The vault

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

A thing yesterday evening that made me laugh a lot. I’ve been slowly but not steadily going through an impressive collection of Stuff in order to get rid of at least some of it, and in a stack of old magazines there was an issue of New Humanist from January/February 2011. I put it aside to leaf through later, and yesterday was later so I leafed through it and paused at a review of a book about compassion by Karen Armstrong. “Oh interesting,” I thought. “I wouldn’t mind writing a review of that myself.”

So I read past the headline and discovered that I had written it.

I don’t exactly know why that was so funny, but it was.

It’s here in case you want to read it (also if you don’t).

Comments

20 responses to “The vault”

  1. twiliter Avatar
    twiliter

    An outstanding review. I think that people find easy answers, or non-answers to be a kind of linament, while simply not knowing is treated as unacceptable. It’s okay to not know. Atheism is the rejection of spritual or supernatural “knowledge” or in the colloquial, “belief.” Some of us find that unsatisfying as well.

  2. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    Impeccable. You had me at “churlish” — perfect little word — and then it was successive waves of “YES — that’s it! That’s the thing! I feel that.”

    It’s that you have the whole field of argument in view — you can grasp just as easily those who are lulled by Karen Armstrong and those who aren’t, and you’ve sussed out her own blind spots with psychological precision. That’s what hits me. This is wide-angle critical thinking at full steam.

    I’d all but forgotten about Karen Armstrong until just now. Ah, the heady days of New Atheism… before the culture wars really came on, before trans mania and woke extremism turned the internet to mush…

    I miss when this kind of thinking and arguing had more room to breathe online, before everything got flattened into culture-war positioning, collapsed into opposing camps.

    It’s been a ride, that’s for sure.

    Thank goodness we’ve still got B&W. Thank you!

  3. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    Also: this may be a bit of a topic swerve (better suited to the Miscellany Room perhaps?) but I can’t not notice that this —

    I had thought I was going to be able to confound my own expectations, if no one else’s, by saying that Karen Armstrong’s self-help guide to compassion was a benign and well-meaning advice book, even though not to my taste – but when I got to the Seventh Step, “How Little We Know”, I had to give it up.

    — echoes so much of my irritation with Jordan Peterson and his kooky little self-help demi-cult. Peterson’s guides to manhood or whatever are, if I’m being honest, far more egregious than “not to my taste”, though I tried hard to slot my deep irritation with them into that category. No, I’m afraid, after reading your skewering of Karen Armstrong, I must come forward and confess: I don’t think Peterson is merely “not to my taste”, I think he’s a flaming nut job and either a charlatan or a deluded wack job. Same category as Karen Armstrong. Maybe she really believes, or maybe she’s just driven by the market — saying whatever sells, and maybe starting to believe it on some level — and maybe it’s kind of a mix of both.

    You called Armstrong’s book “twelve steps to cherry picking” and that’s not far from Peterson’s “12 rules or life”.

    There, I said it! Sorry, not sorry, Peterson-heads!

    *phew!*

  4. maddog1129 Avatar
    maddog1129

    I read Karen Armstrong’s popular book, “The History of God,” because I thought it was going to be a genuine history of ideas about religions and monotheism. And then she wrote as if the encounter with “the burning bush” were real. Needless to say, I was profoundly disappointed.

  5. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Golly, thanks, you guys.

    Karen Armstrong is kind of inspirational, but not in the way she intends.

  6. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    It would be hilarious if Karen Armstrong and Jordan Peterson teamed up and did a road show.

  7. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    And they could, too! Both rather airy-fairy Catholic woolly-heads. It could work!

    Here we are, giving them ideas…

  8. Mike B Avatar
    Mike B

    Certain favoured sentimental words recur with maddening regularity, and feel like bossy little tugs on the sleeve – “see things this way”: “spiritual”, “deep”, “profound”, “mystery”, “transcendent” – one begins to loathe the sight of them.

    lol

    God bless you, Ophelia.

  9. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Heh!

  10. Athel Cornish-Bowden Avatar
    Athel Cornish-Bowden

    You were all jealous when I told you that I had been at school with Michael Palin. You will probably be less jealous when I tell you that I met Karen Armstrong a couple of times before she was famous. I wasn’t particularly impressed. Her mother was our next-door neighbour for about five years of the time I lived in Birmingham, and we knew her very well: a very pleasant person.

  11. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Ya she’s really not particularly impressive. She was very popular with institutions like the Beeb and the Guardian back then, which just goes to show.

  12. Bjarte Foshaug Avatar
    Bjarte Foshaug

    I seem to remember Daniel Dennett doing this wonderful parody of Karen Armstrong during one of his speeches. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was along the lines of:

    “Now, Karen, do you believe that God exists?”

    “Oh, I think that’s the wrong question to ask. Because you see that assumes that God is a “being” that can be said to exist or not, when in fact, God is no being at all. No, God is being itself!”

    Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure it was the same talk in which Dennett introduced the concept of “deepities”.

  13. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Heh. I wouldn’t mind seeing that.

  14. Bjarte Foshaug Avatar
    Bjarte Foshaug

    Found it ! The Armstrong impersonation begins at about 44:40, but the whole thing is worth watching.

  15. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Aha, thank you!

  16. Jim Baerg Avatar
    Jim Baerg

    The Dennett talk is now on my ‘to watch’ list.

    I did see a talk by him at one of the ‘Imagine No Religion’ conferences. I also talked with him a bit there.

  17. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    I got to sit next to him once at a CFI dinner.

  18. Artymorty Avatar
    Artymorty

    Dennett was def my fave of the “four horsemen”. Hitch had whipsmarts and pizzazz up the yazoo, but also some blind spots. (Forgivable!) Dawkins has his polished Oxbridge manners, and also some blind spots. (Also forgivable!) Sam Harris was — and still is… young. IMO he should have baked in the academic oven a few more years before being elevated to a public persona. He’s telegenic, but a bit undercooked, intellectually. But, again, that’s forgivable.

    Dennett seemed like a sweet, loveable bear, through and through. What’s to forgive when you’re a big sweet huggybear?

  19. Athel Cornish-Bowden Avatar
    Athel Cornish-Bowden

    Karen Armstrong had an absolutely horrible time when she was on the way to becoming a nun, up to 1969 — a good ten years before I met her. If I had had one quarter of the experience she had it would have led me not just to recognize that the Church was an evil institution, but to leave religion and god altogether. Amazingly, though, it didn’t seem to have that effect on her: she remained a faithful servant of god.

  20. Jim Baerg Avatar
    Jim Baerg

    Having now watched the video of the Dennett talk I will note that the sort of ‘patterned ground’ he mentions near the start, exists near Calgary and I have seen it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plateau_Mountain_(Alberta)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More posts