Christopher Caudwell on religion as static imagination

I have blogged here before about Christopher Caudwell. As I also mentioned, I used the title of his essay collection Studies in a Dying Culture (1938, followed by Further Studies in a Dying Culture, 1949) as the title of my podcast/radio series and one of my blogs.  Here is an interesting quote on religion from Caudwell's correspondence:

As I see it, religion undoubtedly represents very strong emotional realities, but they only become religion by religious people’s making them static, i.e. by demanding that their formulations (angels, salvation, heaven, hell, God, etc.) represent actual existent entities with the same reality of existence as matter. It is just this static formulation which is the core of any formal religion (Buddhism, Christianity, Mohommedanism). Separate that out and what have you left? Primarily two currents. One: art, or ‘poetry’—The fluid emotional experimenting with illusory concepts drawn from reality, either felt as illusory, as in our civilised age, or felt as real, but unconsciously acknowledged as illusory by the very fluidity of treatment, as in Greek myth (not Greek religion). The other current is sociological, and is symbolical of the tremendously powerful and emotionally charged currents that hold a society together, and express, in a subtle instinctive way, the fact that though individualities, we yet have a real being in common: buds of the same tree. We are not completely divided by ‘The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.’ The power of this bond is expressed in the attitude of men to a drowning stranger, a ship in distress, in time of war, and so on. You may feel a sociological conception of religion arid and empty of content. So do I, but that is because we are children of a civilisation that necessarily sees society as linked primarily by money exchanges, I mean sees that intellectually, whatever we may sometimes feel emotionally. The first criticism of Communism is always that men would never do their best work for society, regardless of income, and this expresses perfectly how debased and empty of content our conception of social relations has become. But the Greek citizen, or the merest tribal primitive, would see nothing strange in our conception of the society as the basis of religion. To him the city or tribe is joined with religion’s bonds; and even to‑day, when religions are so palpably failing, we see, in Italy and Germany, how men are bowled over by the sociological as opposed to the theological element of religion, in however questionable a guise it comes.

But why not leave it at that, you may ask, and, seeing religion’s aesthetic and sociological credentials, say ‘Pass friend, all’s well?’. Just because religion, to be religion, formulates its sociological and aesthetic beliefs in terms of science, of external reality. So that on the one hand art is held back from developing, made to accept the outworn forms of yesterday, and, on the other hand, man, mistaking social relations for divinely ordained permanences, is held back to the social groupings of yesterday. So the Greek, cramped into the City State, was torn by internecine warfare and fell victim to the barbarians he despised. So we, with our national formations, and national churches, are involved in imperialistic wars, in which ministers preach from the pulpit the divine approval of a just war. And it is no answer to say that genuinely religious people are pacifists, for we can only take religion as it appears, and to do otherwise is to mean by the adverb ‘genuinely’—‘religious in a way we approve’, which, from a historical view­point, taking religion as it has manifested itself, turns out to be not religious at all, but people who put social reality before theological formulations—heretics, prophets, and rebels.

SOURCE: Caudwell, Christopher, Letter to Paul [Beard] and Elizabeth [Beard]. 21 November 1935 (from London), in Scenes and Actions: Unpublished Manuscripts, selected, edited, and introduced by Jean Duparc and David Margolies (London: New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), extract: pp. 220-221.

W. E. B. Du Bois on Religion (7): "Divine Discontent"

Kahn, Jonathon S.  Divine discontent: The Religious Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Contents:

Introduction : Divine discontent as religious faith -- What is pragmatic religious naturalism, and what does it have to do with Du Bois? -- Pragmatic religious naturalism and the binding of The souls of Black folk -- "Love for these people" : racial piety as religious devotion -- Rewriting the American jeremiad : on pluralism, Black nationalism, and a new America -- "Behold the sign of salvation-a noosed rope" : the promise and perils of Du Bois's economies of sacrifice -- Conclusion : Beyond Du Bois : toward a tradition of African American pragmatic religious naturalism.

Description:

W. E. B. Du Bois is an improbable candidate for a project in religion. His skepticism of and, even, hostility toward religion is readily established and canonically accepted. Indeed, he spent his career rejecting normative religious commitments to institutions and supernatural beliefs. In this book, Jonathon Kahn offers a fresh and controversial reading of Du Bois that seeks to overturn this view. Kahn contends that the standard treatment of Du Bois turns a deaf ear to his writings. For if we're open to their religious timbre, those writings-from his epoch-making The Souls of Black Folk to his unstudied series of parables that depict the lynching of an African American Christ-reveal a virtual obsession with religion. Du Bois's moral, literary, and political imagination is inhabited by religious rhetoric, concepts and stories. Divine Discontent recovers and introduces readers to the remarkably complex and varied religious world in Du Bois's writings. It's a world of sermons, of religious virtues such as sacrifice and piety, of jeremiads that fight for a black American nation within the larger nation. Unlike other African American religious voices at the time, however, Du Bois's religious orientation is distinctly heterodox-it exists outside the bounds of institutional Christianity. Kahn shows how Du Bois self-consciously marshals religious rhetoric, concepts, typologies, narratives, virtues, and moods in order to challenge traditional Christian worldview in which events function to confirm a divine order. Du Bois's antimetaphysical religious voice, he argues, places him firmly in the American tradition of pragmatic religious naturalism typified by William James. This innovative reading of Du Bois should appeal to scholars of American religion, intellectual history, African American Studies, and philosophy of religion. 

 This is shameless intellectual charlatanism of the worst sort, part of the reactionary turn to religion to which intellectuals have caved or opportunistically joined. In our decaying "postmodern" age, anything goes.

From Adam & Eve to Cain & Abel

In line with an ongoing project, I finally put together a working though obviously non-comprehensive bibliography on unusual treatments of the Eden and Cain/Abel myths, actually two bibliographies, one in English and one in Esperanto (consisting of original and translated works in the respective languages), which do not completely overlap, as there is much that is found in only one of these languages:

• From Eden to Cain: Unorthodox Interpretations & Literary Transformations: Selected Bibliography


• De Edeno al Kaino: Malkutimaj Interpretoj & Literaturaj Pritraktoj en Esperanto: Bibliografio

Suggestions for additions are welcome.

Not everything gets translated, for example, Johannes Linnankoski's play in Finnish, Ikuinen taistelu (1903, ‘The eternal struggle’). See:

Johannes Linnankoski (Pseudonym of Johannes Vihtori Peltonen, 1869-1913): Literature in English & Esperanto

Ever since reading Byron's Cain in 1979, in conjunction with Blake's The Ghost of Abel, I have been interested in the reversal of the orthodox meanings of myths canonized in sacred texts. One sees an autonomous reconfiguration of myth in British Romanticism, in Blake, Byron, and Shelley. I have recently returned to this subject in engagement with literary uses and unorthodox interpretations of the Edenic and Cain/Abel myths, for example, with Imre Madách's classic verse drama The Tragedy of Man and with Erich Fromm's psychoanalytic and humanist interpretation of the Old Testament. I am interested in how far the meanings of these mythical constructs can be stretched in literary interpretations before their deployment bumps up again insuperable limitations. I am also interested in the fundamental flaws and intellectual duplicity of liberal religion. (See my previous post on Erich Fromm.)

Erich Fromm on religion (3): In the Garden of Eden

I probably first read Erich Fromm's distinctive analysis of the Biblical myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in his most important book, Escape from Freedom, which as a teenager I read several times. Over the next few years I read most of Fromm's books in English.  But as with several of my youthful interests, I moved on and only took him up again decades later.

I was always intrigued by his interpretation of the Eden myth, which makes a good deal of symbolic sense, i.e. that what Christians call the Fall really represents man's rupture with his unity with nature, with his unselfconscious animal state, whereupon he gains knowledge of his mortality and becomes embarrassed by his nakedness. I believe he is correct in this, but I cannot accept this as a complete interpretation. Several myths (my interest is primarily in the Edenic and Cain/Abel myths) have been reinterpreted, transformed, even turned upside down. But I think that, at the end of the day, there's an inherent limitation in myth, and I think the Edenic myth is a case in point.

Fromm includes variations of his analysis is various of his works. It seems to me that there is an unresolved contradiction in his perspective. His thesis on the Old Testament is that Judaism begins as an authoritarian religion and ends up as a humanistic one. I think that his approach is fundamentally flawed, but at the moment I would like to point out Fromm's admission that the Edenic myth shows evidence of its development in ancient times and the survival of repressed elements (see my previous post) and that God's judgment on Adam and Eve is a manifestation of authoritarianism. So, if the Edenic myth is interpretable both as anthropomorphically authoritarian and as symbolic of the rupture with the unity of nature, there is an unresolved discrepancy here. I think both assertions are true, but this is precisely why myth is inherently limited and liberal religion inherently ideologically suspect.

Here is my list of significant references.

Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941. In Britain: The Fear of Freedom, 1942; see pp. 27-28.

__________. Psychoanalysis and Religion [1950] (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), pp. 41-42.

__________. The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths (New York: Grove Press, 1957 [1951]), pp. 234-235.

__________. Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1961), Chapter 6, Marx's Concept of Socialism.

__________. You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Traditions. New York: Fawcett Premier / Ballantine, 1966. See pp. 21-23, 57-58, 96-98.

Summary: Naomi Sherer reviews... You Shall Be As Gods by Eric Fromm.

__________. “On Disobedience” [excerpt] (1984).

Erich Fromm on religion (2)

The Biblical myth begins where the Babylonian myth has ended. The supremacy of a male god is established and hardly any trace of a previous matriarchal stage is left. Marduk’s “test” has become the main theme of the Biblical story of Creation. God creates the world by his word; the woman and her creative powers are no longer necessary. Even the natural course of events, that women give birth to men, is reversed. Eve is born from Adam’s rib (like Athene from Zeus's head). The elimination of every memory of matriarchal supremacy is, though, not entirely complete. In the figure of Eve we see the woman who is superior to the male. She takes the initiative in eating the forbidden fruit; she does not consult with Adam, she simply gives him the fruit to eat and he, when discovered, is rather clumsy and inept in his excuses. It is only after the Fall that his domination is established. God says to Eve: “And thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.” Quite obviously this establishment of male domination points to a previous situation in which he did not rule. Only from this and from the complete negation of the productive role of the woman can we recognize the traces of an underlying theme of the dominant role of the mother, which is still part of the manifest text in the Babylonian myth.

This myth offers a good illustration of the mechanism of distortion and censorship that plays such a prominent role in Freud's interpretation of dreams and myths. Memories of older social and religious principles are still contained in the Biblical myth. But at the time of its composition as we know it now, these older principles were so much in contrast to the prevailing thought that they could not be made explicit. And now we recognize traces of the former system only in small details, over-reactions, inconsistencies, and the connection of the later myth with older variations of the same theme.

SOURCE: Fromm, Eric. The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths (New York: Grove Press, 1957 [1951]), pp. 234-235.

Erich Fromm on religion (1)

The following was written August 11, 2012:

Fromm was one of my teenage heroes, beginning with Escape From Freedom, which I read and marked up several times. I don't remember how I reacted to Fromm's writings on religion, but I approach this book again with a much sharper and more critical eye as to the weaknesses of Fromm's methodology, weaknesses shared with liberal religion:

Psychoanalysis and Religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is not a very good Wikipedia entry, but it's one entry point into Fromm's Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950). I know I read this book at least twice before, because my copy is full of marginal scribbling, beginning with "completed for the second time 7/19/73".

I read and liked much of Fromm's work in English. The only one that did nothing for me was his best-seller The Art of Loving. My criticism of him 35 years ago, when I last seriously engaged him, was that he was overly idealistic. I thought him rather uncritical and gullible in his selection of heroes; he even included Pope John XXIII somewhere, which I thought was unacceptably shallow on his part. And I think he was entirely too gullible about D.T. Suzuki's propaganda for Zen. But then I left Fromm alone until I re-engaged the Frankfurt School serious in the '90s.

This is an apt summary of the first 41 pages of the book:

Religious Experience Resources - Reviews

You may discern even from this bare abstract the conceptual beefs I will have with Fromm. Left out of account here is Fromm's advocacy of Freud as humanist and critique of Jung as reactionary authoritarian. Fromm was right about Jung.

The nature of this web site notwithstanding, this quote from Fromm nicely captures the existential dilemma of human existence which is one cornerstone of Fromm's work:

MY BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE: --Excerpt from: Erich Fromm " Psychoanalysis and Religion"

Fromm is interested, as religion and philosophy once were, in investigating the "soul", a word he uses to indicate something not captured in the purview of experimental psychology. Psychoanalysis and religion both have an interest here.

     I want to show that to set up alternatives of either irreconcilable opposition or identity of interest is fallacious; a thorough and dispassionate discussion can demonstrate that the relation between religion and psychoanalysis is too complex to be forced into either on of these simple and convenient attitudes.

. . . it is not true that we have to give up the concern for the soul if we do not accept the tenets of religion . . . . He [the pyschoanalyst] finds that the question is not whether man returns to religion and believes in God but whether he lives love and thinks truth. If he does so the symbol systems he uses are of secondary importance. If he does not they are of no importance. [p. 9]

Relegating the the symbol systems and belief to secondary status I think is quite wrong and indicative of Fromm's idealist abstractions. As we shall see later on, he was unduly influenced by the Talmud.

My memories of Fromm's other writings on religion are vague and scattered. I know at one time I read these relevant books:

The Forgotten Language; an introduction to the understanding of dreams, fairy tales, and myths (1951)
Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960)
The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture (1963)
You Shall Be as Gods: a radical interpretation of the Old Testament and its tradition (1966)

Life of Pi (film)

Saw the movie (spoiler alert:) Life of Pi yesterday afternoon. It was visually stunning. The acting was superb. The two-hour narrative was compelling, though I grew impatient with the long sojourn in the Pacific Ocean, which took up at least half the movie. As a film, it is definitely worth seeing. I have not read the novel.

However, thematically I have a big problem with it. For its major theme is belief vs reason, and while it gives reason some props, and preserves ambiguity, belief ends up having the upper hand.

The film is enacted mostly in flashbacks. Pi's story is supposed to convince a skeptical journalist of the existence of God. Pi himself as a young man develops a belief system in which he is a combination, Hindu, Christian, and Muslim. (Later in life, as a scholar, he develops an interest in Judaism.) His brothers mock him for adopting several religions at once; his father, however, is a rationalist and skeptic, warning Pi not to be fooled by the pageantry of religious ceremonies as they distract from the darkness underlying all religion. Pi, raised in a zoo, develops an early empathy with animals, and even tries to develop a rapport with a tiger named Richard Parker, who eventually becomes the second most important character in the tale.  But Pi's father warns him not to project his own human emotions onto the tiger, giving him a graphic demonstration of what tigers as predators are really like.

Later on (spoiler alert) Pi spends half the movie trapped on a lifeboat with the tiger Richard Parker. This goes on a bit too long, and though not boring, could tax the patience of a viewer who rejects the basic premise of the narrative, which involves a paradoxical symbiosis between man and tiger.

The story Pi tells about this sojourn on the Pacific is so incredible that the question arises at the end whether, without corroborating evidence, it can be believed, or for that matter, an alternative story that Pi makes up.  And this is related to belief in God.

Pi does in the end give credit to his rationalist father for teaching him the survival skills necessary to deal with the tiger.  So in the spirit of eclectic liberal tolerance, rationalism too occupies a place of honor, even if in the end a subordinate one, in the pantheon of religious pluralism.

The emphasis on the believability and desirability of one possible narrative among others on the basis of congeniality alone strikes me as decidedly postmodern and consonant with the liberal religiosity congenial to the upper middle class, with an inherent appeal to a middle class middlebrow or art film audience. These people are suckers for Pi's eclectic spirituality. I do not like this.

Given the foregrounding of Pi's relationship with animals, particularly the tiger, I thought at first that the spirit of the film was essentially pantheistic, but the violence of nature is not soft-pedaled. Pi constantly invokes God, which inevitably points to theism, despite the misguided, unrealistic empathy with the tiger, who has to be tamed anyway.

I also have a problem I have with the essentially individualistic character of spirituality, common among religious people irrespective of education and class, but obnoxious in a special way in bourgeois spirituality. It doesn't matter how many people suffer as long as one person is miraculously spared. The faith of the lone survivor is always vindicated in this world view. But the universe is not your friend, and even if by chance it seems to act that way upon occasion, it surely ain't everybody's friend.

The unbelievable fantasy dimension of the narrative (the ocean odyssey) is irritating even though clever, and its framing in the context of belief in the existence of God is really a waste of the imagination deployed in concocting this tale. And the beautiful visual imagery, reflecting the exquisitely developed technology now at the filmmaker's disposal, reflects the disparity between our advanced technological capability and the constriction of our ideological universe.

I wrote most of the above review upon arriving home yesterday, before I discovered this article:

Life of Pi author Martel hears from Obama, Winnipeg Free Press, 04/8/2010

According to the article, the author received a letter of praise from President Obama. Read attentively what Obama wrote, and tell me this does not confirm my analysis to a 'T'. It's fitting to contemplate this amidst all the fakery of today's presidential inauguration:

"My daughter and I just finished reading Life of Pi together. Both of us agreed we prefer the story with animals. It is a lovely book -- an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling. Thank you." 

I can't think of a more fitting basis on which to condemn this story.

Lenin: On Religion

I knew that this little book existed, but it is not easy to find these days. I wasn't sure whether I had a copy buried in my archive, but I found one. I know I read this many many years ago, and found it eye-opening. I've already blogged about several of the essays anthologized here. The ones I missed on my own, but which are included in this collection, are: (1) Tolstoy; (2) Classes and Parties; (3) Working Women's Congress; (4) Draft Programme.

Lenin, V. I. On Religion. 3rd rev. ed. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969. 83 pp.

Preface to the Russian Edition

"Socialism and Religion," in Collected Works, Volume 10 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), pp. 83-87. Originally published in Novaya Zhizn, No. 28, December 3, 1905.

"Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution," in Collected Works, Volume 15 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), pp. 202-209. Originally published in Proletary No. 35, September 11 (24), 1908.

"The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion" [translated by Andrew Rothstein and Bernard Issacs], in Lenin's Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), Volume 15, pp. 402-413. From Proletary, No. 45, May 13 (26), 1909. (Also available on the From Marx to Mao site.)

"Classes and Parties in Their Attitude to Religion and the Church,"in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), Volume 15, pp. 414-424. Originally published in Sotsial-Demokrat, No. 6, June 4 (17), 1909.

V. I. Lenin to Maxim Gorky, written on November 13 or 14, 1913 [translated by Andrew Rothstein], in Lenin's Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), Volume 35, pp. 121-124 [#55]. First published in Pravda No. 51, March 2, 1924. Sent from Cracow to Capri. (Text also available on From Marx to Mao site.)

V. I. Lenin to Maxim Gorky, written in the second half of November 1913 [translated by Andrew Rothstein], in Lenin's Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), Volume 35, pp. 127-129 [#58]. First published in 1924 in Lenin Miscellany I. Sent from Cracow to Capri. (Text also available on From Marx to Mao site.)

Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women, November 19, 1918, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), Volume 28, pp. 180-182. [On Religion states: Newspaper report published in Izvestia, no. 253, November 20, 1918.]

From the Draft Programme of the R.C.P.(B.: Section of the Programme Dealing With Religion, in Collected Works, 4th English Edition (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), Volume 29, p. 134 (out of pp. 97-140).

"The Tasks of the Youth Leagues", Speech Delivered At The Third All-Russia Congress of The Russian Young Communist League, in Lenin's Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), Vol. 31, pp. 283-99. Speech written and.or delivered on October 2, 1920, published in Pravda, Nos. 221, 222 and 223, October 5, 6 and 7, 1920. (Also available on the From Marx to Mao site.)

"On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (12 March 1922), in Lenin’s Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), Volume 33, 1972, pp. 227-236. First published in Pod Znamenem Marksizma, No. 3, March 1922. (Text also available on From Marx to Mao site.)

Notes

Name Index

Philip Kitcher: Militant Modern Atheism

Kitcher, Philip. "Militant Modern Atheism," Journal of Applied Philosophy,Vol. 28, No. 1, 2011.

While defending the "new atheists" on the matter of their objection to superstition, Kitcher is dissatisfied with the belief model of religion, suggesting an orientation model instead and offering a working taxonomy of religious orientations. Here is a key passage:

First, militant modern atheism is entirely correct in its assault on those types of religious life that fit the belief model. On the other hand, all three of the non-secular approaches that accord with the orientation model are defensible. In the case of the mythically self-conscious that is hardly surprising, and the militant modern atheists applaud when tho e who continue to think of themselves as religious firmly reject ‘supernatural’ entities — the militants think, however, that what remains hardly deserves the name of religion. More problematic, at first sight, are the cases of the doctrinally-entangled and the doctrinally-indefinite. I’ll suggest that doctrinal indefiniteness can be a reasonable expression of epistemic modesty, and that even doctrinal entanglement can be justified when it is the only way of preserving, in the sociocultural environment available, a reflectively stable orientation. Militant modern atheism tends to overlook this point because it is in the firm grip of the belief model, and thus assumes — wrongly — that correction of belief about the occupants of the cosmos can automatically be articulated into a satisfying vision of what is valuable in one’s life. Perhaps that is true for the privileged few, but it is not so for the less fortunate many.

I find Kitcher's justification of an orientation model unconvincing and incoherent, though indeed the belief model (which one sees in its most ridiculous incarnation in Sam Harris) is shallow and asociological. Kitcher however does go on to emphasize the inadequacy of religious experiences, however valuable they may be as pure experience, as justifications for beliefs and doctrines.

Kitcher also addresses the inadequacy of Dawkins' & Dennett's speculative evolutionary psychology, which is based on the belief model, or in the case of Dennett an incipient orientation model. Kitcher frames the inadequacy in terms of needs which may be unmet by Dawkins' perspective, given the fact that few can participate in the creative scientific life therein indicated. You can read Kitcher's conclusions for yourself. I find his treatment inadequate, and paradoxically, predicated on the same academic isolation as that of the militant atheists he criticizes: his tolerance is the tolerance of the privileged, and just as apolitical.

Humanistic Judaism: religion or philosophy?

I always liked the Humanistic Jews—in DC, the Machar people—but this is mealy-mouthed nonsense. Humanistic Judaism is not, as far as I know, traditional Judaism. The latter is unequivocally a religion; the former, I would think, depends on the individual perspective of the participants. But people should be clear about what they're advocating and not engage in mystification. If everybody's Jewish values were Einstein's, we'd now be in a better world, but "Jewish values" are not metaphysically given; they're no more than what you make them, especially when you're selective about the ideas you have extracted from tradition.

Moses Mendelssohn on reason, revelation, miracles & the practice of Judaism

Jennifer Michael Hecht in her book Doubt: A History (p. 365) adduces this quote; I am quoting a larger chunk:

Judaism boasts of no exclusive revelation of eternal truths that are indispensable to salvation—no ‘revealed religion’ in the usual sense of that phrase. Revealed religion is one thing, revealed legislation is another. The voice that let itself be heard on Sinai on that great day did not proclaim

‘I am the Eternal, your God, the necessary, independent being, omnipotent and omniscient, that recompenses men in a future life according to their deeds.’

This is the universal religion of mankind, not Judaism; and the universal religion of mankind, without which men are neither virtuous nor capable of happiness, was not to be revealed there. Actually, it couldn’t have been revealed there, for who would have been convinced of these eternal doctrines of salvation by the voice of thunder and the sound of trumpets? Surely not the unthinking animal-man who hadn’t thought his way through to the existence of an invisible being that governs the visible. The miraculous voice wouldn’t have given him any concepts, so it wouldn’t have convinced him—let alone the sophist, whose ears are buzzing with so many doubts and ruminations that he can’t hear the voice of common sense any more. He demands rational proofs, not miracles. And even if the teacher of religion raised from the dust all the dead who ever trod the earth, in order to establish an eternal truth, the sceptic would say:

‘The teacher has awakened many dead, but I don’t know any more about eternal truth than I did before. I do know now that someone can do and say extraordinary things; but there may be several such beings, who aren’t ready to reveal themselves just yet. And all this ·raising-the-dead routine· is so far removed from the infinitely sublime idea of a unique and eternal Deity that rules the entire universe according to its unlimited will, and detects men’s most secret thoughts in order to reward their deeds according to their merits, either here or in the hereafter!

Anyone who didn’t already know this, anyone who wasn’t saturated with these truths that are so indispensable to human happiness, and ·therefore· wasn’t prepared to approach the holy mountain, might have been bowled over by the wonderful manifestations but he couldn’t have learned anything from them. – No! All this was presupposed; perhaps it was taught, explained, and placed beyond all doubt by human reasoning during the days of preparation.

– Jerusalem: or Religious Power and Judaism (1782), edited by Jonathan Bennett

The most remarkable part of this passage is the quote from the hypothetical skeptic. Hecht summarizes other aspects of Mendelssohn's position (pp. 362-366). Mendelssohn severed belief from practice and, as Hecht notes, was convinced that Jewish practices could be adhered to without belief. He proved to be correct within a century and a half. However, if you read further in Jerusalem, you should note that this liberalized and rationalized view of religion remains burdened with a fundamental contradiction. It is quite true that Judaism differs from Christianity in that it is more about behavior than belief or salvation. Furthermore, in today's secular society this is the tacit orientation of most American Jews. However, there is none other than an irrational and authoritarian basis for adherence to the Torah or its "legislation". Hence Mendelssohn, though a hero of the Enlightenment (and specifically the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment), is at best a liberal figure, and not as radical as his contemporary Salomon Maimon, not to mention Spinoza. (See also my post on Maimon in my Esperanto blog: Salomon Maimon: filozofo & obstina judo.) Hecht is not concerned with this contradiction, though; she concludes with an apparently laudatory reference to Mendelssohn's pluralism.

Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" (3)

Follow-up on my preceding two posts: Here is my first intervention on the subject on the Ray Bradbury Message Board, 8-9 May 2003.

More importantly, there are several excerpts of the 1979 miniseries on YouTube. Here is one of the climactic scenes:




I presume this is part of the soundtrack. The entire recording was available for purchase and can still be found at amazon.com.

Ray Bradbury & religion

I first became interested in this topic upon revisiting the 1979 mini-series The Martian Chronicles, which I found thematically rich, lack of sophisticated special effects notwithstanding. I wrote an essay about it and transcribed a thought-provoking scene:

The Martian Chronicles & Our Subjective Desires (8/2/2001, rev. 5/17/2003, 6/1/2003)

In 2003, I participated in the Ray Bradbury Message Board. (This is the current incarnation of the message board. There are links to an older version I will also include.) Here I am extracting and mildly editing some of my interesting posts on Bradbury's fictional treatment of religion and principles of criticism.

*  *  *

posted 05-15-2003 12:32 AM

I would also want to look at the open-endedness of Bradbury's stories from a less open-ended view, i.e. what makes it objectively possible to draw opposing conclusions from the text? It's interesting that Bradbury shows Peregrine to be selfish and parochial in projecting his own need and thus torturing the Martian. If the Martian really were Jesus, it would be just as bad, because the selfishness would be just the same. It's this aspect of the story that I find brilliant. On the other hand, the priest's basic standing, his mission, and his quest are granted their dignity; only his provincialism and lack of knowledge of other things in the universe are lacking. Hence he comes off looking pretty decent in spite of his limitations.

I find this fascinating and I think revealing of Bradbury. I would not have let the priest off the hook like this, but then I'm a different person. Ultimately this aspect of the story is a bit too pious (and even conservative) for me. It is also guaranteed as much as possible not to offend the religious believer, while the author still remains a freethinker. In other words, Bradbury comes off as a religious liberal rather than an iconoclast against traditional religion. I think this is a shortcoming myself, a lack of critical edge, but what Bradbury does he does beautifully.

posted 05-15-2003 02:23 AM

Now when I say that I would not have been as lenient as Bradbury, that statement is only of value insofar as it allows us to inquire into the logical structure of Bradbury's fictional treatment of religious topics. You have explained fairly well both aspects of RB's treatment of the subject. On the one hand, he evinces skepticism towards limited and partial views which lay claim to more complete knowledge that he evidently thinks exists. On the other, he treats these limited views as components of a larger truth, a puzzle to be better put together if not completed in the future. This is the logic I believe needs to be delved into.

This structure allows a number of things to happen. One, spiritual experience, or the alleged spiritual content of belief systems, can be preserved intact and only closed-minded dogmatism rejected. One could even claim that such openness reflects the real meaning of traditional religious views more so than their dogmatic shells. Two, the specific nature of the partial truths revealed in various religious systems in relation to the yet undetermined whole truth remains indefinite and unspecified. Hence a religious liberalism that can be all things to all people except to die-hard fanatics who terrorize anyone who refuses to genuflect to their religious beliefs--I won't name names.

I find this an interesting logical structure, esp. in comparison to others that might be constructed. True, it's Bradbury's that matter here: not to disavow, not to endorse, but to understand. But one way of understanding is to dig into the assumptions involved. In stories such as "The Fire Balloons" and "The Messiah", RB is might generous to these priests--much more than they deserve, in my opinion, but what matters is the underlying logic of the stories. Are there other RB stories where his implied criticism of conventional religion is much harsher?

posted 05-15-2003 12:39 PM

I agree on the point about the difference between the symbolic indeterminacy of literature vs. the precision demanded by philosophical analysis. Literature embodies within it various models of reality, and we both agree that we can demand precision in our analyses of these models even though we would never demand of the artist an unequivocal advocacy of a particular position. However, by making this demand on ourselves, we can overcome our own inhibitions in getting to the bottom of the object of our scrutiny.

My personal acquaintance with Bradbury's views suffers from several decades of separation from his work. I'm going on memories of books I haven't read since some of you were born, most likely. But my immediate stimulus was an investigation into The Martian Chronicles and related stories, though I have had thoughts about the prescience of Fahrenheit 451, and generally about the boldness in the repressive 1950s of Bradbury's radical critique of American society. I actually never read "The Messiah"--I don't remember reading it--until a few days ago. Same with "The Fire Balloons." Instead, I was going on a vivid impression I did not forget even after two decades of the scene from the miniseries. I've rarely seen such a brilliant expression of a philosophical concept. Indeed, ideas matter more to me than special effects, which is why I find SF movies so insufferable, including the recent dumbed-down version of Solaris.

The priest's confrontation with the Martian Jesus was brilliant. It was all about his need, his projections, and the effects of his subjective needs, i.e. the torture of others. This is a profound observation you never ever see in popular culture. And if this Martian Jesus were the "real" Jesus, the message would be the same: why do you continue to torture me with your need? Because of YOUR need, I am held hostage to this form and am forced to suffer. Brilliant!

So the story stuck with me, as it resonated with my world view, a rare experience for me in watching TV. But it didn't even occur to me until reading these stories and reviewing this thread that the story in its religious liberalism still respects conventional piety much more than it deserves. Not that I would demand Bradbury rewrite his story to unequivocally condemn the priest, but you see it's just this aspect of Bradbury's work that demands further analysis. Because in it there may be some conventional thinking, sentimentalism, or even psychological inhibition (Midwestern?) that may explain how Bradbury handles his material across the board. I never thought about this before, but this consideration opens up new territory, to me at any rate.

posted 05-15-2003 07:51 PM

I cannot pursue a conversation that is predicated on an opposition to critical thought. Hence questions like why can't you just appreciate it as a story and don't worry about what it means, or what's wrong with conventional thought, are conversation-stoppers for me. As for distrust, I distrust people who don't think and who oppose critical thought.

The question of leniency to the priest opens up an avenue of deliberation which several people would like to shut down. "Tolerance" in this case means the destruction of critical thought and the endorsement of repressive institutions that have 2000 years of unspeakable crimes behind them. The question here is not to force ex post facto RB to write the story some of us might have preferred to be written, but to get at the assumptions behind his treatment. In reality, there are several kinds of priests: the sincere kind portrayed in Bradbury's stories, political priests of the right and left, tolerant priests, fanatical, authoritarian priests, child molesting priests, passive and dependent priests who join the church like others join the army so that they will be told what to do, etc. But whichever type you pick to focus on, you ought to consider that person's relationship to an authoritarian, retrograde institution like the Catholic Church. (Not that others don't serserve the same criticism, but this reprobate institution is the one udner consideration now.) In other words, instead of taking people at face value, their underlying assumptions about their place in the world have to be questioned, by me anyway. But feel free to go back to sleep, if you like.

RB happened to pick one or more of the better priests: showing their limitations still leaves them off the hook because of their sincerity and alleged good intentions. I'm not saying that it is a defect of the story that RB didn't treat his priests differently: it's that, by considering a range of possibilities, we can get at the assumptions underlying the story and therefore the "evidence" given us to react to in the various ways that we do. I was quite content to accept "The Messiah" (in its transmuted televised incarnation) as is for over two decades, because what I thought it did it did brilliantly. I still do, but now I ask more questions, after reading through this thread, in which I find the analysis of Mr. Dark to be very useful and everyone else's remarks to be completely useless. The priest is shown to be reacting to his subjective need, which means victimizing the Martian "Jesus." But it might as well be the real Jesus: even the most sincere worshipper is a parasite feeding off the misery of this poor deified Hebrew instead of standing on his own two feet. The way RB dramatizes this insight is a stroke of genius. So this can be a basis of further deliberation: what are the other consequences of such belief systems and the institutions that support them, even in their most benign moments? Does Bradbury enable us to push even further, does he push further himself, does he backtrack? Does his tolerance in the final analysis put the brakes on critique being carried to its ultimate conclusions?

Again, he need not have done more than he did in this one story. But as readers we ought to do more. If we don't, then we remain naive. You of course have this right, but I am not obligated to keep quiet about what I think for fear of offending your delicate sensibilities, which in the final analysis may not be well-intentioned either.

posted 05-16-2003 06:51 PM

We could take this further and ask, why take the priest seriously at all? Just my question. Bradbury shows up his limitations, but not too harshly. [GS--another interlocutor] also makes the crucial point of tying Christian imperialism to real, physical colonization. The Martian Chronicles is inter alia a critique of how the USA treated the territory it conquered after exterminating the Indians. Anyone who knows the basic facts about the acitivies of Christian missionaries knows the criminal role they played in terrorizing the native peoples. And the Indians did not take this crap lying down. Several Indian chiefs, among them Red Jacket, had scathing contempt not only for Christians, but for Christianity itself. In their arguments they showed themselves the equals of any secular humanist, contrary to the popular images of Indians current nowadays guided in every thought and action by spirit visions. The compulsion of irrational belief in unprovable assertions of allegedly earth-shattering import based on unverifable sacred texts written in distant times and places, there is the very essence of imperialism. This issue is conceptually distinct to be sure from a generic conception of the divine or of spirituality, but the claim that a particular religious doctrine is not false but just part of a greater truth is the sort of wishy-wishy tolerance that tolerates nonsense and harmful ideas in lieu of defining the specific relationships between particularistic doctrines and the generic sensibilities to be defended.

[. . . ] What do you think RB's use of the word "God" implies? Is hew just using it as a conventional symbol or does he mean it literally in a recognizable way? And how does it relate to his poetic style in general? Do you take him seriously as a poet, or do you think his poetry is rather conventional, second-rate doggerel?

posted 05-16-2003 11:05 PM

To reiterate the logic of this inquiry: what is the structure of RB's story/stories that enables us to argue for an emphasis on its/their lessons from our own varying points of view? What are the range of possible interpretations that may reasonably be based on the text itself? Also, what are the projections we are likely to make based on our own individual viewpoints? [MD--another interlocutor] presented a convincing case for RB's own views, those implicit in his stories and what is known of his explicit views.

One or more people identified RB as a Unitarian. The question of RB's known personal identification and the views implicit in his fiction are not synonomous though obviously related. They are not identical questions, because the very nature of fiction or poetry as opposed to a philosophical argument or assertion is that it sets up a concrete picture of a reality, which, instead of labelling itself, presents itself to us to interpret as we may, as does life itself. Artists create something concrete, whose implicit structure may even "prove" the opposite of what they consciously intended.

Naturally, facing this scenario, I interpreted it in a way congenial to me. Then I read about two pages of posts on this thread, and I realized I had to think about other aspects of the story which were never issues for me. From reading these posts, I concluded that the lack of sharpness to what the issues really are in life could result in a flabby judgment of the fictional narrative. Again, it's not a question of whether RB should have written a different type of story and prove that he is on one side or the other. Rather, by inquiring sharply into the issues raised by the narrative, and the range of possibilities enabled by its structure, including but not limited to RB's known or probable attitudes, we get define with greater depth the logical structure of suppositions that both the narrative and we make.

I'm pretty sure I'm not succeeding in getting this across, even to a sympathetic reader, nor do I think I would do much better by taking care not to arouse other people's hysteria. It's not an easy point to convey under any circumstances. [GS] has brought out some additional implications of "The Fire Balloons." An essential point of my last point, hysterical reaction notwithstanding, was: what is the relationship implied between generic spiritual concerns and specific doctrines? It's not that RB must conform to anyone else's notion, or that an interpreter should project his own views onto RB's intentions in order to feel more comfortable with the work. It's that, unless we can pose pointed questions that sharply compare our sense of reality to what we read, we are not going to fully understand the conceptual structures at play. In the final analysis we might wish to determine, without diminishing RB's achievement: what is RB capable of saying or showing in his work, and what not? Hence the problem of being wishy-washy, or mental inhibition, self-censorship, the fear of thinking unacceptable thoughts.

posted 05-17-2003 02:05 AM

I am not interested in building community; I see no value in it, especially not in intellectual matters. However, I am interested in exercising the mental discipline not to lose focus or control of the subject matter and to be able to advance a line of argument to the next step. Avoiding stagnation--becoming bogged down--is what I would like to strive for in these discussions. That way, disagreement doesn't have to lead to a dead end, at least not until there's nothing left to be said.

Perhaps the fault is mine, but you missed my point about the Indians. My characterizing them as equal to secular humanists (not secular humanists themselves!) in their reasoning ability to reject the authority of the Bible is the opposite of romanticizing Indians (or am I compelled to say Native Americans?), as people close to the earth, guided by spirit visions, and similar Noble Savage crapola. My intent was to show them as reasoning beings in their better moments just like anyone else. So it's not about idealization or romanticization. As for any missionaries doing any of them any good, that's news to me.

Now back to Peregrine. Yes, I accept your characterization of the story and its characters. Just extend that reasoning further and ask yourself why those priests were even priests at all. If course if they weren't, there would be no story and we would be up the creek, but suppose Peregrine's open-mindedness and capacity for self-examination had led him to even more drastic conclusions about the institution and belief system in which he was enmeshed. There are even further implications to this scenario than those brought out. No, it wouldn't make sense for RB to pursue them to the extreme in this one short story. The story might even lose its plausibility and effectiveness if it were pushed too far. But it is easy to see that one could draw far more drastic conclusions about being part of a church or a religion. (This has happened in history, too, even in theology, for example in Higher Criticism or the curious doctrine of Christian atheism or Death-of-God theology.) I'm suggesting that it is important to see this, not to criticize Bradbury or his story, but to clarify its implications, its emphases, its silences, its ramifications, and to extrapolate to the horizons of its conceptual universe or beyond if necessary.

Something tells me you understand what I'm getting at and something tells me you don't. There are at least two levels involved here--one of that of Bradbury's stories and personal philosophy--and the meta-level of evaluation of religion and perhaps other issues in general. Then there is the interaction between the two. It seems that the issue here is not so much about Bradbury himself, but how our appreciation of Bradbury interacts with our general understanding and what we look for in any situation. My suspicion is that wishy-washy tolerance serves as a brake to conceptual clarity. And BTW, the original historical purport of toleration was to respect people's rights and freedom of conscience, not their beliefs, two entirely separate matters.

posted 05-17-2003 02:52 AM

I don't know how one separates thinking from feeling. I would never trust anyone who did that. One of course communicates with the prospect of an ideal listener who will understand what one is talking about, however slim the likelihood of such an outcome. Brains are only handed out one at a time, though, and thus it is an immense struggle to formulate the notions in one's head and for others to get them into theirs. The key word is struggle. How can there be any friendship in ideas? Thought is by nature ruthless; its very existence is a struggle against inertia; it can't accept being dragged down, slowed down, or held down.

I also have a problem with all fandom--it's like joining a cult or a church. Sometimes people can share things they love in common. But how far does that commonality extend? Why expect it to go very far? That makes no sense.

When I first read through this thread before adding my two cents, I was very offended by both content and manner of expression, especially by certain religious persons whose names I won't mention and with whom I have no intention of conversing. They have no obligations towards me, nor I towards them. But since such people are used to having their way in this society--in fact terrorizing the whole society--I only wish to emphasize that they're not going to get away with it around me. Other than that, they can do their thing and I mine, and hopefully we can stay out of one another's way. There is only one obligation as I see it: to be able to advance some usable idea, and not to go round and round in circles.

Otherwise, I think all the pretence to civility and community just covers up a lot of hypocrisy and the contradictions in the application of one's alleged principles. Why not just take difference as axiomatic? At least that way one can negotiate differences. But you can't go around pretending that people--or nations--are unified when they are not, except by violence, by silencing people who contradict your lies.

posted 05-17-2003 10:59 AM

On Blake [ . . . .] the concepts of outline and of nature are fairly consistently characterized in Blake. Nature is considered as the "indefinite". "Outline" is characterized as the basis of virtue. Nature without man is barren, the lowest plane of existence. All conventional religion: Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam--the whole schmeer--along with deism and Lockean empiricism!--is really "natural religion", i.e based on the logic of brutality and domination that governs the empirical natural and social world. I've never seen any interpretation of this particular line, "Nature has no outline, but imagination has." Being literal-minded myself, I have my own interpretation.

FYI, this line comes from Blake's last engraved original work, "The Ghost of Abel"--very brief, only 2 plates--which is a heretical reading of a heretical reading of the Cain & Abel story. The first heretical reading was Byron's "Cain", which caused a major scandal. Blake defends Byron but suggests he did not go far enough. For Blake, the God worshipped by conventional Christians is really Urizen or Satan, the false God of empire, oppression, revenge, and "morality". Byron rebels against this God but is left in the wilderness, forlorn.

There is a whole a symbolic economy to Blake's words and symbols, which reflects and struggles against the ideological landscape of his time.

One might get something out of comparing and contrasting Blake with Bradbury, but I'm not going to touch it at this stage.

Since we are off-topic, just one more thing, as Colombo would say. Is it confirmed that Bradbury is a Unitarian? In the 19th century, the Unitarians were in hot water with the religious fundamentalists. There is also an indefinite association with the Higher Criticism and German philosophy, which was little understood but considered to be the fount of heresy. And then there was Bruno Bauer, dean of the Young Hegelians. Very little of Bauer was translated into English, so we are dependent upon paraphrases and interpretations of his views by others, such as this one:

"But if Christianity was universal and did not know the limits of previous religions, it was at the same time the worst religion: 'Christianity is the religion that promised men most, that is all, and took back most, that is all.' Bauer attempts to explain this ambivalence of Christianity thus: the nearer that religious consciousness approaches to truth, the more it alienates itself therefrom. Why? Because, qua religious, it takes the truth that is only to be attained to in self-consciousness away from self-consciousness and places it against self-consciousness, as though it were something alien to it. What is opposed to self-consciousness as alien is not only formally separate from self-consciousness (in that it stands outside it, is in heaven or comprises the content of some long past or far in the future events), but also this formal separation is backed up by an essential and real separation from all that goes to make up human nature. When religion has reached the point that man makes up its content, then the climax of this opposition has been reached."

I cite this as one way of approaching the issues raised by the ostensibly ecumenical spirit of RB's stories. I agree with [MD...] that the textual analysis of RB's own work is what matters here. But is there a single other person in this discussion whose treatment of the text has been based solely on what the text itself is saying? If it were, I would have entered this discussion in a very different frame of mind. But as I saw an ideology at work throughout this entire discussion, I said to myself: there's an obstruction at work here; what is it?

I think I've gone as far as I can without repeating myself endlessly. As for "community", as this brings us into the overall political situation, I would suggest that you look around you at what kind of society you are living in and what you think your place in it is. 'Nuff said.

posted 05-20-2003 11:40 PM

Do you think that Bradbury's conception of space travel as reaching toward God and finding the latter's finger approaching his is comparable to Arthur C. Clarke's notion, e.g. in 2001? If either one is right, though, wouldn't it depend upon space travel broadening the conceptions of the human race? It has been said that travel broadens the mind, but then again there's the classic American tourist: he stays in fancy hotels and acts as if he is back home.

posted 05-30-2003 02:16 AM

My video set of The Martian Chronicles miniseries finally arrived in the mail two days ago. I'm in the process of watching one of the three parts per night, which is two hours a pop. I've written some running commentary under a different rubric on this discussion board.

It's a good thing I ordered this, because I was correct in supposing that the telecast from which my home-made tape originated was a butchered version. I've watched parts one and two so far. Watching part 2 this time, I got to see the one scene that was cut from my version. In between the scene where David first reappears and disappears and his return to the Lustigs, there is a long segment featuring Frs. Peregrine and Stone. Lo and behold, it is the story of "The Fire Balloons", with only the names changed.

While at first the priests irritated me, as the cinematic depiction of all clergy does, their contrary points of view and Peregrine's strong interest in the Martians caught my interest. When they encounter the three blue spheres after getting lost walking their way back to the settlement, the priests' contrary reactions are noteworthy. Stone thinks they are the devil's work, but Peregrine has a positive attitude. The spheres save the priests' lives from an avalanche, but Stone's opinion does not change. While Stone is asleep, Peregrine tests his theory that they are intelligent, moral beings by jumping off a cliff, whereupon he is rescued by a sphere. Peregrine offers to build a Martian church, but the sphere declines.

I noticed something interesting about Peregrine's expression of faith. For all the talk of sin and meeting Christ, he has a different attitude toward the Martian spheres not from any faith in God but faith in his fellow creatures. This is quite clearly the opposite of Stone, who would rather find the inhuman in the human than the human in the inhuman. Peregrine jumps off the cliff with faith not in God but in the good will of the spheres. Very interesting.

Ray Bradbury's messianism in outer space

Here is a piece (with only one or two editorial tweaks) I wrote on 20 May 2003 and posted on the Ray Bradbury Message Board. (This is the current version of the board.)

I finally got a chance to read Ray Bradbury's “The Man”, which I found in The Illustrated Man. My first association is with the Jewish writer Franz Kafka, who wrote that the Messiah would come when he was no longer necessary.

At first I thought this story was pretty insipid, like an exceptionally overbearing didactic episode of The Twilight Zone. But the story's last substantial paragraph made me reconsider. The image of the captain chasing after the Man on planet after planet, just missing him by a day, an hour, a second, etc., intrigued me. It temporarily redeemed an otherwise unappealing story.

Because the captain wanted to chase after the savior/Messiah/Christ as if he were hunting just another material entity external to himself, but with the wrong attitude, he would never find what he was looking for. The problem, of course, was within. And in that sense this is an arresting image. But it also highlights the contradictions of the story that tend to plunge it back into banality.

The essential contradiction is this: the ability to recognize the presence of the savior depends upon inner attitude, but with the proper state of being, the concept of an external savior is meaningless. The savior appears: the aliens are digging him; the captain doesn’t believe the rumors, and doesn’t and wouldn’t appreciate it anyway. So how could an external source prompt the appropriate reaction where the receptivity didn’t already exist?

The element that spoils the whole story and pitches it back into conventional mores is faith. The struggle between the captain and his officer becomes one of world-weary cynicism vs. simple faith of simple people. A pretty dull concept if you ask me.

Yet there is something else of interest to consider. The captain is a hardened autarch and knows only how to bully people. Yet once he learns that the Second Coming is real, he becomes obsessed. But as the mayor asks him: what are you going to say when you meet him? The captain is caught in a contradiction which his culture has bequeathed to him. He operates from only the crassest of pragmatic motives and assumes everyone does the same. Yet once part of his cultural indoctrination is triggered—the prospect of salvation—he wants that too, though it is no part of his practical reality. And then the paradox is that when he pursues it, he bases his pursuit on his faulty selfish premises, and so fails.

It’s an interesting contradiction when you think about it, and it’s a contradiction of a whole civilization and its symbolic economy, and not just of a sour individual. The need for faith is as much a sickness as the sickness it’s trying to cure. So while Bradbury is astute up to a point, he also unconsciously reproduces the contradictions of conventional thinking. The polarity of corrupt civilization and pastoral innocence is an old idea. Utopian thinking sits quite comfortably with the conservative, repressive institutions of civilization. This was true for the author of the original “Utopia” as well. Bradbury injects a new twist into an old story, but in the process of exploiting this ambiguous polarity between credulous pastoral innocence and cynical civilizational guilt, he places himself in ambiguous position whereby he can be interpreted as (and may himself be) conservative and liberal at the same time.

Ethics as Metaphysics & Ideology

“Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” – Theodor W. Adorno [1]

Ethics as a philosophical or ideological subject is both social and individual. Its purview is the regulation of individual behavior under an assumed social context. It may also involve a critique of the social context in so far as reality does not live up to ideals. But the ideals are as a rule predicated on existing social reality even when critical of it.

Marx’s & Engels’ dictum that in class society the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class holds here. The virtue ethics of an Aristotle or Confucius presupposes and justifies the repressive institutions of the existing order. Presumably some concepts of use may be extracted from them, but only selectively, shorn of their metaphysical and sociopolitical obfuscations.

In bourgeois society ethics undergoes certain transformations. Kant is a superb example of an individualistic ethics which both criticizes pragmatic social reality and reflects the presuppositions of emerging bourgeois society. Self-submission to an abstract concept of duty, irrespective of circumstance or inclination, the illusion that one can actually live as if others could be regarded as ends and not used as means, as if this were an individual matter, represents the quintessence of bourgeois illusion, of fairness and strict accounting in the marketplace, even as it criticizes the actual by reference to the ideal.

We could go through the various systems of ethics and unearth the tacit assumptions behind each—utilitarianism or any ethical calculus being the most obvious correlate to the quantifying tendencies of the capitalist marketplace and the money economy.

Ethics at this historical stage goes hand in hand with the secularization of society. What about ethics postulated as the basis of a movement or institutionalized philosophy? Here the secularization of religion comes into play.

Consider the Ethical Culture movement initiated by Felix Adler. Adler, raised in the rabbinical tradition, was philosophically a Neo-Kantian and politically a social reformer. If we move ahead to the forging of the first Humanist Manifesto of 1933, we see also an inclination towards social reform as well as the secularization of religion: the Unitarian influence in the formation of this humanist movement was considerable. [2] We have here, as in other instances, a transition from theology to philosophy and a liberalization of religion to the point of jettisoning its supernaturalist baggage.

In the ensuing decades we have seen episodic issuings of new manifestoes, publication of books enunciating the principles of humanism & delineating secular ethics, endless regurgitation of the same generalities, with varying specifics in laundry lists of social concerns. [3] The abstract principles of liberal democracy and individual human rights have been laid claims to along a spectrum of political positions, from libertarianism to anti-Stalinist Marxism. [4] To the extent that abstract humanistic principles serve as rallying points to focus attention and forge coalitions in differing social situations, they may be useful, though hardly resulting in a full-fledged sociopolitical world view as is often claimed.

Once one speaks of creating a new ethical system to be formulated and promulgated as a doctrine, especially as general principles have been enunciated time and time again and are already part and parcel of the moral arsenal of liberal democratic values, we see how little advance has been made in the past two centuries to transcend idealistic metaphysics. Whether it is individual ethics or a planetary ethic, what could be more pointless and ineffectual in the absence of a serious social movement that provides a comprehensive social analysis and platform? [5] For all the prating about the scientific method and scientific morality, a secular ethics is pure ideology, a metaphysical massage for the upper middle class intelligentsia and assorted entrepreneurs, a superimposition of a schema of platitudes onto social reality concomitant with a numbing of any serious analysis of class society, and absent serious linkage to reform movements in the manner of the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.

Ethics as a new religion or religion-substitute had its time as a stage in the liberalization of religion and the reforming instincts of a “liberal class”, useful up to a point even with its limitations. But what it represents is long obsolete, actually retrograde by comparison with today’s needs and apparently progressive only with respect to right-wing religious revanchism. Religious humanism apes the institutional structures and moralistic sermonizing practices of its supernaturalist forbears. Secular humanism forgoes religious humanism’s obvious mimicking of religiosity (albeit in attenuated, watered-down forms), but preserves the ideological ornamentation of middle-class respectability: “we’re nice people and we have an ethical catechism to prove it.” Such earnest naïveté has lost its charm. [6]

[1] From Minima Moralia (1951). See also Wikipedia entry and Lambert Zuidervaart, Review of Deborah Cook (ed.), Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts. The standard translation by E.F.N. Jephcott is available in hard copy. Another translation can be found online: Minima Moralia, translation by Dennis Redmond (2005).

[2] Edwin H. Wilson,  The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto.

[3] See my bibliography, Secular Humanism—Ideology, Philosophy, Politics, History: Bibliography in Progress.

[4] See for example Tolerance and Revolution: A Marxist-non-Marxist Humanist Dialogue, edited by Paul Kurtz and Svetozar Stojanovic (1970) and Humanist Ethics: Dialogue on Basics, edited by Morris B. Storer (1980).

[5] Paul Kurtz still adheres to a social liberal, social democratic perspective and his condition of manifestoitis is chronic. See Humanist Manifesto 2000: A Call for a New Planetary Humanism and Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular Principles and Values: Personal, Progressive, and Planetary (2010).

[6] The ideological limitations of humanism were criticized by anti-Stalinist Marxists a half century ago and more. I have blogged twice about George Novack (William F. Warde, pseud.), “Socialism and Humanism” (1959) and Paul Mattick, “Humanism and Socialism” (1965), criticizing both. Mattick’s application to this post is more diffuse. Novack never updated his analysis from the 1930s, when Trotskyism and the liberal humanist movement were serious ideological contenders and competitors. Neither Novack nor Mattick seriously address the need for specific secularist campaigns and coalition politics even in their time, a lapse now especially obvious in the absence of the left wing working class movements of yesteryear. 

W. E. B. Du Bois on Religion (6): Race & Biblical Metaphor?

Terrance Macmullan, University of Oregon
Treasure Hidden in the Field: The Significance of Biblical Metaphor within W.E.B. Du Bois's Conception of Race 
(March 8, 2002, session on "Du Bois and Dewey")
Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 29th Annual Meeting, University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME, March 7-9, 2002.

This is a rather pathetic, self-contradictory, and ultimately ambiguous attempt to highlight the alleged religious dimension of Du Bois. If it were simply a matter of highlighting Du Bois' use of Biblical metaphor as rhetorical strategy, and even to suggest the symbolic reference of Du Bois' rhetoric has been overlooked, there would be nothing controversial here. But Macmullan is apparently after more. In the first paragraph Macmullan claims that Du Bois' religious rhetoric is both prophetic and pragmatic, which of course brings to mind the philosophical empty suit of Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism, or preaching with footnotes. While there may be some use to interpreting properly the notion that "that each race bears a gift", it is a mystical notion left over from the 19th century that is best left to the past.

For emphasizing Du Bois' secularism and downplaying the spiritual dimension, Macmullan criticizes Shamoon Zamir, Adolph Reed Jr., Anthony K. Appiah, Lucius Outlaw, and even Cornel West. All this while admitting time and time again that Du Bois was a freethinker. Had Macmullan stuck to statements like the following, there would be no need to object:

His use of religious language stemmed from a recognition of the fact that the idea of race in America emerged largely from a religious discourse, and that this same discourse must be instrumental in its reform.

However, Macmullan implies more with formulations such as the following:

Where Christians at the time succored Africans in America with the image of the Lamb (the chosen child of God that humbly bears suffering for the sake of universal salvation), Du Bois calls on his fellow African Americans to read their plight as the trial of a prophetic people who must boldly speak out against their oppression that others might learn the consequences of cruelty and the need for love.  

He further explicates the Biblical references, and continues:

If we take Du Bois’ biblical orientation to heart, we see that the race-specific ideals of life are prophetic gifts that are of unsurpassable value to those outside the race, yet are also potentially dangerous for the gift-bearing race. 

 The phrase "Du Bois’ biblical orientation" is misleading. Macmullan commences his conclusion:

When we attend to his use of religious language, we better see how and why the racial gift is a bridge across the racial divide made possible by the divide itself. 

 . . . and concludes:

Du Bois developed a perspective on race that is still a vital tool in ongoing efforts to heal the invidious racism of the last four centuries. However, in order to fully understand his idea of race, and in order to fully reach into the lived experiences of most people, we need to not only study the religious language at the heart of his concept but also engage the religious discourses that perpetuate outdated ideas of race.

This position is ideologically bankrupt.  There is no vital tool here, but an obsolete metaphorical framework that may have been justified for its time, but can serve no constructive purpose now. The only proper way to engage religious discourses now is to obliterate them. Furthermore, the spiritualistic concept of race is not an advance over the later and more invidious biological concept, but is rather a retreat to German Romanticism, an absolutely reactionary move in light of two essential considerations: (1) it is essentially anti-scientific; (2) it could not be more at variance with the contemporary reality of American society, in which the meaning of culture, let alone of race, is so radically mediated and altered from the past, that the very idea of a mission or a coherent social entity that could be the bearer of a mission, is utter nonsense.

How rotten is this marriage of multiculturalism and the academic retooling of classic American pragmatism? How high the moon?

Howard L. Parsons: East meets West (2): Naturalizing the religious impulse

I have uploaded three excerpts from this book I started to review in a previous post:

Parsons, Howard L. Man East and West: Essays in East-West Philosophy. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1975. xi, 211 pp. (Philosophical Currents; v. 8)

Howard L. Parsons on the Role of the Philosopher

This is Parsons' general prescription for the philosopher's task and not specifically tied to the theme of the book.

Howard L. Parsons on Naturalist vs. Supernationalist Perspectives on Value

Parsons is skeptical both of Barth's neo-orthodoxy and Tillich's liberal theological palaver about 'being'. We should seek the natural basis of human dependencies instead of railing against modern man and hyping his dependence on a transcendental source. Progress means that theology tends to become anthropology. Parsons seeks to preserve some of the traditional concerns, but with an updated, naturalistic world view. This is an example of how he typically expresses himself:

Yet a full anthropology, which sees man in society, history, and nature, in the full stretch of space and time, might bring modern humanism to affirm, in a new and qualified way, some of the assertions of ancient religion.

While I've seen much worse in my time, I find this sort of formulation conceptually muddled. Parsons also evinces an excessively deferential attitude toward sacred figures and what others call the great spiritual teachers. On the plus side, Parsons sees the human symbolizing capacity as having from the beginning taken a wrong turn into superstition. Parsons also criticizes Sartre's mournful nostalgia for the outmoded supernaturalist position.

Howard L. Parsons on Naturalism & Religion: Conclusion

Parsons sums up his position in the final pages of the book. Parsons is mostly on track, but I object to his characteristic formulations, e.g.:

Is it possible to combine the best of the religious perspective with the power of scientific knowledge and control now in our hands? It is not only possible; it is necessary, if we are to be saved from a science determined by men who do not understand or appreciate the evolutionary role of man in nature and his responsibility toward it, and from religions that do not understand and even repudiate science. The first would give us man divorced from nature and from values grounded in nature; the second, values divorced from man and nature. In both cases, values become arbitrary and, in the event of conflict, subject to settlement by capricious preference and arbitrary power.

 In his essay "Theories of Knowledge: A Dialectical, Historical Critique" Parsons evinces an awareness of the interplay between positivist and irrationalist tendencies in the ideological life of bourgeois society. However, he tries too hard to have it both ways, affirming modernity and criticizing tradition while fudging his analysis of the allegedly admirable facets and impulses of pre-modernity. There is both sophistication and epistemological repression going on here, which I suspect is related to his brand of Marxism with its lack of recognition of the ineluctable impossibility of socialism in rapidly modernizing peasant societies.

Ernst Gellner on ideology

Gellner, Ernst. "Notes towards a Theory of Ideology," L'Homme, tome 18 n°3-4 (juil.-dec. 1978), pp. 69-82.

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Gellner insightfully targets a few key characteristics of religious ideologies, most notably Kierkegaard, but falls down on a general theory of the subject. His first mistake is to characterize ideology as a noun: "Ideologies are systems of ideas or beliefs." But ideologies are also relations between persons and sets of ideas or beliefs, and relations between persons and the (social world), which involve relations between the sets of ideas or beliefs and the world. Ideology is a concept with many meanings and theories behind it, but most powerfully, it designates a verb more than a noun. It is not just the ideas one holds, but one's relationship to one's own ideas and to social practice that reinforces the relationship. Hence even perfectly rational sets of idea or beliefs can still function ideologically in the bad sense, i.e. in a fashion which remains unconscious to the holders and appliers of those ideas or beliefs.

Gellner proceeds to dissect Kierkegaard, singling out the notion of "offensiveness", in Kierkegaard's case, the offensiveness of Christianity to reason. Gellner concludes that ideologies must simultaneously attract and repel, that this must be an inherent property. The inner tensions and experiences of offensiveness on the part of potential candidates for ideologization serves as a confirmation of the validity of the ideology itself. Religious existentialism plays on an anxiety about reason and attacks the very notion that people's view of the world can be rationally warranted, claiming a deeper insight into the human condition. Simultaneous menace and attraction/temptation constitute the driving force of the ideological process.

The very eccentricity of ideologies distinguish and isolate them from other ideas, including commonsense notions.

Kierkegaard, like Pascal before him, trades on despair. Either one is despairing or too lacking in consciousness to recognize one's despair. Hence exploitation of vulnerability is key to the process.

Ideologies claim to be intellectually sovereign, they monopolize validation, establishing not only the truth but the criteria for distinguishing truth from falsehood.

However, there is a hidden duality here. Ideologies, in attempting to lure prospects and produce converts, must tacitly admit the context of a broader world which they did not create and do not maintain under their control. Ideologies claim to be all-embracing, but must implicitly posit by contrast a richer empirical world and implicitly accept its conventions.

With this realization, Gellner attacks the premises of two modern theologians, Barth and Tillich, who represent opposite extremes. Barth's disregard for justifying Christian belief does not do justice to the hidden ambivalence of all ideologies, and any belief system could be posited as an unassailable absolute, this Barth neglects the very basis of the efficacy of ideological indoctrination. Tillich goes to the other extreme, eliminating all offense by equating 'God' with 'ultimate concern', by which logic every man has a God, but not necessarily the same one.

There is a footnote here about "fashionable Marxist theology", i.e. that Marxism cannot be transcended because it is the philosophy of our age (combined with a remark about the underdetermination of theory in philosophy of science), and attempts to refute it confirm the bourgeois mentality of the skeptic. I presume Gellner is alluding to Sartre here. This does not seem like much of an argument in embryo against Sartre, and there are far more apropos targets. As I will argue later on, Gellner is ill-equipped to analyze the ideological (in the bad sense) functioning of Marxism, particularly in its worst Marxist-Leninist incarnation.

Gellner's next concern is to distinguish between two oft-conflated issues:

(1) the social construction of reality
(2) the role of ideology within reality

The first concern has become a fad, a super-holism (my term, not Gellner's) according to which systems of ideas are borne not by individuals but by cultures or languages, which leads to relativism (my term, not his). Oddly, Gellner finds this fad nurtured by Chomskian linguistics, i.e. the notion of a universal generative capacity (p. 77, 79). This is nonsense, but what Gellner is really after is French structuralism, or the misapplication of structural linguistics to social phenomena which are nothing like languages. Bourdieu, who quotes, Chomsky, is criticized here (78).

However and to what degree the social construction of reality is effected, ideology has a narrower scope; it is something that happens within the world. This smaller question may be more manageable than the broader one.

Finally, Gellner aims to exclude pre-literate, tribal religions from the category of ideology: the formulation of doctrine is too weak for there to be competition between doctrines rather than magical practices.

While Gellner emphasizes at the end that he is offering notes, not a complete theory, I am nonetheless dissatisified. His greatest insight is into the coercive mechanisms to be found in Kierkegaard, and the complementary defects of Barth and Tillich. This provides an "in" to the mechanisms of faith-based ideological processes. The conversion experience and the "leap of faith" are crucial in this context. Others delimit the scope of "ideology" in different ways, if at all. Gellner cuts off preliterate religious and magical superstitions while focusing on religion and saying little about secular ideologies. Others limit the notion of "ideology" to the modern world, excluding all pre-modern religious societies. Other than the dig at Marxism, which comes down to an implied dig at Sartre, Gellner curiously fails to address a crucial social fact of our time, ideology not based in religion.

I'm guessing that his implied takeoff point is that of a bourgeois liberal out to expose the irrationality of 'extremism', i.e. the left and the right. If ideologies are totalizing though not total, then there must be mechanisms insulating them against criticism, for which Gellner offers a carrot-and-stick mechanism as to how they operate. One might assume that a conversion experience is necessary by which lured recruits take that leap of faith by which an ideology is internalized as a self-authorizing master interpreter of social phenomena. The surrender of rational individual autonomy that Kierkegaard sadomasochistically gloried in could presumably be duplicated in secular ideologies.

However, this is too crude a construct by which to understand the various shades of Marxism and how they operate or not to insulate their assertions from rational criticism. Hopefully, Gellner is not as stupid as Popper. Certainly, the history of the Communist Parties (and their Trotskyist antagonists) provides ample examples of where Marxism in practice went wrong and substituted self-authorizing dogma and manipulation for critical thought. To analyze this is detail requires another post.

For more on Gellner and links, see my entry on Gellner in the first incarnation of another of my blogs, Studies in a Dying Culture.

Mind of the Bible-Believer (prefatory note)

I never got around to writing a full review, but here's a fragment adapted from a post written 30 June 2007:

[In May 2007] I began reading this weighty, demanding 400-page tome (17 May - 3 June):

Cohen, Edmund D. The Mind of the Bible-Believer. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986.

It will take some effort to fully digest it. There are several comments on the web, and a couple of mini-reviews from the Christian opposition as well as from liberal Christian semi-sympathizers, but there is only one real full review from the atheist camp (accompanied by the lyrics of a Zappa song), summarizing the Christian techniques of mind control:

"The Mind of "the Bible-Believer": a critique of the book by Edmund D. Cohen (Positive Atheism)

From other people’s criticisms, it seems that these are the main areas in which to evaluate the book:

(1) the schema of mind control techniques
(2) the psychological theories adopted by Cohen
(3) Cohen’s account of the history of Christianity, in general and in the USA
(4) Cohen’s thesis that the founders of Christianity fully intended to engage in mind control.

Cohen’s sympathizers are most sympathetic to (1), and most critical of Cohen’s take on (3) and (4).
My position going into this: I myself am not in a position to judge (3). But I am on the lookout for the incorporation of sociological factors. Psychology in isolation from sociology cannot do the job. Perhaps Cohen’s account of the conditions of the Roman Empire in which Christianity was generated will prove insightful. Perhaps Cohen will have a good explanation, as he purports to, as to why Christianity was so successful in penetrating all different types of cultures.

I still have not evaluated the book after reading it. There’s a heavy-duty Freudian and Jungian preparation, before an immersion into a couple hundred pages on the New Testament’s mind-control techniques. I will return with a more detailed critique.

Liberal religion vs. the 'new atheists'

"Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination . . ."

-- Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

Should I Quit Being Christian? Some Questions for the New Atheists
Tikkun / By Be Scofield.
AlterNet, June 28, 2010

"The new atheists negate the contributions of religious people in the reforming of religion and the resisting of injustice."

A long whine about the "new atheists", with some interesting tidbits about Martin Luther King, Jr. Problem is, the historical information adduced here leads to ahistorical conclusions about the future . . . where to go now that we know what we know . . . and so the author ends up being as useless as the historically illiterate Sam Harris.

Scofield does not understand the problem with wishy-washy liberals, whether in religion or other matters. He fixates on certain statements by certain "new atheists", i.e. that moderate religionists pave the way for the extremists. He is so put out by such a blanket assertion, he seeks to disprove it with loads of historical information about the contributions of liberal religionists to progressive political action and social reform. This, I suppose, is consonant with Tikkun's soft and cuddly notion of progressive politics, a milder version of more radical liberation theology.

There is, however, a problem with this argument: the failure to distinguish between yesterday and today. Secular humanism emerged from the long and painful struggle to liberalize religion, passing through the stage of liberal religion and in the USA very much through the medium of Unitarianism. The first Humanist Manifesto of 1933, itself largely a product of social liberalism, already surpassed the level of today's whiny religious liberals. The question is not one of demanding that the past conform to the imperatives of the present and future, but of what our standards should be now.

Scofield fails to attack Dawkins and especially Harris where they are weakest: their ignorance (in the case of Harris, shameless ignorance) of history and indifference to sociological analysis. Harris is the only "new atheist" who is actually new on the scene. The others and their colleagues have been at it for decades and still show no curiosity to learn anything new about history or society. The exception to the rule is of course Christopher Hitchens, who knows more about both than the rest of the organized humanist movement combined, but who has jumped the shark and utilizes his leftist past as petty gossip.

Instead, Scofield obsesses over this one isolated idea about moderate religionists, ignoring the purport of the comment for today's world, instead escaping into the past, including the all-embracing bosom of Dr. King, to justify the squalid middle class feelgood self-indulgence in nicey-nice prettification of ugly reality.

Unfortunately, neither Scofield nor the "new atheists" seem to be aware of what's wrong with upper middle class make-nice liberal religion. What is most noteworthy here is the middle class inclination towards respectable niceness and liberal guilt. (For the panderers to liberation theology, it's radical guilt, which is liberal guilt raised to the nth power.) And characteristically disgusting is the exploitation of Dr. King, the gold standard of the social gospel. Interestingly, Scofield tells us here that the Kings seriously considered joining the Unitarian Church, but realized they could not be socially effective with black Southerners by doing so. If this is so, it's not for us to judge King in hindsight, because he was not a free agent, but what about us? Why must we be shackled with the chains of the past?

It's one thing to be Mr. Nice Humanist walking the plush grounds of the Harvard Divinity School, it's quite another to fight one's way out of the culture of poverty and struggle to transcend the abuse heaped on one by social dysfunction, bad child-rearing practices, fear-based enforcement of social conformity, and degrading assaults on psyche and intellect. Such people don't live in a nicey-nice world and know what the struggle for the human mind is worth. It's war.

Ideological obfuscation does not help anyone, and progressives reveal something about their own weak politics in so indulging. Pompous gasbags like Cornel West and Michael Lerner are quite limited in what they positively have to offer compared to the harmful nonsense they spew and their contribution to the theocratic domination of public discourse.