Author: Ophelia Benson

Our sermon for today is on the text

The religiosity of the recovery movement is evident in its rhetorical appeals to a higher power and in the evangelical fervor of its disciples. When I criticize the movement I am usually accused of being ‘in denial,’ as I might once have been accused of heresy.

That is from Wendy Kaminer’s examination of the ‘recovery’ and self-help movements, I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional. But the reaction she describes is typical of vastly more ‘movements’ and ideological systems than just the self-help variety. In fact it’s probably fairly difficult to find a ‘movement’ or ideology whose adherents don’t resort to that tactic. If someone criticises a set of ideas to which I am committed, then that someone is doing a bad thing. I must elaborate on exactly what kind of bad thing it is that the critic is doing. Let me see. The critic is being intolerant. The critic is an elitist. The critic is arrogant and anti-democratic. The critic is an extremist and outside the mainstream. The critic believes things that most people don’t believe, or doesn’t believe things that most people do believe. The critic has Bad Motives – I don’t know exactly what they are, but I’ll hazard a guess. The critic is Eurocentric, or Orientalist, or a positivist.

It’s all pre-emption. And all based on the premise that criticism, however impersonal and general it may be, is somehow impermissible. Not just wrong, in error, inaccurate, but wicked and invidious and deserving of moral condemnation. That’s a bizarre notion on the face of it, and it will be worth pondering where it came from…

Alan Wolfe has a new book out, in which he apparently says something very silly.

As modern Americans with distinctly tolerant sensibilities, you pride yourselves on your willingness to change, yet religious believers, even the most conservative among them, have adopted themselves to modern society far more than you have changed your views about what they are really like. You have made the whole country more sensitive to the inequalities of race and gender. Now it is time to extend the same sympathy to those who are different in the sincerity of their belief.

Well, I for one don’t put ‘tolerance’ at the center of my politics or my belief system or whatever you want to call it, precisely because of statements like that. Depending on how one defines ‘tolerance’, of course. If it means simply non-interference, live and let live, equality before the law, and so on, that’s one thing. But if it means, as it is so very very often taken to mean, never ever breathing a word of criticism even in general terms, even in public media like books and newspapers and websites – then that’s quite another. And that seems to be what Wolfe means by it.

And his analogy is a very bad one. ‘Inequalities of race and gender’ are not the same thing as ‘difference in the sincerity of belief’. Obviously. Blindingly obviously. One is born a given race or gender. Yes, ‘race’ is a social construct that doesn’t really mean very much, but being stuck with it is certainly part of that social construct. There’s a lot of cultural pressure around these days to try to construct religion the same way – to convince us all that we’re born Muslim or Hindu and can’t possibly change it. But that notion overlooks the fact that religions have ideational content, religions make truth claims which can be accepted or rejected, religion is a cognitive matter. If we demand immunity from criticism for religion, what other set of ideas will we claim immunity for? And if we start demanding immunity for any set of ideas that people are ‘sincere’ about, what hope is there that we can analyse and judge and criticise all ideas impartially?

Erin O’Connor at Critical Timber continues to expand on her discussion of conformity in the humanities. There are new posts here and here.

This is a large, rich subject, and one that has been under discussion for quite a long time, for instance in the pages of the late lamented Lingua Franca. William Kerrigan has an excellent essay on his enchantment and then disenchantment with Derrida and ‘theory’ called ‘The Falls of Academe’ in Wild Orchids and Trotsky. David Lehman discusses the displacement of literature by literary ‘theory’ in Signs of the Times. Helena Echlin describes the misery of being a literature graduate student at Yale in this essay.

But my professors look at me as if I am the village idiot. It tires me out listening to long sentences that sound like English but lack all meaning. And resistance isn’t easy. Where there is noparaphrasable meaning, dissent is impossible, because there is no threshold for attack. It is like trying to disagree with a poem by Mallarmé. (Without the poetry.)

Without the poetry indeed.

In general, students and faculty at Yale do not explicitly espouse theory, or particular theorists. But high theory, whatever its merits or demerits, has validated the use of jargon. People who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages. The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism…

It sounds very like an email O’Connor received last year:

Hipper-than-thou graduate colleagues literally smirked when I voiced my thoughts in class, then snubbed me in the hallway; professors dismissed my papers as naive and romantic. In a private meeting, one professor questioned me about my “evident resistance” to critical theory, which she described as a “problem.” Chiding me to “rise above the undergraduate level,” she encouraged me to adopt more “rigorous” critical approaches. When I asked her to elaborate, she reeled off a dozen theorists–Jameson, Spivak, Said, etc.–whose “sophisticated” analyses should “inform” my thought.

Oy veh – can’t you just hear them. Naive and romantic, indeed! But ‘critical theorists’ themselves are never naive, oh hell no, they’re the only sophisticated people on the planet, they are. Yes and offering up the same old dreary list of red-hot ‘theorists’ is all that’s required for ‘informed’ thought. Because Jameson hung the moon, and Spivak invented the wheel, and no one thought about power until Foucault came along. That’s one of the rich ironies of the whole thing, of course: the way a discipline that prides itself on being cutting-edge and hip and non-naive is in fact so remarkably sheep-like and suggestible and line-toeing. Read Mark Crispin Miller’s account of attending a lecture by Homi Bhabha. The acolytes he saw talking to his friend after the lecture, who were so overcome with admiration and yet so unable to articulate why and of what…How can we not suspect that we have a bad case of Emperor’s new clothes here? That they are all simply unwilling to be the ones to say ‘That just sounded like a lot of empty words being shoved around like so many tiddlywinks to me’? No, so much better just to go on assuring each other that it was all terribly sophisticated and rigorous, and simply accuse anyone who doesn’t agree of ‘resistance’ to theory. The trick served Freud well, after all; it got him an undeserved reputation as a brave and lonely iconoclast; so let’s all do that. How else are we going to get tenure?

As B and W gets ever more popular, I find myself cringing at times. So many right-wing blogs seem to like us. Fortunately so do a lot of left-wing ones, as well as less-politically-classifiable ones, but all the same, I do cringe. But as my colleague likes to remind me, the left has only itself to blame (or, when he’s being ruder, it serves the left right). If they will insist on being woolly, if they will insist on ignoring evidence they don’t like – then they’re just giving away ammunition, that’s all. The more leftish voices there are trying to keep the left honest, the better, and if that’s a gift to the right too, so be it.

But then again. It’s not always quite that simple. People do have agendas, after all, and can use evidence for their own purposes. So I do cringe, and hesitate, and doubt, and ponder, sometimes when I find an article on a site belonging to the Cato Institute, or the American Enterprise Institute, or the Competitive Enterprise Institute (we should start calling ourselves the Butterflies and Wheels Institute, I think, it sounds so much more important). Getting the facts right is one thing, and using them to try to make a case for profit as the ultimate decider of every question is quite another. But then I shake the water out of my ears and remember that if the article is good on its own terms, if it makes its case, I should link to it and let readers draw their own conclusions. So that’s what I do – cringing all the while.

My colleague’s colleague (Julian Baggini) talks about this in an article at Open Democracy.

But it would be as wrong to dismiss Bradley’s claims because of their provenance as it would be to accept them because of a prior commitment to free trade. Bradley backs up his claims with plenty of evidence, and some of his recommendations are as eco-friendly as any green could wish…But there is little chance of Bradley or Beckerman getting a sympathetic hearing from greens or their leftist allies. This isn’t just because of willful narrow-mindedness. The problem is that there is a wider ideological war going on and in war, propaganda is more valuable than the truth. What people say is not as important as how their words will be used.

That’s just it, you see. How will the words be used. But then if that worry becomes a reason to hide or dismiss or ignore or conveniently ‘forget’ evidence or arguments that we don’t like – the result is obvious. Everyone will be systematically lying all over the place and any hope of getting policies based on reality instead of wishful thinking is gone.

Our ideological enemy’s enemy is our ideological friend; loyalty to a position, deserved or not, blinds us to the merits of our opponent’s case…A tract like Bradley’s can be readily dismissed – since it emanates from a free-marketeer, ‘he would say that’. But this game can be played on both sides: when greens dismiss Bradley’s thesis, the neo-liberals can just as easily say ‘they would say that’. Yet we should judge arguments on the basis of their premises and reasoning, not on the predictability of their conclusions.

He’s right you know. The other way only leads to Down the memory-hole. We’ll just have to get used to the odd cringe.

I had a bit of a dispute or anyway discussion with my colleague yesterday, about one paragraph in his article on the Bright idea. On this Durkheimian idea that religion does not necessarily entail a belief in the supernatural, that it can also refer to the sacred, and hence to inviolable unrevisable ideas. I haven’t read Durkheim, and I need to. I think the only reason I resist the idea is that that’s not what people usually mean by religion (a point Richard Dawkins makes in his article ‘The Great Convergence’). Discussions and arguments about religion can become frustratingly evasive and slippery when the parties are not talking about the same entity, and defenders of religion have a way of defining religion one way when talking to skeptics (you know, it’s feelings of awe or wonder, it’s that ‘oceanic’ feeling that Freud was so stonily devoid of) and quite another way when talking to fellow-believers. So I’m dubious about broadened definitions.

But the underlying idea I do think is interesting. I suppose it’s one of the essential background ideas of B and W that no beliefs, opinions, ideologies, theories, ideas, should be inviolable. At least none that amounts to a truth claim about the world. But other commitments or loyalties, on the other hand, ought to be. It would be a fine thing if all six billion plus of us had what we so obviously don’t, an unshakeable conviction that we must not murder, slaughter, ethnically cleanse, torture, rape, beat, injure anyone. It would be a conspicuously better world if that conviction were precisely not revisable by, say, ethnic or religious chauvinists on the radio whipping up hatreds, or mullahs or priests or rabbis or reverends lashing their congregations into frenzies of hatred and rage, or ‘teachers’ in madrassahs teaching boys to hate and despise and punish women.

But alas, no. That’s not how it is. Ideas about decent behavior are all too easily revisable – see Eichmann in Jerusalem, Ordinary Men, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. No, it’s the damn silly, useless, or harmful ideas that become sacred and inviolable, while the most necessary one is tossed out the window all too easily.