelief in God somehow resulted in the use of nuclear weapons (or forgetting, in his haste to try on as many philosophical hats as possible – because dressing up is fun! – that he is himself, an atheist who, presumably, came to that state of affairs as a result of a rational thought process).
Science can do terrible things. Science can do wonderful things. The laws of physics will be there whether we pretend they aren’t or not and religion won’t hold water even if we, through our rose-tinted spectacled view of noble Quaker martyrs, wish it would.
“Hauerwas is willing to let Christianity’s bloody history singificantly affect a core Christian belief; Christians need to rethink (as in, provisionally abandon) prosletyzing in light of the Native American genocide done in part in the name of Christ.”
Great! Marvellous! What proportion of his co-religionists would you say agreed with him?
“What core belief of liberal enlightenment rationalism should be reevaluated in light of the dropping of the atom bomb? Anything?”
You assume that only the liberal enlightenment could have resulted in the decision to use such a weapon. You assume wrongly.
“Communism is avowedly atheist. Nazism was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, who was extremely anti-Christian.”
That’s your “evidence”? Good grief. Communism and Nazism both mythologised agrarian labour, ergo farming leads to death camps. Communism and Nazism both favoured bombastic orchestral soundtracks, ergo classical music results in the invasion of Poland. Hitler was strongly influenced by Henry Ford, ergo all cars are anti-Semitic. Stalin and Hitler both had moustaches – as did many other dictators – facial hair is the enemy!
The relationship between ideology and institution is pretty murky, true enough. I guess the question is what ideologies originate and sustain which institutions. But I admit, I don’t like mustaches.
“But I admit, I don’t like mustaches.”
If we can look past variant spellings, I think we just found our common ground.
Why do you assume I chose atheism through a rational process? I never said that. I think most people’s beliefs are not in fact chosen rationally. You come to them because of communities, traditions, and processes that are largely opaque. You really believe that your own thoughts are entirely transparent to you?
“That’s your “evidence”? Good grief. Communism and Nazism both mythologised agrarian labour, ergo farming leads to death camps. Communism and Nazism both favoured bombastic orchestral soundtracks, ergo classical music results in the invasion of Poland. Hitler was strongly influenced by Henry Ford, ergo all cars are anti-Semitic.”
This seems very much like hand-waving. Mythologizing agrarian labor absolutely was part of the romanticism the impelled Soviet and Nazi ideology; the arts were absolutely implicated in Soviet and Nazi ideology in various ways; capitalism and Nazism are intertwined and that link has implications for capitalism which people need to think about and deal with. I haven’t ever heard that Nazis or Soviets made facial hair a tenant of their ideology; if you have heard different let me know.
The question still stands. You can point every which way you’d like and accuse everyone else, but your utter unwillingness to entertain even for a moment the possibility that your preferred ideologies might have a downside buttresses Hauerwas’ arguments more thoroughly than I ever could.
“You assume that only the liberal enlightenment could have resulted in the decision to use such a weapon. You assume wrongly.”
I don’t assume anything of the kind. What actually happened matters. The tradition that dropped the bomb needs to think through why that happened and how the tradition itself is implicated. Waving your hands and pointing at other people and saying “you’re another” is neither sufficient nor honorable.
Oh…and Neibuhr’s whole project is arguably about chastising Christians for their hubris and insisting that secularism and other religions have as much to offer Christianity as Christians do. This is part of the reason that Neibuhr is so popular with non-Christians…but it’s certainly an important instance of Christians being willing to engage in self-critique. (And Neibuhr’s one of the most important theologians of the last 100 years, I think.)
“Why do you assume I chose atheism through a rational process?”
Why would you continue to be an atheist if you didn’t think it was correct? You’re clearly a person who ponders these things and if you thought Christianity (or any other religion) made more sense, it’s not unreasonable to think you’d stop calling yourself an atheist.
“Mythologizing agrarian labor absolutely was part of the romanticism the impelled Soviet and Nazi ideology; the arts were absolutely implicated in Soviet and Nazi ideology in various ways; capitalism and Nazism are intertwined and that link has implications for capitalism which people need to think about and deal with.”
But none of those things are the root cause of either system and none of those things can reasonably be held accountable for the crimes of those systems. Come to that, none of them are even unique to post-enlightenment regimes. You’re simplifying history to an unsustainable degree and the record just doesn’t support you.
“The question still stands. You can point every which way you’d like and accuse everyone else, but your utter unwillingness to entertain even for a moment the possibility that your preferred ideologies might have a downside”
I’m talking about atheism. That’s one ideology (if you can even call it that) – singular not plural. All the other stuff you want to hang on it is, at best, tangential to my central premise: atheism makes logical sense, religion doesn’t. Without new evidence to support religion or undermine atheism I can no more renounce atheism than I can renounce gravity.
I’m not convinced that atheism (which certainly pre-dates the enlightenment, though it certainly grew to far greater prominence subsequently) does have a downside but even if it did that wouldn’t make it wrong in the same way that the capacity of physics to give us the atom bomb can’t make physics incorrect, can’t make me reject physics in favour of, I dunno, magic or whatever.
“I don’t assume anything of the kind. What actually happened matters. The tradition that dropped the bomb needs to think through why that happened and how the tradition itself is implicated.”
The bomb wasn’t dropped by a tradition, Noah. History is much more complicated than that, much messier and much harder to compartmentalise in the way that you seem intent on. Truman’s America – just like every other nation on the planet – was a mass of traditions (philosophical, cultural, societal, economic, political, religious and more) some competing, some co-operating, some seemingly mutually incompatible but all intertwined and interacting with one another and with all manner of outside and environmental factors and all manner of human actors. Was enlightenment thinking one of those traditions? Absolutely. Can rational thinking have undesirable outcomes? Sure. Is it right to lay all of the blame on one strand of that spaghetti? I really don’t believe it is.
“Waving your hands and pointing at other people and saying “you’re another” is neither sufficient nor honorable.”
When mud is being flung in your general direction, waving your hands in front of your face is eminently sensible reaction.
And pointing out that you’re an atheist when you’ve already identified yourself as such on more than one occasion is not dishonourable. If I were a self-proclaimed Marxist arguing passionately that capitalism was preferable to Marxism, wouldn’t you be liable to point out the apparent inconsistency?
“Nobody said totalitarianism and atheism were synonymous. We’re saying (I think) that atheism was central to the philosophy of these particular totalitarian states.”
Well, no. Nazism was wrapped up in an insane religiosity that was not only irrational, but explicitly anti-rational.
I’ve recently been reading about Hitler’s library. It included an enormous quantity of books about Christ, copiously annotated by the Fuehrer; his insanity led him to view himself as a modern incarnation of the Christ, a Messiah.
Even Hitler, however, viewed with hilarious disdain Heinrich Himmler’s attempts to invent a Nordic religion.
You simply cannot yoke Nazism to rationalism.
As for Nietzsche, read “Nietzsche against Wagner” and “The Wagner Case”, wherein he attacks anti-Semitism as the ultimate sign of intellectual mediocrity. He opposed Judaism only to the extent that it spawned the ‘slave religion’ of Christianity.
And regarding atheists’ morality– read again your Sartre and Camus. Yes, modern existentialism concerns the search for meaning and values (thus, for morality) in an absurd, Godless world.
In my experience, atheists are actually much MORE anguished and thoughtful about morality than Christians or other religious believers, who have an E-Z recipe for moral conduct to follow.
Ian, I think you’re doing fine– I agree with Noah that your response is incredibly ideological, but not that it’s dishonorable.
But it seems like the way to explain positivistically would be something like this. Humans do not understand everything about how the brain works. There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that core beliefs are not even apparent to the subject (specimen?), let alone arrived at rationally or subject to rational deliberation and redirection. Someday science will be able to work out your life decisions to the five trillionth decomal point, but we’re not there now. So to assert that we are truly in control of our own minds and can be certain of our status in the universe is a form of hubris that might seem well nigh mythological.
I became Christian as an adult, and it had elements of a choice, elements of a gift, elements of a realization (and a memory), elements of an experiment– but it wasn’t precisely a rational process.
Norb, your comment about “believers have mindless ethics” resonates with Slavoj Zizek’s critique of Dostoevsky’s claim that without religion, everything is permitted; Zizek, of course, says no, with religion everything is permissible, 9/11 blah blah. I just found that Dostoevsky quote, and it’s a quote he puts in the mouth of a thoroughly unreliable character, Ivan Karamazov, a pretentious jerk who has some intellectual justification for theocracy that we are in no way meant to take seriously.
“Why would you continue to be an atheist if you didn’t think it was correct?”
Because people’s beliefs are not entirely predicated on rational calculations? Belief requires faith; that’s not something you can necessarily rationally summon up. Who you are isn’t a choice. This is where we came in.
For what it’s worth, I don’t find the evidence for atheism any more persuasive than the evidence for God’s existence. It’s not even clear to me what “evidence” would mean in this context,honestly.
“The bomb wasn’t dropped by a tradition, Noah.”
It was dropped by the American President…whose authority is tied into a tradition and a community. It was (as far as I’ve been able to figure from reading about it) a pragmatic decision, not a religious one. It’s been largely defended on pragmatic and rational grounds (that is, more Americans would have died in an invasion than Japanese died in the bomb.)
To me it raises some fairly serious questions about utilitarian calculus and war. Is the way to evaluate policy to determine how many millions of deaths would ensue? How can you even make those calls — what rational experts can predict the future like that? If it were true that more Americans than Japanese would have died, does that justify the use of the bomb in any case? Is making these decisions on a rational utilitarian basis moral in the first place?
There’s also the fact that Truman appears to have dropped the bomb not after making any particular calculus, but simply because he had the weapon and he was at war and using weapons is what you do during a war. Which raises questions about whether war can rationally be restrained, and about whether rational decisions about entering wars can be called moral in any sense.
My point isn’t that looking at Truman’s action would cause you to renounce rationality or pragmatic decision making. But I think it raises real questions about those paradigms, and insisting that Christians would do the same thing, or that rationality and pragmatism aren’t responsible — I don’t think those are serious responses.
“Can rational thinking have undesirable outcomes? Sure.”
Okay. What are they, exactly? You haven’t yet been willing to own this even for the sake of argument. What problems are there with rational thinking?
“You simply cannot yoke Nazism to rationalism.”
Surely there’s a kind of mad rationality to the methodicalness of the concentration camps. I’m hardly the first person to suggest that.
“As for Nietzsche, read “Nietzsche against Wagner” and “The Wagner Case”, wherein he attacks anti-Semitism as the ultimate sign of intellectual mediocrity. He opposed Judaism only to the extent that it spawned the ‘slave religion’ of Christianity.”
That’s the usual defense. And whenever I read Nietzsche, I always wonder how it can hold water for anyone. He’s constantly sneering at Jews…and, you know, spawning the slave religion was for Nietzsche a serious sin.
I like Camus and Sartre okay. I think Niebuhr argues that there’s a kind of maudlin self-dramatization in existentialism that comes from putting human beings at the center of the world. That seems right to me.
Bert –
“But it seems like the way to explain positivistically would be something like this. Humans do not understand everything about how the brain works. There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that core beliefs are not even apparent to the subject (specimen?), let alone arrived at rationally or subject to rational deliberation and redirection. Someday science will be able to work out your life decisions to the five trillionth decomal point, but we’re not there now. So to assert that we are truly in control of our own minds and can be certain of our status in the universe is a form of hubris that might seem well nigh mythological.”
I wouldn’t necessarily argue with any of that – I think when it comes to making informed, rational decisions we do the best we can with what we’ve got (or at least should do so) but I fully concede that we rarely know enough to act in a fully rational way (and don’t always, even when we do because of other factors).
But I don’t think recognising that invalidates being as rational as we can manage to be and I do think, personally, that we know enough – or, rather, can disprove and discredit enough of the opposing arguments – for that not to apply to atheism (as opposed to rationalism more broadly).
I should point out that (most) atheists do not say “there absolutely, positively is no god” (which would, indeed, be hubris). Rather, they say “there is absolutely no reason to believe there is a god” and that there is ample evidence to discredit the teachings of this or that religion.
Noah –
“For what it’s worth, I don’t find the evidence for atheism any more persuasive than the evidence for God’s existence.”
Ah. Then it’s a semantic misunderstanding we’re having. As I understand the terminology, what you’ve just described is agnosticism, not atheism. All becomes clear.
“It was dropped by the American President…whose authority is tied into a tradition and a community.”
Right. All I’m saying is that he was part of a multiplicity of traditions and communities and that it’s not so easy to separate one from the others. I mean, Joe Hill was a rationalist (and decidedly anti-religious too) but if he’d still been alive at the time, do you think he would have supported the decision?
“Which raises questions about whether war can rationally be restrained, and about whether rational decisions about entering wars can be called moral in any sense.”
I think the problem I have with this is not so much that I disagree – those are interesting questions – as that I don’t understand what you’re putting forward as an alternative. Irrational thought? Instinct? Not that those things don’t already play their part but do you think we’d be better off with more of them and less of rational thought? If so, on what basis?
I mean, if an alternative is on the table, one can compare and contrast and at least attempt an informed choice. Throwing out the bathwater, baby and all, without an alternative though, just seems like nihilism.
“Okay. What are they, exactly? You haven’t yet been willing to own this even for the sake of argument. What problems are there with rational thinking?”
On the contrary, I’ve repeatedly said that rationalism is a methodology and that if you put in the wrong information, or flawed information, or even the right information but turned towards an evil purpose (because the system is amoral but its users inevitably aren’t), then you’re going to get the wrong answer out of it, sometimes catastrophically. And, of course, it’s not always possible to know if you’ve got the right evidence, with the correct weighting – or close enough – and that makes for inherent risks. I think it’s less risky than not even attempting to balance evidence at all but I’m certainly not claiming perfection because we, the operators, are all imperfect.
I used the courts as an analogy a while back and I think that holds up – the courts should be fair and reasoned and balanced but, of course, the system is imperfectly constructed and imperfectly maintained and operated by imperfect people so that sometimes we get the wrong results and an innocent person is imprisoned or a guilty person goes free. I certainly wouldn’t object to criticisms of that system nor to suggestions to improve it. I would, however, object to presuming its flaws are sufficient reason to re-implement a less rational system (like, say, trial by ordeal or justice by blood feud) because I think what we have now is a hell of a lot better than what we had previously and that it can be built upon.
Hey Ian. No, I think I’m an atheist. I don’t believe there’s a God. That belief (or disbelief) isn’t really rationally based, but that’s the belief I’ve got, nonetheless.
“as that I don’t understand what you’re putting forward as an alternative.”
I mentioned prophetic nonviolence earlier. I’m for that. I’m pretty sure that’s not nihilism.
“On the contrary, I’ve repeatedly said that rationalism is a methodology and that if you put in the wrong information, or flawed information, or even the right information but turned towards an evil purpose”
Wrong information and flawed information aren’t a critique of rationalism; that’s just saying that you’re not being rational enough.
“Evil purpose” is interesting, though. What would an evil purpose be, exactly? How would you determine that it’s evil other than by rationality? Is evil something other than a failure of reason? If you’re rational enough, does evil disappear? If not, what standards are you using other than rationality to determine what evil is?
The debate’s well and truly moved on since I last checked in (time zone differences…) but — Noah, you’re just wrong about utilitarianism, at least as that theory is understood in debates among ethicists who actually know what utilitarianism is. (1) It’s no more “pragmatic” than any other ethical theories and (2) it doesn’t at all presume “autonomous rational experts who can balance actions and consequences”. (2) is a particularly ridiculous accusation when you consider that the main theoretical alternative to utilitarianism in 20C Anglo-American ethics was Kantianism, the normative theory par excellence for autonomous rational agents. I can elaborate on both these points at mind-numbing length, but I’m sure I’ve already numbed enough minds today.
Having read Mill and Bentham entitles one to make claims about “what utilitarianism says” no more than having read Augustine and the Bible entitles me to make claims about “what Christian theology says”. The debate’s moved on since then, and it’s a much, much broader church than that.
I know that you make it a matter of principle to issue confident ex cathedra declarations about things you don’t know actually very much about — at least you do in aesthetic debates. (This isn’t a cheap shot; you’ve explicitly justified doing so on this very blog.) To judge by this thread, it’s a matter of principle to do the same in other debates as well.
That’s your prerogative — it’s your blog!! But it does make it hard to have a discussion with you. Maybe I should just follow your lead…let’s see…ahem: Hauerwas’ view is a form of pragmatism which presumes that we’re autonomous rational agents. Also, Hauerwas was a doody-head who thought that we should enslave all redheads and left-handers into building spaceships for our Venusian overlords. And Lacan totally had cooties.
Hey, that was fun. Maybe I should do this more often! Anyway, with sincere good humour, I think I’m going to bow out of this one before I decrease anyone’s utility any further…
I mean…they are blog comments. I’m actually quite interested to hear why utilitarianism isn’t pragmatic, or how it’s possible to balance iotas of happiness without some sort of autonomous rational expertise…but if you’re gone you’re gone, I suppose….
Also…your use of technical expertise as a bludgeon is not exactly undermining my sense of where utilitarians and/or pragmatists are coming from….
“No, I think I’m an atheist. I don’t believe there’s a God. That belief (or disbelief) isn’t really rationally based, but that’s the belief I’ve got, nonetheless.”
Uh, okay. We’ve obviously reached the same conclusion by very different routes then. Apologies if I was presumptuous.
“I mentioned prophetic nonviolence earlier. I’m for that. I’m pretty sure that’s not nihilism.”
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that term exactly. “Prophetic” in that it pertains to which prophet or prophecy exactly? How does this differ from pacifism (if at all) and how does it act as an alternative to rational thought where it doesn’t relate to violence?
“Wrong information and flawed information aren’t a critique of rationalism; that’s just saying that you’re not being rational enough.”
Yes and no. I guess you could argue that a system that relies on imperfect people behaving perfectly in order to get the best results is inherently flawed.
But, you know, obviously I think the idea works well enough (most of the time) – or at least better than the alternatives – or I wouldn’t be defending it.
““Evil purpose” is interesting, though. What would an evil purpose be, exactly?”
Well, that’s at least somewhat subjective obviously – I doubt most of the people I think of as evil consider themselves to be that. As I think somebody commented earlier, atheists don’t have a rulebook or set of stone tablets to refer to but we are, nonetheless, as moral (or immoral) as anybody else. I think, as a society and as individuals, we have an evolving sense of right and wrong that incorporates both concepts that are generally accepted as well as concepts that are gaining – or losing – traction and which we accept, adapt or reject according to the personal morality we develop via socialisation, education, experience, community standards, political ideology, religious beliefs (for those that hold them) and, yes, reasoned argument.
“Is evil something other than a failure of reason?”
Evil is a transgression of morality so the degree to which it’s a failure of reason is dependent on the degree to which the particular moral being violated is reasoned.
“If you’re rational enough, does evil disappear?”
Not entirely I wouldn’t think. There will always be circumstances in which we feel we have to choose the lesser of two evils for example (and an evil committed in a good cause is still an evil). But, even if we can’t achieve a perfect record, to steadily decrease the evil that we, personally and collectively, are guilty of, seems to me to be a pretty worthy ambition.
Nietzsche did have cooties– that’s why he went nuts and wrote a book called Why I Write Such Great Books. Or is that also a pernicious fable?
I am a complete doody-head when it comes to issues of contemporary utilitarianism, but is it not still mostly all about maximizing the bottom line of functionality? That is certainly different from Kant, whom, unlike Bentham, Swift did not make fun of by calling for the ingestion of the Irish.
“It works because it works” and “it works because of rational laws” are different arguments. And yet equally unsatisfying when it comes to the non-cognitive dimensions of experience.
It’s all about Zizek’s structuralist elaboration of Donald Rumsfeld, who spoke of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.’ Along with “known knowns” seems to describe the full purview of modern intellectual interests.
But there’s still “unknown knowns,” things that we do not know that we know. And you can only get at that through descriptions and symbols, not universal structures.
I was thinking about prophetic nonviolence…it’s a term I’ve seen used a bunch, though not defined; didn’t find a good definition with a quick google search either….
I believe the point is that it’s emphasizing that it’s nonviolence based on scriptural faith or as part of faith; that it’s a witness intended as a gesture towards participating in god’s plan (rather than a reasoned or rational calculus of means and ends.) It’s what MLK was doing, both in his activism and when he denounced the Vietnam war.
As I said before, Christian pacifism as discussed by people like John Howard Yoder isn’t seen as unrational or irrational, but it’s ultimately based in faith, not in rationality.
I was referring to nonviolence in particular in relation to Truman’s decision to drop the bomb. I believe Hauerwas’ position in general in terms of rationality would be that going outside rationality doesn’t make you irrational. Prophetic nonviolence comes out of a faith and a community and a tradition. Those things have a coherence and a logic, but it isn’t necessarily the logic of rationality. Being willing to die for your enemies is not exactly rational, but it’s not irrational. It makes sense from a particular frame of reference, but that frame of reference is not the evacuated nontradition of rationality.
“Evil is a transgression of morality so the degree to which it’s a failure of reason is dependent on the degree to which the particular moral being violated is reasoned.”
But what does an unreasoned moral rest on? You mention community standards and environment and so forth…but if any of those go against reason, aren’t you willing to jettison them? If reason is the final arbiter of all the other standards, then isn’t the only basis for morality finally reason? And if, on the other hand, community standards and traditions matter, then what is the basis for admitting they matter?
“to steadily decrease the evil that we, personally and collectively, are guilty of, seems to me to be a pretty worthy ambition.”
Sure…but is this something you actually think can happen or is happening?
Aw hell, since you ask so politely, I’ll lay some knowledge on you. Everyone else, you can assume that this is tl;dr.
First, utilitarianism varies along a number of dimensions. The four that seem to me to be the most contentious are:
* the nature of utility (is it purely hedonic pleasure; the ‘pleasure’ consequent to believing that your preferences have been satisfied; the mere fact of your preferences having been satisfied, whether or not you know so; some objective list of factors that contribute to well-being…)
* which factor we are to evaluate the consequences of (the act itself; the motives of someone performing the act; the rule that might promote such an act…)
* which consequences we’re to evaluate (actual consequences; objectively probable consequences; subjectively probable consequences…)
* what measurement of utility we should maximise (average utility; total utility; some other measure weighted for “fair” distribution…)
That said, utilitarians seem (to me) to agree broadly on some basic tenets. These include (I quote from Sinnott-Armstrong’s description of “classic [i.e. Mill/Bentham/Sidgwick] utilitarianism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for “consequentialism”):
* Consequentialism = whether an act is morally right depends only on consequences (as opposed to the circumstances or the intrinsic nature of the act or anything that happens before the act)
* Evaluative Consequentialism = moral rightness depends only on the value of the consequences (as opposed to other features of the consequences)
* Universal Consequentialism = moral rightness depends on the consequences for all people or sentient beings (as opposed to only the individual agent, present people, or any other limited group).
* Equal Consideration = in determining moral rightness, benefits to one person matter just as much as similar benefits to any other person (= all who count count equally).
Thus endeth part one.
Interlude: yes, Bert, Nietzsche did go nuts, but only because he spent too much time STARING INTO THE ABYSS AT THE GODLESS TRUTH.
Also because he probably had syphilis, aka cooties.
But the book is called “Ecce Homo” — an explicit self-identification with Christ; “Why I write such good books” is only a chapter title. Other chapter titles include “Why I am so wise”, “Why I am so clever” and — what’s always been my own personal favourite — “Why I am a destiny”.
As wikipedia puts it, “in many ways, Ecce Homo is a quintessential reflection of Nietzsche’s humility as a philosopher, writer and thinker”.
Okay, so what’s pragmatism in ethics? Well, as a term in philosophy, pragmatism mostly describes a theory about or approach to epistemic matters like truth and justification, or to metaphysics. But, I learn from my dictionaries of philosophy, there is such a thing as ethical pragmatism.
Oxford Companion, first two sentences under the “pragmatism” entry:
“The characteristic idea of philosophical pragmatism is that efficacy in practical application — ‘What works out most effectively in practice’ — somehow provides a standard for the determination of truth in the case of statements, rightness in the case of actions, and value in the case of appraisals. However, it is the first of these contexts, the epistemic concern for meaning and truth, that has historically been the most prominent.” [NB: over the other 1000 or so words of the entry, not another word about pragmatic ethics]
Cambridge Dictionary, second-last par in “pragmatism” entry:
“Pragmatic ethics is naturalistic, pluralistic, developmental and experimental. It reflects on the motivations influencing ethical systems, examines the individual developmental process wherein an individual’s values are gradually distinguished from those of society, situates moral judgments within problematic situations irreducibly individual and social, and proposes as ultimate criteria for decision making the value for life as growth, determined by all those affected by the actual or projected outcomes.” [No, I don’t have any fucking idea what most of that means, either]
So we have at least two competing accounts of ethical pragmatism. (There’s actually another account in the Cambridge Dictionary under “moral epistemology” but it would take far too much time for me to explain why this meta-ethical thesis is not relevant to normative ethics. Just trust me: it’s not). Now, is utilitarianism, as described in part one, a version of ethical pragmatism on either of these accounts? Let’s take them in turn.
Account 1: “…’What works out most effectively in practice’ — somehow provides a standard for the determination of […] rightness in the case of actions”
No. This account of ethical pragmatism merely says that rightness is determined by ‘what works out most effectively'”. But there are indefinitely many ways to measure the effectiveness of an action — is it effective for making me more money? is it effective for making American WASPS more money? is it effective at oppressing women? is it effective at enabling women? is it effective at boiling custard? is it effective at ensuring that there will be a odd number of atoms in the solar system? etc. We could, in other words, judge an action by its effectiveness at producing anything at all.
As we have seen, utilitarianism, by contrast, sets very strict conditions on what to evaluate actions by: their consequences for the utility of all, considered equally with one another. So MAYBE you could say that utilitarianism is a very strict version of this first account of ethical pragmatism, a version that has very specific constraints on what kind of effectiveness we should concern ourselves with. Thus utilitarianism would turn out to be a narrow form of ethical pragmatism.
But you could equally well say the following. Consider a kind of divine command theory that says that you should act in accordance with God’s will. Now consider a view I’ll call “do-whatever-you-want-ism” which says, well, exactly what it says on the tin. In some sense, the divine command theory is a version of DWYWism. It’s just a very specific variant that says you should only ever want to act in accordance with God’s will, and should act accordingly.
So utilitarianism is a form of ethical pragmatism, and my divine command theory is a form of DWYWism. Except that, you know, in either case it’s deliriously misleading to say so.
Account 2: [a lot of hogwash and then] “ultimate criteria for decision making the value for life as growth”
No. Utilitarianism couldn’t give a shit about the value for life as growth.
Thus endeth part two.
“Okay Jones”, you say, “maybe utilitarianism isn’t a form of pragmatism in your hoity-toity, lah-de-dah, ivory tower definition of ‘pragmatism’. But I’m no pointy-headed boffin, and I meant ‘pragmatism’ in the everyday sense. You know, *pragmatism*. What about that, smart guy?”
All right. Let’s do something I wish my students never did: quote a dictionary definition. Definition 1 from dictionary.com:
“character or conduct that emphasizes practicality.”
Definition 2:
“action or policy dictated by consideration of the immediate practical consequences rather than by theory or dogma”
I’ll take these in reverse order, so Def2 first. Is utilitarianism an “action or policy dictated by consideration of the immediate practical consequences rather than by theory or dogma”? Not in the slightest.
(1) Utilitarianism *is* a theory, specifically a theory about what makes actions right or wrong and what we should do; and it has a dogma, viz. that we ought to maximise utility.
(2) Every single variant of utilitarianism ever in the entire history of the universe has held that we need to look beyond the immediate practical consequences when evaluating actions. *All* the consequences downstream count, including ones in the distant future, ones on the other side of the planet or the other side of the universe, ones that affect whether people get punched in the face, and ones that affect more abstract factors that wouldn’t typically be considered “practical”. For instance, when evaluating whether it’s permissible to buy factory-farmed meat, the evaluation includes the effect your actions will have on your friends’ views about whether to eat meat, the effect your actions will have on contributing to a social climate that fosters certain kinds of attitudes about animal welfare, the effect those attitudes might have on attitudes towards socially marginalised human populations, the effect that boycotting meat would have on capitalist organisations of labour and the means of production etc. etc. etc.
And, seriously, I do mean etc.
So utilitarianism is as theory-driven as any other ethical theory (almost by definition), and it looks far beyond the immediate consequences. That’s a fail for definition 2.
What about def1? Is utilitarianism a “character or conduct that emphasizes practicality.” Um…that entirely depends on what you mean by “practicality”. I won’t bore you further with definitions of “practicality”, not when I have so many other things to bore you with. But I will say that, of the first 10 dictionary.com definitions for “practical”, utilitarianism doesn’t seem to emphasise any of them more than any other ethical theory…except for definition 7, which I’ll quote:
“mindful of the results, usefulness, advantages or disadvantages, etc., of action or procedure.”
So if what you mean by saying “utilitarianism is a form of ethical pragmatism” is that “utilitarianism emphasises the results, usefulness, advantages or disadvantages, etc., of action or procedure” then…YES YOU’RE TOTALLY RIGHT THAT’S WHAT UTILITARIANISM IS. (I’ll choke down the qualifiers on the tip of my tongue).
But that’s a very highly constrained sense of “pragmatism”, when what you really mean is just that utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism (see part 1). Which, well, yes, yes it is. And when you combine consequentialism with the lack of agent-centred restrictions that I discussed several posts earlier [yes, consequentialism is an independent thesis from the denial of agent-centred restrictions], plus a bunch of other theses, you get utilitarianism, an ethical theory with which most people disagree. Hooray!
But it’s not really a form of pragmatism in any sense that doesn’t take several hundred words to explain.
Thus endeth part three, and my response to Noah’s first question. Aren’t you glad you asked? I’ll try to get to the second question some time before the eventual heat death of the universe.
“I believe the point is that it’s emphasizing that it’s nonviolence based on scriptural faith or as part of faith; that it’s a witness intended as a gesture towards participating in god’s plan (rather than a reasoned or rational calculus of means and ends.)”
The obvious problem with that is that you can only expect to spread the idea on the back of an unprovable faith. Surely there are secular pacifists whose ideas might be “sold” to both the non-religious and the religious (of all faiths) alike?
“I believe Hauerwas’ position in general in terms of rationality would be that going outside rationality doesn’t make you irrational. Prophetic nonviolence comes out of a faith and a community and a tradition. Those things have a coherence and a logic, but it isn’t necessarily the logic of rationality.”
Community and tradition may be, at least in part, rooted in rational thinking (which, I would argue, existed to some degree prior to the enlightenment, even if we didn’t have a name for it – we’ve always understood logic and evidence on some level and there have always been thinkers that pushed us up those paths). Faith, though, is irrational by definition. That doesn’t mean that something a person believes as a result of faith is necessarily wrong – it just means they can’t justify it on the basis of that faith if they’re communicating with anybody that doesn’t share their faith. A religious commandment might be perfectly reasonable on its own terms but it needs, I think, to be argued for on that basis and not just because somebody says it was handed down from God on tablets of stone.
“But what does an unreasoned moral rest on?”
Prejudice. Religion. Tradition. Fear of the other. All sorts of things.
A lot of people still think homosexuality is immoral. That’s not reasoned – it’s learned prejudice. A lot of people still think abortions are wrong at any stage because a foetus has a soul. That’s not reason – believing in souls requires a leap of faith.
“You mention community standards and environment and so forth…but if any of those go against reason, aren’t you willing to jettison them?”
From my personal perspective I’d say jettison what doesn’t add up for the most part but feel free to ignore what’s harmless (whilst conceding it as irrational). I’m not anti-eccentricity after all – quite the contrary. As I think Orwell pointed out when writing about the “conservative anarchism” that supplanted his previous commitment to communism (granted, it’s been 15 years since I read the essay…), there are entirely unreasoned traditions that nonetheless enrich our lives without any perceivable downside. I don’t see reason as a blind wrecking ball.
As I said, we come to our perception of morality through a whole variety of sources, only some of which are initially reasoned (or influenced by reason), at least by us. That’s natural and it’s okay provided that when we encounter a perspective that runs contrary to our own, that challenges our presumptions, we’re willing to question both it and our pre-existing belief and see which stacks up best and, if we find that our own position is unsustainable, to move towards the better position.
I think that’s a logical path to progress that holds us to a positive standard that’s often difficult but not impossible.
“Sure…but is this something you actually think can happen or is happening?”
Absolutely. Unevenly and often at a slower pace than I’d like and sometimes with the odd, hopefully temporary, reversal or ideological roadblock but I think the general collective morality of our society stands up to more scrutiny than it did 100 years ago. I would see our understanding of the evils of sexism, homophobia, racism and so on as one example of rolling back unreasoned prejudice. We certainly haven’t got any of those things perfect (or even universally accepted) yet but we’re a lot further down the road than we were even a few generations ago.
100 years ago every country had the death penalty. Now only two First World countries I can think of have the death penalty and an ever-increasing number of developing nations have abandoned it too. To me, that’s a clear, largely reason-based, progression in our morality.
I will give that a reread, Mr. Jones. But can I propose another wildly misinformed simplification: that utilitarianism is a system (primarily ethical) based on pleasure (quality of life factors), whereas pragmatism is a system (primarily epistemological) based on power? If that’s anywhere near accurate, you probably really need to deal with the incredibly nonrational forces (not just at the margin) that govern the distribution of power and pleasure.
Thanks Jones. I think Bert’s thumbnail is a pretty good response…and I’d also say that power and pleasure are in many cases linked more closely than utilitarians or pragmatists might want to admit.
Ian…so yes, you are basing morality entirely on reason, with a sort of condescending pass to communities and traditions that don’t trespass on reasonableness. To buttress your faith in reason, you propose an ever improving progress…which is both far from as evident as you seem to believe, and also has not historically been predicated on reason in the way you claim.
British imperialism in India was not ended by rational calculations. Neither was Jim Crow in the U.S. — the latter of which has been the inspiration for many of the social justice movements you’re fond of.
Probably the worst time to be gay in the entire history of the world was the period 1850-1960 in the west. The period 1880-1950 was sometimes referred to as the nadir of race relations, and was in some parts of the country (like the North) a worse time than slavery for African-Americans.
Our current prison system is worse than at any time in our history, I think. It’s certainly linked to an enlightenment tradition of rationality which argues against corporal punishment. Is our current prison regime actually worse than some sort of corporal punishment? It’s hard for me to see how.
You mention community, but you persist in seeing faith as some sort of isolated hermeticism which can’t be communicated to anyone else. If we were robots, perhaps we could only communicate across the flat desert of rationality. However, being human, people communicate faith all the time. This is the Christian idea of witness; faith inspires action and lives, and those actions and lives are interpretable and meaningful to other people. Perhaps, I dare say, even more meaningful to other people than reason.
I would pose the question to Noah (with utmost sympathy) as to whether there is a middle way between the irrational faith he does not share and the faith in rationalism that he also does not share. That’s sort of the million-dollar question of post-poststructuralist neo-Hegelian radical-orthodox what-have-you philosophy. And if not (which I might be inclined to think), well, why not?
Got me. If I figure it out, I’ll post it and take my nobel peace prize up to heaven/rationalist utopia.
You’re sort of stuck with a confluence of utilitarianism and pragmatism then– aren’t you saying that truth claims (no matter how irrational) are all roughly equivalent (that’s the pragmatism), based on the aggregate life-quality output (that’s the utilitarianism)? Are there lines that should not be crossed, even at the expense of suffering and death?
Maybe your agent needs a client? When there’s an agent, I want there to also be a client.
You’re talking to me, right? Not to Jones?
I wouldn’t say I’m stuck with anything that coherent.
I don’t think all truth claims are equivalent. But I’d say they need to be evaluated based on history and power relationships, not just rationality. I’m not sure that saves me from the charge of pragmatism, though.
I do think there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed even at the expense of suffering and death. I think Truman shouldn’t have dropped the bomb even if it would have meant more Americans got killed than Japanese, for example. I don’t think torture is justified even in a ticking time bomb scenario.
Indeed– I’m talking to you Noah. Situation-specific, context-specific moral/epistemic judgments are utilitarian/pragmatist, I think.
I’m not convinced that you don’t think that torture and nuclear weapons aren’t bad in terms of consequences, because of the history element you cited– if torture is okay in one situation, it sets a precedent. If you bomb Japan, it sets a precedent. Is that fair?
No, I just think they’re wrong. Even if the technology for the bomb would disappear immediately after it was used, it would still be wrong. Murdering millions of people because you’re afraid of death yourself is a sin, or wrong, or whatever.
I don’t think situation-specificity has to be utilitarian or pragmatist necessarily. As I said before, Hauerwas thinks you need to think about history and context, but I don’t think he’s either a utilitarian or a pragmatist. (Which doesn’t let me off the hook, of course.)
I don’t think you’re on a hook, I just don’t think you’re not a pragmatist. Have you read William James? Here’s a thing that came up when I Googled “pragmatism abstract justice”:
http://books.google.com/books?id=UoQpAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA229&lpg=PA229&dq=pragmatism+abstract+justice&source=bl&ots=TnzRXsstZl&sig=mEPAZJqTncitwe1JoFoy_MUwQ9Q&hl=en&ei=RX37TdHbBMfu0gGEsMCpAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&sqi=2&ved=0CFEQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Sorry I still don’t know how to embed things.
I may or may not be a pragmatist…but I don’t think a discomfort with abstract justice makes one a pragmatist automatically. Like I said, Hauerwas doesn’t like abstract justice at all, but that’s because of his commitment to community and narrative, not because he wants the best of all pragmatic solutions.
Yes, but you don’t believe (other than abstractly) in community and narrative, which is of course all okay, but in secular terms I don’t know what you’re working with if not circumstantial justice or abstract justice.
Your refusal to theorize has been respectably theorized, is all I’m saying.
That’s fine.
I don’t know that I don’t believe in narrative…I’m still thinking about it…
Well, I certainly endorse that. I kind of think nobody is all that far from the edge of belief, no matter what side they’re on.
A few comments– Truman was totally ‘out of the loop’ regarding the Atom Bomb. It was only after his hasty assumption of the Presidency that he learned of its existence. I believe he authorised its use based on incomplete information– he was told that the Army had this new super-explosive; to his mind, how was that different from using radar or thermite or other recently developed war technologies?
BTW, “millions” were not killed in the atomic bombing of Japan.
For me, the deepest horror came with the bombing of Nagasaki. It was totally unnecessary from a military point of view, so why? Because the Army had been given the authorisation to use the atom bomb, and they would continue to do so until told to stop. Not joking. It was that inhuman a process of decision.
Note that Truman was a Christian.
Noah Berlatsky, trashing the Enlightenment is a popular practice these days. But note that the United States of America and its constitution are products of that Enlightenment. When America declared its independance from Britain, British Jews could not vote, be elected, go to university, join a profession such as the Law. At a stroke, America gave this to all Jews. A point to ponder, perhaps?
This debate has been stimulating to follow; however, the waters are muddied by a bit of semantic legerdemain. ‘Reason’, ‘rationality’ and ‘rationalism’ are pretty much used interchangeably by all parties. I think the distinctions are best observed; for example, ‘rationalism’ implies an ideology.
I think they all imply an ideology.
I’ve read a bit about the atom bomb decision. I agree that there’s not much difference between dropping the atom bomb and fire bombing dresden. My conclusion from that is not that dropping the atom bomb is okay.
And, yes, it looks like it was more 100,000 give or take. Exact figures do start to get kind of meaningless once you get up to those numbers, but best to be corrected still.
Truman was a Christian. I really have never seen anything that suggested he operated from a particularly Christian perspective either in general or in dropping the bomb in particular. He was a pragmatist and not a particularly thoughtful guy, from what I’ve gleaned.
“But note that the United States of America and its constitution are products of that Enlightenment.”
Quite so. And through the mystic pixie dust of enlightenment equality, Jews became better off and blacks and Native Americans were utterly screwed. You can cheer about that if you want, I guess.
Re: the universal betterment of humankind… since I’ve been nagging him, I would suggest going back to see Naoh’s historical comments on the nadirs of racist and homophobic violence– right around the turn of the 20th century.
Noah:
“Quite so. And through the mystic pixie dust of enlightenment equality, Jews became better off and blacks and Native Americans were utterly screwed. You can cheer about that if you want, I guess.”
A cynical comment. Very well, take the French Revolution. Before the Jacobin bloodbath, the Constituante abolished slavery, extended universal suffrage and citizenship regardless of race, religion, or sex, gave women equality (including the right to divorce,) enshrined religious neutrality.
These were noble aims of the Enlightenment.
“Quite so. And through the mystic pixie dust of enlightenment equality, Jews became better off and blacks and Native Americans were utterly screwed. You can cheer about that if you want, I guess.”
A cynical remark. ‘Pixie dust’, indeed.I’m sure that an 18th century American Jew would disagree.
Very well, let’s look at the French revolution. Before the blood-soaked Jacobin takeover, the Constituante legislated equality of citizenship for all adults, irrespective of birth, race, religion, or sex. Gay relations were made legal between consenting adults. Slavery was abolished and former slaves enfranchised.
Enlightenment.
Brief period of utopia– there’s pre-Stalinist Russia for you. So, did the Enlightenment end with the Jacobin bloodbath?
In regard to improved circumstances for Jews, I presume we aren’t citing the establishment of Israel as an unqualified success? Well, it probably is for Jews. The point just being– Jews aren’t either more or less important than anyone else. People of colorhave gained some things from the Industrial Revolution and colonial invasions, capitalism and humanism, but some pretty bloody qualifications pertain, in the present as well as the past.
Not that I, for one, would call the modern epoch thoroughly unredeemed. Penicillin and blogs and so forth.
I’m really glad someone has more discombobulated test than me, occasionally.
“Text!” “Discombobulated text!” Oh my stars. I can’t turn off the irony setting in my personal sphere of influence.
“you are basing morality entirely on reason, with a sort of condescending pass to communities and traditions that don’t trespass on reasonableness.”
I think morality should be informed and tested by reason – its basis, I think, is more likely to be biologically, socially and anthropologically instinctual / inherited. I think I’ve made that clear enough, often enough and I doubt it’ll be worth repeating again. You’re not listening to anything you don’t want to hear in any case.
And if the allowance of trespassing make believe is condescending, it is no more so than faith’s occasional tolerance of reason. Unhappy bedfellows in either instance, but bedfellows for the foreseeable future nonetheless.
“British imperialism in India was not ended by rational calculations.”
The decision to give it up without a struggle was entirely rational (far more so than, say, France’s irrational determination to hang on to French Indo-China and Algeria). I agree with you that the horrific sectarian bloodbath that claimed the lives of close to a million people and displaced something like 12 million more in the aftermath of that rational withdrawal wasn’t very rational at all though. Thoroughly drenched in faith-based hatreds in fact. And of course those faith-based atrocities continue to this very day across the sub-continent. But still, how’s Sri Lanka for some good old fashioned, epic-scale, religion-fuelled, wholly irrational, genocidal slaughter, huh? Makes you proud to be unenlightened, doesn’t it?
Oh, wait, no, I guess you wanted me to think of Gandhi. Sorry. My bad. He’s one of the messianic figures of your emergent faith-based philosophy, I take it?
Incidentally, you’d be amazed by just how much of Britain’s 19th Century imperialism was fuelled, agitated for, romanticised, legitimised and directed by ever so well-meaning religious zealots. I’d recommend you start your reading with Thomas Pakenham’s The Scramble For Africa, which is really rather good.
“Neither was Jim Crow in the U.S. — the latter of which has been the inspiration for many of the social justice movements you’re fond of.”
Hmm. Who was on the other side of that particular struggle? You know – the guys with the pointy hoods and the passionate belief that God was on their side and that they acted within the “narrative of their community” (which, of course, they absolutely did). Something beginning with “K”, I think. What is it those guys burned again? Oh yeah! Crosses.
So, er, I guess faith-based morality isn’t *always* so great, is it Noah? I mean, I suppose it might look that way if all you were to do was cherry pick the half dozen smartest and gentlest and most astute religious people you could think of and then contrast them to the half dozen worse non-religious atrocities that you maybe thought you could tenuously link to rationalism (if only by denying that, actually, many of the participants, “Gott mit uns” adornments and all, were kind of soaked in religiosity).
But I’m sure you would *never* stoop to that.
“Probably the worst time to be gay in the entire history of the world was the period 1850-1960 in the west.”
Really? You think it was better to be sent to prison by a secular court in 1950 than set on fire by a religious one in 1550?
Also, you put an end date on that range. So you think things have improved since then. Do you want to try and persuade me it was primarily religious groups that were responsible for that improvement? Please do.
“The period 1880-1950 was sometimes referred to as the nadir of race relations, and was in some parts of the country (like the North) a worse time than slavery for African-Americans.”
I’ll take your word for it that the racism of that period was actually worse than slavery (though I suspect there are many who would disagree with you). But…so what? Have things got somewhat better since then? Did not both religious people and secular humanists help to achieve that change? And does racism only effect black people? How have things progressed for every other non-WASP community? What about in the Western world beyond your parochial frame of reference?
Things are very evidently a long way from perfect in terms of race relations. But I think they are, with the odd anomaly, generally, if haltingly, headed in the right direction in most of the developed world most of the time. You can try and divorce that process entirely from secular liberalism and from rationality. You can tell yourself its *entirely* down to venerated icons like Martin Luther King and his sweet faith in the goodness of God. You’ll be wrong but go ahead.
“Our current prison system is worse than at any time in our history, I think. It’s certainly linked to an enlightenment tradition of rationality which argues against corporal punishment.”
Thank fuck, then, that the American prison system is such an anomaly with nothing of comparable scale anywhere in the world, let alone the rest of the developed Western World. On the plus side, the US prison system does make for a seemingly endless supply of documentaries and newspaper articles that make smug Europeans feel much, much better about themselves.
“Is our current prison regime actually worse than some sort of corporal punishment? It’s hard for me to see how.”
That’s…just…no. The non-rational alternative isn’t corporal punishment *instead* of prisons, it’s corporal punishment *as well as* prisons.
Oh, and aren’t the roots of the current American behemoth prison system largely down to the reforms of…can you guess who? That’s right it’s…those lovely cuddly Quakers! Yay! Hooray for the Quakers!
“You mention community, but you persist in seeing faith as some sort of isolated hermeticism which can’t be communicated to anyone else.”
No, Noah. That’s not it. At all. You can only (effectively) communicate ideas dependent on faith (as opposed to other ideas generated by people who might well happen to possess faith) to those willing and able to make the same leap of faith.
Example: you could effectively communicate an argument for or against abortion on a number of grounds without regard for the faith, or lack thereof, of either party. But an argument against abortion that’s reliant on the concept of a soul makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever to anybody who doesn’t believe in souls and isn’t likely to until somebody produces one for dissection.
Is that *really* so hard for you to grasp?
“If we were robots, perhaps we could only communicate across the flat desert of rationality.”
This would be the desert that exists solely in the minds of the anti-enlightenment brigade, yes? I’ve never observed anyone actually approaching and living with rationalism in those terms outside of Star Trek. You should know, Noah – I’m quite sure even you make rational decisions every single day. Then again, maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe when you’re trying to decide if you should take an umbrella out with you, you sprinkle fairy dust on your toes and pray to your fridge for guidance?
“However, being human, people communicate faith all the time. This is the Christian idea of witness; faith inspires action and lives, and those actions and lives are interpretable and meaningful to other people. Perhaps, I dare say, even more meaningful to other people than reason.”
If you believe what they believe, take the dip and join the congregation. But if you don’t believe in God, you *can’t* believe what they believe and you’re just some bored pseudo-intellectual patronising and romanticising the religious for his own entertainment, flirting with faith like some tedious fucking hippy who thinks Native American culture is, like, soooo deep, man, and he’s got a book about sodding dream catchers to prove it. Give it a rest.
You’re as much a product of the enlightenment as I am and you couldn’t disentangle yourself from its traditions any more than I could but please do prove me wrong. I’ll give you bonus points if you wear a Deicide T-shirt to your baptism.
“you know – the guys with the pointy hoods and the passionate belief that God was on their side and that they acted within the “narrative of their community”
The people on the other side weren’t the KKK. If it were just the KKK, there’d have been no contest. It was good, rational, everyday folks like you and me who perpetuated Jim Crow. Blaming the KKK is convenient, but not convincing.
“You think it was better to be sent to prison by a secular court in 1950 than set on fire by a religious one in 1550?”
Gay people really weren’t burned in 1550, at least as far as I can tell. Sodomy was a crime that basically was abhorred but not prosecuted…and which wasn’t really especially linked to gay people. Indeed, gayness as an identity was not at all well-defined before the modern period. The church actually tolerated homosexual relationships for much of its history; it became less tolerant as time went on.
Things have certainly gotten better for gay people in the last 50 years. But…that’s the last 50 years. It’s a really short time. Do you really build a belief in eternal progress on the last 50 years? That doesn’t seem reasonable to me….
Also, if you’re so exceedingly rational and enlightened, why do you sound more and more personally aggrieved, and why are you launching more and more bitter personal insults? Is rationalism rational? Or is it an ideology tied to your personal identity that you need to angrily defend when poked?
Of course I’m a product of the enlightenment. There are many aspects of it that I appreciate, and indeed I no more know how to go beyond it than I do how to go beyond capitalism. Both have many downsides, however, and I don’t think denying that, or claiming that we will progress ever upward as long as people become as rational as I, is either convincing or admirable.
The charge of hypocrisy and general lack of commitment is certainly a home one…but it’s a charge that I’m prone to because I’m an enlightenment liberal who is characteristically unwilling to commit to a faith, or admit to the one I’ve got.
You know when witch trials really got going– it was the 17th century, in the wake of the Reformation. Lynching in the South was, as Noah points out, a response to Reconstruction. The Third Reich was a response to the Depression and the Versailles Treaty. Official church homophobia came about in the 13th century or so as part of consolidating papal authority. And, of course, the bloodshed in South Asia resulted from the partition of the subcontinent.
The culprit in these cases is neither religion nor reason (though neither is off the hook either), but first and foremost a purging reaction to a crisis in power caused by massive social upheaval. Neither religion nor reason has widely or consistently taught people to seek comfort in massacres. Both spheres generally try their best to discourage that sort of thing, whenever they think to. Probably there’s some more nuanced approach to this discussion that doesn’t involve constantly comparing martyrs and genocides. I mean, the Old Testament is many things, but it is not a healthy guide for anyone who thinks they have godlike authority.
“But if you don’t believe in God, you *can’t* believe what they believe and you’re just some bored pseudo-intellectual patronising and romanticising the religious for his own entertainment, flirting with faith like some tedious fucking hippy who thinks Native American culture is, like, soooo deep, man, and he’s got a book about sodding dream catchers to prove it. Give it a rest.”
I might as well talk about this at a little more length. The thing about the judeo-christian tradition and the enlightenment is that they’re pretty closely linked. The morality that obtains in the west is still very much a judeo-christian morality. So I don’t really feel like being interested in theology or in Christian thinkers is an appropriation; it’s my tradition. I don’t agree with Hauerwas on everything (or even on many things) but I don’t really see how I’m appropriating him. He’s my culture.
Along those lines…you seem to have this idea that faith and reason are really separate and unmixing, Ian. You decide rationally whether you believe or you don’t, and then you’re ineradicably in one camp or the other. That isn’t really how I see things…not least because I think being an atheist is an act of faith.
For instance, this:
“But an argument against abortion that’s reliant on the concept of a soul makes absolutely no fucking sense whatsoever to anybody who doesn’t believe in souls and isn’t likely to until somebody produces one for dissection.”
If you’re speaking about “souls” you understand them, yes? It’s a word in our language that has a meaning which can be metaphorical, the way all words can. Denying you know what it means isn’t an act of reason; it’s an act of aggression…nicely emphasized by the “fucking”.
Also; I know you’re all fired up and it’s probably cruel to point this out…but it’s such a perfect encapsulation of scientific reasoning it’s hard to resist. The soul doesn’t exist unless you can dissect it. Unless it can be cut apart and killed, it doesn’t matter, and can’t be understood. A lovely philosophy to live by.
To Bert’s point…I’d agree that gleefully pointing out atrocities probably isn’t super helpful. So I will try to stop. I certainly don’t at all deny the world’s long history of sectarian violence perpetrated by many different religions. At the moment, though, I think our current imperial project, which more or less encompasses the world, has a lot more to do with the logic of capitalism and pragmatism than with sectarian animosity. Blaming the problems of the world on faith, and presuming that we’re going to be ever more rational and therefore ever improving, in our current context seems to me like an excuse to continue with that imperial project, not an alternative to it, or a critique of it.
Noah, when I asked “if you feel that way, why be an atheist?” I wasn’t accusing you of hypocrisy. I was asking. I thought your answer would have to bring out some opinion we hadn’t heard.
However, that you took it as a charge of hypocrisy (“you do it if it’s so great”) supports my impression that you try to get people into the Christian tent, and to demolish cultural and intellectual alternatives.
Some corners of philosophy call all foundations of reason and knowledge into question in ways that haven’t been resolved. Your approach seems to delve into them with the notion that this will leave only Christian revelation standing. It doesn’t, and throwing out rationality to make a case for something doesn’t work because all argument is an appeal to rationality. You’re going to carry on using it unless you’re planning to take a vow of silence tomorrow. Thus it is a call for exception. Admitting that you are inconsistent yourself is the same because you will continue to argue by pointing out inconsistency in other people’s claims until the day you take a vow of silence.
Your beliefs are your business, but your public presence is all about a kind of scorched-earth denunciation that gets into everybody’s business. When you say “that’s how I feel, and I’m an atheist”, that has a rhetorical effect. It implies that this is a judgment made on some general, non-Christian ground and that another atheist could feel the same way. But when I keep reading I see opinions I don’t think I could share and be an atheist. I haven’t seen you express a single opinion I would associate with atheism. Without that periodic declaration a picture emerges of consistent if bondage-oriented advocacy for Christianity and entrenched, often childish resentment of a secularism that thinks it can get along without it.
I’m not interested in your precise relation to the Christian communion, your “dark night of the soul” definition of atheism, or whatever Jesuitical completion of the sentence you mouth as you type. Your vague hints in response to this line of questioning are really too tiresome to sort minutely because arguing with you already takes so… much… time. From a once-over I think you’re mixing “being” with “declaring”. I’m not saying “why don’t you declare, Noah?” The problem is what you declare. I think you say “oh, but I’m an atheist” to keep your readers off-balance.
“Also, if you’re so exceedingly rational and enlightened, why do you sound more and more personally aggrieved, and why are you launching more and more bitter personal insults? Is rationalism rational? Or is it an ideology tied to your personal identity that you need to angrily defend when poked?”
I’ve suggested rational beliefs are preferable to irrational beliefs. However, I’ve never claimed to be entirely rational (or that anybody can, in fact, be entirely rational). Nor have I suggested that rational people are somehow emotionless Vulcans, divorced from normal human psychology (who’d want to be?). In fact I’ve explicitly indicated the opposite. Repeatedly. As you well know.
If I minded having my beliefs and values challenged I wouldn’t have spent a week talking about this stuff. For the most part I’ve enjoyed myself. Which isn’t to say I never get touchy about things that mean something to me – who doesn’t? – but that isn’t why I lost my temper with you. I lost my temper with you because you can be – often quite deliberately, I’m sure – really, really annoying.
The ideological dilettantism that I’m very happy to see you admit to is certainly a large part of that. For what it’s worth your writing is always a hell of a lot more interesting and entertaining when it sounds like you actually believe what you’re saying and aren’t just posing for effect.
Then again, you’ve got 150 replies to a three sentence blog post so maybe you’re doing something right after all.
I think I’ll opt out at this point – apologies if I overstepped the mark towards the end there.
Ebster,
” I haven’t seen you express a single opinion I would associate with atheism.”
That’s interesting. I thought I could be an atheist just by not believing in God. Is there a fuller catechism I’m not aware of? Did I miss the Sunday school curriculum? Do tell me the rational tenets I need to swear to so that I may join your illustrious non-club. Or maybe you can contact the proper authorities, inform them of my heresy, and officially read me out of the church?
“Some corners of philosophy call all foundations of reason and knowledge into question in ways that haven’t been resolved. Your approach seems to delve into them with the notion that this will leave only Christian revelation standing.”
There’s lots of writers who use theology to respond to those questions. I’m informed by them (people like Zizek, and Badiou, and Kierkegaard, and Hauerwas, and others) and interested in them. Some of them are Christians, some of them aren’t. But it’s not clear to me why it’s deceptive or stupid to think that they have interesting and valuable things to say.
Also…I like things about Marxism. I like things about queer theory. I like things about Freudian theory. I’m not really sure where you get this idea that I’m opposed to all thought other than Christianity.
“and throwing out rationality to make a case for something doesn’t work because all argument is an appeal to rationality. ”
Is it? Any argument is an appeal to rationality? Nobody ever appeals to emotion or sympathy or prejudice? Or faith? When you call me “childish”, that’s an argumentative appeal to reason, is it?
I don’t think rationality is the neutral, all-encompassing base of human argument or interaction. Like I said, the enlightenment is where I am, and reason is a big part of that, and I’m hardly in a position to free myself from it, not least because I’m not as smart as people like Lacan or Irigary or Wallace Stevens or any number of others. But smugly pointing out that I haven’t adequately dealt with the problems doesn’t remove the problems. Just because I can’t adequately think outside the hegemony doesn’t mean it’s not hegemonic.
Ian, of course anyone can lose their temper. Entirely understandable (reasonable even!)
I think there’s a substantial difference between being uncertain about one’s beliefs, or being conflicted in one’s beliefs, and posing for effect I really try hard not to say things I don’t believe in my writing. Admitting to various vacillations is part of that. (Such as…posing for effect is so much a part of any kind of writing (which is all public performance) that I wonder whether I can really disavow it entirely.)
I’ve been giving Noah a hard time on this point, but he’s just doing what Zizek and others are doing when they appropriate Christianity as a critique– a theory, really, the same way Marxism and psychoanalysis are now academically respected as theories rather than practices.
I wonder about that approach, but it’s not without precedent. As much as it lacks consistency, this bricolage outlook meets pragmatist criteria for matching the right tool to the specific interpretive task, even if the tools didn’t all come from the same factory. We all do that, to some degree, which is why pragmatists gleefully claim that all philosophy is pragmatic.
The reason to overlook the inconsistency is not just to be eclectic and difficult, but because the problem of capitalist cultural imperialism is real, as are its dramatic effects on the world. One theory could be that if the Enlightenment gave us more of our current, immediate global problems (all of its achievements notwithstanding), maybe it also erased some of the solutions.