Friday, February 26, 2010
U.S. religious propaganda posters from World War II
These posters illustrate the duplicity of the government's characterization of the fascist enemy and of the nation's moral basis.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Jean Anouilh’s Becket
I've always preferred literary art with a philosophical dimension. Case in point: the play Becket by Jean Anouilh. I was introduced to the play via the film starring Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton, which I saw with a friend 35 years ago or more.
We were so impressed with this drama that some years later, my friend initiated a local theater production of it. It never panned out, but I can still remember the rehearsals. Though not an actor, I participated in reading rehearsals, playing an archbishop locked in a power struggle with the King. Tossing out veiled threats was, I admit, intoxicating, even in fantasy. Nothing says sadistic lust for power like the Catholic Church.
But I recall as well something far more important—my reason for the fascination with the play—the curious self-awareness of the Becket character and the ambiguity of his role-playing, culminating in a martyrdom predicated on assuming "the honor of God". Having worked behind the scenes in the theater (long ago and far away) and kibitzing incessantly for years, I got to observe actors, directors, and playwrights. It's instructive to see who really has awareness of the meaning of plays and who doesn't. I've found actors in plays are just as clueless as actors in real life. But some roles can't be adequately played without profound inquiry into meaning. This play presents such a challenge.
I've distilled out of the play some key quotes revealing this most intriguing character:
If you want some entertainment that makes you think instead of settling for the usual pabulum, you'd do well to rent this film.
We were so impressed with this drama that some years later, my friend initiated a local theater production of it. It never panned out, but I can still remember the rehearsals. Though not an actor, I participated in reading rehearsals, playing an archbishop locked in a power struggle with the King. Tossing out veiled threats was, I admit, intoxicating, even in fantasy. Nothing says sadistic lust for power like the Catholic Church.
But I recall as well something far more important—my reason for the fascination with the play—the curious self-awareness of the Becket character and the ambiguity of his role-playing, culminating in a martyrdom predicated on assuming "the honor of God". Having worked behind the scenes in the theater (long ago and far away) and kibitzing incessantly for years, I got to observe actors, directors, and playwrights. It's instructive to see who really has awareness of the meaning of plays and who doesn't. I've found actors in plays are just as clueless as actors in real life. But some roles can't be adequately played without profound inquiry into meaning. This play presents such a challenge.
I've distilled out of the play some key quotes revealing this most intriguing character:
Jean Anouilh's Becket: Choice QuotesThere's not a line wasted in this play, so it's hard to extract the essentials. I vividly recall almost all these extracts from decades past. I'll just add a comment about the King, since I've not focused primarily on him in these extracts. The King constantly marvels at the intelligence and elusiveness of his close friend Becket, who understands the social order the King commands better than the King does himself. This king—as is characteristic of all rulers—is obtuse to certain underlying properties of the social system he commands. Becket, however, as a member of a conquered people who collaborates with his conquerors, exhibits an excruciating self-awareness and a deeper awareness of how all components of the social order fit together, thus enabling him to help the king rule with greater efficiency. The King is merely pragmatic, though thoroughly so, and like all pragmatists he can see through pretense but not through pragmatism. Hence it is child's play for the King to deflate the hypocritical pretenses of the Catholic Church, while Becket remains an enigma to him. The interplay between these two characters is key to the brilliance of the play.
If you want some entertainment that makes you think instead of settling for the usual pabulum, you'd do well to rent this film.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Two Cultures going on 51
2009 marked the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's landmark lecture on "The Two Cultures," later supplemented and published in book form. The press covered this anniversary last year. I found some articles on the subject, and at some point I may review them and mention the most interesting ones. At the moment I have this reference at hand:
Brin, David. The old and new versions of "culture war", Contrary Brin blog, May 8, 2009.
A brief bibliography and web guide on the subject forms a section of my Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide.
Independently of this anniversary, the "two cultures" remains a theme in popular culture, addressed by a variety of serious intellectuals. Here are a few examples I just came across:
Mae Jemison on teaching arts and sciences together, TED, Feb. 2002.
Rebecca Goldstein, "The Two Cultures," in M. Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Experience in Contemporary Literature: Two Worlds? (Special issue of Maggid, The Toby Press, 2004).
"Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth ": A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein, Edge: The Third Culture, 06.08.05.
Rebecca Goldstein, "Why I’ve Learned to Love the Novel," New Scientist, Aug. 25, 2007.
Brin, David. The old and new versions of "culture war", Contrary Brin blog, May 8, 2009.
A brief bibliography and web guide on the subject forms a section of my Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide.
Independently of this anniversary, the "two cultures" remains a theme in popular culture, addressed by a variety of serious intellectuals. Here are a few examples I just came across:
Mae Jemison on teaching arts and sciences together, TED, Feb. 2002.
Rebecca Goldstein, "The Two Cultures," in M. Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Experience in Contemporary Literature: Two Worlds? (Special issue of Maggid, The Toby Press, 2004).
"Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth ": A Talk with Rebecca Goldstein, Edge: The Third Culture, 06.08.05.
Rebecca Goldstein, "Why I’ve Learned to Love the Novel," New Scientist, Aug. 25, 2007.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Rebecca Goldstein: 36 Arguments for the Existence of God
See the web site for Rebecca Goldstein's new novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.
See also the page on 36 Arguments on Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's own web site.
When Goldstein appeared in Washington to promote her new book, she emphasized the subtitle, which renders the title deliberately ironic. The appendix to her novel catalogs the 36 arguments.
Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher who turned to fiction with her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. Since then she has written several works of fiction and non-fiction, the latter including an excellent book on Spinoza and an intellectual biography of Kurt Godel and his friendship with Einstein.
Here are a couple of reviews:
'36 Arguments' Poses Questions Of Faith, In Fiction by Maureen Corrigan
NPR, 20 Jan 2010
Trying to Paint the Deity by Numbers Against a Backdrop of Jewish Culture
By Janet Maslin
The New York Times, January 20, 2010
See also the page on 36 Arguments on Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's own web site.
When Goldstein appeared in Washington to promote her new book, she emphasized the subtitle, which renders the title deliberately ironic. The appendix to her novel catalogs the 36 arguments.
Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher who turned to fiction with her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. Since then she has written several works of fiction and non-fiction, the latter including an excellent book on Spinoza and an intellectual biography of Kurt Godel and his friendship with Einstein.
Here are a couple of reviews:
'36 Arguments' Poses Questions Of Faith, In Fiction by Maureen Corrigan
NPR, 20 Jan 2010
Trying to Paint the Deity by Numbers Against a Backdrop of Jewish Culture
By Janet Maslin
The New York Times, January 20, 2010
Debunking Afrocentrism & crackpot history
The Hall of Ma'at
(Weighing the Evidence for Alternative History)
http://www.thehallofmaat.com
Several topics are covered. On Afrocentrism see, e.g.:
"Stolen Legacy (or Mythical History?) Did the Greeks Steal Philosophy from the Egyptians?" by Mary Lefkowitz, Skeptic, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1994, pp 98-103.
(Weighing the Evidence for Alternative History)
http://www.thehallofmaat.com
Several topics are covered. On Afrocentrism see, e.g.:
"Stolen Legacy (or Mythical History?) Did the Greeks Steal Philosophy from the Egyptians?" by Mary Lefkowitz, Skeptic, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1994, pp 98-103.
"Afrocentrist Linguistics" by Mark Newbrook, updated version of an article originally published in The Skeptic (Australia), Vol. 19:2, 1999, pp 18-23.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Friday, July 17, 2009
Judaeo-Christian tradition, American civil religion, Anti-Semitism, Jeremiah Wright
Note: The following commentary was written on 18 June 2008, in the heat of the presidential campaign and all its controversies. Since I wrote this, I have been more vehement in my opposition to the notion of a Judaeo-Christian tradition, which is not only a cover for the worst crimes generally, but is specifically a cover-up of the anti-Semitic heritage of the United States and western civilization as a whole. Among other things, it is important to look at the American civil religion, not only as it revved up during the Cold War, but how it was used, dishonestly, in my view, in the anti-Nazi propaganda of World War II. Posters of that period are quite revealing: a picture of the dagger of Nazism piercing the Holy Bible, a testimonial from Joe Lewis saying we will win because God is on our side, etc. All of this was a cover-up of the real nature of the fascist threat and the complicity of Allied powers including the USA in racism, anti-Semitism, and fascism, including direct ideological, commercial, and technological ties between American big business and the Nazis, not to mention the vile history of the "Christian" nations in fostering all three of these scourges against humanity.
The most widely recognized refutation of the myth appears to be:
The Spring 2008 issue of the AAH Examiner [newsletter of African Americans for Humanism] is exceptionally topical, or so it seems due to the two articles on the Obama/Wright issue. I can't argue with Gerry Dantone's "Almost Everyone Should Leave Church." Mel Reeves' "Sacred Cows, Black Jesus, and Civil Religion", however, struck me as an argument with a number of gaps in it. I haven't studied the concept of civil religion in detail, but my impressionistic take on it, which is based on the conditions under which I grew up, was somewhat jarred by Reeves' argument.
My notion of American civil religion is extremely minimalistic, hence while I see the concept justifying a general national mythology, I don't immediately see it as justifying any particular action or state of affairs in American history.
This is because, while the public schools I attended in Buffalo taught us American exceptionalism, and they indeed taught us about Manifest Destiny, they fostered a certain doublethink whereby America could be glorified without justifying its arguably criminal actions of the past. Popular culture was also quite minimalistic, judging by my memories of television. American civil religion, even among the most liberal sectors of the population, was affected by McCarthyism and the Cold War, i.e. America's war against "godless communism". But this, too, was promoted in my neck of the woods in the most minimalist of ways. Eisenhower (before my conscious life began) talked about the Judaeo-Christian tradition, a notion that gained some currency as a result of World War II. Eisenhower, after all, had liberated the Nazi death camps, and it would have been most tasteless to refer to America as a Christian nation; so, playing it safe, he invoked this newly-forged concoction of a Judaeo-Christian tradition. I didn't know much about Eisenhower, as my earliest memory of politics is the Kennedy-Nixon race (but not of the controversy surrounding JFK's Catholicism, which I could not have understood at that age). But my experience of television was consistent with a minimalist conception. A telling example is an episode of the very liberal TV series The Twilight Zone, in which Burgess Meredith is condemned to death by a totalitarian state declaring the state has decreed that God does not exist, and Meredith's character defiantly declares that there is a God, and tranquilly awaits execution while reading the Bible. This is the type of civic religion I was exposed to.
Also, both education and popular culture encouraged a doublethink about American history. On the one hand, American exceptionalism, and on the other, occasional admissions of America's past crimes. There were a couple of TV docudramas even in the early '60s, one about Harriet Tubman, and cowboys-and-Indians lore notwithstanding, the injustices against the Indians were no secret. All of this was in accord with the dominant liberalism of the time.
So the American civil religion, as I understood it, was:
Given my indoctrination in a minimalist version of the American mythos, it would not be immediately apparent to me that Jeremiah Wright opposes the American civic religion. A more obvious candidate would be Malcolm X, who even predates this black liberation theology bullshit of the late '60s. But somehow I never thought to think of Malcolm X in this way. So evidently I did not thoroughly research just what the concept of civic religion entails. Or perhaps I just assumed that a religious person is not the one to oppose a civil religion.
One thing I have been questioning though, is this notion of a "Judaeo-Christian tradition". Its history has been outlined in this article, which I've planned to review:
The notion has been advocated and refuted by Jews and Christians of various political and theological persuasions. Some, but not even a majority, of objections came from militant secularists, such as Sidney Hook in the 1940s. There are several bases for objections to this notion, some based on theology and religion, some on sociopolitical considerations. The objection that interests me most is that the token inclusion of Judaism in the tradition is actually a mask for Christian anti-Semitism. I don't recall a specific allegation that Jewish adherence to this notion is a form of Uncle-Tomism, but that would be the logical corollary. And I concur with both propositions. The political resuscitation of redneck America under the banner of Reagan awakened a visceral hostility against Christian America that had not been a conscious issue for me.
But put that aside for now, while I return to the concept of American civil religion. It seems that the concept involves these factors:
It must be the inclusion of (4) in Reeves' argument that threw me for a loop, and I guess when I think of civil religion I mostly think of (1); i.e. obligatory religiosity in America.
Now the argument that a liberation theology in general challenges the American civil religion depends on what the latter implies politically. In Reeves' schema, Christian abolitionists opposing slavery would also oppose the American civil religion. I never thought of it this way, and while I'm not in principle opposed to this line of thinking, I don't find it compelling. I see Frederick Douglass challenging all the components of the civil religion characterized by Reeves. But I also see this tradition of dissent as very American.
There are after all, radical versions of Americanism. I'm most familiar with the secular ones, I haven't thought much about religious variants. Earl Robinson's "Ballad for Americans" is what we would today call multicultural. Ralph Ellison's Americanism was non-religious. Whatever religious or mystical beliefs held by black cultural figures I can think of, mostly jazz musicians, their expressions of Americanism don't appear to be predicated on any non-secular basis.
Anyway, I can see there are some holes in my knowledge of the meaning of the concept of civil religion. I gave a quick scrute to some Wikipedia and other articles as a first step in ameliorating the situation:
In the end, Reeves appears to justify Wright, which I find unacceptable. Replacing one mythology with another works for bourgeois nationalists, but in the end does not serve human emancipation. Reeves was derelict in this regard. I was not shocked by Wright, as I've heard all this before, and I don't think he's totally crazy, but he is an obscurantist and crackpot in his own right, like any other black nationalist jackleg preacher jackass I've encountered over the decades. So I see no reason to defend Wright, but only to oppose the double standard.
It doesn't even take much of a civic religion to keep white Americans as clueless as they are. Obama notwithstanding, if you look at political discourse among average American citizens including journalists, even if they are liberal (whatever that means nowadays), they all talk as if white people are the only real people inhabiting this nation. Other groups are occasionally recognized as other groups, but not as if they enter into the personal reality of white people discussing politics.
The most widely recognized refutation of the myth appears to be:
Cohen, Arthur A. The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition. Harper & Row, New York, 1970.
The Spring 2008 issue of the AAH Examiner [newsletter of African Americans for Humanism] is exceptionally topical, or so it seems due to the two articles on the Obama/Wright issue. I can't argue with Gerry Dantone's "Almost Everyone Should Leave Church." Mel Reeves' "Sacred Cows, Black Jesus, and Civil Religion", however, struck me as an argument with a number of gaps in it. I haven't studied the concept of civil religion in detail, but my impressionistic take on it, which is based on the conditions under which I grew up, was somewhat jarred by Reeves' argument.
My notion of American civil religion is extremely minimalistic, hence while I see the concept justifying a general national mythology, I don't immediately see it as justifying any particular action or state of affairs in American history.
This is because, while the public schools I attended in Buffalo taught us American exceptionalism, and they indeed taught us about Manifest Destiny, they fostered a certain doublethink whereby America could be glorified without justifying its arguably criminal actions of the past. Popular culture was also quite minimalistic, judging by my memories of television. American civil religion, even among the most liberal sectors of the population, was affected by McCarthyism and the Cold War, i.e. America's war against "godless communism". But this, too, was promoted in my neck of the woods in the most minimalist of ways. Eisenhower (before my conscious life began) talked about the Judaeo-Christian tradition, a notion that gained some currency as a result of World War II. Eisenhower, after all, had liberated the Nazi death camps, and it would have been most tasteless to refer to America as a Christian nation; so, playing it safe, he invoked this newly-forged concoction of a Judaeo-Christian tradition. I didn't know much about Eisenhower, as my earliest memory of politics is the Kennedy-Nixon race (but not of the controversy surrounding JFK's Catholicism, which I could not have understood at that age). But my experience of television was consistent with a minimalist conception. A telling example is an episode of the very liberal TV series The Twilight Zone, in which Burgess Meredith is condemned to death by a totalitarian state declaring the state has decreed that God does not exist, and Meredith's character defiantly declares that there is a God, and tranquilly awaits execution while reading the Bible. This is the type of civic religion I was exposed to.
Also, both education and popular culture encouraged a doublethink about American history. On the one hand, American exceptionalism, and on the other, occasional admissions of America's past crimes. There were a couple of TV docudramas even in the early '60s, one about Harriet Tubman, and cowboys-and-Indians lore notwithstanding, the injustices against the Indians were no secret. All of this was in accord with the dominant liberalism of the time.
So the American civil religion, as I understood it, was:
(1) America is exceptional;Somewhere along the line, disillusioned by all the ruckus of the late '60s, I concluded that all this was a load of crap. I don't recall a specific turning point, but by 1973 I opted out of the American mythos.
(2) America is underwritten by the Judaeo-Christian tradition;
(3) America is great because we can confess and correct our mistakes; hence at the end of the day, the system works.
Given my indoctrination in a minimalist version of the American mythos, it would not be immediately apparent to me that Jeremiah Wright opposes the American civic religion. A more obvious candidate would be Malcolm X, who even predates this black liberation theology bullshit of the late '60s. But somehow I never thought to think of Malcolm X in this way. So evidently I did not thoroughly research just what the concept of civic religion entails. Or perhaps I just assumed that a religious person is not the one to oppose a civil religion.
One thing I have been questioning though, is this notion of a "Judaeo-Christian tradition". Its history has been outlined in this article, which I've planned to review:
Silk, Mark. "Notes on the Judaeo-Christian Tradition in America," American Quarterly, 36 (1984): 65-85.
The notion has been advocated and refuted by Jews and Christians of various political and theological persuasions. Some, but not even a majority, of objections came from militant secularists, such as Sidney Hook in the 1940s. There are several bases for objections to this notion, some based on theology and religion, some on sociopolitical considerations. The objection that interests me most is that the token inclusion of Judaism in the tradition is actually a mask for Christian anti-Semitism. I don't recall a specific allegation that Jewish adherence to this notion is a form of Uncle-Tomism, but that would be the logical corollary. And I concur with both propositions. The political resuscitation of redneck America under the banner of Reagan awakened a visceral hostility against Christian America that had not been a conscious issue for me.
But put that aside for now, while I return to the concept of American civil religion. It seems that the concept involves these factors:
(1) the mythos of America undergirded by religious principles;
(2) the mythos of America as a social-political entity—its exceptionalism, essential goodness, soundness, etc.;
(3) the relation between (1) and (2);
(4) the justification of American actions and policies, past and present, on the basis of this mythos.
It must be the inclusion of (4) in Reeves' argument that threw me for a loop, and I guess when I think of civil religion I mostly think of (1); i.e. obligatory religiosity in America.
Now the argument that a liberation theology in general challenges the American civil religion depends on what the latter implies politically. In Reeves' schema, Christian abolitionists opposing slavery would also oppose the American civil religion. I never thought of it this way, and while I'm not in principle opposed to this line of thinking, I don't find it compelling. I see Frederick Douglass challenging all the components of the civil religion characterized by Reeves. But I also see this tradition of dissent as very American.
There are after all, radical versions of Americanism. I'm most familiar with the secular ones, I haven't thought much about religious variants. Earl Robinson's "Ballad for Americans" is what we would today call multicultural. Ralph Ellison's Americanism was non-religious. Whatever religious or mystical beliefs held by black cultural figures I can think of, mostly jazz musicians, their expressions of Americanism don't appear to be predicated on any non-secular basis.
Anyway, I can see there are some holes in my knowledge of the meaning of the concept of civil religion. I gave a quick scrute to some Wikipedia and other articles as a first step in ameliorating the situation:
Wikipedia articles:
Civil religion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion
American civil religion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion
Judeo-Christian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Christian
and:
Marty, Martin E. "A Judeo-Christian Looks at the Judeo-Christian Tradition", The Christian Century, October 5, 1986, pp. 858-860.
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=188
In the end, Reeves appears to justify Wright, which I find unacceptable. Replacing one mythology with another works for bourgeois nationalists, but in the end does not serve human emancipation. Reeves was derelict in this regard. I was not shocked by Wright, as I've heard all this before, and I don't think he's totally crazy, but he is an obscurantist and crackpot in his own right, like any other black nationalist jackleg preacher jackass I've encountered over the decades. So I see no reason to defend Wright, but only to oppose the double standard.
It doesn't even take much of a civic religion to keep white Americans as clueless as they are. Obama notwithstanding, if you look at political discourse among average American citizens including journalists, even if they are liberal (whatever that means nowadays), they all talk as if white people are the only real people inhabiting this nation. Other groups are occasionally recognized as other groups, but not as if they enter into the personal reality of white people discussing politics.
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