Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: "Slapstick"

What would I have thought of Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s 1976 novel Slapstick had I read it when it came out? I had read his 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions, but some time in the interval I had moved on to other interests until 2006, when I was given Timequake. Vonnegut died in 2007, and I know around this time I had read some of his later nonfiction and began to re-read a couple of novels. I rediscovered Vonnegut as I had rediscovered other people I had drifted away from in the mid-’70s. I don’t recall even being aware of the publication of further novels in the ‘70s, and I think I might have thought that Vonnegut was done with them in 1973. But I must have thought I absorbed everything I had to gain from him. So what would I have thought of Slapstick, his next novel after 1973? And what do I think of it now that I have finally read it?

My reaction was one of both familiarity and bewilderment. One familiar element was Vonnegut’s constant repetition of catch-phrases, this time “Hi ho.” This adds caustic irony to the narrative as did Vonnegut’s catch-phrases in his earlier novels, although for me his catch-phrase wore thin after a while this time around. Also characteristic is the deceptive simplicity, easily readability, and often cartoonish character of Vonnegut’s style, which looks easy but just try and write that way yourself. There is the prominence of Indiana, Vonnegut’s homeland, though the story is initially set in New York City (now known as the Island of Death). And then there is Vonnegut’s outrageous imagination. But this time I couldn’t place it in making sense out of it, especially in relating it to the state of American society of the mid-’70s. Even the title, indicating Vonnegut’s dedication of the work to Laurel and Hardy, struck me as puzzling. Woody Allen’s dystopian film comedy Sleeper made sense to me and was much funnier, and the slapstick in that film was real slapstick.

Vonnegut begins his Prologue by stating that it is the closest thing to an autobiography he is ever going to write. The bizarre symbiotic relationship between the novel’s narrator and his sister is in some way an imaginative projection of Vonnegut’s feelings about his own sister and himself. He also states that the novel represents what life feels like to him, and that he loves the personifications of Laurel and Hardy because they did the best they could with their destinies.

Note that the novel’s subtitle is “Or, Lonesome No More!”—which, as we learn much later, is the narrator’s campaign slogan on which he wins the presidency of the United States. Vonnegut recycles an earlier idea of his of arbitrarily creating extended families to create a novel form of support system. The condition this is meant to address was a concern of American sociologists, notably Philip Slater’s 1970 The Pursuit of Loneliness. I remember, accurately I hope, that Slater had written that the revolutionary political slogan for the American (white) middle class should be ‘no more loneliness’.

What then, was contemporary about Slapstick? I could discern only the mention of Richard Nixon and the curious use of mainland China as the inscrutable world power sciencefiction-ly pulling the strings as the USA declines—which could easily be applicable to the present though a haphazard ‘prediction’ in the mid-’70s, after which Nixon had visited China and around the time of Mao’s death.

By Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s social criticism had progressed to the trashing of American society, or, somewhat more specifically, of ‘Middle America’. What comes next?—is a question I have only now posed. It seems to me that Slapstick represents not the objective state of the USA as a whole in the mid-’70s but rather the disintegration of Vonnegut’s own midwestern universe.

There are familiar elements of post-apocalyptic utopias here—plagues that wipe out millions, social breakdown . . . and even rendering this in a comedic farcical mode is not jarring (remember Sleeper), but the specific mode in which the social transformation occurs strikes me as rather conceptually anemic. The narrator, known eventually as Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, becomes president on the basis of his ‘loneliness no more!’ slogan, in which extended families are arbitrarily established and networked on the basis of his middle-naming system. As the existing governmental organization of the United States disintegrates, the new extended family system results in fiefdoms of warring clans. (And the Hatfield-McCoy feud is not forgotten.) Well, this latter development has a certain logic to it, but, while the totality of the developments described may well be characterized as slapstick—and now we are surely living in a political state of outrageousness oblivious to consequences, they are in my view not effective in characterizing the forces of social breakdown. Social isolation and individual helplessness are indeed the breeding ground of fascism—which isn’t exactly the social order depicted here either—but this cute Vonnegut notion of the artificial extended family cannot carry the weight ascribed to it. It really represents the limit of the midwestern sensibility of his generation that Vonnegut injected into his ouevre. The Vonnegut imagination persists, and I suppose in some way it reflects the social decline perceptible in the 1970s, but only dimly through Vonnegut’s personal lens.

I have not read the intervening novels, but Hocus Pocus in 1990 is on point with respect to American dystopia. By 1973 Vonnegut’s social critique had traveled a long way from 1952’s Player Piano, and apparently sometime in the 1980s he was prepared to confront America’s irreversible social decline imaginatively with greater exactitude.

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

I just finished reading Janna Levin's novelization A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines. It is a superb piece of writing. At the end the author (an astrophysicist) lists her sources and indicates which aspects of the narrative are her fictional inventions and which historically accurate, with sources also for quotes.

The principal characters are Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, both geniuses and revolutionaries in the realm of mathematical logic (Turing the theoretical pioneer of computation and artificial intelligence), both out of their minds, and both meeting a tragic end. But they are also polar opposites in one respect: Turing the mechanical materialist, Gödel the spiritualist, both unable to deal with the world they lived in from opposing yet united philosophical perspectives.

By comparison, another important character, Ludwig Wittgenstein, is sane, though he is wigged out himself. Moritz Schlick, head of the Vienna Circle (eventually murdered by a fascist), is pretty tight-assed himself, but more normal. The most human of the male geniuses are Otto Neurath and Oskar Morgenstern. All these are real people, though the actual treatment of their interchanges with the main characters are embellished in spots--with Otto and Oskar, that is.

There is so much a novel can do to remain generally digestible while engaging the ideas of Gödel, Turing, and Wittgenstein, but one gets a sense of their overall obsessions if not the technical depth of their ideas, though one gets a general notion of what they are. Not all geniuses are so one-sided, but such is the course of human history. That we can think anything at all is a wonder under the circumstances.

Of note to us would be the relationship of the innovations of the central characters in the formal sciences to their extra-formal philosophies to their actual social existence. Wittgenstein, who exploited formalism in his Tractatus, is the least impressed by it, seeing no real problem in contradiction in mathematics or logic proper, contrary to Gödel, Turing, and Schlick. All of these people, however, as is the world, were caught up in larger contradictions which they could not even adequately conceptualize, let alone surmount.

This by an astrophysicist and a first class writer. If I actually believed women were superior in integrating thought and feeling, this would convince me.

Here is her web site

Janna Levin's Space

Here, you can find out more about her novel and the take on the subject matter in an interview:

"Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth | On Being". Speaking of Faith. 2012-05-31

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A few months ago I encountered Levin (didn't know who she was) on an episode of "Star Talk" by Neil de Grasse Tyson. You can listen to the entire episode on the Star Talk site or watch it on Facebook:

Celebrating Einstein - Star Talk, March 9, 2018

StarTalk: Special Einstein Episode

Here is what I wrote at the time:

Later on, there's a lot about black holes with a side order of neutron stars. Also at the end Levin says that what is most amazing about Einstein is the acceptance of constraints (speed of light) and fierce intellectual independence. Early on, what is most interesting is the assertion that had Einstein not been there, special relativity would have been discovered within a few years. But general relativity was so different from what anyone was thinking, that without Einstein it would have taken another half century to come up with something and it would have looked completely different. This is a testimony to Einstein's imagination and intuition and intellectual boldness, the most amazing scientific achievement in history.

Michel Onfray in Esperanto

I've blogged about Onfray on my Esperanto blog Ĝirafo several times, as I have on this one. Onfray is cited or mentioned from time to time in Le Monde Diplomatique en Esperanto. Onfray has subscribed to a petition regarding the acceptance of Esperanto in the French academic establishment: Campagne pour l'espéranto au bac, which advocates:

Pour toutes ces raisons nous demandons que l’espéranto soit ajouté à la liste des langues admises en tant qu’option au baccalauréat.

Now Onfray's Traité d'athéologie, which has been translated into several languages—in the USA it goes under the title Atheist Manifesto—is available in Esperanto translation: Traktaĵo pri Ateologio. I have blogged about this in Esperanto: Michel Onfray en Esperanto.

On this blog you will find my critical remarks about the ideological perspective underlying Onfray's work. I have not seen a critique in English that matches the thoroughness of this Russian Esperantist's critical review:

Ateismo subjektiva, limigita kaj katolika [An atheism that is subjective, limited, and Catholic] by Nikolao Gudskov

Gudskov cites a number of omissions in Onfray's historical account, but in addition to other specific criticisms, Gudskov criticizes Onfray's underlying methodology. Gudskov, who has no sympathy for Stalinism, nevertheless evidently learned something from historical materialism, as he insists that religion as a historical phenomenon cannot be understood as an abstraction isolated from the social factors that motivate it, and that the critique of religion cannot be limited to the critique of the Abrahamic religions or monotheism in general. He sums up Onfray's work as intellectually inadequate but useful as a popular work that articulates what fledgling atheists feel but have not yet fully articulated for themselves. I concur.

This is an interesting example of prevailing ideological differences among the intellectual cultures of different nations or linguistic spheres, in this case the French, Russian (formerly Soviet), and Anglo-American, though I should hasten to add that different intellectual cultures overlap said boundaries and can be found within them. Of course, Esperanto is not indispensable for overcoming provincialism nor does it by any means guarantee doing so. Nevertheless, it provides opportunities for dialogues among persons that would not exist otherwise.

Maoist Critique of Maoist Atheism

Critiquing Religion Without Understanding It: Avakian’s Away With All Gods! by Pavel Andreyev

Andreyev effectively critiques Bob Avakian's slipshod arguments. It is unfortunate that these occasional pieces should be puffed up into a major intellectual statement. Andreyev's critique itself is flat and lacking in insight. In exposing Avakian's lapses in fact, logic, argumentation, and historical knowledge, Andreyev sticks to the surface. Worse, he relies on another pompous ass, the Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou, intellectual flavor of the month in the Anglo-American world, as a counterweight to Avakian's misunderstanding of Christianity.

The section "A Suggested Alternative Approach" (p. 11), a proposed alternate narrative on the history of religion, is as insipid as Avakian's approach. There's nothing dark about religion as presented in this narrative; the view here is indistinguishable from the Whiggish view of liberalizing religion. There's nothing perverse or vicious about Christianity per se as one would find in Edmund G. Cohen's The Mind of the Bible-Believer, for example.

Avakian approaches the issues of anti-Semitism, Zionism, and Islamism, about which Andreyev offers no additional insight. Avakian's many criticisms of Michael Lerner are critically scrutinized, but Andreyev is mainly perturbed about Avakian's failure to indict Lerner for being a Zionist. There is no criticism, however, of the pompous middle class pandering to popular religiosity and the vacuous moralizing of the "politics of meaning". While Avakian's constant accusations of patriarchy in religion are banal truisms, to take one outstanding example, Andreyev never rises above truism himself.

Andreyev does not intelligently address Avakian's slapdash treatment of African-American religion: he criticizes Avakian's ultraleft elevation of Malcolm X above Martin Luther King, Jr. only by pointing out the religiosity of Malcolm X (pp. 17-18).

Andreyev continually points out Avakian's obtuseness in argumentation. One example treated at length is Avakian's sophomoric scoffing at the concept of the Trinity. Andreyev claims, apparently accurately, that Avakian has no understanding of the nature of myth. But who does Andreyev rely on but Karen Armstrong, a religious liberal whose approach to history and religion could not be more insipid and intellectually contemptible.

I've despised Maoists since my first encounter with one in high school decades ago. Childish irresponsible simpletons they were and will always be. How unfortunate that Andreyev's review is fundamentally no less idiotic than the book under review.

Tarrying with Theology: Slavoj Žižek & The Monstrosity of Christ

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?
Slavoj Žižek & John Milbank, edited by Creston Davis.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
http://www.sok.bz/web/media/video/ChristZizek.pdf

Contents:

Introduction: Holy Saturday or Resurrection Sunday? Staging an Unlikely Debate / Creston Davis

The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity / Slavoj Žižek

The Double Glory, or Paradox versus Dialectics: On Not Quite Agreeing with Slavoj Žižek / John Milbank

Dialectical Clarity versus the Misty Conceit of Paradox / Slavoj Žižek

Creston Davis is a jackass: he is the philosophical correlate of the Democratic Party, of Clinton-Obama bipartisanism: overcome the cleavage between liberals and conservatives by capitulating to conservatives. In philosophy, is there anything more disgusting than postmodern theology?

Apparently, one of Žižek's other conceits, besides being a poseur tough-guy born-again Leninist, is to pose as an atheist Christian theologian. This is almost as sickening as the rest of the book, but there are some interesting moments. I'll confine myself to Žižek's first essay "The Fear of Four Words."

Žižek begins with a quote from Chesterton. The aims is to posit Christianity against magical thinking, nature worship, and other religions. Žižek has an animus against New Age mysticism, which is at least interesting:

The next standard argument against Hegel’s philosophy of religion targets its teleological structure: it openly asserts the primacy of Christianity, Christianity as the “true” religion, the final point of the entire development of religions. It is easy to demonstrate how the notion of “world religions,” although it was invented in the era of Romanticism in the course of the opening toward other (non- European) religions, in order to serve as the neutral conceptual container allowing us to “democratically” confer equal spiritual dignity on all “great” religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism . . .), effectively privileges Christianity—already a quick look makes it clear how Hinduism, and especially Buddhism, simply do not fit the notion of “religion” implied in the idea of “world religions.” However, what conclusion are we to draw from this? For a Hegelian, there is nothing scandalous in this fact: every particular religion in effect contains its own notion of what religion “in general” is, so that there is no neutral universal notion of religion—every such notion is already twisted in the direction of (colorized by, hegemonized by) a particular religion. This, however, in no way entails a nominalist / historicist devaluation of universality; rather, it forces us to pass from “abstract” to “concrete” universality, i.e., to articulate how the passage from one to another particular religion is not merely something that concerns the particular, but is simultaneously the “inner development” of the universal notion itself, its “self- determination.”

Postcolonial critics like to dismiss Christianity as the “whiteness” of religions: the presupposed zero level of normality, of the “true” religion, with regard to which all other religions are distortions or variations. However, when today’s New Age ideologists insist on the distinction between religion and spirituality (they perceive themselves as spiritual, not part of any organized religion), they (often not so) silently impose a “pure” procedure of Zen- like spiritual meditation as the “whiteness” of religion. The idea is that all religions presuppose, rely on, exploit, manipulate, etc., the same core of mystical experience, and that it is only “pure” forms of meditation like Zen Buddhism that exemplify this core directly, bypassing institutional and dogmatic mediations. Spiritual meditation, in its abstraction from institutionalized religion, appears today as the zero- level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core. The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.

Adorno did as good a job or better on this subject. Later, Žižek approvingly quotes Chesteron again:

Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces. . . . This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. . . . All modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls.

Žižek has his problems with Western mysticism, too, e.g. Eckhart, who, among others, neutralized the "monstrosity of Christ". A couple more interesting paragraphs:

The trap to avoid apropos of Eckhart is to introduce the difference between the ineffable core of the mystical experience and what D. T. Suzuki called “all sorts of mythological paraphernalia” in the Christian tradition: “As I conceive it, Zen is the ultimate fact of all philosophy and religion. . . . What makes all these religions and philosophies vital and inspiring is due to the presence in them all of what I may designate as the Zen element.” In a different way, Schürmann makes exactly the same move, when he distinguishes between the core of Eckhart’s message and the way he formulated it in the inappropriate terms borrowed from the philosophical and theological traditions at his disposal (Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas . . .); even more, Schürmann designates the philosopher who, centuries later, was finally able to provide the adequate formulation of what Eckhart was striving at, Heidegger: “Eckhart came too early in his daring design. He is not a modern philosopher. But his understanding of being as releasement prepares the way for modern philosophy.” However, does this not obliterate the true breakthrough of Eckhart, his attempt to think Christology (the birth of God within the order of finitude, Incarnation) from the mystical perspective? There is a solution to this impasse: what if what Schürmann claims is true, with the proviso that the “modern philosopher” is not Heidegger, but Hegel? Eckhart’s goal is withdrawal from the created reality of particular entities into the “desert” of the divine nature, of Godhead, the negation of all substantial reality, withdrawal into the primordial Void--One beyond Word. Hegel’s task is exactly the opposite one: not from God to Godhead, but from Godhead to God, i.e., how, out of this abyss of Godhead, God qua Person emerges, how a Word is born in it. Negation must turn around onto itself and bring us back to determinate (finite, temporal) reality.

Later on, Žižek does reveal what a reactionary Chesterton is without naming him as such; Chesteron has merely failed to see that the anarchist lawlessless of the philosopher is not just the most criminal act, but an indictment of the criminality of an entire system. I imagine that Orwell would have a field day--perhaps he did, for all I know, with Chesterton's contention that orthodoxy is the greatest rebellion.

Here is a curious comment on the diversity of atheisms:

Peter Sloterdijk was right to notice how every atheism bears the mark of the religion out of which it grew through its negation: there is a specifically Jewish Enlightenment atheism practiced by great Jewish figures from Spinoza to Freud; there is the Protestant atheism of authentic responsibility and assuming one’s fate through anxious awareness that there is no external guarantee of success (from Frederick the Great to Heidegger in Sein und Zeit); there is a Catholic atheism à la Maurras, there is a Muslim atheism (Muslims have a wonderful word for atheists: it means “those who believe in nothing”), and so on. Insofar as religions remain religions, there is no ecumenical peace between them—such a peace can develop only through their atheist doubles. Christianity, however, is an exception here: it enacts the reflexive reversal of atheist doubt into God himself. In his “Father, why have you forsaken me?”, Christ himself commits what is for a Christian the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith. While, in all other religions, there are people who do not believe in God, only in Christianity does God not believe in himself.

Žižek demonstrates here how little he knows of Jewish atheists, and how he obtuse he is to real, historical Christianity, not the sanitized version of theologians. It is the same intellectual fraud that real theologians and mystics perpetrate via their religions: that their constructs constitute the inner meaning of the vulgar exoteric religions that form the actual substance of history.

Žižek digresses from there to Frankenstein, the Book of Job, pop culture, and Freud. Then back to Kant and Hegel. Another curious assertion follows:

This double kenosis is what the standard Marxist critique of religion as the self-alienation of humanity misses: “modern philosophy would not have its own subject if God’s sacrifice had not occurred.” For subjectivity to emerge— not as a mere epiphenomenon of the global substantial ontological order, but as essential to Substance itself—the split, negativity, particularization, self-alienation, must be posited as something that takes place in the very heart of the divine Substance, i.e., the move from Substance to Subject must occur within God himself.

A little farther down, another indictment of "standard" Marxism:

This is why standard Marxist philosophy oscillates between the ontology of “dialectical materialism” which reduces human subjectivity to a particular ontological sphere (no wonder Georgi Plekhanov, the creator of the term “dialectical materialism,” also designated Marxism as “dynamized Spinozism”) and the philosophy of praxis which, from the young Georg Lukács onward, takes as its starting point and horizon collective subjectivity which posits / mediates every objectivity, and is thus unable to think its genesis from the substantial order, the ontological explosion, “Big Bang,” which gives rise to it.

More rehabilitation of Hegel. Then literature, movies, detective stories. . . and Wagner.

Žižek poses the question of what is different about the Jewish communal spirit and the Christian one? I must have missed his answer, for we are back to Hegel. Then on what makes Christ different from other wise men.

The next section begins with Pope Ratzinger's verbal assaults on Islam, secularism, and Darwinism. Then comes a curious defense of Islam, coupled with Judaism. Christianity as the monstrous exception that unifies the two abstractions. More Chesterton. Žižek sees an affinity between Catholicism and dialectical materialism (vs. the ontological incompleteness of the universe, viz. quantum mechanics, Badiou). More on Badiou and materialism . . . and of course Lacan. Passing remarks about the new atheists. Then ruminations about the relationship between monotheism and atheism, e.g.:

. . . what if the affinity between monotheism and atheism demonstrates not that atheism depends on monotheism, but that monotheism itself prefigures atheism within the field of religion—its God is from the very (Jewish) beginning a dead one, in clear contrast with the pagan gods who irradiate cosmic vitality. Insofar as the truly materialist axiom is the assertion of primordial multiplicity, the One which precedes this multiplicity can only be zero itself. No wonder, then, that only in Christianity—as the only truly logical monotheism—does God himself turn momentarily into an atheist.

More on materialism, Deleuze, Badiou, Lenin, Bukharin, Chalmers, Lacan . . . . Then:

What, then, is the proper atheist stance? Not a continuous desperate struggle against theism, of course—but not a simple indifference to belief either. That is to say: what if, in a kind of negation of negation, true atheism were to return to belief (faith?), asserting it without reference to God—only atheists can truly believe; the only true belief is belief without any support in the authority of some presupposed figure of the “big Other.”

Žižek is a clever boy. Interesting little observations here and there, but he adds up to nothing. And this intervention in theology is outstandingly worthless and devoid of integrity.

Descartes’ Bones (1)

Shorto, Russell. Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason. New York: Doubleday, 2008.

There is a web site for this book: Descartes' Bones by Russell Shorto.

This has got some important material on it, including an excerpt, a gallery of images, and a reader's guide. Some of the questions asked of the reader are more fruitful than others, and deeper questions could be added.

There is also a link to Shorto's YouTube video, or you can access the video at YouTube itself.

See also the publisher's page at Random House.

Naturally reviews can be found in innumerable places, but here's one from The New York Times Book Review:

Body of Knowledge By GARY ROSEN (October 31, 2008).

And behold: "Gary Rosen is the chief external affairs officer of the John Templeton Foundation." This speaks volumes about the integrity of the newspaper of record. Naturally, the gambit here is to dampen the conflict between science and religion by adopting a middle-of-the-road position that purports to make friends with everyone.

And this position is not far from Shorto's own:

LEAPING INTO THE POST-BUSH WORLD
By Julie Phillips. Amsterdam Weekly,6-12 November 2008.
"After eight years of warring fundamentalisms, Russell Shorto says in his new book,
Descartes Bones, it’s time for something new."

The bankruptcy of contemporary thought is multiply worse than the end-of-ideology ideology of the 1950s, predicated on liberal premises, for this manifestation of "moderation" is fundamentally right-wing. Calling people extremists for vehemently opposing extremists ultimately pulls everything to the right, and moderation becomes timidly mitigating the right-wing extremism while capitulating to it. To defame the "new atheists" (a fake journalistic moniker) as extremists, and also to claim that both Obama and McCain represent a move away from fundamentalism: how shamelessly idiotic can you be? This is what today's right-wing liberal pundits posit as a transcendence of dichotomies. It's too disgusting for words.

We learn also that Shorto is a lapsed Catholic, and that his rebellion against his upbringing is related to his preoccupation with the chasm between faith and reason. This issue also contains an excerpt from the book.

The book itself does not seem to be so vacuous, though one must be alert to spin. It can be classified in what seems to be a growing genre of popular philosophical biography, much of it produced by serious scholars. Examples of this genre are Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (my favorite), Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (another favorite) and Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, Steven Nadler's The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil, and Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers and Rousseau’s Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Such books take off from a relationship (often antagonistic) between two thinkers, or a specific incident or problem, or a particular thinker, perhaps with respect to a particular question.

This book begins with an account of Shorto's visit to the Musée de l‘homme, where he gets to see Descartes' skull. Then Shorto flash's back to the beginning of his quest. For him, as well as others, Descartes is the intellectual fount of modernity, which has recently come under attack from the right and the postmodern left. The conflict of faith and reason belongs to our time as well as Descartes'. The "new atheists" are cited here. (xviii) As the fate of Descartes' remains shows, Descartes has been appropriated by left and right. The basis for the right's interest is Cartesian mind-body dualism, the mind or soul being untouchable by materialistic science. Shorto follows Anglican cleric Colin Slee in positing a contemporary three-way split: fundamentalist religionists, fundamentalist secularists, and religious liberals. (xix)

Such is the preface and the shallow middle-of-the-road journalistic approach to ideas and politics. It's an unwitting piece of evidence for the contention that religious moderates pave the way for religious right-wing extremists, an argument that can be extended to politics in general, though today's atheist liberals would probably not understand this.

Chapter 1 gets down to the actual history. The story starts with Descartes on his deathbed. Descartes protests against proposed medical remedies for his soon-to-be-fatal condition. Here we find an interesting, underappreciated facet of the Enlightenment and scientific revolution: The new skeptical attitude was also applied to an inherited body of medical pseudoscience. Materialistic medicine, based on the soon-to-be-established mechanical world view, is something taken for granted (by its critics as well as by its other beneficiaries), but physical medicine was inseparable from religion in Descartes' day; prayer was an integral to treatment as medicaments. (8) Since this is by no means a relic of the past, Shorto wonders what makes the modern modern. He wonders whether the divide between the material and the spiritual is wrong. (9)

Again, the shallow editorializing. However, we shall see what we can learn from the historical account as the book proceeds.

Little Book of Atheist Spirituality

Comte-Sponville, Andre. The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, translated by Nancy Huston. New York: Viking Press, 2007.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
I - Can We do Without Religion?
II - Does God Exist?
III - Can There Be an Atheist Spirituality?
Conclusion: Love & Truth
Suggested reading

If I were going to advocate a concept such as this, I would consider it rather differently, but this book could be considered a bridge between religious spirituality as normally understood and atheism. I was not particularly thrilled with this book, but I will highlight its most noteworthy features.

Digression: On 7 February, I attended a talk by a Unitarian minister on his book on naturalistic spirituality. His advocacy of a naturalistic spirituality got quite a bit of resistance, from an allergic reaction to the word itself to a resentment that someone would forcibly attribute a quality to a person who vehemently denies possessing it, to the unnecessary labelling of common experiences. My objection was that the word, if not precisely definable, should at least point to something reasonably clear and concrete instead of constantly being used as a nonce word as a cover for not thinking or saying anything at all.

Only chapter III of the book now under review is of any interest. I will summarize the concepts contained therein, but actually the only part of it that piqued my intellectual interest can be found on pp. 136-8. There the author discusses a finite opening to the infinite, opposes spirit to religion, affirms an absolute but denies transcendence, favorably treats the cousin concepts of naturalism, immanentism, and materialism, and asserts that nature is an uncreated totality that of necessity precedes the emergence of spirit. Materialism denies the ontological independence of spirit from nature. Spirit is only thinkable when nature precedes it. While this doesn't delineate just what is meant by spirituality, I like this philosophical groundwork.

For some reason, I don't really care about the author's characterization of spirituality itself, but I will outline his concepts. I should first mention that he quotes various philosophers throughout the book. For some reason I noted Wittgenstein on mysticism and a reference to Spinoza on p. 141.

The concept of "Immanensity" is introduced (a neologism which apparently fuses immanence with immensity.) My handwriting is nearly illegible, but I wrote something about the spirituality or experience of the immense . . . the experience of the infinite, which is not conceptual . . . the tranquility of the All as the polar opposite to the ego. (p. 144)

The author surprised me by claiming that there is nothing particularly religious about the oceanic feeling discussed by Freud and Romain Rolland. (150) Camus' novel The Stranger is discussed on pp. 152-3. Freud is mentioned again on p. 154, Spinoza on p. 158. The experience is further characterized on pp. 156-7.

Other concepts explored are mystery, plenitude, simplicity (self-forgetfulness, Zen), unity, eternity, "eternullity" (neutralizing temporality & living in the moment), ataraxia (from ancient Greek philosophy), serenity (living without hoping), acceptance (the a-morality of nature, Nietzsche's amor fati, the relativity of value judgments), independence. All of this comes from the author's examination of his own experience.

Mysticism is opposed to faith. The mystical path to atheism is a logical, perhaps inevitable progression. Monotheistic revealed religions are very distrustful of mysticism, because their God tends to dissolve in the process. (190-1)

My handwriting is legibility-challenged, but I wrote a phrase like "religious spirituality", which makes no sense. In any case, in discussing the notions of interiority and transcendence, the author reveals that he is sick of all this. One should seek not to dwell on interiority, but escape the self, open oneself to others and to the world. Hence he stresses the notions of immanence and openness. (197) Husserl and Sartre are mentioned (198).

So much for chapter III. In the Conclusion, the author claims that love goes with relativism. (204) He affirms love, joy, the temporal experience of eternity, humanism as opposed to nihilism.

The selected bibliography is diverse. I noted a couple of authors representing a materialist position, i.e. LaMettrie, and Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation.

All in all, I can't say I find the author's perspective objectionable for the most part, especially as a characterization of the experience he has had or would like to have, but I am also indifferent to it. My priorities are elsewhere.

Michel Onfray reviewed again

I've blogged about Michel Onfray, his Atheist Manifesto, and his hero Jean Meslier a number of times. I just have a few notes to add now. First of all, note this detailed review of Onfray's book published last year:

Layton, David. "A Fresh Look at Atheism and the Enlightenment," Free Inquiry, vol. 27, no.4, June/July 2007, pp.64-65.

In addition to highlighting Onfray's key points, Layton calls attention to specifically French aspects of Onfray's writing. While skeptical of some of Onfray's assertions and arguments, Layton enumerates three objections at the end: (1) Onfray takes too many shortcuts, especially in his treatment of history; (2) Onfray tends toward rhetorical sloppiness; (3) in propounding a manifesto, Onfray projects a post-Christian future sans evidence to back himself up.

My reaction to Onfray's manifesto inclcuded its specifically French undertone and characteristic pretentiousness. Perhaps prevailing French mores are still so bourgeois that its atheists perserve respectable Christian morality even after dumping God, but I wonder whether that's true or just a conceit? The call to reject moralism and embrace physical existence doesn't sound awfully revolutionary in our time. I'm beginning to wonder whether Michel Onfray's Atheist Manifesto attacks only monotheism because Onfray was influenced by Nietzsche. Perhaps Nietzsche's approbation of the sickening Laws of Manu were responsible for Onfray's omission of Hinduism from his catalogue of religious horrors?

I was prompted to think about this after perusing Brian Leiter's Nietzsche blog, particularly this entry of 6 Dec. 2007:

"the most revolutionary political proposition ever advanced"

That is how Mitt Romney, a Mormon who is one of the contenders for the Republican nomination to be U.S. President, described this idea: "The conviction of the inherent and inalienable worth of every life." Admittedly, in the American context, this is partly code language for opposition to abortion, but putting the parochial peculiarities of American politics to one side, Romney is surely right that the "inherent and inalienable worth of every life" is, indeed, "the most revolutionary political proposition" of modernity (perhaps ever). It is equally clear that the basis he offers for it--namely that "every single human being is a child of God"--is (viewed as a cognitive, rather than an emotive, proposition) false.

But when Nietzsche mocks the "free thinkers" who "oppose the Church but not its poison" (GM I:9) is he not thinking precisely of those who reject the false cognitive proposition but still accept that "most revolutionary political proposition," precisely the one discovered by those Nietzsche calls the "slaves" at the birth of Christianity?

Here is my reaction of 10 July 2008:

Not terribly insightful on anyone's part. But now I think I understand Michel Onfray's Atheist Manifesto better. He cut and pasted some Nietzsche . . . To analyze Nietzsche's assertion, though, requires a bit more. One item on the agenda is to examine what the German socialists had to say about Christianity. Was the moral poison the moralistic illusions about Christianity, or the egalitarianism so hated by Nietzsche?

The Marriage of Bette and Boo

The Marriage of Bette and Boo by Christopher Durang, directed by Perry T. Schwartz and offered by my favorite theater company in the Washington DC metropolitan area, Spooky Action Theater, is described as “Thirty years of divorce, alcoholism, madness and death in a wacky family world turned inside out.” It is also a tale of thirty years of serial pregnancy, psychological abuse, and Catholic ignorance, told in a series of flashbacks by Bette and Boo’s surviving son and a student of English literature, Matt. The play begins with the wedding ceremony of Bette and Boo, and what at first glance seems to be just another vapid middle class family scenario quickly morphs into a tactless farcical display worthy of an episode of South Park or Family Guy. In 1985 Durang was ahead of the curve. At first I had my doubts, but when Karl Hudlocke (Boo’s dad) referred to his wife Soot (no kidding) as “the dumbest white woman alive,” I knew I would love this play.

Bette begins her nightmare marriage as an airheaded Catholic girl, void of knowledge of the real world, dreaming about all the babies she wants to have. Decades of bitter experience that follow do not dissuade her from her illusions, i.e. her Catholic brainwashing. She is also unable to break Boo’s addiction to alcohol, itself propelled by her incessant urge to breed. Her sister Emily is a basket case constantly apologizing for her existence. Her other sister Joan is bitter and cynical . . . and seemingly always pregnant. Her father, Paul Brennan, has a speech impediment that will have you rolling in the aisles. Her matronly mother Margaret attempts to manage this menagerie. As for the in-laws, Soot Hudlocke is an addled doormat. Her husband Karl—my favorite character—is callous, cynical, tactless and totally outspoken in every situation without a tinge of self-consciousness. Then there is the doctor who keeps delivering Bette’s stillborn babies, and the pièce de resistance, the priest Father Donnally.

Time and hardship have a way of wearing down the naïveté of even the most clueless and wiping the forced smiles off the faces of even the most vapid. But the inability to learn anything from bitter experience takes a lot of effort, unless one’s faculties are disconnected from reality at the onset. This is where Catholicism comes in.

Father Donnally is an obtuse jackass, indifferently pushing the Church’s party line on these families without engaging them as real human beings, which they have been discouraged from becoming in the first place by their upbringing. One of the most hilarious, and perhaps the key scene in the play occurs at a marriage counseling retreat attended by both families in toto and conducted by Donnally. This moment reveals the disconnect between ideology and reality like no other. Donnally alternates between regurgitating the platitudes of church doctrine sans conviction and more convincingly imitating a slice of sizzling bacon. His audience listens without conviction. No birth control, no divorce, but also no thought is allowed by the Catholic Church. All resent and hate their lives and one another, but they are mentally and psychologically numbed and hence have no place to go. This is what happens to you when you’re not allowed to feel your own pain.

Father Donnally nevertheless has one moment of truth, which nevertheless fails to induce him to reflect on his theocratic propaganda. Donnally screams: why don’t people get to know the people they are marrying; why don’t they think about what they really have in common with the person they plan to spend the rest of their lives with? Why are people so stupid? He has posed the question of questions, but he will not stay for an answer.

You know, as comic as this play is, it’s not far removed from reality. I wasn’t raised like this, thank goodness, but I’ve known more dysfunctional Catholics than I can count. This dehumanization, this disconnect of one’s own emotions and thoughts from one’s reality, is one of the innumerable crimes the blood-drenched Catholic Church can never recompense.

The actors all did a superb job. How they could keep from breaking character while I and others howled in the audience is a miracle of the acting craft I will never understand. The set too was marvelous; I don’t know how this company does it without money. This is not establishment bourgeois theater for the upper crust; it’s always on the edge, and you should show up to support it.

Details:
The Marriage of Bette and Boo
by Christopher Durang,
directed by Perry T. Schwartz,
with Katie Atkinson, Gerald B. Browning, William C. Cook, Joe Cronin, Mary C. Davis, Bill Gordon, Martha Karl, Ellen Mansueto, David Rothman and Mundy Spears.

The Black Box Theatre at Montgomery College, Corner of Philadelphia (East-West Hwy) & Chicago Ave., Takoma Park, MD.
June 5 – 29, 2008. Performances Thu – Sat at 8 PM and Sun at 7 PM.

My reviews of other Spooky Action productions:
Alice in Washington

Away With All Gods! (1)

I'm not accustomed to sober, measured argumentation from Maoists, but the 21st century holds many surprises:

Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World by Bob Avakian (Chicago: Insight Press, 2008).

That's right, Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Regardless of what you think of the party line in general or on various matters, there is much material on this web site of interest, under the rubrics:

Atheism & Religion

Christian Fascism

I'll cite two specific pieces which appear in the book's bibliography:

"A Leap of Faith" and a Leap to Rational Knowledge: Two Very Different Kinds of Leaps, Two Radically Different Worldviews and Methods by Bob Avakian

God the Original Fascist Series by A. Brooks.

Note also this debate on YouTube:

Atheism, God and Morality in a Time of Imperialism and Rising Fundamentalism, An Exchange Between Chris Hedges and Sunsara Taylor (23 April 2008).

Philosophers Without Gods

Written 17 Nov 2007:

Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, edited by Louise M. Antony. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Another book hot off the press and on the shelves. Gave it a scrute yesterday. This book is an anthology of 20 chapters contributed by professional philosophers. Naturally, writing about this topic is likely to be monotonous and repetitive after a while, but this book has its unique charms and could prove to be a valuable contribution. The editor attempts to show off the variety of atheists, from those who were once believers (orthodox Jews, Catholics, etc.) to those who never entertained the existence of God as a serious possibility. There are arguments against the existence of Gods and the authority of sacred texts as well as articles conerning the basis of ethics and spiritual concerns and emotions sans religions and gods. There were three articles that stood out for me:

(1) Anthony Simon Laden, "Transcendence without God: On Atheism and Invisibility", pp. 121-132.

This essay is prefaced with quotes from Thomas Hobbes and . . . Ralph Ellison! There is no mention of Ellison's non-religiosity (now documented by Arnold Rampersad), but Laden borrows Ellison's concept of "invisibility" (which begins with the issue of race but is universalized by Ellison and others) to explain his non-religious sense of transcendence. For me this is definitely the most interesting and original contribution in the book.

(2) George Rey, "Meta-atheism: Religious [Avowal--handwriting illegible] as Self-deception", pp. 243-265.

Seeing as how simple, obvious, and irrefutable the usual arguments against religious beliefs are, and the imperviousness of believers to them, Rey steps back and analyzes belief as a form of willed self-deception. I suppose this is why he coins the term "meta-atheism".

(3) Simon Blackburn, "Religion and Respect", 179-[???].

Blackburn deals with the problem of respecting people and the fact that they hold beliefs which he cannot respect, delineating those aspects of religious expression he can relate to and those he can't. He makes a useful distinction between "onto-theology" and "expressive theology" (or religion), also contrasting transcendence with immanence. Expressive theology can be found in religious art, music, literature, architecture, etc., and Blackburn can appreciate the spirit and enthusiasm that went into it, even though he doesn't take the belief systems seriously. Believing in religious doctrines is what he labels onto-theology. When they become liberalized when putative believers can't swallow them literally any more, they tend to become more and more symbolic and metaphorical, less literally held to be true. I don't recall whether Blackburn says this, but it is just this slipperiness that makes religious liberals so weaselly, as literalism gives way to metaphorization without cutting ties to the tradition as it was originally conceived. Expressive theology is then the hook for the unwary; the difference being that atheists can understand the expression without being tied to tradition and authority, however watered down and concealed.

If the other essays approach being this interesting, you should check out the book.

James Baldwin: Beyond Jails & Churches

“You think that's all that's in the world is jails and churches?”
—Roy Grimes to his mother, in Go Tell It On the Mountain

“Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty—necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels.”
— James Baldwin, "Letter from a Region in My Mind" (New Yorker, 17 Nov. 1962; reprinted in The Fire Next Time, 1963).

In this essay I explain my long-standing impulse to read Baldwin's first novel Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953):

James Baldwin Revisited (1): Prolegomena

And here is my review:

James Baldwin Revisited (2): Go Tell It on the Mountain

God, the Failed Hypothesis

Stenger, Victor J. God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007.

Written 16 Mar 2007:

I gave Victor J. Stenger's book God: The Failed Hypothesis a quick read yesterday. It is far superior to Dawkins's latest book and I'm hoping it will ride the wave of the alleged "new atheism" to gain a wider readership than such books would likely have garnered in the past. I have some philosophical nits to pick with the book, but it is an excellent springboard, or baseline, to work from, and then work out some of the more esoteric philosophical issues as a follow-up.

The book focuses on scientific arguments pertaining to all aspects of the God hypothesis, and while not attempting to "prove" a case for atheism, it trashes the basis for any belief in a god exhibiting the standard divine attributes. Thus, while some God could conceivably survive such a treatment, its alleged properties would be constrained. For Stenger, what would be left would be nothing more than a weak deism with no real explanatory consequences.

Fortunately, Stenger does understand the difference between science and philosophy for the most part, and he supplements his science-based approach with some strictly philosophical considerations as to the coherence of certain god concepts on purely conceptual (rather than empirical, i.e. scientific) grounds. This is an improvement over Dawkins.

The most important thing to understand here is the demolishing of a scientific, empirical basis for belief in gods, paranormal phenomena, and nonmaterial self-subsistent entities. Or to put it any other way, God as an explanatory device for scientifically investigated phenomena. The other philosophical arguments are icing on the cake, and they take us a good part of the way to demolishing a rational case for any kind of God 99% of humanity including intellectuals would lay claim to. As I say, there are more refined philosophical issues remaining to be treated, but this is a good basis to work from for general public purposes.

Stenger references two books unfamiliar to me which seem to be central to addressing these purely philosophical issues: The Non-Existence of God, ed. Nicholas Everitt; The Impossibility of God, ed. Michael Martin & Ricki Monnier. I think such approaches are indispensable, as the basic conceptual problems with the god concept are as central as those involving empirical proof of such an entity.

I made pages and pages of notes and outlined a detailed review which I should publish online or perhaps better yet in print. In it I would also address what I consider to be the unfinished business of this genre.

Postscript, 26 March 2007:

There are two ways to conceive of the existence of god: (1) as an empirical entity like any other, (2) as a concept, bearing various definitions and attributes. The "proofs" of the impossibility of God do not pertain to (1), as such proofs are impossible. Rather, the philosophical proofs of God's non-existence would be based on the incoherence, self-contradiction, vacuousness, etc. of the concept. I presume such proofs would have to do with the alleged attributes of God's perfection.

The Dawkins approach, I would say, is rather simple-minded, but since it is addressed to a nation of simpletons who don't understand the nature of scientific explanation, I guess I shouldn't complain. In my view, though, (2) is as important, fundamentally even more important than (1).

The existence of a god as an empirical entity is the anthropological god, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Muhammed, yo mama. But the other god is the god of the philosophers, an abstract concept, the god the theologians attempt to hang on to, craftily shifting back and forth from the anthropological to the metaphysical god.

Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto

Book review written 20 March, 6 April, 7 April 2007. Originally written in 4 installments on my Freethought Forum blog. Comments attached to these installments are mostly off-track. Of my responses, the most directly relevant are appended below.

Onfray, Michel. Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; translated from the French by Jeremy Leggatt. New York: Arcade Pub., distributed by Hackette Book Group, 2007.

1

Is there anything new to be said in favor of atheism, some argument that hasn’t been presented thousands of times before? There is probably little new to say, but aside from the perennial need to break through the defense mechanisms of an intractably irrational humanity, there is always a social subtext underlying the recurrent rounds of atheist assertion. In the USA and across the English-speaking world, we have a pretty good feel for what that is now. But when literature is translated from one language to another, can we be sure we know what is behind the ostensible argument of the text? While it is good to see Michel Onfray’s work now rendered into English, its underlying motive has not been translated, and so we must do some sleuthing to suss out its tacit presuppositions and motives.

It is almost impossible to be a French intellectual without having some highly valued cultural capital behind you. An argument is not just an argument; it enters intellectual space competing for attention not only in ways familiar to us, based primarily on good P.R., but competing for social status based on traditional European intellectual hierarchies. Onfray’s book is prefaced by a quote from Nietzsche, which, we can guess, is not only a quote from Nietzsche, but an announcement to his French audience that Onfray is playing with the big boys. Nietzsche, god of the postmodernists, has been a dominant figure in au courant French philosophy at least since the beginning of the ‘60s.

In his preface Onfray evocatively recounts his encounter with a devout Muslim in the Mauritainian desert. Onfray notes the capacity of this pious and good man to deny the evils of his religion and to see only what he wants to see in a belief system he is in fact much better than. This sets the stage for the book. In the introduction Onfray states his compassion for the victims of religion, reflecting the eternal human inability to face reality. He refuses to feel superior in any way to deluded believers, reserving his contempt for priestcraft, i.e. for the exploiters of the devout. Onfray is more pro-Enlightenment than the original Enlighteners. The mainstream of French deism opposed its more radical wing. In Germany Kant wimped out when it came to religion and morality.

Onfray decides to exploit the term ATHEOLOGY, coined by Georges Bataille in 1950 in a communication to Raymond Queneau. This might not mean a great deal to the uninitiated American reader, but this is a serious marshaling of cultural capital, as Bataille of the famous College of Sociology in the 1930s is a great hero of the postmodernist crowd, and Queneau is known as an associate of the surrealists and a co-founder of Oulipo. Onfray forgets to mention, though, the crypto-fascist undertones of Bataille’s obsession with primitive rituals and secret societies.

Chapter 1 begins with the claim that the death of God has been greatly exaggerated. Even the term “atheism,” a negative term, reveals how its history has been skimped on. Onfray delves into the etymology (15). The recorded history of “atheism” is largely a history of libellous theist propaganda. This has affected the history of philosophy as a whole, as anti-Christian philosophers have been eclipsed. Many celebrated heretics were not in fact atheists though condemned as such. Spinoza, for example, though excommunicated was no atheist and never declared himself such.

Chapter 2 begins with the question, who was the first outspoken atheist? Cristóvão Ferreira, A Jesuit who renounced Christianity (The Deception Revealed, 1636) was a great forerunner. But the honors go to Jean Meslier (1729), a primary object of Onfray’s scholarship. Other French Enlighteners are mentioned, but the atheist heritage of even the famous names is slighted in the history of philosophy: La Mettrie, Nicolas Deschamps, Baron d’Holbach, Helvetius, Sylvain Marechal, and the Ideologues.

The next major leap is instituted by Ludwig Feuerbach, who has also been largely forgotten, except as a precursor to Marx. Feuerbach was exploited by Louis Althusser who used him to bolster his thesis for Marx’s “epistemological break.”

The final milestone is . . . voila: Friedrich Nietzsche.

Onfray claims that religion has now been smuggled back into [French] intellectual/public life, but we are experiencing the birth pangs of a post-Christian era.

The third chapter sets up Onfray’s agenda. We have not advanced beyond the stage outlined by Nietzsche. We don’t live in a non-religious age, but we do live in an age of nihilism, announced by 19th-century writers, including Dostoevsky. Regardless of the loss of traditional religions, people still believe in the need for “something” more. This is what Onfray attacks: “Atheism implies the banishing of transcendence. With no exceptions.” (46)

Citing Foucault’s notion of invisible epistemology, Onfray asserts that the West is still dominated by Christian discourse. (47) French jurisprudence, for instance, is ostensibly secular, but implicitly it is still Catholic. (49) The same obsolete notion of free will and the moralistic torture of humanity prevail.

Religious institutions encourage memory and rote behavior but not learning or critical reflection. (52) Las Casas defended Indians but not their books against obliteration, nor did he defend Africans as fully human in his lifetime. (54) Religionists have a selective memory.

At most we have a tradition of clerical freethinking. We need what Deleuze calls “quiet atheism”. We must confront the final obstacle, “atheist Christianity,” which retains Christian morality. We need a really “atheistic atheism”, that is post-Christian and post-nihilist, beyond both nonbelieving churchiness and anticlericalism. (57) The English philosophers Bentham and Mill should be revisited. (58)

This book aims at the deconstruction of (1) the three main monotheisms, (2) Christianity, (3) theocracy. Despite the conflicts among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, they share fundamentals—priestcraft and a hatred of intelligence and life. (59) Paul, the founder of Christianity, was a masochist sadistically inflicting his belief system upon the world. (60)

Such is the book’s agenda. Note also the mustering of the darlings of the postmodern dispensation, Foucault and Deleuze. Clearly, this approach has a meaning in the original French context which is not fully transparent to the average American and other anglophone reader. If what Onfray says about the slights in the history of philosophy and the prevalence of Catholic morality in his neck of the woods holds water, it is certainly worth analyzing and addressing. Still, his agenda, to this American reader, seems very French in another way—pretentious, overblown, and at the end of the day, trite. The French radical intellectual’s preoccupation with grand metaphysical antimetaphysical interventions may be an effective way of muscling into the intense competitiveness in the domain of French cultural capital, but really, is there a whole lot to these portentous generalizations? The Atheist Manifesto is not just an atheist manifesto, as it would be for us in the English-speaking world; it is an intervention in French intellectual life by a pretender to the throne, yet it seems to me to be saying something rather old and unimportant and ultimately no more sophisticated than Dawkins’s banalities. As for the truly affirmative, post-Christian, post-nihilist age, this pretense of standing on Nietzsche’s shoulders to declare a brand new epoch just does not impress me at all.

2

In the first part of my review I suggested that Onfray was exhibiting the pretentious puffery characteristic of French philosophy. But anything objectionable of that sort was over with by the end of the first part of the book, i.e. the first sixty pages. While the balance of the book does not say anything strikingly new or different from the usual anti-religious fare—what does?—it is nonetheless a searing indictment of just about everything that is wrong with the three major monotheistic religions.

A survey of this sort should not have stopped with the evil that came out of the Middle East nor with monotheism. Certainly there is no more despicable religious system than Hinduism, which embodies every bit of superstitious belief, ritual, taboo, violence, viciousness, exploitation, and racism of any creed known to man. Except for its penetration into New Age thought, which has an historical connection with fascism, Hinduism presents no palpable menace outside of South Asia, so perhaps it is no surprise that Onfray by and large limits himself to the three monotheisms that have the greatest impact on the world political stage. Still, it is potentially dangerous to limit one’s scope to the three monotheisms without at least a caveat. Occasionally Onfray deals with the more general background of religion and superstition, but it is left to us to fill in the blanks as to how and why religion and magical thinking have evolved as they have.

In part two, on monotheisms, Onfray does in fact begin with generalities.

I. The Tyranny of Afterlives

The preoccupation with the afterlife is a way of cheating death, paradoxically accelerating death by incorporating it into life. Religion is a manifestation of a death wish. Monotheism incorporates a hatred of freedom, reason, intelligence, desire, sexuality, and women. It extols obedience and submission. (67) The tree of knowledge is forbidden, i.e. to gaze upon the naked truth (pun intended). There are taboos and an obsession with purity. But does purification of the body entail respect for the body? No, for purification rituals are not about hygiene. (75)

II. Bonfires of the Intelligence

The religions—here Christianity and Islam are mentioned—resorted to book-burning in order to establish the authority of the Book. They exhibited an implacable enmity towards science except for its religious appropriations. (81) Sacred texts monopolize and lay an exclusive claim to knowledge.

The Church has compaigned against all materialist philosophy from Democritus on. (83ff) Why is the Church so opposed to any hint of materialism? One reason is the need for transubtantiation. (86ff) The Church persecuted the philosophy of atomism and combatted the claims of all major scientific advances up through the discovery of DNA. (88–89)

III. Seeking the Opposite of the Real

Religion populates the cosmos with angels, but it is the fallen angels who are the harbingers of freedom. (98) “Paradise” is an anti-world, a clarion call for battle. Religion is the guardian of procreation, replete with misogyny, homophobia, anti-abortionism.

The story of Origen exemplifies the religious celebration of castration. Sexual regulations simulate this state. The countless circumcision rituals, scarification practices, foot-binding, neck-elongation—all forms of ritual initiation, body deformation, mutilation, and real castration—are manifestations of this impulse. Onfray concludes: “God loves the maimed.” (109)

This concluding section, as well as the opening statements of Part II, are the places where Onfray generalizes beyond the three monotheistic religions under examination. Clearly these practices reach back to the origins of humanity, and require more than these general psychological explanations, though they are a start and do indeed enumerate some of the essential issues behind the fear and violence of myth and ritual. None of this is unique to monotheism, but so far, Onfray is doing pretty well. It’s a shame he doesn’t mention Wilhelm Reich, who came to some pretty drastic general conclusions himself about the primal fear that engendered magical thinking, as he himself teetered on the edge of sanity and slipped over.

“Fascism has awakened a sleeping world to the realities of the irrational, mystical character structure of the people of the world.”
—Wilhelm Reich

3

Part III is devoted to Christianity.

I. The Construction of Jesus

The historical existence of Jesus has not been established. The history of Christianity is replete with forgery, destruction of libraries, book burning, interventions by scribes, persecutions. As Christianity’s history is a forgery, the historical record cannot be trusted. (117)

Jesus is a result of the hysteria induced by the Roman Empire. (119)

Onfray ventures into textual analysis, finds in the Christian scriptures borrowed themes and similar rhetorical strategies to prior works in the Mediterranean region. (120ff) “The miraculous turns its back on history.” (124) The Gospel genre is performative. (125) Historical truth does not matter; myth-making is self-deception. Even a redaction of the myth over centuries could not remove its contradictions and improbabilities. (126) “Jesus was thus a concept.” (129)

II. The Pauline Contamination

Paul was “a hysterical, fundamentalist Jew,”his character pathological, his ideology imbued with brutality, sadomasochism, and sexual morbidity. (131ff) He manifests the joy of submission, the adoration of suffering and misery (137), the hatred of learning and intelligence (138–139).

III. The Totalitarian Christian State

Constantine was a hysterical monster. He turned on the very magic, superstition, and paganism in which he was schooled, building a Christian empire, the first totalitarian state (145). He provided the model for all totalitarian regimes, which trod the path from victims to victimizers. (146ff) The tactics: torture, murder, destruction of libraries and cultural artifacts, propaganda, absolutism; monopolization of violence, communications, organization, private life.

Part IV is titled “Theocracy.”

I. Selective exploitation of texts

Onfray explicates the difficulty of establishing the origins of sacred texts, which were subject to clerical monitoring and control and limited availability outside the clergy. The canons of the three religions were established over centuries. Collectively, their time span adds up to 2700 years. The sum total is an incoherent hodgepodge full of contradicitons which enable cherry-picking of texts to prove anything at all.

The religious traditions are predicated on double standards. The Ten Commandments? “Thou shalt not kill” really means “thou shalt not kill other Jews.” The Gospels are both pacifist and warlike. (164–166) Hitler loved the story of Jesus chasing out the moneylenders. (166) There was a symbiosis between Hitler and Islam. (167ff) The Koran is riddled with contradiction on every page. (168–172) Is there a feminist Koran? A peaceable Koran? How can opposites be rationalized? (173)

II. In the Service of the Death Fixation

Historically, cherry-picking justified the worst, not the best options within these traditions. Monotheism is fixated on death. (176)

Judaism invented monotheism and holy war—the whole mess. (178) Priestcraft existed before, but it was adapted to new ends. Moses was an empire-builder who wrote a prescription for butchery.

Christianity from Paul on sanctioned temporal power as divine—”render under Caesar.” Anti-Semitism was sanctioned in the New Testament. The Vatican colloraborated with all anti-Semitism from the beginning up to and including Nazism. (182ff) The Vatican was linked with Hitler from first to last. Both targeted the same enemies: Jews and communists. (184ff) Was Hitler a pagan? An atheist? He loved the Vatican. (187) There are numerous points of similarity between Catholicism and Nazism. They are not fortuitous but a product of the whole history of Christianity. (188–189)

The Vatican sanctioned the atom bomb. (191)

Love of neighbor? Slavery was sanctioned from the Old Testament to the Middle Passage, and Islam practiced it too.

Zionism is not expansionist or internationalist. It seeks dominion over one territory alone. (195, but note criticisms elsewhere)

The Catholic Church invented ethnocide. (195) The Church Christianity has embraced mass extermination from the beginning to Rwanda. (196–197).

Onfray summarizes the death instinct of the three monotheisms. (197–198)

Before moving on to the final chapter, I want to note that this is all good stuff, but certain generalizations are not well supported. First, Onfray specifically targets monotheism but not priestcraft or class-based religion in general. He erroneously assumes that the Hebrews invented monotheism and that it is qualitatively different from what preceded. But if Judaism was truly an ideological innovation in empire-building, its novelty and relationship to other religious ideologies needs to be precisely delineated. As usual, Onfray leaves out of account the religions of South and East Asia, including the unspeakable barbarism of Hinduism. Outside of the scope of this book, but which we should also keep in mind, is a sociological, historical account of the development of religion which would supply a level of explanation that psychology-based generalizations cannot.

4

Chapter III of Part IV is its final chapter and the final chapter of the book. It is titled “Toward a Post-Christian Secular Order,” but, oddly, it is mostly about Islam.

Onfray traces Islamic blood-lust back to its very beginning. Islam is inherently hierarchical, discriminatory, and exclusionary, monstrous and retrograde. It is incompatible with the Enlightenment. (Later he says that Islam is structurally archaic; it is not liberalizing and cannot accommodate the Enlightenment: 209ff.) It is the patriarchy of herdsmen defying time. (202) Its discrimatory nature is codified in the concept of dhimma, a notion that institutionalizes the “yellow star” that the Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis. (203–204) Islamic society is a closed society opposed to democracy. (204ff)

Onfray also delves into its contemporary fascist incarnation, particularly the hijacking of the Iranian revoluton of 1978 by fundamentalism. (206ff) Foucault, who was pro-Khomeini, was inexcusably ignorant about the true nature of this counter-revolution in the revolution. (207) (Note: Foucault is again mentioned on p. 214.) I will return to this point later.

Onfray summarizes the “mystical logic” of the fusion of fascism, populism, and Islam. (211ff)

The 21st century is shaping up as a monotheist holy war between the Judaeo-Christian USA and Islam. Must we choose between them? (214)

Onfray opposes “religious secularism.” Freethinkers are still too holy. Even their vitriol is reminiscent of their enemies. (215ff) In effect we see a secularization of Judaeo-Christian morality.

Moral handbooks in republican schools preach the excellence of the family, the virtue of work, the need to respect one’s parents and honor the old, the rightness of nationalism, patriotic obligations, mistrust of the body and passions, the beauty of manual labor, submission to political authority, duty to the poor. (216–217)

This obviously addresses French conditions, and I lack the background to evaluate these assertions. If they are correct, the middle class respectability that tends to accompany secular humanism is much worse in France than it is in the USA.

Another curious assertion:

While the epistemology remains Judaeo-Christian, secularism acts as if religion no longer impregnates and imbues consciences, bodies, and souls. (217)

My guess is that French secularism is quite different from what it is in the USA, and official society there simply sweeps the real psycho-cultural life of society under the rug.

Finally, Onfray broaches his perspective on a post-Christian secularism. (218–219) The notion of the equality of belief systems is wrong. There is a war on between Enlightenment and magic, between philosophy and priestcraft, between this-worldliness and otherworldliness. And the final words of the book:

They know that there is only one world, and that promotion of an afterlife deprives us of the enjoyment and benefit of the only one there is. A genuine deadly sin. (219)

Now let us recall that the book is refreshingly free of French philosophical cant once the first part of the book is past. In this final chapter we find that Foucault’s misguided embrace of Islamic fundamentalism is a matter of some importance to Onfray, but curiously, he fails to account for Foucault’s lapse. Is it so mysterious, though, why the illiberal anti-humanism, the reactionary vitalist Nietzscheanism of French radical chic, the intellectual slumming and rhapsodizing over the body from the privileged sanctuaries of the academic elite, should finally stumble back to its natural home, fascism? In any case, Onfray’s silence on this matter is baffling, given the trouble he took to criticize Foucault at all. Then again, I may be baffled only because there is a French subtext to this intervention that eludes me.

To sum up, the book is very good for what it does. A few books attacking religion from various angles may add up to a formidable array. This is quite a different angle of attack from Stenger, who attacks theism and religion from the standpoint of science. Onfray condenses the miserable historical record of pathology of the three Abrahamic religions. His lacunae, as I have mentioned before, are that his account is abstractly psychological and that it unnaturally isolates monotheism as the culprit from other magical and religious belief systems without even providing a sociohistorical account of monotheism. Perhaps there is a deeper reason for these omissions than simply the need for focus. One would have to consult Onfray’s other works in French to make this determination. Now that Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, limited as they are, have opened the doors to the best seller lists and the op-ed columns and the electronic media, perhaps more substantial fare can squeeze its way in as well. But the severe ideological limitations on public discourse in America, especially under conditions of political repression and media manipulation, may preclude more radical interventions on the religious question from getting through. This book, however, is a useful weapon in the arsenal.

References:

Michel Onfray—Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Introductory Note to Onfray by Doug Ireland

Jean Meslier and “The Gentle Inclination of Nature” by Michel Onfray

Michel Onfray, philosophe, écrivain, université populaire (in French)

Jean Meslier—Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Superstition In All Ages (1732) by Jean Meslier

Meslier, a play by David Hall

The Late Vitalism of Wilhelm Reich: Commentary