With this post, I'm inaugurating an occasional feature on the blog. Think of it as an idiosyncratic monthly book review section. The books I'll mention will often be new(ish), but not always. They will simply be a sample of what I've been reading and thinking about in recent weeks. Hence the unassuming title of the post.
David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009). One of the intellectual highlights of my time as an editor for First Things magazine was publishing the work of David Bentley Hart. Yes, he can be insufferably pompous. (And yes, he was quite happy to serve as Roger Kimball's hit man when it came time for the New Criterion to do its part for the conservative movement and savage my "extremely boring" book.) Still, there is no denying Hart's polemical gifts or his brilliance as a theologian and as an intellectual historian of Christianity. With Atheist Delusions, he has written a learned response to the "New Atheists" (Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens) -- writers who, in Hart's view, exhibit astonishing ignorance and superficiality compared to the greatest atheists of the past (Hume, Gibbon, Nietzsche). His book aims to transform the New Atheists' straw-man version of Christianity into a warrior capable of defending himself against antagonists both sublime and ridiculous. Anyone interested in taking the debate about God to the next level should read and reflect on Hart's spirited brief on behalf of Christian truth.
Michelle Goldberg, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (Penguin, 2009). Author of one of the first (and still the most richly reported) books about the American religious right during the early years of this decade (Kingdom Coming), Goldberg has now turned her attention to the rest of the world. In a series of engaging and troubling chapters, she examines the "one thing that unites cultural conservatives throughout the world" -- namely, the view that "women's equality and self-possession" is "unnatural, a violation of the established order." Her book is a sharply critical (and deeply informed) examination of the misogynistic ideas and fears that link Protestant fundamentalists, Islamists, Hindu Nationalists, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and ultramontane Catholics into a global inter-religious movement that aims to curtail the rights of women and stamp out feminist ideals. Highly recommended for those interested in understanding the culture war and/or waging it from the secular-liberal side.
Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard, 2006) and Open-Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Harvard, 1998). Do you know the work of Jonathan Lear? You should. In an age when a motley crew of feminists, evolutionary and cognitive psychologists, right-wing culture critics, and pharmaceutical and insurance companies have formed an unlikely alliance in furious opposition to Freudian psychoanalysis, Lear (an accomplished philosopher at the University of Chicago and a practicing psychoanalyst) has taken on the important but thankless task of defending Freud against his critics and mounting a sophisticated defense of psychoanalysis as a highly effective method for achieving the ancient philosophical goal of self-knowledge. Open-Minded contains some of his most accessible (and stimulating) essays, one of which was originally published in TNR back in 1995. Radical Hope is something very different -- namely, an attempt to explore (using a mix of philosophical and psychoanalytic concepts) the meaning(s) of a haunting, elliptical utterance of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Native-American Crow Nation: "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened." What might Plenty Coups have meant in saying that "nothing happened" after the culture of his people had been destroyed? Lear uses this question as an occasion to reflect both on the fate of the Crow and more broadly on the human capacity to cope with the most shattering of experiences: cultural annihilation. It is a remarkable book, as profound as it is original.
Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh (written in 1939). In the wonderful American Experience biographical documentary of Eugene O'Neill, long-time TNR drama critic Robert Brustein describes The Iceman Cometh as having a "nihilistic vision," and he pairs it with Shakespeare's King Lear, calling them "twin plays." I couldn't agree more. Not to diminish the awful, wrenching greatness of Long Day's Journey into Night, the play usually ranked as O'Neill's finest, but in my view the Iceman surpasses it in both dramatic impact and humanistic depth. O'Neill's ambition in the Iceman is nothing less than to subvert one of the core assumptions of the Western philosophical (and scientific) tradition: that the true and the good are one, or at least compatible with one another. (For more on this theme, see here and here.) The Iceman, in other words, is a profoundly Nietzschean play -- and like Nietzsche's greatest works, it will shake you to the core if you let it. On paper, the play is powerful, but O'Neill's needlessly fussy stage directions and overuse of exclamation points can become a distraction. Much better, of course, is seeing it performed. Unfortunately, though, the play is rarely revived, and even more rarely revived competently. (That'll happen with a four-hour play with an extraordinarily demanding lead role and a dozen significant characters.) The 1973 film is a failure. That leaves the 1960 teleplay version, available on DVD in the magnificent Broadway Theatre Archive series, as your best bet. The image is grainy and the sound often muddy. And some of the performances (including a young and largely unknown Robert Redford in the difficult role of the tortured and treacherous Don Parritt) are uneven. But Jason Robards, in a role he perfected on Broadway, is simply electrifying as salesman Theodore Hickman ("Hickey") -- the "iceman" of the title who makes his friends miserable by insisting that they give up their pipe dreams and face the dark, unadulterated truth about themselves and the world, and who reveals in the course of the play that his own life and sanity are held together by a single, horrible, ineradicable illusion. No one who cares about fine theatre and acting -- or who is fascinated by the seemingly infinite human capacity for self-loathing and self-deception -- should miss Robards's definitive, and chilling, performance of Hickey's 25-minute confession speech in Act 4, which forms the climax of the play. (And thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can watch it on YouTube: first here, then here, and finally here.)
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COMMENTS (11)
Gibbon was an atheist? I think not. Skeptic, Enlightenment thinker, friend of Hume, critic of Christianity as it developed in the later Roman Empire, etc. -- yes. But for his claim that the fall of the Roman empire was "the triumph of barbarism and religion," there are too many CYA passages in Decline and Fall to believe that Gibbon was not at least a deist (although not a Moral Therapeutic one).
Gibbon was an atheist? I think not. Skeptic, Enlightenment thinker, friend of Hume, critic of Christianity as it developed in the later Roman Empire, etc. -- yes. But for his claim that the fall of the Roman empire was "the triumph of barbarism and religion," there are too many CYA passages in Decline and Fall to believe that Gibbon was not at least a deist (although not a Moral Therapeutic one).
I am always anxious to find something -- anything -- that addresses itself directly and intelligently to the central claim of atheists, new and old, which is that there is no God that anyone knows about. Reading the blurbs and reviews on Amazon, I think I'll have to keep looking. It may be facile to say to a religious "authority," "You obviously don't know what you're talking about. You haven't the first clue that anything you say regarding God or the meaning of the universe is actually true, though you pretend otherwise." Facile means easy. In this case, it's easy to say because it's obvious, and I've yet to hear or read anyone explain why i ... view full comment
I am always anxious to find something -- anything -- that addresses itself directly and intelligently to the central claim of atheists, new and old, which is that there is no God that anyone knows about. Reading the blurbs and reviews on Amazon, I think I'll have to keep looking. It may be facile to say to a religious "authority," "You obviously don't know what you're talking about. You haven't the first clue that anything you say regarding God or the meaning of the universe is actually true, though you pretend otherwise." Facile means easy. In this case, it's easy to say because it's obvious, and I've yet to hear or read anyone explain why it's not -- why it's more complicated than that. I was schooled in the unpersuasive historical "proofs" for God. I'm familiar with the arguments of today's more intellectually rigorous religious apologists. The main argument I hear is that ordinary truth is known whereas religious truth is felt. But that's preposterous on its face. One's feelings, as far as any of us can tell, are incapable of saying anything about the universe outside our heads and thus cannot approach anything we might call universal or objective truth. So, you know, you might write a book extolling the virtues of Christian virtue, or the wonderful history of the Christian faith. Someone could write a different book saying the opposite, spinning a tale based on all the bad stuff. That's all beside the main point, though -- the point from which Dawkins, Harris, et al. begin and upon which they pour their anti-religion gravy -- which is, religion is pretty clearly a lot of bunk in that it claims knowledge of things that nobody knows. If Mr. Hart wants to talk about that little problem, I'm all ears.
...With Atheist Delusions, he has written a learned response to the "New Atheists" (Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens) -- writers who, in Hart's view, exhibit astonishing ignorance and superficiality compared to the greatest atheists of the past (Hume, Gibbon, Nietzsche). His book aims to transform the New Atheists' straw-man version of Christianity into a warrior capable of defending himself against antagonists both sublime and ridiculous. Anyone interested in taking the debate about God to the next level should read and reflect on Hart's spirited brief on behalf of Christian truth. ...
What utter horsehit!
Supporting arguments for gobbedy gook partially on the dismissive ... view full comment
...With Atheist Delusions, he has written a learned response to the "New Atheists" (Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens) -- writers who, in Hart's view, exhibit astonishing ignorance and superficiality compared to the greatest atheists of the past (Hume, Gibbon, Nietzsche). His book aims to transform the New Atheists' straw-man version of Christianity into a warrior capable of defending himself against antagonists both sublime and ridiculous. Anyone interested in taking the debate about God to the next level should read and reflect on Hart's spirited brief on behalf of Christian truth. ...
What utter horsehit!
Supporting arguments for gobbedy gook partially on the dismissive basis that the New Atheists are not as grand intellectually as the old(er) atheists--this coming from someone who has the audacity to speak about "Christian truth", which, of course, isn't truth at all. So easy to use such portentuous words as "truth" to mask the fatuity lying behind them as so used.
Simply fucking amazing!
Oh come now. Read the book. It certainly isn't twaddle. It simply meets dismissive contempt with dismissive contempt and offers a fairly rendered history complete with disclaimers of the sort which any intellectually honest scribe must allow. As if to say, " Take your tea-pots and flying spaghetti monsters and shove them up your ass."
Entertaining stuff. Certainly the kind of detail to satisfy will be lacking. It always is with atheists. In fact that is the sole basis of certainty. Every bit as self fulfilling as any fundamentalist dogma.
Jack
Oh come now. Read the book. It certainly isn't twaddle. It simply meets dismissive contempt with dismissive contempt and offers a fairly rendered history complete with disclaimers of the sort which any intellectually honest scribe must allow. As if to say, " Take your tea-pots and flying spaghetti monsters and shove them up your ass."
Entertaining stuff. Certainly the kind of detail to satisfy will be lacking. It always is with atheists. In fact that is the sole basis of certainty. Every bit as self fulfilling as any fundamentalist dogma.
Jack
Jack, well, "Take your tea-pots and shove them up your ass" is hardly an argument. The tea-pot thing, by contrast, is an argument. An argument addressing the central points that atheists make is a pretty big "detail" to omit in a book-length response to such arguments.
Meanwhile, the difference between arguing with an atheist and arguing with a person of faith is that atheists' arguments are conceived in -- and thus vulnerable to -- every day logic and reason, which is the way most of us purport to address questions of fact generally. Faith, on the other hand, sets itself apart from such mundane, ordinary ways of thinking and thus ingeniously immunizes it ... view full comment
Jack, well, "Take your tea-pots and shove them up your ass" is hardly an argument. The tea-pot thing, by contrast, is an argument. An argument addressing the central points that atheists make is a pretty big "detail" to omit in a book-length response to such arguments.
Meanwhile, the difference between arguing with an atheist and arguing with a person of faith is that atheists' arguments are conceived in -- and thus vulnerable to -- every day logic and reason, which is the way most of us purport to address questions of fact generally. Faith, on the other hand, sets itself apart from such mundane, ordinary ways of thinking and thus ingeniously immunizes its factual claims from any objective or serious external inquiry. Therefore, the atheists' position is not as "self fulfulling as any fundamentalist dogma." Fundamentalists take as true a lot of fantastical propositions. Atheists, on the other hand, decline to assume those things -- just as we all do when it comes to most fantastical propositions we don't happen to buy -- and go where they think logic and reason takes them.
Now, if you disagree with them on that score, they have invited you to make sensible counterarguments. If you can't come up with such a counterargument, you might say, "Oh, well, you're just as dogmatic as religious fanatics," or "I don't care for your obnoxious tone," or "Western moral values are grounded in Christianity." All of that, of course, is maddeningly beside the point. You also might say, "Religious truth is different from ordinary truth because it is revealed in our thoughts and feelings." That might sound plausible until one realizes that nobody thinks objective truth is reliably *felt* and that we all regard as crazy those claiming eccentric rather than mainstream "revelations." To credit revelation, one must have a way of dealing with the multiplicity of conflicting and/or nutso revelations out there. To me, the more plausible -- if "facile" -- answer is that "revelations" are nothing of the sort but merely profound, overly ambitious feelings to which we are all prone now and again and which are, because they are subjective, bound to differ from person to person and bear no reliable correspondence to objective reality.
What's more, it's pretty ironic that those espousing, first and foremost, *doubt* should so frequently come under attack for a lack of humility. Who, after all, are the ones claiming to know the one true meaning of the universe? I often think that the objections to atheists and their arguments are basically grounded in a petty reaction to their impolitic audacity -- their willingness to say that something that so many take so seriously is nonsense -- and to their bluntness, directness, total lack of (and disdain for) reverance, which is (mistakenly I think) taken for self-satisfied snark. Okay, but let's be clear -- not liking the cut of Dawkins's or Harris's jib has got nothing to do whether they're pretty much right. I'm still waiting for that argument.
jhildner, How you doing old man? Let me say first off that though you and I have done the cha- cha before I have enjoyed the dance. You move with concision and grace, bared teeth, bit lip and all.
Hart isn't trying to convince you to believe or disbelieve in God. Neither am I. Hart proposes relevant context be considered when measuring Jesus against the days in which all of this hoo-haha took place and where we are now.This relevance, naturally, gives rise to many other considerations. (not the least of which might be whether there was a sympathetic election to Lordship among contemporaries and why.) Personally I think that Hart makes points. That said, I'm sure it won't satisfy your mindset ... view full comment
jhildner, How you doing old man? Let me say first off that though you and I have done the cha- cha before I have enjoyed the dance. You move with concision and grace, bared teeth, bit lip and all.
Hart isn't trying to convince you to believe or disbelieve in God. Neither am I. Hart proposes relevant context be considered when measuring Jesus against the days in which all of this hoo-haha took place and where we are now.This relevance, naturally, gives rise to many other considerations. (not the least of which might be whether there was a sympathetic election to Lordship among contemporaries and why.) Personally I think that Hart makes points. That said, I'm sure it won't satisfy your mindset. I promise that it is a good chew though.
I wonder why Dennet once a supporter of the Jaynsian model of consciousness backed away from it. I think he at least intuited the context implications and got a glimpse of his life work in the shit can. If that is true I think he is mistaken to feel that way. All things forward, neh? I used to argue apples and oranges via non overlapping magisteria. I'm changing my mind on that one. But that is a whole nother book yet written.
Anyway consider my recommendation. It might piss you off a bit but it's not a waste of time.
Jack
Sorry, Dennett and Jaynesian.
"What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us?" So goes the song. What if indeed and what would that mean? Poetically speaking and all. Waves which crash the crags find a gentled beach in its wake. Time is foe and friend. Metaphor of a metaphor.
Sorry, Dennett and Jaynesian.
"What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us?" So goes the song. What if indeed and what would that mean? Poetically speaking and all. Waves which crash the crags find a gentled beach in its wake. Time is foe and friend. Metaphor of a metaphor.
boxofrox:
I really did not understand your answer to jhildner's telling post in answer to yours.
Why not address the arguments in his post without all the cha cha cha and say why you think he's wrong in his defence of atheism and in his arguments against the claims of subjective *truth* masquerading, it seems, as more than they are.
Which is to say, make an actual argument why doncha'.
But don't feel bad: as to this this dance--pirouetting or cha cha chaing and saying nothing at all really--no one dances better than Linker, on this subject or anything else that catches his fancy and moves him to dance the dance of the sheer multiplication of words.
boxofrox:
I really did not understand your answer to jhildner's telling post in answer to yours.
Why not address the arguments in his post without all the cha cha cha and say why you think he's wrong in his defence of atheism and in his arguments against the claims of subjective *truth* masquerading, it seems, as more than they are.
Which is to say, make an actual argument why doncha'.
But don't feel bad: as to this this dance--pirouetting or cha cha chaing and saying nothing at all really--no one dances better than Linker, on this subject or anything else that catches his fancy and moves him to dance the dance of the sheer multiplication of words.
Itzik,
It may surprise you to find that I fully embrace many of the indictments brought forth by the "new atheists". I disagree with the Truth conclusions. I question the sincerity of proposing 1+1= 2 holds standing with " Do unto..." I see mathematics as a very sophisticated braille. For all of its wonders blind nonetheless. All of the furious and sincere perforative calculation cannot encompass.
Obviously my disposition leans to poetic, enthralled of paradox and its alchemy. Perhaps it is because I was once a very sick man then healed by the magnificent dignity and truth of Love.
I will attend these arguments as the visiting team. I intend to kick the 'brights" in t ... view full comment
Itzik,
It may surprise you to find that I fully embrace many of the indictments brought forth by the "new atheists". I disagree with the Truth conclusions. I question the sincerity of proposing 1+1= 2 holds standing with " Do unto..." I see mathematics as a very sophisticated braille. For all of its wonders blind nonetheless. All of the furious and sincere perforative calculation cannot encompass.
Obviously my disposition leans to poetic, enthralled of paradox and its alchemy. Perhaps it is because I was once a very sick man then healed by the magnificent dignity and truth of Love.
I will attend these arguments as the visiting team. I intend to kick the 'brights" in the ass.That doesn't mean I consider the rules to have been brokered honestly much less comprehensively. But for now I'll leave your accusation stand.
Jack
ps. the yeah but what about them argument is about as tedious as it gets. Home or away. Not that anyone has made it in this discussion.
Okay Jack.
Okay Jack.
Jack p.s.
Just to say, as JHildner already said better, that stylistics and brashness aside, the new atheists are humble in arguing for us not to dress up what we don't know, know what we don't know and in exposing the emperor's birthday suit. Celestial teapots are right on the money.
I just don't know what the good argument(s) contra is.
Note this:bostonreview.net/.../byrne.php
Jack p.s.
Just to say, as JHildner already said better, that stylistics and brashness aside, the new atheists are humble in arguing for us not to dress up what we don't know, know what we don't know and in exposing the emperor's birthday suit. Celestial teapots are right on the money.
I just don't know what the good argument(s) contra is.
Note this:bostonreview.net/.../byrne.php