The Joy of Secularism

[rug]

November 6, 2011, 1:54 pm Posted by Paul Lakeland

It was only a matter of time before the New Atheists were challenged from within their own ranks. Hitchens and Dawkins and Dennett and Sam Harris, the leading figures among the self-proclaimed “brights” (seriously, with no sense of irony) offer sometimes serious and thoughtful challenges to the possibility of theism but fail spectacularly to present an alternative vision with any charm or warmth or—let’s face it—any brightness at all. One of the first to recognize this was Terry Eagleton in his Reason, Faith and Revolution, who wittily excoriated the hybrid “Ditchkins” for a shallow and naïve reading of Christianity as an alternative to a scientific explanation of the universe. Something of an atheist himself, Eagleton saw very quickly that you can’t build an alternative vision of reality simply by a shabby misreading of religion.

Now along come more secularists in what I think we might want to call “second-wave new atheism,” killing their fathers at least by implication in The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now. The cover is wittily picked out in the reddish gingham that connotes The Joy of Cooking or some equally classic 50s guide to cuisine, most certainly not about the way we live now. But between the covers there is a serious effort to provoke secularist thought to offer the kinds of satisfactions for which religion has traditionally been responsible. Darwin and Freud and, of course, Charles Taylor, are much in evidence here as George Levine (the editor) and his contributors make a very good case for secularism as meaningful and, yes, in a way, enchanted. Of course, there’s a lot for religious believers to take issue with, but there’s a lot to agree with too. Secular or religious we are all postmoderns despite ourselves, and science presents us with more than enough wonders for most imaginations. Who needs angels when you have quantum physics and black holes? There is enchantment, wonder and ethics aplenty in this collection of essays, at once learned and intriguing, intellectually demanding without being dry or daunting (with perhaps one exception that I couldn’t finish).

If secularists can come up with essays on wonder or helplessness or trust, doesn’t this suggest we might want to divide and distinguish when we hear Pope Benedict one more time lamenting the secularization of Europe? Cardinal Ratzinger found an unlikely ally in Jürgen Habermas (see The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion) and he might find more among the authors of this book. Christianity’s notion of dependence on God is certainly not the same thing as radical helplessness, particularly when the secularists see the Christian version as inauthenticity, but they are sufficiently close to talk to one another. And if the secular sense of wonder does not necessarily correspond to “finding God in all things,” it’s not a million miles away either. Postmodern philosophers have lately been engaged in debating the question, “Can a gift be given.” Perhaps we could shift sideways and engage them over the related question, “Does a gift require a giver?” After all, gratitude for the gift of life and gratitude to God for the gift of life sound like related rather than antithetical positions. Perhaps this is why the Pope is busy encouraging debate between believers and atheists (though not the “new” atheists). He certainly seems to see that the real enemy is materialism, and his words to French youth earlier this year suggest a collaborative approach. God knows (no pun intended) that the meaning of life probably haunts the thoughtful secularist at least as much as the believer. By the same token, those who worship the markets are as likely to be found in Church as not. Ignatius of Loyola would surely tell us that if we can find God “in all things,” then we can surely find God in secularist joy.

http://commonwealmagazine.org/verdicts/?p=702



http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9433.html

[NMMNG]

1. It might help if he had a clue what he was talking about

Lumping Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens and Harris together as "Brights" is a mistake. I have to wonder if he even has a clue what the term means (much the way most believers have no clue what "freethinker" means). I haven't read the book so I can't assess his review of it but given his wholly inaccurate claims about the "New Atheists" I doubt he's right about that either.

[rug]

2. At the link you can google sections of the book.

The publisher's description parallels the review's.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. But still, Hitchens thought 'brights' was an awful term

My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called "brights," is a part of a continuous argument.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/features/2007/god_is_not_great/religion_poisons_everything.html

It looks more like the reviewer's own ad hominem - a chance for him to claim Dawkins et al. show no charm, warmth or brightness. There is just one point in the whole book where the 4 are grouped together, and all it says is "they pay too little attention to questions that might arise for erstwhile believers after the demolition is done".

[rug]

4. But it is Dawkins' term not the reviewer's.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. But it occurs nowhere in the book

which backs up my assertion that the reviewer just wanted to insult Dawkins et al. And he didn't care that he mischaracterised Hitchens' point of view, if it gave him the chance to insult him too.

[rug]

6. Have you read the book already? I haven't.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. I used your suggestion of searching it online

No mention of 'brights' at all. Hitchens and Harris are only mentioned once, in the bit I talked about; Dawkins and Dennett get a few more mentions, but not in connection with any lack of alternative vision.

[Silent3]

8. Do Dawkins and Dennet still promote the use of that term?

I'd hope by now they've realized their mistake and dropped it. Cringe-making indeed.

[struggle4progress]

9. Religion for radicals: an interview with Terry Eagleton

... I’m urging them, I suppose, to read the Bible because it’s very relevant to radical political concerns ... I’m not trying to convert anybody, but I am trying to show them that there is something here which is in a certain interpretation far more radical than most of the mainstream political discourses that we hear at the moment ...

I think the whole movement to see religion as literature is a way of diffusing its radical content. It’s actually a way of evading certain rather unpleasant realities that it insists on confronting us with ...

... a lot of the authentic meanings of the New Testament have become ideologized or mythologized away. Religion has become a very comfortable ideology for a dollar-worshipping culture. The scandal of the New Testament — the fact that it backs what America calls the losers, that it thinks the dispossessed will inherit the kingdom of God before the respectable bourgeois — all of that has been replaced, particularly in the States, by an idolatrous version. I’m presently at a university campus where we proudly proclaim the slogan “God, Country, and Notre Dame.” I think they have to be told, and indeed I have told them, that God actually takes little interest in countries. Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way. He slips out of your grasp if you try to do so. His concern is with universal humanity, not with one particular section of it ...

I don’t think the pope will consider me a Christian. I was brought up, of course, a Catholic. I suppose it was fortunate that around the time of the Vatican Council I encountered, just when I might have rejected a lot of it, a very challenging version of Christianity. I felt there was no need to reject it on political and intellectual grounds, because it was highly relevant and sophisticated and engaging. In a sense one doesn’t have much choice about these things. What I find is that heritage very deeply influences my work, and probably has more so over the last few years. Quite what my relation to it now is is hard to say. But that’s just a historical dilemma, a matter of how to understand oneself historically ...

http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/09/17/religion-for-radicals-an-interview-with-terry-eagleton/

[struggle4progress]

10. Those ignorant atheists (Salon | 2009)

Tuesday, Apr 28, 2009 6:27 AM EST
By Andrew O'Hehir

... Eagleton’s terminology is deliberately provocative, and some Christians won’t find his account of their beliefs, colored as it clearly is by the Catholic “liberation theology” of his youth, to be mainstream at all. Still, he is incontestably correct about two things: There is a long Judeo-Christian theological tradition that bears no resemblance to the caricature of religious faith found in Ditchkins, and atheists tend to take the most degraded and superstitious forms of religion as representative. It’s a little like judging the entire institution of heterosexual marriage on the basis of Eliot Spitzer’s conduct as a husband ...

Biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s famous pronouncement that science and religion were “non-overlapping Magisteria” has sometimes been viewed as a cop-out, or as a polite attempt to say that the former is real and the latter imaginary. Whatever Gould’s intentions, Eagleton agrees wholeheartedly, and finds this view entirely consonant with Christian theology. Dawkins is making an error of category, he says, in seeing Christian belief as a counter-scientific theory about the creation of the universe. That’s like saying that novels are botched and hopelessly unscientific works of sociology, so there’s no point in reading Proust ...

In one of Eagleton’s most ingenious turns of phrase, he describes contemporary Christian fundamentalists as faithless, because they specifically lack the kind of performative faith mentioned above. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek has described fundamentalism as a species of neurosis, in which a person keeps demanding proof that he is loved and never finds it sufficient. In trying to shoehorn anti-scientific hokum into schoolbooks, or wasting money and time on a “creationist science” that strives to prove that the Grand Canyon is less than 6,000 years old and that Noah, for reasons unknown, kicked T. rex off the ark, fundamentalists have become the mirror image of atheists. Unsatisfied with the transcendent and unknowable nature of the Almighty, they’ve stuffed and jammed him into a dinosaur diorama ...

You can almost hear the steel chairs creaking as the last secular liberals rise to depart when Eagleton declares where his true disagreement with Richard Dawkins lies, which does not directly concern the existence of God or the role of science. “The difference between Ditchkins and radicals like myself,” he writes, “hinges on whether it is true that the ultimate signifier of the human condition is the tortured and murdered body of a political criminal, and what the implications of this are for living” ...

http://www.salon.com/2009/04/28/terry_eagleton/

[struggle4progress]

11. In Praise of Marx (Eagleton | Chronicle of Higher Education | April 2011)

... The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called "generalized scarcity," by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a recycling of "the old filthy business"—or, in less tasteful translation, "the same old crap." Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people. It is not a program by which nations bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age ...

There is a sense in which the whole of Marx's writing boils down to several embarrassing questions: Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality? What are the mechanisms by which affluence for a minority seems to breed hardship and indignity for the many? Why does private wealth seem to go hand in hand with public squalor? Is it, as the good-hearted liberal reformist suggests, that we have simply not got around to mopping up these pockets of human misery, but shall do so in the fullness of time? Or is it more plausible to maintain that there is something in the nature of capitalism itself which generates deprivation and inequality, as surely as Charlie Sheen generates gossip?

Marx was the first thinker to talk in those terms. This down-at-heel émigré Jew, a man who once remarked that nobody else had written so much about money and had so little, bequeathed us the language in which the system under which we live could be grasped as a whole. Its contradictions were analyzed, its inner dynamics laid bare, its historical origins examined, and its potential demise foreshadowed. This is not to suggest for a moment that Marx considered capitalism as simply a Bad Thing, like admiring Sarah Palin or blowing tobacco smoke in your children's faces. On the contrary, he was extravagant in his praise for the class that created it, a fact that both his critics and his disciples have conveniently suppressed. No other social system in history, he wrote, had proved so revolutionary. In a mere handful of centuries, the capitalist middle classes had erased almost every trace of their feudal foes from the face of the earth. They had piled up cultural and material treasures, invented human rights, emancipated slaves, toppled autocrats, dismantled empires, fought and died for human freedom, and laid the basis for a truly global civilization. No document lavishes such florid compliments on this mighty historical achievement as The Communist Manifesto, not even The Wall Street Journal ...

Radical change, to be sure, may not be for the better. Perhaps the only socialism we shall ever witness is one forced upon the handful of human beings who might crawl out the other side of some nuclear holocaust or ecological disaster. Marx even speaks dourly of the possible "mutual ruin of all parties." A man who witnessed the horrors of industrial-capitalist England was unlikely to be starry-eyed about his fellow humans. All he meant was that there are more than enough resources on the planet to resolve most of our material problems, just as there was more than enough food in Britain in the 1840s to feed the famished Irish population several times over. It is the way we organize our production that is crucial. Notoriously, Marx did not provide us with blueprints for how we should do things differently. He has famously little to say about the future. The only image of the future is the failure of the present. He is not a prophet in the sense of peering into a crystal ball. He is a prophet in the authentic biblical sense of one who warns us that unless we change our unjust ways, the future is likely to be deeply unpleasant. Or that there will be no future at all ...

http://chronicle.com/article/In-Praise-of-Marx/127027/

[struggle4progress]

12. Terry Eagleton on Marxism as a Theodicy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJePGD7D_RQ

[trotsky]

13. This is quite commonly heard, and is hilarious:

"(New Atheists)... offer sometimes serious and thoughtful challenges to the possibility of theism but fail spectacularly to present an alternative vision with any charm or warmth..."

I did not know that it was a requirement for truth to give you the warm fuzzies. I kinda just thought it was true no matter how it made you feel.