When facts are missing, just surmise
I’m reading Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. It’s a very slight book which one could read in an hour, but I’m reading it slowly because I’m taking a lot of notes, and also because it makes me sick, so I don’t like to read it for long at a stretch. I gave myself a break from it for a few days, and when I picked it up again after this break, I was struck all over again by its truly objectionable combination of rudeness and glibness and shallowness and pretension. I really hate that combination, and Terry Eagleton wears it as if it were a mink coat and he were a heedless aristocrat.
I’ll explain what I mean. The rudeness is in the insistent, wild, evidence-free denunciation of largely imaginary people he labels ‘Dawkins’ and ‘Hitchens’ and, mostly, as a pair, ‘Ditchkins.’ The glibness is in his habit of assertion, his absurd comparisons and analogies (‘it’s as if,’ he’s always saying, and it never is), his air of authority which is not backed up by any strength of argument or breadth of learning. The shallowness is in his failure to notice any of this. The pretension in his assumption that literary critics are some kind of universal authorities.
I can illustrate all this by extensive quotation, and I will; this is by way of throat-clearing. I’ll give you just one tiny example to warm your hands over in the meantime.
[T]he scientific rationalist passes too quickly over the thorny issue of what is to count as certainty, as well as of the diverse species of certainty by which we live. [p 115]
No she doesn’t. That’s just an absurd generalization, with not a shred of example or evidence, not to mention argument – and it is, as such, entirely typical. It is his style, his schtick, his thing.
The next paragraph pretends to expand on the point, but doesn’t.
Nobody has ever clapped eyes on the unconscious. Yet many people believe in its existence, on the grounds that it makes excellent sense of their experience of the world. (One doubts that this includes Ditchkins, since the English tend to have common sense rather than an unconscious.)[p 115]
That, too, is absolutely typical – he slams Dawkins and Hitchens with a guess about what they may or may not think – completely without embarrassment or diffidence. He does that repeatedly throughout the book. It’s rude, it’s glib, it’s unfair, it’s stupid, and it’s crap ‘scholarship.’
You can see why the book is hard to stomach.
Sounds like vintage Eagleton, to be read with a bucket handy.
I may be wrong but I recall getting into a comments exchange with the man himself on this site. But that was no sooner on than it was over.
Well, such is life.
Hmm, I don’t think so – I think I would remember that.
It really is a horrible book – nasty in a very childish way. I can be very hard on people, but I at least quote them! Eagleton just flings out abuse with, most of the time, no evidence whatever.
Eagleton is a bullshit artist, but he is an artist. I suspect that he hasn’t read a book (from cover to cover) in 30 years, but after reading the back cover and the first few pages, he pontificates over the text without scruples. However, I think that he represents the inner-bullshit-artist in most of the anglophone world’s pseudo-intellectuals and so is widely accepted and applauded by his fellows, the pseudo-intellectuals, who are much more numerous than the rigorous thinkers.
Well this book is not evidence that he’s any kind of artist. It’s full of clever-clever analogies, but they’re not nearly as amusing as he seems to think they are, and for the rest – it’s not art. It’s also not anything else worth doing.
I’m sure that Eagleton wouldn’t include someone like Richard Feynman in his caricature of ‘Ditchkins’. Feynman’s book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is on my short list of books that I recommend to everyone. Here is his take on certainty:
“You see, the thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything…”
Rather than “passing too quickly over the thorny issue”, he rejects it altogether. And for good reason. As he says later:
“The question of doubt and uncertainty is what is necessary to begin; for if you already know the answer there is no need to gather any evidence about it.” “We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt.”
I wonder, does Eagleton go into any more detail about these “diverse species of certainty”? I was under the impression, perhaps naively, that certainty is certainty, and there is not a lot of wiggle room left for equivocating there. Does he know of some sort of uncertain certainty?
No. He goes on to talk a lot of woolly or obvious or both blather about knowledge, as if he were the first person to think of any of it – and he veers from certainty to knowledge to various other things as if they were all interchangeable. He probably meant knowledge there – but who knows.
I really dislike the term “Ditchkins” because Dawkins is a reasonable public intellectual with some great points and Hitchens is a buffoon. It does everyone a disservice to conflate them.
[T]he scientific rationalist passes too quickly over the thorny issue of what is to count as certainty, as well as of the diverse species of certainty by which we live. [p 115]
Not if the scientific rationalist is a Bayesian they don’t. To a Bayesian there is no certainty, only probabilities. Its just some hypotheses are so unlikely that they can be largely ignored.
Right on, James K. I hate it when people talk about “rationalism” as if it’s a monolith. Where is this deep appreciation of nuance that we’re supposed to extend to religion?
Frankly, NO scientific rationalist I’ve ever met or read – however widely one might apply such a blithely broad label – has ignored the issue of certainty in the way Eagleton hand-wavingly dismisses. It’s a complete bullshit accusation, a broadside aimed at no actual position ever advanced by any identifiable person – which makes it of a piece with all the other criticisms Eagleton tosses about with such reckless abandon. But what can one expect from such an inveterate tosser?
“Not if the scientific rationalist is a Bayesian they don’t. To a Bayesian there is no certainty, only probabilities. Its just some hypotheses are so unlikely that they can be largely ignored.”
It’s true! And what is more Bayesians accept any body of evidence that tends to confirm a proposition as evidence, so we can take people’s ‘feelings’ and ‘intuitions’ and ‘sense of the numinous’ all into account and still reject the god proposition because the propbability of it being true is so minute (although as Bayesians we will adjust our estimation of the probability with every new piece of evidence). Does Eagleton know all this and deliberately misrepresent, or is he as ignorant as he claims Dawkins to be?
Perhaps it makes more sense in context but I literally do not know what Eagleton means when he says: ‘…the English tend to have common sense rather than an unconscious.’
Anyone care to explain what is meant by this? Is it that the English supposedly live by a superficial ‘common sense’ instinct rather than giving deeper thought to anything? If so it does seem a generalisation that insults an entire country…
Jenavir, I have to disagree. Yes, Dawkins is a reasonable public intellectual, but Hitchens is not a buffoon. If I were to choose between The God Delusion and god is not Great for depth and sensitivity, I would choose the latter. Hitchens has a far deeper grasp of the attractions of religion, and its power, than Dawkins. A buffoon could not have written this.
Eagleton, however, is a buffoon. I listened to some of the lectures on which his latest book is based. He came across as crude, shallow, and boring. Particularly noticeable was a belief that he is funny, when he isn’t funny at all. He’s great at name dropping, but he gives no sign that he really understands the people whose books he has read. His is one book I will not bother to read. OB’s remarks seem right on the money, based on the little I heard and bothered to listen to. I tormented myself by reading Armstrong. Eagleton’s is a book too far.
“Hitchens is not a buffoon”
Indeed. Lumping him in with Dawkins is wrong because their arguments and styles are different enough that doing so fast breeds incoherency.
“It’s a very slight book”
The original draft was in fact twice as long, because Eagleton had added “(by the way, have I mentioned my extraordinarily sharp sense of humour?)” after every occurrence of the word “Ditchkins”.
For some reason the editors cut it.
Whenever I read one of Eagleton’s sprightly asides which he thinks are jokes, I think of a self-satisfied lecturer trying to humour up his subject in front of a gang of undergraduates. Some sycophants are laughing, the rest are rolling their eyes and sending saracstic text messages saying LOL!!
Exactly, Kb player. I had to study Eagleton’s Lit Crit and found it supremely unenlightening. He’s a show-off, shallow, and immensely self-satisfied. I despair of our universities when people like this are rated in the humanities.
Eric, sorry, I don’t think anyone can read anything Hitchens has produced on the subject of the Iraq war and reasonably contend that he’s not a buffoon.
On Eagleton, you’ll get no argument from me.
Dave J L, it absolutely doesn’t make more sense in context, not least because there is no context; it’s completely out of nowhere and random and arbitrary. It follows immediately after the previous quote I give, which I think shows just how context-free it is.
It’s absurd to dismiss Hitchens as a buffoon. It might be reasonable to say he’s buffoonish, or a buffoon, on the Iraq war, or on the Iraq war and some other subjects; but just to say he’s a buffoon, period? No.
“He’s a show-off, shallow, and immensely self-satisfied.”
Perfect summing up, and this book reeks of all three. I keep wondering how the audience at the lectures reacted – I can’t imagine adults taking him seriously.
“You find the notion that there are things happening in your brain of which you are not consciously aware “incoherent”?”
No, but I find the idea that I may have a desire that I am unconscious of nonsensical. Take your smoking example. You wonder why you do it given all the obvious drawbacks, but you don’t wonder that you do want to do it, you know that, you are conscious of it. A strong version of the theory of the subconscious could have it that you want to smoke even though you don’t think you want to and, in fact, don’t. It is silly. Of course, you may have motives that you more or less choose not to think too much about, but motives that you can’t know about? It is daft, isn’t it?
“It is daft, isn’t it?”
There’s a lot of biological activity going on in the brain. Isn’t it possible that your brain wants something, but that “you” are not/not yet aware of? Is your consciousness in total control and does it have total awareness of all those brain processes? Just wondering….
I think John is talking about the specifically Freudian version of the unconscious (as Eagleton almost certainly was) and Dan and Fryslan are talking about unconscious processing and the like. The first is bullshit, the second isn’t.
…motivations which I am mostly unable to access consciously, perhaps simply because it’s painful to acknowledge them consciously.
That doesn’t sound like you’re unable to access these “motivations”, simply that you’re unwilling to. The rest of your smoking example is a little unclear to me. Why don’t you quit smoking?
Addiction would be the most obvious reason, surely – and addiction isn’t exactly what’s meant by ‘unconscious’ is it? It’s involuntary but not necessarily unconscious.
But the math problem example is unconscious processing. I had a really vivid experience of that a year or so ago, which I’ve reported here – of hearing a very familiar tune and being frustratingly unable to put a name to it – then the next day having the name the instant I called up the tune. (It was the Sailor’s Hornpipe.)
Let’s say that I don’t like being around my mother and that in fact, her conversation irritates me, but in childhood I let myself be convinced by my mother that I love her because a good child loves his mother, and so every time the irritation with my mother comes to mind, I attribute it to tiredness or stress on my job or the fact that I have an irritable character in general, although in fact, I enjoy being with friends. Those mechanisms of denying my irritation with my mother become mental habits and hence, unconscious.
Wouldn’t that be a way of seeing how I can have unconscious motivations? I’m simplying a bit, I know.
“which makes it of a piece with all the other criticisms Eagleton tosses about with such reckless abandon. But what can one expect from such an inveterate tosser?”
Unlike Eagleton, G Felis, you are genuinely amusing.
I took Eagleton’s attempted witticism about common sense/unconscious to be aimed English academia’s rejection of continental bullshit like Psychoanalysis – of which Eagleton, like all good bullshitters, is a fan.
I disagree, OB. I don’t think Hitchens has anything of value to contribute. The few sensible things he says are unoriginal. And on most topics he’s just…well, a buffoon. Period. It’s not just the Iraq war; it’s his casual racism and misogyny.
John Meredith: what’s so ridiculous about unconscious desires? I don’t get it.
No, not period. Have you read any of Hitchens’s literary reviews and essays? His historical stuff? His nearly forty years of journalism? His book on Kissinger, his book on Mother Teresa?
It’s simply not unarguable – as in ‘period’ – that he’s a buffoon on most topics. Don’t be so dogmatic.
I do hope you didn’t have to BUY a copy, Ophelia.
Jenavir:”I disagree, OB. I don’t think Hitchens has anything of value to contribute. The few sensible things he says are unoriginal. And on most topics he’s just…well, a buffoon. Period. It’s not just the Iraq war; it’s his casual racism and misogyny.”
Jenavir, I doubt I would be the first to call YOU a buffoon. Hitchens is excellent value especially when kicking one’s half-baked opinions in the arse, and by his separation from some opinions of his former friends he displays integrity that is rare in public life.
Actually, the concept of unconscious motivations is useful for understanding religions. We see the brutality with which religious authorities and teachers punish children. At times their faces betray delight in cruelty, outright sadism, yet they swear (and I have no reason to believe that they are consciously lying) that they are punishing sinfulness, that in punishing, they are carrying out a distastful but necessary religious duty. I would explain their conduct by saying that they are unconscious sadists, that they are unaware of the violence that drives them.
“I would explain their conduct by saying that they are unconscious sadists, that they are unaware of the violence that drives them.”
I would say that they refuse to acknowledge the violence that drives them.
But OB is right when she says above that it is the Freudian idea of the unconscious that people like me reject as nonsense. I accept the commonsensical aspects of the unconscious, the fact that our minds process a lot more infomation than we can be conscious of. I once solved a crossword clue in a dream. And we all catch balls (some of us more reliably than others, ahem) without doing any conscious mathematical calculations. But the idea that there is a sort of Freudian ‘secret self’ that has desires and motivations which can be drawn out by a psychologist and which a subject may think are totally alien, is daft. I think that is the Eagletonian sort of subconscious. Terry would love to be able to explain to you your REAL motives for rejecting the infallibility of the Pope (nothing to do with the ‘reasonable’ objections that you THINK you have). Then he controls the terms of the entire argument and gets to decide who wins.
There’s not much difference between “being unaware of the violence that drives them” and “refusing to acknowledge the violence that drives them”. I agree that there’s not a secret self called the “id”, but most of us have aspects of our self which we refuse to acknowledge and those aspects are unconscious. You’re right that there is not an entity called the Unconscious, as Freud believed.
Oh come on – there’s a massive difference between being unaware and refusing to acknowledge. There can always be uncertainty about which is going on, but that’s a different thing.
Another thing about the Freudian ‘unconscious’ that makes it daft is that all this pulling out of secrets is done as if by prestidigitation – there’s no evidence, no argument, only a flexible non-falsifiable ‘theory’; it’s tailor-made for bullshitting.
Russell, I got it out of the library! I would never buy it under any circumstances (including Gatesian wealth).
I loved Tom Freeman’s joke above, by the way.
It’s extraordinarily difficult for me to pin down my own motives: why did I decide to continue with this conversation? I don’t see how any of my motives, except the simplest (e.g., I eat because I’m hungry), could be falsified. The problem with the Freudian explanation of motives is not that it cannot be falsified, but that it is completely dogmatic (everything is linked to one or two drives); has, as you say, no relation to usual sources of evidence about motives (introspection, what others may surmise about one’s motives by observation of one’s behavior); is impermeable to argument (arguing with a Freudian is seen as evidence of one’s “resistance”.) and reduces the complexity of human motivation to one or two given drives. Freudianism is very simplistic.
It is indeed difficult or impossible to falsify motivations, but that is one reason Freudian psychoanalysis is so inane: it pronounces with great certainty about matters that are not capable of certainty. A major problem with the Freudian explanation of motives is that it can’t be falsified. Thanks for the correction, but it’s wrong.
I understand. Thanks for the clarification. I think that we are in agreement.
For the record, since I think that no theory of motives is falsifiable, I affirm that the problem with Freudianism isn’t that it is not falsifiable, but that it is an extremely dogmatic and simplistic theory of motives, which does not take into account the only sources of evidence that one has about motives: introspection and what others may surmise about one’s motives by observation of one’s behavior.
For what record? What do you mean you affirm? Why is this about you? Do you think the recording angel is taking notes? You affirm, forsooth – you don’t make yourself right about something by affirming.
OB, I have read his book on Mother Theresa and much of his past journalism–which would be relevant if I was arguing Hitchens has always been a buffoon. I’m not. I’m saying he is one, now, on most topics that he speaks about currently.
And as for “inarguable,” that’s your addition, not mine. When I said Hitchens was a “buffoon, period,” I was responding to your distinction between being a “buffoon, period” and being buffoonish about particular issues. My point wasn’t that anything was “inarguable”–nothing’s really “inarguable,” even if arguing it would be stupid–but that he is generally a buffoon.
Come on, ChrisPer, is that the best you can do? “You’re a buffoon, too”? Really?
I don’t think it helps atheism or skepticism to have a spokesman like Hitchens. And not because he’s too aggressive or too blunt, but because he’s too bigoted.
In light of all the discussions that have been popping up recently about how the predominantly white male atheist movement should reach out to women and non-white people, the bigotry of Hitchens should be obvious as a big problem. My first real engagement with atheism was through a feminist of color. But if Hitchens was among the first or the most prominent atheists I encountered, I wouldn’t have felt like a movement or zeitgeist that promoted him had anything to offer me. I wouldn’t want any part of a movement that had him as their second-most prominent intellectual.
Jenavir – ah – well you didn’t make that clear, so I did think you meant he was a buffoon then now and always. (That’s the thing about ‘is’ – as well as ‘are’ – a limited or qualified sense may be meant but it can’t be assumed that that’s what’s heard. I recently had a very heated argument about just this subject with someone who likes to pronounce sweeping and lofty moral judgments on people.)
I still don’t agree, but it’s a much more defensible view.
Right, about ‘period’ – I spotted that later – I’d forgotten that I said it first.
Mine was in reply to your first comment, I hadn’t seen the second.
Hmm. I don’t think of Hitchens as a ‘bigot’ on the subject of women so much as obtuse, in the same way Martin Amis is obtuse. The Vanity Fair piece was crap, but I haven’t seen him write that kind of crap on a regular basis. He’s obtuse in the sense that he mostly just doesn’t seem to notice that women exist, just as Amis doesn’t. Am I missing something?
(I think that obtuseness is more noticeable in Amis, actually, because he writes fiction, in which women do occasionally make an appearance, and they’re such blanks that it’s disconcerting. With Hitchens – the issue just doesn’t arise much.)