Author: Ophelia Benson

I was going to post this as a reply at Cliopatria, but then it went on a bit longer than I intended, and seemed (yet again) less anodyne than I feel I need to be on this subject in that location. Maybe I’m wrong to feel that way, but…I’m not convinced, and so far what people have said has just convinced me of the opposite. At any rate. Ralph said this in answer to a question about why say G_d –

As I suspect you know, there is a long tradition in Judaism of using g_d. It transliterates the Hebrew which has no vowels and it respects the unknowable, mysterious, ineffable qualities of ultimate reality. It isn’t a “naughty” word, though without naming any names there are apparently some people who prefer not to hear it uttered in their presence, except as a curse. My use of it is a little affected, since I am not Jewish. It’s not my only, my best, or my worst affectation.

And I started to answer this way, and then decided not to.

Well (without naming any names) how would you go about uttering it in our presence? What does it sound like without the vowel?

But seriously folks. If ultimate reality is unknowable and mysterious and ineffable – then why discuss it at all? Why claim to know something about it? Why, specifically, claim to be able to know what God’s will is and that it ought to be prior to politics?

That’s not a rhetorical question, and it’s also not a purely provocative one, though I daresay it will be taken as such – and the reason I daresay that is because I keep being told that I should say whatever I want to and then when I do say something (something quite mild) at B&W I’m told I’m calling for a “ban” when I’m not. Hence my chronic expectation that any disagreement with religion is likely to be greeted with – shall we say, acerbity. At any rate, that’s not a purely provocative question. One of the problems with religion when one is trying to have a rational discussion is that kind of having it both ways. God is ineffable etc. but that won’t stop us from knowing all about him. That kind of move doesn’t work in secular discussion, and doesn’t get resorted to as much. But with religion – well, you know, everyone means something different, and it’s ineffable, and you can’t pin it down or define it, and if you try to you’re just being literal and scientistic…

And that’s where I decided to stop, and transfer over here, instead. But that is a serious question. I am constantly being told that when I disagree with religion on substantive issues I misunderstand because that’s not what it’s about, it’s about awe and wonder, or love, or inner experience. But that’s not what Hugo’s post is about at all. It’s about taking the Bible as a guide to morals, and without picking and choosing, because that’s a bad habit. It’s about replacing one’s existing suppositions about justice with God’s will. It’s about taking direction from the Holy Spirit – not metaphorically but literally. That is the kind of thing that worries me, not awe or wonder, and not ineffable things (provided people don’t then decide that they’re effable after all when a different argument is going on).

Writing God as “G_d” isn’t just irritating because there isn’t a God, though that’s part of it. It is irritating because, in certain contexts, it is indicative of a casual assumption that religious belief is something which cannot cause offence. Why should it cause offence? Well, let’s skip over the whole horrors done in the name of Christianity thing, and also the whole religious right thing, and the whole Intelligent Design thing, etc. It’s got to do with double-standards. If I flaunt my atheism, or if Ophelia flaunts her atheism, then in certain contexts this is considered hostile, aggressive, bad mannered, etc. But it just doesn’t work the other way around. It doesn’t seem to occur to the religiously minded that just occasionally we’d rather not be confronted with their faith. This is not to say that we don’t welcome debate with the religiously minded. But it is to say that we expect them to respect our atheism in the same kind of way that in certain contexts we’re expected to respect their theism. And that means not flaunting articles of their faith in our faces.

It’s fundamental disagreement time. I disagree radically with a line of argument at Cliopatria, and what’s worse, the kind of argument it is makes it very difficult to dispute as directly and bluntly as I would like to – or as I would like to in one sense but would not like to in another. That’s exactly the problem. I may decide to leave Cliopatria as a result – because as it is, I seem to be semi-acquiescing in views that are anathema to me.

My politics are derived from my faith, not the other way around. When I was younger, and a secular liberal, my politics were the only faith I had! Since coming to Christ (and yes, I do call myself “born again” without embarrassment), I have had to rebuild my politics from the ground up. When I consider political questions, I am forced to ask myself what position I believe Christ calls me to. This isn’t easy, for any number of obvious reasons, starting with the fact that the New Testament is not a modern political manual. This is why I can’t merely allow myself to hunt and peck through Scripture, finding passages that support my already-in-place suppositions about justice. (Many liberal and conservative Christians alike do this; it’s an understandable habit, but a bad one). Rather, I have to be open to what the Holy Spirit, the Bible, and my church community are telling me about right, wrong, peace and war and so forth…The Christian left must be faithful to Christ first, not secular dogma. Where our agendas and our understandings coincide, so much the better. But at times, we will stand with our Christian brethren on the right of the political spectrum, not out of sectarian loyalty but out of a sense that, as Carter said, “discerning God’s will and doing it is prior to everything else.” It is no easy thing to claim to have discerned God’s will. No wise Christian tries to do it alone. We do it in the light of (thanks Wesley) Scripture, Reason, Tradition, and Experience; above all we do it prayerfully, humbly, and together.

History is a secular subject. Historians work in archives and libraries, they don’t seek revelations. They examine and analyse evidence, they don’t ask what Jesus would think about it (at least I think they do, most of them, and when they’re doing their job properly). They rely on logic and reason, not prayer and the Holy Spirit. I don’t even know how to have conversations that have to do with mental constructs like God’s will and what Christ calls people to. In fact I’m having a hard time even writing this, here at B&W, where regular readers know perfectly well that I’m an atheist and a secularist, and where most regular readers are similarly inclined. I’m having a hard time saying bluntly how I react to talk of the Holy Spirit.

I can say this much though. I think this: ‘This is why I can’t merely allow myself to hunt and peck through Scripture, finding passages that support my already-in-place suppositions about justice. (Many liberal and conservative Christians alike do this; it’s an understandable habit, but a bad one).’ is a truly terrible and dangerous line of thought. It is not a bad habit to ‘hunt and peck’ through the Bible, leaving out the disgusting bits. It is not a bad habit to have pre-existing suppositions about justice that are better than those of the people who wrote the Bible three thousand years ago.

Either there is an omniscient benevolent being taking care of us and the world, or there isn’t. If there is, it does make sense to rely on what it tells us to do. But if there isn’t, then it doesn’t. If there isn’t, we need to get very very clear that there is no force that will make things come out all right ‘eventually’ – just for one thing, there is no ‘eventually’! We need to get very clear that however appalling it is that humans are the most intelligent compassionate beings we can look to – that is nevertheless how things are. Thinking we get to overrule human judgment because there is some kind loving wise person in the sky running the puppet show is a hideous irresponsible delusion. It’s a recipe for abdication at best and theocratic tyranny at worst.

Hugo cites this article by Stephen Carter. I’ve mentioned Carter here before – I think he’s the source of a lot of the guilty leftish spinelessness about religion – the deep unwillingness to resist it, to point out that it is in fact a comforting fiction and should not be treated as if it were on all fours with other more rational ways of thinking.

And if the narrative is truly about the meaning God assigns to the world, as Christianity’s narrative is, the follower of the religion, if truly faithful, can hardly select a different meaning simply because the state says so. If a religionist believes that God’s love does not allow some human beings to enslave others, no amount of teaching by the merely mortal agency of the state should cause the religionist to change. Quite the contrary: the religionist, if he believes that the state is committing great evil, has little choice but to try to get the state to change.

But what if a religionist believes that God’s love does allow some human beings to enslave others? Eh? Has Carter forgotten that that’s exactly what a great many ‘religionists’ did indeed think not very long ago? What recourse is there then but to disagree with them? To apply one’s ‘already-in-place suppositions about justice’ to the matter and say that they’re wrong? To argue, in fact, in a secular manner? None that I know of.

Amardeep Singh’s blog is full of interesting matter. He’s thinking about a lot of the same issues that B&W thinks about. This post from a few days ago for instance is about his shifting views on – his on-going struggle with – postmodernism and theory and theory-jargon.

I was trained at one of the centers of postmodernist thought — Duke — and for my entire professional career I’ve defined myself as a postmodernist, poststructuralist, and postcolonialist. Only lately I’ve found that these modes of thought have been distinctly unhelpful in dealing with the major topic I’ve been grappling with, namely secularism. Many humanities academics are privately skeptical of these theories, only they don’t say so because theory-jargon sounds so intimidating. Even as people in other disciplines or outside the academy mock our obsession with deconstruction and psychoanalysis, within the humanities there has been no strong mode of resistance to ‘theory’ other than overt conservatism. The fastest track to career advancement goes through Derrida and Foucault, not through teaching or overall mastery of the subject of literature. Doubters are immediately suspected or accused of being reactionaries, or even worse, dumb.

Wonderful, isn’t it? If you’re not an ardent ‘theory’ fan, then you’re a reactionary or dumb (or a dumb reactionary). Umm…what does that remind me of? Oh yes! Our dear president – if you’re not with us you’re against us. Otherwise known as Manichaeanism – reactionary and dumb, in fact. The ‘Only Two Possibilities’ view of life – the ‘binary opposition’ view of life that theorists themselves often make mock of. Not to mention the idiotic muddle of literary theory and political stance, and the perhaps even more idiotic muddle that thinks postmodernism is automatically progressive. Thanks to the work of people like Alan Sokal and Meera Nanda, it ought to be blindingly obvious by now that postmodernism can be extremely reactionary.

Some academics do feel comfortable dismissing high theory, but retain the basic belief-system that high theory created, chiefly the understanding that there are multiple modes of reason and a general sense that cultural relativism is right, even if other names are used in its stead. Essentialism, cultural nationalism and standpoint epistemology are all variants of this relativism. One might be in favor of women’s rights, for instance, only wary about insisting that some rights should be universal: like the right to protection from violence, the right to divorce, the right to work, and the right to education. Similar issues come up with the way different societies treat various kinds of minorities (ethnic, linguistic, religious). I find I no longer accept that basic human rights are relative. Instead, I believe that some ethical values are universals, at least at the level of the ideal.

Just so. It’s just that wariness about insisting that, say, the right to protection from violence should be universal that can make postmodernism such a great prop of oppression and injustice – of sadism and murder, in fact. It is, to adapt a famous remark of Bernard Williams’, a wariness too many.

Here is another post, this one from April 10, which mentions Meera Nanda and Romila Thapar.

Romila Thapar is one of India’s most important historians. She has become the focus of a campaign by the Hindu right in India (and here in the U.S., unfortunately)…I myself signed onto a pro-Thapar petition that circulated following the VHP attack…Thapar uses hard, empirical evidence — traces of the written language from the Indus river cities, as well as archeological fragments — to show that those cities were definitely not “Aryan.”…John Pincince, of the University of Hawaii, mentioned Meera Nanda to me as we were chatting after the Gandhi conference that took place at Yale on April 5. Nanda has a new book, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India where she draws a provocative link between the Hindu right’s attempt to assert that “Hindu science” has some validity.

There are links to articles on Amardeep’s site.

Right, where are we. How much ground have we conceded and how much can we keep. We’ve admitted what we’ve always known and would admit when pressed: that aesthetic opinions are opinions, not facts. Very well. That’s the sum total of our concession, and I’m sure we can all remember conceding the same thing when we were fifteen and judging the contest between Austen and Bronte or the Beatles and the Stones or folky Dylan and rock Dylan (yes, thank you, I am a dinosaur, I told you that, I said on my birthday I was 175) or NWA and Eminem or whatever it may be. De gustibus non est disputandum. Fine. Granted. But we go on disputing just the same, and a good thing too.

It’s all an illusion, but what of that? So many things are illusions, aren’t they. As a matter of fact I wrote an essay about that for TPM Online recently. We live in a great sea of illusions, that we know are illusions if we think about it, but we need to live as if they weren’t. We need to think, or half-think, or think in an ‘as if’ sort of way, that what we do matters, that our lives mean something, that there’s some point to long-range planning. It’s the same with aesthetic opinions and judgments. We need to pretend they are meaningful, or at least sort of meaningful, semi-groundable, quasi-real, or else why bother? And since not bothering is boring and depressing whereas bothering is interesting and engaging, we keep the illusion.

And then, what if they were groundable? What if aesthetic judgments were in fact factual, like judgments about evidence or documents? What if someone could prove mathematically that ‘Hamlet’ was better than Bridget Jones’ Diary or vice versa? Would we even want that? Hardly! In fact the idea is revolting. So perhaps the very ungroundedness, the subjectivity and dependence on personal experience, association, resonance – on the individual mind and self – is what we like about art? I don’t want to prove that Austen is better than King, I want to explain why she is, so if you have interesting reasons why the reverse is the case, I’m interested to hear them.

It all has to do with exploration, I think. As well as with what Schiller (and wmr in comments) said about play. Art is gratuitous, and it needs to be gratuitous to do its work, and to work. If it’s not (at least somewhat) gratuitous it stops being art – what we think of as art – and becomes something else. Vitamins, or education, or discipline, or some such. Good things, but different from art, and answering different needs and desires.