Life inside two mental boxes
Anthony Grayling nails Terry Eagleton (who has written a new book pretending to say something about evil).
[H]e sets off on one of those complexifying journeys, like the route of a pinball bouncing backwards and forwards among a thicket of pingers, from William Golding to St Augustine, Macbeth to Pseudo-Dionysus, original sin to the Holocaust, Shakespeare to Freud, Satan to Thomas Mann, Arendt to Aristotle, and so copiously on – a verbal pinball ride among the entries in the telephone book of Western culture, to tell us what evil is. But do not expect, by the end, a conclusion, still less a definition, nor even a summary. Eagleton has been too long among the theorists to risk a straightforward statement. You have to grasp at fragments as you bounce among the pingers, not always quite sure whether he is agreeing or disagreeing with this or that author, even whether he is still paraphrasing an author or speaking with his own voice. That’s a technique, of course.
That’s the guy all right – copious name-dropping, energetic showing off by means of style and a bogus kind of erudition, and no actual argument at all. That last bit about not being able to tell if he is paraphrasing or speaking with his own voice applies exactly to Stanley Fish, too. The snail-trail of ‘Theory.’
As we are dealing with Eagleton here, note that this is of course not a mish-mash of inconsistencies, as it appears to be; this is subtlety and nuance. It is, you might say, nuance-sense.
It may not be clear if you haven’t read the whole review: that first claim is pure irony.
Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic – that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them.
Now that’s a great line. Funny that Eagleton, for all his showing off, can’t write anything as good.
Terry Eagleton:
Even on my usual table
He can beat my best
His disciples lead him in
And he just does the rest
He’s got crazy flipper fingers
Never seen him fall
That deaf, dumb and blind kid
Sure plays a mean pinball
I really enjoyed the article except for when he calls Eagleton “witty”. Facetious, yes, witty, no. As for his partial defence of Islamic terrorism, I wondered when Eagleton would finally fall into that hole – he’s been spinning around it for long enough.
Well maybe he manages to be genuinely witty in this book…though it seems terribly unlikely after “Ditchkins.” Failing that, I agree: he fails dismally at wit.
He’s already partially defended Islamic terrorism. There was an idiotic article some years ago in which he talked deluded bullshit about suicide bombers, leaving out almost all the important issues.
The world would be a better place if Eagleton could be persuaded to keep his nuance-sense inside his mental box, instead of ejaculating it all over the rest of us.
‘Nuance-sense’ makes me think of Phil Collins talking ernestly about paedophiles on Chris Morris’s ‘Brass Eye’.
I’ve written a short piece here. Eagleton has a great itch to write and he must make those with writer’s block wild with envy. Books pour out of him, like polystyrene bubbles in packaging.
He just had to one-up Schrödinger by adding another box, didn’t he?
Pity that it’s still not enough to keep the nuancesense contained.
He came to my campus on Thursday. We had a nice exchange. My question to him was about “Ditchkins”: I asked him why he thinks he can say (when mocking Dawkins and Hitchens) that “religion was never meant as a form of explanation” while also admitting in other comments that from the 17th century onward religion has been treated as a form of explanation, which is Armstrong’s whole point. When confronted with this contradiction, he talked about the difference between rationality and faith, confusingly. It seemed that he either avoided the question or misunderstanding it. (Which is, perhaps, my fault — I have been known to be unclear.)
As an aside, my friends from another university tell me that he would later say that he had nice things to say about me even though we “went at it for a bit”. This is a kind of intellectual charity that I think is decent, and is worth acknowledging. (Contrast that with Chris Mooney, who remarked to one of my university’s administrators, “that guy hates me”, which is not a great thing to say about a first-year graduate student with no clout. Lucky for me the administrators had a sense of humor.)
I haven’t read Eagleton’s new book, but here’s what I understood his position to be. The core of his talk was a way of understanding evil from the standpoint of virtue ethics. Essentially, Eagleton regards evil as the rejection of all value, the doing of things for the hell of it alone. To be evil is to be cynical, in this sense — to resent that which is created, and whose sole pleasure (amidst a life of misery) involves destroying the things that have been made. Hence Stalin does not count as evil, because his horrible policies against the Kulaks made a kind of vulgar sense, but Hitler does count as evil, since his aim was explicitly to destroy.
I think this is an interesting perspective, and (unlike his stuff on Dawkins and Hitchens) a conversation that is at least respectable. If I have understood him right, I have to think he’s wrong. The Stalin-Hitler comparison, for instance, just isn’t going to sit right with most people. Moreover, it isn’t going to make sense of the banality of evil (i.e., Eichmann), who did evil things within a completely rational framework. Further, it isn’t going to make sense of the vileness of Wall Street traders who engage in the trading of value for a living, but trade in the wrong sorts of value: think Enron. It isn’t going to make sense of the evil of the wifebeater who can’t control his rage despite loving his wife deep-down. In sum, it repeats a tired line in theology, reducing one’s opposition to nihilism, when one’s opposition may be substantive and wrong-headed and wrong-hearted.
Interesting. Well done engaging him.
Incident of of decent intellectual charity duly noted, but also compared with insistent lack of decent intellectual charity in incessant iteration of “Ditchkins” and general scorn for all but his own version of intellectual activity. That’s cryptic – what I mean is that he treats literary conversation as if it were argument, and seems oblivious to the existence of real argument. He seems not to be even aware that mere bald assertion is not argument, and to me this bespeaks a kind of arrogance about more substantive disciplines.
Still. Good that he was fair to a real-life interlocutor.
I don’t think evil can be reduced to destroying things for the hell of it.
Any definition of evil which includes a kid kicking over another’s sandcastle but excludes Stalin doesn’t seem useful to me.
The Hitler-Stalin thing is not merely odd, but trivially wrong, a vulgar error of historical perception – the preponderance of historical documentation demonstrates that AH and the Nazis had a very clear set of worldly goals to rationalise their killings. Slaughter of women and children in defence of the German nation is no less rational and goal-oriented than slaughter of women and children in defence of Soviet power. Unless you cherry-pick your definitions of ‘value’, ‘sense’ and ‘reason’ very carefully. And why would a Catholic Marxist need to do that?
There is, in my experience, nobody quite so anti-Catholic as an ex-Catholic; nor one so anti-Marxist as an ex-Marxist. The latter were as thick as fleas on a dog just after WW2; recruited in the ’30s and ’40s: resigned or expelled in the ’50s. Many had exited the Catholic Church and fallen straight into the arms of the Communist Party. Some probably made their way back to Catholicism, but many simply got embittered.
Eagleton the Catholic-Marxist churns out the books and someone out there keeps printing them for others who keep on buying them. I’m damned if I know why, as such short pieces of his that I have read online have turned me off him for life. It inclines me to the view that rather than being locked in a box, Eagleton has been confined for life to a two-room flat. Sometimes he is in the Marx Room, and sometimes in the confessional. But always in the flat.
Nigel Cawthorne’s Tyrants: Hiistory’s 100 Most Evil Despots & Dictators is worth a read. A couple of years ago I bought a copy from a remainder table outside a bookshop and shortly settled fown to dip into it over a cup of coffee. Arendt’s famous phrase about the banality of evil: its sheer everyday ordinariness was brought home to me when I realised that out of Cawthorne’s 100 all-time worst, I had managed to meet and physically shake hands with two.
In their own social contexts, they were both soft-spoken ordinary-looking men. Five fingers on each hand, no claws, no horns, no arrow-headed tongues. Both had become famous by each clawing their way to the top of a social pyramid. But lots of people do that.
:-)
Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing#Local_maxima
The banality of evil point – this is one of the really horrible things about life the universe and everything, especially in a technological age. The quantity and quality of harm people can do is in no way proportionate to the kind of people who do it. There’s no match-up, and there’s something repulsively disconcerting about that. A pimply youth who wants some cash to buy cigarettes and porn can murder an Einstein or a Bernard Kouchner, or a thousand of them.
The pimply youths who shot up and torched Bombay for instance – they weren’t even ideologues, even of the ridiculous jihadist kind – they were just rural teenagers who had been trained to shoot up and torch Bombay.
To play devil’s advocate for a moment, I think he disavows a simple connection between evil and harm-doing (or consequentialism), because that’s supposed to be a “liberal humanist” way of thinking. He wants to have a far narrower sense of evil — not just harm-doing, but genuine evil as a matter of character.
I’d be interested to go back to Hannah Arendt to see whether or not she was a consequentialist in that sense. Something tells me that it’s not likely.
No I think you’re right – it’s hard to see Arendt as a consequentialist, at least in any simple sense. But she was interested in the disproportion. What Eichmann did was titanic – in its consequences, though I don’t know that she put it that way – but he himself was as untitanic as it’s possible to be. He was always getting “elated” by his own rhetoric, and promptly contradicting himself. He would never ever ever say X; then five minutes later he cheerfully says X.
Not having read “On Evil”, I have to suppose that he puts himself at odds with Arendt. For it sounds like he holds the plumb opposite of her view: “Her characterization of [Eichmann’s] actions, so obscene in their nature and consequences, as “banal”… is meant to contest the prevalent depictions of the Nazi’s inexplicable atrocities as having emanated from a malevolent will to do evil, a delight in murder.” She presents a challenge to Eagleton (the desire for destruction is not the key impulse), and to the consequentialist (since the “nature of” the action matters).
Still, Eagleton obviously thinks there’s a debt to Arendt in some tenuous way — he wants to say that evil is a banality as well. But unlike Arendt, he wants to examine the banality of being a mere cynic or destroyer.
Eichmann’s monstrous lack of imagination, an unbridged gap between theory and practice, is what we might want to call “banality”. His banality lay in the fact that he was a rule-follower, and his rule-following was disconnected from his capacity to empathize or sympathize. Yet surely, contrary to Eagleton’s view, the Destroyer is not banal in any way that is remotely related; for the Destroyer presumably has a completely different ratio of vices to virtues, i.e., lacking sympathy, but possessing empathy and rule-recognition. If the Destroyer is banal, she is only banal in a sense that is appreciable by the literary critic.
Yes Ophelia, Eichmann as he came across on TV was about as untitanic as one can get. He was simply a faithful cog in a horrible bureaucratic machine who had advanced himself by concentrating on carrying out his duties.
Dominance hierarchies are found in many animal species. They are nothing special in humans as such. But human dominance is the only kind that can be exercised remotely: a Stalin can snap his fingers and some poor bastard he has never seen and is eight time zones away gets a bullet in the back of the head. Social evolution starts with groups of 30-60 people led by the most respected, skilled and experienced and finishes with modern states and corporations coordinating and controlling millions of people, remotely and impersonally.
Evolution has not equipped us for handling power. Eichmann the bureaucrat was in his own grisly way a top performer. But Eichmann the man was in way over his head.
Getting back to Eagleton: I bookmarked a page from Martin in the Margins some time ago. The following quote from Martin contains a longer quote from Eagleton:
http://martininthemargins.blogspot.com/2009/04/eagletons-evasions.html
I used to have a dog that was fond of chasing his own tail. But he did not merely go round in a circle centred on the one spot. His centre of rotation moved steadily, causing him to to bounce off walls and trees and knock smaller things over. Then he would leave off, and some time later be back at it again. The strangest thing was that he never managed to get hold of his tail. It was always just out of reach. But then again, if he had actually mangaed to sink his teeth into it, he would have got the shock of his life.
Haha, brilliant analogy!
Oh yes that passage, I remember it well! I commented on it here – possibly more than once. Now that Josh has made it soooo easy to search N&C, I’ll just find it.
Eagleton improving on Arendt – I have to say, I get more from one page of E in J than I do from whole books of Eagleton’s. He doesn’t really think; not in the way she did. He writes but he doesn’t really think.
Yup. Eagleton again, gawdelpus
And you commented, Ian.
And that’s where you found Martin in the Margins, too – Rosie (KB Player) linked. And there is someone with a photograph! Funny going back to an old comment and finding a face.
My comment isn’t a comment really, just a presentation of the key passage.
Some of those people on Tel’s hit list are friends of mine! Email or Facebook friends anyway.
If Tel ever wants to be my Facebook friend he’s out of luck.
Yes, Ophelia; thanks for the link, and what a blast from the past! But then again in the modern rush to upgrade, update and beat the ever-looming spectre of obsolescence, it’s nice to find something as constant as Eagleton.
He’s reassuring in his own way. ;-)
PS: Ophelia, could you use your search engine to find out if it was Eagleton who put a comment on one N&C thread? I’m pretty sure it was he who got into an online argument with me and Eric MacDonald a while ago. But I may be wrong. (Just searching for him by name would be useless; it has to be as a commenter.)
I don’t think I can, Ian. Anyway I’m very sure Eagleton never commented here – I would remember that! I suppose it’s just barely possible that he commented on an old thread I wasn’t paying attention to…but then surely you or Eric would have prodded me…
It is always very patronising when someone tells you from the opposite side of the floor in a debate how doing such and such detracts from the case you are making. That was what was done to Eric as I recall, and I seem to remember it was a ‘name’ like Eagleton who did it.
Needless to add, he got himself nowhere and left considerably chastened after 3 or 4 posts.
It certainly was someone who was naturally inclined to talk down to people.
I could do a google search; might find it on page 975.
from “Atheist Limericks”:
A cranky old critic named Terry
whose God was a Trotskyite fairy
attacked an ex-comrade
whose faith had long gone bad
but not his affection for sherry.
I’m amused at Eagleton’s line in http://tinyurl.com/ybfb4aj that: “‘Monster’ in some ancient thought meant, among other things, a creature that was wholly independent of others.”
A slightly dishonest attempt, I suspect, to plant in our minds the idea that “monster” is etymologically related to “mono-” (sole, alone) as monarch and monorail.
Drove me to the dictionary to check and it’s nothing to do with that; it derives from Latin “monire” to show, as in demonstration, premonition…and, the evocative “monstrance” – a piece of liturgical apparatus for showing off the “consecrated” host at Catholic services.
Thank you (indirectly) Ophelia and Terry. Now when I see a congregation, meek and mumbling, in obeisance to the supposed Real Presence of a god, I will recognise it as an act of monstrance.