Author: Ophelia Benson

Jay Rosen on “the church of the savvy” is great; thanks to Physicalist in comments for pointing him out.

Though they see themselves as the opposite of ideological, the people in the national press actually share an ideology: the religion of savviness.  Since it differs from both liberal ideology and conservative ideology and from political thought itself, savviness often eludes description, or even recognition as a set of beliefs.

Oh is that what it’s called – the way they’re always talking about the process at the expense of the policy. “How will this affect the November elections?” is always the point, after a perfunctory and unenlightening glance at the substance. So that’s savviness.

The savvy do know how things work inside the game of politics, and it is this knowledge they try to wield in argument…. instead of argument. In this sense savviness as the church practices it is the exemption from the political that believers think will come to them because they are journalists striving only to report on politics or conduct analysis, not to “win” within the contest as it stands.

And that’s what makes them so boring and depressing – they report as if the process were an end in itself as opposed to…the process. They report as if winning were the only aim and as if all of us should be as enthralled by the contest as they are, when in fact most of us don’t give a flying fuck about the process, we want to know how they expect us to cough up thousands of dollars for health insurance every month.

Prohibited from joining in political struggles, dedicated to observing what is, regardless of whether it ought to be, the savvy believe that these disciplines afford them a special view of the arena, cured of excess sentiment, useless passon, ideological certitude and other defects of vision that players in the system routinely exhibit…[T]he savvy don’t say: I have a better argument than you… They say: I am closer to reality than you. And more mature.”

And that explains why they think they get to lecture people who are much older and wiser and cleverer than they are; it’s because they’re savvy. Yes that does explain a lot.

Russell Blackford posted a comment he made at the Intersection on July 30th, that never got posted, in reply to Mooney’s “final word” on Tom Johnson. It’s a good comment – thoughtful, and civil. But it’s not uncritical – and it’s not posted there.

It may have been penny wise and pound foolish to censor it though, since it’s more conspicuous as a post than it would have been as a comment. Russell suggests (this alone will have been enough to explain the non-posting) that Mooney should lift the ban on me, and adds that if he did I would probably ask the old question again about why he thinks Jerry Coyne was wrong to review books by Miller and Giberson for the New Republic.

 You seem to think that Jerry did something wrong in agreeing to review the books and in reviewing them the way he did. I don’t see it. If you no longer think that, it would be nice if you said so explicitly. If you do still think it, I’d be interested to know what you think Jerry should have done when asked to review those books.

Yes, so would I. I don’t expect I will ever know. It’s one of those haunting unanswered questions that irritate us while we’re waiting for the bus.

Sadly, the comments on Russell’s post got infested by the Pieret-Ramsey faction and then by Ramsey jabbing at me endlessly – not to mention DM, who has added me to his death threat list, blasphemous little bitch that I am.

The Telegraph is also worked up about the pope and his impending visit and the rudeness and badness of people who think he’s a bad man. That’s not as surprising from the Telegraph as it is from the New Statesman though. But it’s still sick-making.

…the Queen will be playing the formal role of host to a fellow head of state, who is also the spiritual leader of a billion people.

Yes, yes, it’s all very glam. Some people get a sexual thrill from that phrase, “spiritual leader” – and when it’s of a billion people, oh well then – the pope must be very important and thrilling indeed. Never mind that the whole thing is a vast fraud and a system of mental imprisonment – let’s just admire their pretty clothes and their big shiny cars.

 Old-fashioned anti-Popery is not the force that it was in 1982, because the community of anti-papal fundamentalists has shrunk, along with the Christian community in general.

The community of anti-papal fundamentalists! Who knew there was such a community – I certainly didn’t. But everybody is a community in the UK. The lucky ones have spiritual leaders, and the others are fundamentalists about the people who have spiritual leaders. Or something.

Both the BBC and the Government set great store by “celebrating other cultures”. Benedict XVI’s arrival is an opportunity to celebrate a culture that planted our Christian roots; for it was a Pope who sent St Augustine to Britain.

Well yes, they do, as they also set great store by “celebrating communities.” It’s one of their more gag-worthy qualities, especially when the cultures and communities in question are centrally concerned with bending the knee to a non-existent deity. Anyway – you have your orders – be nice to the pope.

Disobey them.

So now we have the New Statesman rhapsodizing about Newt Gingrich converting to Catholicism and presenting a film that rhapsodizes about the previous pope. Yes really. Then it (in the person of Carla Powell) rhapsodizes about the current pope’s upcoming visit, and his meeting with the queen. Gingrich, two reactionary popes, a monarch…The people’s flag is deepest red, all right.

 And yet, on recent visits to London, I have been shocked by the negative criticism of the Pope and the Catholic Church. Why are so many of the capital’s liberal elite upset? Why is Pope Benedict, an 83-year-old retired university professor, causing such anxiety?

What a fucking stupid question. Because he is the reactionary head of a reactionary institution that tells millions of people what to do, and tells them wrong. Because he is a man at the top of a pyramid of men in an organization that officially bans women from all the decision-making jobs but doesn’t hesitate to tell them what to do.

The child abuse scandals central to all this have been a stain on the Catholic Church. But it is important to remember that this is a problem the Pope has been working to resolve for at least a decade. Grave as it is, the scandal should not be allowed to obscure his core message.

Which is that secularism is evil, that condoms cause Aids, that the ordination of women is The Worst, and that when priests rape children it is up to the church to protect…the priests. Well don’t worry, the “scandal” of child rape and the church’s protection of child rape doesn’t seem to be obscuring that message too much.

The tabloids will always offer apparently easy solutions and those hostile to the robust moral teaching of my faith will jump on any bandwagon.

Bandwagon shmandwagon. Yes I am hostile to the “robust moral teaching” of your “faith.” Why aren’t you? It sucks. The “robust moral teaching” of your faith is that homosexuality is a sin, women must never have the freedom to use their own bodies for their own purposes instead of other people’s, birth control is evil, men must be in charge of everything, and a bunch of priests have access to a special spooky holy morality that cannot be adapted to fit modern sensibilities. I despise the “robust moral teaching” of your faith and your church.

It hurts me that those advocating the arrest of His Holiness are increasingly in danger of sounding like the Chinese government, which seeks to use its brute economic influence to silence the Dalai Lama whenever he travels abroad. So much for British freedom of speech.

Nonsense. It’s nothing to do with silencing, and it’s nothing to do with freedom of speech. Ratzinger concealed crimes from law enforcement; that’s a crime; that’s why he should be arrested.

What is this falangist drivel doing in the New Statesman? I know they’re crazy there, but this? A Catholic rant about liberal elites?

Harriet Baber likes to put things in a provocative way (as do I), and she does so in answering the Comment is Free belief question of the week. Lots of provoking, and I will oblige by being provoked into commenting.

I see no reason why I should believe that life is, as Tony Soprano’s perfectly awful mother Livia put it, “a great big nothing” after which we are annihilated. That may very well be the way things are. But I see no benefit to believing it is so.

Yes but that’s a false choice, because it’s an incomplete description of the alternative to believing that life is made into Something by the existence of god. The choice is not: 1. god, and life=something, or 2. no god, and life=nothing. I don’t think of life as a great big nothing. In fact that’s a very odd way to describe life – life is very much something. The amount and variety of life on this average-size planet is staggering; it’s light years away from “nothing.” If the idea is that life feels like nothing to people who don’t believe god exists, that’s wrong too. Harriet must know that, but…she likes to provoke.

But if I believe in God and a blissful afterlife contemplating him, then even if I am wrong I will not be disappointed. I would rather live in a fool’s paradise than no paradise at all.

Really? An eternity of blissfully contemplating god? Wouldn’t that start to get boring after about, oh, say fifty years?

Truth is overrated. And it’s remarkable that the very individuals who are most vocal in their opposition to religiously motivated puritanism are the most fiercely puritanical when it comes to truth.

No. It’s not remarkable at all, because the two are not the same kind of thing. (And who are these people, anyway?) Thinking that truth matters is not the same kind of thing as thinking that pleasure is sinful.

People in any case overestimate the value of truth and underestimate the difficulty of arriving at it. There are a great many truths in which I have abolutely no interest – truths about the lifecycle of Ctenocephalides felis, (the common cat flea) or the extensive body of truths about the condition of my teeth that my dentist imposes on me. I see no reason why I should bother with these truths or make a point of believing them.

I see no such reason either, but the whole thing is a red herring. It’s not a question of bothering with every truth there is, it’s a question of paying attention to the truth or otherwise of what one already believes.

There is some notion that even if we can ignore these workaday truths we should be concerned about the larger, more significant truths about the meaning of life, if any, and the human condition. I don’t see why. In any case, I’m a satisficer, quite happy in every department of life with good enough…I don’t much care about getting the right answers to what are commonly called the big questions.

An interesting remark from a philosopher.

That is no doubt what she wanted people to say. I’m nothing if not obliging.