21st century religious wars?
I’m hiding this here because some of it will be rude to say in public on Easter morning.
These Daily Beast headlines (I’m not bothering to link, they will be paywalled) . . .
. . . together with much recent commentary on how the tribal, zealous, and transporting aspects of religion seem to have migrated over to politics, coalesced in my mind into the realization that we are actually fighting a religious war, just like those that have racked the West throughout so many other centuries.
For the right, “socialism” IS Satan. For the left, science IS gospel. The right has specialized in the crusade of conquest. The left has a lock on penitence. Both practice conversion and excommunication. Each is sure they hold the truth and the other is demonic.
This in turn brought me (by a winding path, admittedly) to the thought that the world would be unimaginably different if the Abrahamic religions had never arisen. And that they may have been the single most toxic and warping factor in human history.
They have certainly been a key to our species’ “success” in the short term—the whole globe having been dragged into this juggernaut by “the West”—but success down a wrong path is mega-failure waiting to happen.
Polytheism, pantheism, nature worship—are they more live-and-let-live, or am I romanticizing them? The impulse to conquest (as opposed to just tribal rivalry and territorial skirmishing) comes with civilization (and its nomadic pastoral predators), which arises from agriculture. But somehow Abrahamic monotheism supercharged it.
It’s fascinating to see how ideas mutate and hybridize, taking on new power and sometimes monstrosity in the process. Neither communism nor democracy would likely exist if not for Christianity. Western Communism x Eastern Confucianism spawned particularly deadly strains.
It’s enough to make your head spin.
No Map to the Post-Enlightenment
A friend who lives in Israel (though US-born) wrote to me worried about how the ultra-Orthodox may be taking over Israel, even as some Evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics here seem to be angling to turn the US into a theocracy. I wrote back to him that they seem to be “out to repeal the Enlightenment.” He asked if I had any thoughts about how to counter that. These were the thoughts that came up in response to that question. Some of them surprised me.
I don’t have any very good ideas about what to do about the fundies of all stripes. I suspect we’re at a fork in our evolution where the ability to tolerate uncertainty is the next step, and we may not take it. We’re a very fearful animal, and we’ve learned just enough to begin to realize how tiny we are, how little we really understand, and how little control we have carved out, though it is much more than we’ve ever had before (to our own detriment as well as benefit). The solution, for a sizable chunk of the human population, is to just junk the whole enterprise and go back to absolute authorities and simple stories. The solution for another chunk is to put a quasi-religious faith in science and scientists—in both cases, driven by the longing for authority to keep us safe. The idea that we have to take our fate into our own hands at precisely the moment when we realize we don’t know shit is pretty overwhelming, but it’s the next step and if we refuse it, as we well may, we won’t survive. I guess it’s Existentialism as well as the Enlightenment, except the Existentialists thought life and the universe were meaningless. It’s probably saturated with meaning and potential meaning, and we have allies, one of whom you would call God—not an authority but the guarantor that this isn’t Hell and that it can be navigated and is brimming with promise, not just pain. The part of us that is made in this Great Spirit’s or Holy Ghost’s image is intuition. Although intuition may be more easily fooled by our hopes and fears than reason (or maybe not—reason can easily be pressed into service as rationalization), it’s also a direct way of knowing the score without knowing how you know. Trust is involved, and not the trust of a child who needs the illusion of being safe.
Political tensions and doubts…
. . . in rural Wisconsin, one of the swing areas that are crucial to Trump’s chances of reelection. It’s not a simple or monolithic picture. And it’s embodied in the falling-out of two women friends, who previously worked together for Trump’s campaign. One has changed her mind, and has had the guts to go public about it, though she’s fearful of the consequences:
“I’m worried about retribution. My barn is made of wood. People have matches. Do two plus two,”
The other expressed the pragmatic, goal-directed point of view of many evangelicals:
“I’m not voting for him to be my pastor, my father, my role model. I’m voting for him to get some things done in Washington DC that have never been done before. We forgive him because of other things.”
As a single parent in mid-divorce, she had once temporarily needed public assistance, but sees no contradiction with Trump’s cuts in food stamps:
She agrees with the move, she said, because the restrictions do not apply to families with children or those with disabilities.
“Of course, we want to make sure the children are taken care of,” she said. “But single adults, you need to get out there and work. Life is hard. Sorry. Life was hard for me too.”
She’s not against some version of public health insurance, though (“I think that’s good. Who wouldn’t?”) . . . as long as it doesn’t raise taxes too much:
If somebody told me my taxes would go up $500 a year for Medicare for All, I might do it. That’s pretty good. But if somebody told me my taxes would go up $10,000 a year, oh no.”
The two women no longer speaking to each other. Meanwhile, a pastor worries about “an unquestioning and even aggressive adulation for Trump” among some congregants who have crossed a line between pragmatism and idolatry:
“It seems like there are many evangelical Christians that are willing to die on the hill of supporting the Republican president, supporting Donald J Trump. And to me, that hill is not worth dying on. No matter who the candidate is, no matter who the individual is,” he said. “To put all your hope into that individual is a dangerous road. Scripture would warn us against that.”
I consider this a must read, especially for us city kids.
The Love Suicides at Sonezaki
I wrote briefly to a friend that I had seen this performance, and he responded:
I had heard or read the word bunraku before but didn’t know what it was. I searched You Tube and was delighted with what I found. The marionettes are quite magical but the sound is beyond magic. Listening to classical Japanese music is like walking among the redwoods in the early evening mist. There is room in the air for everything that might come along. In a way, the music is not created sound. It’s more like the result of applying a filter to the sound of nature so that certain frequencies, among the sounds that comprise the world, have been selected out at that moment. I’m not aware of any other musical tradition that evokes so convincingly the natural world without sounding forced or merely imitative.
That prompted me to write more about it:
What a marvelous description of Japanese music. That is certainly true of Zen music, shakuhachi and the very spare string accompaniment (shamisen?). But the music that went with this melodrama, which was really a kind of opera (“the sung narrative particular to bunraku,” says the program)—the text was part sung and part recited, really acted—was in large part more social and courtly (in the sense of an aristocratic court) than natural. It doesn’t say when it was written, but the Tokugawa shogunate apparently BANNED it in 1721 because it was provoking copycat love suicides (like Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther) and wasn’t performed again for more than 200 years! A very ritualized, courtly kind of Buddhism, with pilgrimages and prayers and chants of “Namu Amida butsu,” in search of liberation, plays a part in the story. It’s about a prostitute (age 19) and her client (24) who really love each other and face insurmountable practical and social obstacles that drive them to despair.Despite my long acquaintance with Japanese culture, the surface of the music was very alien, agitated and atonal (Webern’s got nothing on these guys). So it took me a while to penetrate the surface and begin to comprehend that this was a human comedy as well as a tragedy. A lot of the falsetto and hysteria in the (all-male) voices was probably as satirical as it sounded: behold the pathetic obsessions of these touchingly frail humans. (The helpless passions enacted by the colorful puppets contrast starkly with the enigmatic dispassion of their black-swathed manipulators.) Subtitles were projected above the stage, and quite a lot of the goings-on were about business and money. The author, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, is called the Japanese Shakespeare, and this story was quite a lot like Romeo and Juliet, another tale about very young people, which is foolish, flowery, and even funny for much of its length, until the tragic ending. In this tale, right up to the last minute the young people are coming up with all sorts of natural reasons (e.g. breaking their families’ hearts) for not going through with it. But then they do, in a gruesome, graphic, determined way. And in a forest, away from all the noise of society—and at that point the music becomes exactly as you describe it.
If you love someone, set them free
Heavy fare for a summer Saturday night . . . but hey, freelancers don’t know from weekends or vacations.
This is Kierkegaard on free will. It’s actually very advanced Christian theology. I’m neither qualified nor motivated to debate its provenance, its truth, or its craziness. I just find it beautiful and thought-provoking.
“. . . goodness is to give oneself away completely, but in such a way that by omnipotently taking oneself back one makes the recipient independent. All finite power makes [a being] dependent . . .
“It is incomprehensible that omnipotence is not only able to create the most impressive of all things—the whole visible world—but is able to create the most fragile of all things—a being independent of that very omnipotence. Omnipotence, which can handle the world so toughly and with such a heavy hand, can also make itself so light that what it has brought into existence receives independence, Only a wretched and mundane dialectic of power holds that it is greater and greater in proportion to its ability to compel and to make dependent. No. Socrates had a sounder understanding; he knew that the art of power lies precisely in making another free. But in the relationship between man and man this can never be done . . . only omnipotence can truly succeed in this.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard
It’s just this to the nth power.
“Replacing Self-Ownership with Self-Stewardship”
On his new blog, Strike the Root, Funky Dung is doing some really original thinking at the intersection of Catholicism and Libertarianism. He doesn’t ever let himself stop and rest at a comfortable and convenient point; just when you think he’s come to a really pleasing synthesis, he challenges himself to move on. (When I got to the sentence that is the title of this post, my heart started beating faster.) He seems to be trying to figure out if a sort of “I-Thou libertarianism” is conceivable, one that goes far beyond utilitarian considerations and natural selfishness. If there’s a problem with it, it’s the problem of idealism, of basing a political vision on humans at their best, which may be ennobling as an expectation but unwarranted as an assumption. Very much worth reading, and responding to Funky’s invitation to contribute to an idea under construction.
Is Religion Necessary? [UPDATED!]
As previously quoted, Nassim Nicholas Taleb seems to think so: [bold = emphasis added]
[B]eyond the current mess, I see no way out of this ecological problem, except through that tacit, unexplainable, seasoned, thoughtful, and aged thing crystalized by traditions & religions —we can’t live without charts and we need to rely on the ones we’ve used for millennia. Le 21e siecle sera religieux, ou ne sera pas!
And so, in similar terms but more words, does Gagdad Bob:
So it seems that we must seek a proper balance between letter and spirit. Many people reject religion because of an early experience of too much letter, not enough spirit. But then they might get involved in some new age nonsense, which is all spirit and no letter. However, spirit itself, like any other energy, is neutral; if it isn’t guided by a nonlocal structure of unchanging truth, it can just as easily lead down as up. You can find yourself on a slippery slope that leads all the way down to a slippery dope such as Deepak Chopra, who embodies the paradox of pure “slime without substance.”
Put this way, organized religion itself is a “necessary evil,” as it were. While necessary, we must not confuse it with that to which it points, or else we are simply engaging in idolatry by another name.
* * *
[T]he other day, I was having a conversation with a friend who is a dyed-in-the-wool-over-his-own-eyes atheist — one of those people who is just completely tone deaf when it comes to religion. I mentioned how I had long since abandoned philosophy for theology, and he asked why — what do you get out of it?
Of course, I had no way to explain it in his earthly terms, i.e., to somehow fit it into his little world, which obviously excludes the realm of spirit. I mean, there is surely spirituality there, as there is in any normal person’s life, but he doesn’t see it as an autonomous realm, just a derivative one.
Oddly, this is obviously the real world in which humans live — it is the quintessentially human world — and yet, this type of person rejects the human world for a lower one, while still trying to maintain their humanness. I suppose this can work for a generation or two, but at some point, the thread that links us to our civilizational source will be snapped, and that will be the end. Then it will just be a matter of waiting for the Islamists to finish the job, as in Europe.
Anyway, this friend asked me what I “get out of theology,” and I tried to answer. I pointed out that, first of all, the whole thing is an ongoing surprise to me, and that it is not even as if I chose it; rather, it has chosen me. I said that it was like entering this huge, magnificent intellectual cathedral that was perfectly adapted to the human psyche. . . .
* * *
As you know, Mrs G has converted to Catholicism. Not only that, but quite a few of my readers have either returned to Christianity or undergone formal conversion, and for that I am humbled and eternally grateful. But what about you, Bob? What are you? And what are you waiting for?
I am not a Christian, in the commonly understood sense of the term. I have to acknowledge that up front. Now, some of you are no doubt thinking to yourself, “Ha ha. Yes you are. Stop kidding yourself. You just haven’t realized it yet.” I won’t argue with that, but please indulge me. The point I would like to make is that, while not Christian per se, I am surely on a Christian adventure. An extraordinarily deep one, I might add. It has been ongoing for the past, I don’t know, eight or nine years, and just keeps getting more compelling.
In a way, I feel like the earliest Christians, who, after all, were not “Christians.” Rather, they were simply people having a Christian experience that later came to be known as “Christianity.” In fact, I’m thinking of calling it that myself. But the point is, this is what makes these early writings all the more compelling. No one was telling them the “correct” way to think. They did not “believe” in religion, but were undergoing religion.
And yet, I hold back. Why?
* * *
[W]hat you are seeing is a purely spontaneous production chronicling the encounter between me and Christian truth, which I believe, in a certain way, gives it more weight than it might have if I were simply reciting dogma as an “insider.” While some of what I say might sound dogmatic or authoritarian, I must again emphasize that I am not in my right mind when I’m saying it. Rather, I not only try to write about what I know, but what I don’t know. That is, I try to “write beyond myself,” so to spook, so that I am as genuinely surprised as anyone else at what comes out. Boo!
It is very important to me that I reach people who aren’t religious, but still have an impulse to be — especially people with the “Jesus willies.” I think that I would be less convincing if I were simply coming from a Christian perspective. In other words, perhaps I can be analogous to the disinterested scientist who explains how global warming or reductionistic Darwinism are bogus. People get enough of the normal evangelizing, and, as often as not, it backfires. But when a disinterested person with no vested interest is doing the selling, it may be more effective.
What I hear both these provocative minds saying is that at least for now and the foreseeable future, we don’t have any adequate alternative to traditional religion to keep us on track, connected to our nonmaterial source of raison d’être and perspective and guidance. So even though we may have outgrown the cosmology, we still need the counsel and the consolation. Break the old vessels, spill the wine.
It’s a funny feeling, though. Whatever-it-is spoke to humanity in childlike terms humanity could understand. Now that science has shattered the medium, what happens to the message? And how do we accept that we’re growing up intellectually faster than we are emotionally?
UPDATE: We’re not the only ones talking about just this, just now. Stanley Fish writes in the NY Times (and gets 655, count ’em, high-level comments to date):
In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?”
Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions . . .
In a phrase I suspect is destined to be oft quoted, Eagleton says, “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.”
Read the whole thing. This is shaping up to a verdict, or a consensus: we could shed religion now, but we’d better choose not to. It’s strange to make a conscious choice to believe the no longer believable (the Biblical cosmos is to the actual cosmos we are discovering as a small child’s drawing is to the Sistine ceiling); maybe related to what Jack Whelan of After the Future calls “second naiveté.”
We cannot live as the ancestors lived, but the rationalist prejudices of the moderns caused much that our premodern ancestors valued to be discredited and lost. Our job now is to retrieve the lost gifts, and to adapt it to our life now lived in circumstances unimaginable to the premoderns. [ . . .]
We no longer can maintain a “first naivete”, which is the state of the believer before critical consciousness. We must search out what has been forgotten or lost with a second naivete, which is the attitude toward the superrational that is childlike in its receptivity, but, because we must travel lightly, shrewd in its judgments about what is necessary and what superfluous.
(P.S. Agnosticism — admitting we don’t know shit — still seems more honest and more reverent to my temperament. But like Cal in the comments, I’m not sorry to be surrounded by people who aren’t like me. Being in the gaseous state myself, I’m glad some people are solid.)
Ambiance 