Readings: The Cynical Shepherd

In this previous post, centered on an excerpt from Rebecca Goldstein’s novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, I discussed the dangers inherent in the infusion of logical positivism into the liberal arts. A bit further on in her novel, Goldstein treats the issue of neo-conservatism as it relates to our society’s politico-religious life.

In this excerpt, the character Cass Seltzer (whom I designated only as the younger of the two grad students featured in my earlier post) is now all grown up and a faculty star in his own right. He is a professor whose discipline is Psychology of Religion. Seltzer has hit it big, both academically and financially, as the author of a best-seller with the distinctly William Jamesian title, Varieties of Religious Illusion. I.e., Professor Seltzer is to be classified among the “professional atheists.”

Seltzer has accepted an offer to publicly debate a man named Felix Fidley: “a Nobel-laureate economist who has been taking his stand on a wide range of issues by publishing in the neoconservative magazine Provocation, [and who] has been challenging the so-called new atheists to debate him on the existence of God.”

Addressing his partner, Lucinda, also a star academician (and a staunch rationalist), Seltzer sums up the current situation thusly:

“For lots of people it’s become a matter of political coalitions more than anything having to do with theology. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If liberals are going in one direction in the religion-versus-reason debates, defending the theory of evolution and secular humanism, neocons feel they have to head off in the opposite direction. Or they think that it’s okay for people like them, who are thoroughly civilized, to question God’s existence, but that it would be moral anarchy if the teeming masses started to doubt God. I suspect that’s what Fidley believes."

How accurately this describes the political herding of Christian evangelicals, conservative Catholics and Jews, and other socially conservative Christians, by the rightwing extremists operating within the American political system. If these types were symbolized by an Orwellian ultimate leader, that figure might be called “the Cynical Shepherd.”

I am more than a little concerned that a neologistic compound such as “politico-religious” [see paragraph one above] is even possible, let alone meaningful.

Given this scenario, put me down—for now—as a “moral anarchist.”

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Note on the illustration: This is another of the doodles gleaned from the margins of my college notebooks. If you are wondering why I found it appropriate for this particular post, only realize that it is a left hand, and note the condition of the fingers.

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Readings: Everything That Really Matters

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I am currently reading the novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, by one of my very favorite contemporary writers, Rebecca Goldstein. Or, as she designates herself on the title page of this offering: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.

The excerpts I will share below involve a discussion between two doctoral candidates, each a disciple of the brilliant, if eccentric, faculty star: Prof. Jonas Elijah Klapper. The pair had been for a late-night drink at a student hang-out and had been accosted and “good-naturedly” ridiculed by a group of other grad students for being Klapper’s students. The older of the pair speaks first:
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xxx“Of course [that’s a typical opinion of Klapper]. Jonas gets that all the time from so-called philosophers. He’s the only one who’s doing real philosophy these days, ever since the logical positivists set out to hunt down and exterminate any genuine philosophical insights. These are the guys who run around calling out ‘meaningless’ wherever they find something difficult and profound. …If they can’t bag it in some trivial empirical test, they blast it out of the skies with ‘meaningless.’ Look, according to these guys, even Nietzsche isn’t a real philosopher, and that—to use one of their own favorite ploys—is a reductio ad absurdum if ever there was one.”
xxx“Why didn’t we set the guy straight? Shouldn’t we have defended Professor Klapper?” [asks the younger of the two]

Now, here follows the points that grabbed me, and with which I tend to wholeheartedly agree (even if Rebecca Goldstein may not, btw):

xxx“There’s no point. These guys are ideologues. Their worldviews would crumble if you got them to give up their positivistic, nihilistic scientism. The English departments are mired in political ideology, and the philosophers are buried in scientistic ideology. Jonas is the sole defender of the faith.”

The liberal arts, like the departments of political science and economics, have been invaded and successfully colonized by ideologues. But the issue is not—as is often bruited about by the rightwing ideologues—that they are political leftists; the issue is that they are positivists, dominating disciplines which should be the domains of creative thinkers and idealists. If this trend is not reversed, the soul of our living, organic, age-old civilization is kaput; replaced by a debased anti-culture of mass-produced, repeatable and disposable, inorganic facts.
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Readings: Quote du Jour

Reality is ontologically enriched logic.

~ Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza

Reflections: But Wait--the Joke's on Us!

In the spirit of full disclosure, and lest we get too carried away by the punch line of my previous post, it must be stated that the very next paragraph after the joke about the converso, the roast chicken, the priest, and the fish, says the following:

Despite the joke, one should not equate the Marrano’s notion of private Jewish identity with the Inquisition’s essentialist—essentially racist—presupposition. The Marrano’s Jewish identity was not so much passively received but actively acquired, even if the activity dare not show itself… Being Jewish consisted in the private performative act—one was Jewish because one avowed oneself to be. (Betraying Spinoza, p.128)

Go ahead, take all the fun out of it, Prof. Becky.

So where has all this “private performative” action landed us today? Well, we have the atheism of Becky and her paramour, the redoubtable Steven Pinker. And we also have the following, clipped this morning from the current Sunday New York Times book review:

Neoconservatives don’t think small. They also tend to spurn empirical methods of inquiry, giving the lie to Kristol père’s famous aphorism that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. It’s truer to say that a neoconservative is a liberal (or, more often these days, just a plain old conservative) who has been seduced by the notion that America is in steep decline and must reassert itself as a moral and military force in an otherwise corrupt world. Neocons bear, Heilbrunn writes, “an uncompromising temperament” and a prophetic cast of mind, and they “use (and treat) ideas as weapons in a moral struggle.”

No, this is not a non-sequitur. Keep reading:

Did someone say “prophetic”? There’s no point denying it: neocons tend to be Jewish.

(Ah, ha!)

There are plenty of prominent exceptions — William Bennett, the former education secretary, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late United States senator, diplomat, White House aide and sociologist, were both Roman Catholics — but neoconservatism’s priorities, which range from strong support for Israel to vehement opposition to affirmative action, are heavily influenced by the values, interests and collective historical memory of the Jewish people.

Wow. The warmongering Israeli lobby aside, this is very nearly offensive stuff, isn’t it? In fact, the reviewer rounds off the paragraph above with:

Heilbrunn carries this conceit to the outermost boundaries of good taste by dividing his book into sections whose names are derived from the Old Testament: “Exodus,” “Wilderness,” “Redemption” and “Return to Exile.”

Yeah. Well, to sum up: it certainly seems like there’s material here for another one of Woody Allen’s semi-serious flicks, like The Front. Only this time he should write and direct it, as well as starring. He could play the role of Norman Podhoretz, or the elder Kristol. (It’s too bad Zero Mostel is gone; he’d make a perfect Richard Perle.)

And yet you call me an anti-Semite. Shit, I’d go see it.

Readings: Some Essentialist Humor

One of the books I’m currently reading is Betraying Spinoza: the Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity by my old friend, Rebecca Goldstein. It’s a good read, and I recommend it. But I’m not going to write a review of it here, but rather share something that I got a kick out of, from the chapter entitled “Identity Crisis”.

Goldstein does an excellent and very engrossing job of putting both Spinoza the man and Spinoza the philosopher in the larger context of the Spinoza the Jew. Although we know him as a native of Amsterdam, Goldstein shows how and why it is not incidental that Spinoza was a Sephardic Jew—a descendent of those Jews who were expelled from the Iberian peninsula during the Spanish Inquisition, and who settled in Amsterdam, even then a liberal city.

There were also, however, “secret Jews,” called Marranos, who had remained in Portugal or Spain, ostensibly having been converted to Christianity, but practicing an increasingly heterodox form of Judaism behind closed doors and shutters. It was, in part, this double life that gave rise to the “identity crisis” of the chapter’s title.

Goldstein writes:

The continued inquisitorial persecution of conversos had added yet a new dimension to the mystery of personal identity, merging it with the mystery of Jewish identity. What is it to be Jewish? Is it a matter of creed, of culture, of family or blood—or, as we would now put it, of genes? Having once been Jewish, can one then cease to be Jewish? Or is a Jew essentially a Jew, no matter what religion he might practice or even think himself to be a member of? (Betraying Spinoza, p.126)

I think that is enough to set up my purpose in writing this piece, which is to share the following--perhaps the truest answer to the questions posed above:

A Sephardic friend tells me his grandfather used to tell him a joke that perhaps goes back to Marrano times. A Jew has undergone a conversion process, in the course of which the priest has put his hands on the Jew’s head and repeated several times, “You were a Jew, now you’re Christian, you were a Jew, now you’re Christian.” A few weeks pass and the priest comes on a Friday to see how his converso is getting on. The priest finds, to his shock and dismay, that the New Christian is not eating fish for his Friday night dinner, as he ought to be as a good Catholic, but rather a roasted chicken. The Jew, ordered to account for himself, explains that he had simply put his hand on the chicken’s head and repeated several times, “You were a chicken, now you’re fish, you were a chicken, now you’re fish. (Ibid. P.127)

I love it!

Hmm. I wonder if Woody Allen knows that one?

Reflections: Atheism and its Discontents

I was planning to write a reasoned, well-constructed, rhetorically air-tight little essay contra atheism this weekend. But I’m not gonna do it. I’m just not in the mood. What I need to do instead is go into my room, shut the door, get down on my knees, and ask God…WTF!?! Or else punch a hole in the plasterboard.

A fundamental characteristic of atheism is it's banality. Compared to the intellectual and spiritual richness of myth, religion and theology, it is simply boring. The last really interesting atheist may well have been Nietzsche. Most atheists, regardless of the complexity of their presentation, or the opacity of their academic jargon, have but two messages for the world: 1) There’s no God, and you can’t prove that there is one; and, 2) Religion is responsible for everything that’s been wrong with the world since before the dawn of history.

Okay. Fine. Messages received. What else you got?

What originally set me off on this little rant was being faced with the fact that my latest literary love, Rebecca Goldstein, has hooked up with a professional atheist named Steven Pinker. I had been informed of this anecdotally already, by Madscribe, but I didn’t allow my mind to dwell upon it at that time. Then I came across this article, and all possibility of denial went down the proverbial drain. That Rebecca Goldstein is, herself, an atheist did not so much surprise me, although I would have guessed “agnostic.” But that she would join forces with a preening professional blasphemer was a hard blow.

Right now there are at least three other "intellectuals" making a good buck as professional atheists. You’ve got Richard Dawkins. You’ve got Sam Harris. (“Sam” for chrissake?) And then you’ve got pathetic, drunken Christopher Hitchens. Obviously the times are ripe for a resurrection of the spirit of Madalyn Murray O’Hair. Organized religion is undergoing a period of global resurgence, whether it be in the form of Protestant fundamentalism, or of Muslim militancy. We know from Brother Ike Newton that for every action there’s an opposite reaction, striving to become equal. Steven Pinker is among the strivers.

Dawkins I can ignore. He’s Brit, and we all know about them, don’t we? Eccentric though they are expected, almost obligated, to be, they automatically sound intelligent, even if slightly cockney in their delivery. All of which explains why they are more and more in demand as spokesmen in American TV commercials. But I’m not buying. Dawkins is an evolutionary scientist, so he’s got a professional axe to grind. And he has mouth-breathing mobs of bible banging, fundie adversaries, ready-made to attack him and thereby juice the sales of his books and elevate the price of his speaking fees. Next, please.

Ah. Sam Harris. What can I say? Follow the link, read his bio, and then try to find it in your heart to practice a little charity, preferably in the form of pity. The guy is obviously all jacked out of shape and striking back blindly at those forces, far beyond his control, which have left him in the shape he’s in; forces which he mistakes for the God whose existence he denies. Atheism is, after all, every bit as subjective as religious faith. One can no more prove that God does not exist, than one can prove that He does. Pro- and con-, it’s all faith-based. All of it.

Christopher Hitchens…my, my, my. Through a boozy haze, Mr. Hitchens now squanders what’s left of his talent, and formerly fine intellect, by railing mean-spiritedly against the obvious. By “obvious” I don’t mean that he’s obviously right, but that he sets up every obvious straw man in the atheist arsenal and then kicks it to pieces for the delighted amusement of his adrenaline-pumping audiences in an alcohol induced frenzy of over-the-top wrath. Poor Hitch! Butch as he is, he has yet to realize that since death is inevitable, to die tough is nothing. Oh, yeah--it takes a real mensch to diss the memory of Mother Teresa.

Finally, Steven Pinker. Or should we call him “Little Steven” Pinker, since he’s doing his best to be taken seriously as an intellectual, while simultaneously looking like the foal of Kenny G. out of Adam Ant?

I just don’t know. Becky! Becky! Where did it all go so terribly wrong?

Readings: Coo-Coo-Ca-Choo, Prof. Goldstein

Is it just me, or has existence been kinda flat for the past couple of days? Even the blogosphere hasn't been putting out those energizing vibes that keep me posting. I had an excerpt on my desktop, all ready to go. Then I got involved in some issues over at Civis' blog. And here at Rodak Riffs, and never got around to it. Well, my heart's not fully into it, but here goes nuthin':

The excerpt is from the last work of Rebecca Goldstein's fiction that I hadn't read. The anything-but-snappy title is The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind. Rather than providing a full synopsis, I ask you to check out this short review from the New York Times.

Briefly, the protagonist is a woman philosophy professor at a university which reminds me of Cornell. Now entering early middle-age, she has lived a life of the mind, focusing on the philosophies of Plato and Spinoza, basically celebate since a traumatic youthful love relationship. She develops a passion for one of her students. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson. I know, it sounds boring. But it's not. Anyway...here's the long-dormant excerpt:

"How exquisitely small and simple truth is. Not something loud and large and showy, but quiet and self-contained. Here it is. The relation of logical entailment. Concepts entail concepts, propositions follow from propositions. And from this emerges the truth entire, indestructibly forged of logic locked into the necessary facts of existence. It was this structure that Spinoza called Deus sive Natura. And it rises up beyond the corrosive tides of time that wash over all that is conditioned and contingent, including us, our own poor bodily selves. It rises beyond, and yet – the gift of it! – within our reach. Our minds, in grasping the logical entailments, can take possession of it, can apprehend it and claim it for our own. And in this way we too can partake of eternity."

This is an example of the kind of thing middle-aged, female philosophy profs think about while they do the dishes, I guess. What I would like to consider is the embedded Spinoza aphorism: Deus sive Natura. I searched for a translation, but found nothing that didn't sound clunky compared to the Latin. So forget the translation. The idea expressed by the phrase, as I understand it, is that we experience God (only) as Nature.

At first glance this looks to be atheistic, or perhaps, pantheistic. But, on the other hand, if we consider this concept in the light of, for instance, Simone Weil's utterly transcendent God, traces of whom are seen reflected in the beauty of the material world, it seems to be quite compatible with religious faith; perhaps even with Christianity.

Note to self: Read some Spinoza.

Reflections: Who Shall I Say Is Blogging?

What follows will not be the post that I had planned for today. What I had intended to write was a fairly complicated reflection, rife with links, involving a good deal of composition on two or three interrelated topics. I had done some of the preliminary work on the idea yesterday. I woke up this morning and took up the work where I had left off last night. But I didn't have it. The energy wasn't there. I went outside and spent ninety minutes doing yard work. I thought more about it as I walked behind the roaring mower. I came back in and made some lunch. I ate. I picked up a book and read a few pages. I picked up another book. I sat down at the computer and found myself to be without interest in working on the post that I had planned. I read some more, killing the rest of the time until the first college football game of the day came on TV at noon. I continued watching football, and reading during the commercial breaks, until it was time to get some dinner. And now I find myself back at the computer...

Instead of what I had planned to post (as the third game of the day plays in the background), I offer this:

"How can we think eternally to maintain ourselves when personal identity is, even while we live, a plumped-up phantom, a frightened fiction by which the vast majority of us try to keep the wider sea from breaking through?
"But it shall break through. Sooner or later, for us all, it shall batter us down and break us through."

--Rebecca Goldstein, The Dark Sister

I would go further than that. I would say that personal identity is a multiplicity of "plumped-up phantoms." How, for instance, can I explain my ability to identify, with ease, with a wide variety of very different fictional characters, finding in each of them so much in common with my "self"? I find that I am a bundle of loosely integrated contradictions, connected primarily by a common, if unreliable, access to certain bundles of memory. And the devil is in the details.

It is most likely that the blogger who had planned to post a completely different set of ideas today, is not very precisely the same blogger who writes these words now. Yet to achieve eternal life, the quote from The Dark Sister suggests, one would have to become Real. I would say that one becomes Real by first becoming integrated; by merging what is compatible in all of these contradictory selves, into one, seamless, self that travels in one direction, with one set of memories, in one dimension of time. This must be a prior necessary condition for sainthood. And for the keeping of promises. And for writing the post that one had originally intended to write.

Religion: Don't Contradict Me

On page 252 of Rebecca Goldstein’s excellent novel, Mazel, we meet a young Jew, Maurice, living in pre-War Warsaw, who has found no vocation in life. His older brother, Jascha, is a composer of music, considered to be a genius by many. In Jascha’s life, music provides a definite focus and meaning, accompanied by self-conscious movement in the direction of existential authenticity.

As opposed to Jascha’s focus, we see in Maurice a constant and unresolved vacillation between various imagined lives, each of which he projects as potentially desirous. This we can understand as the interplay of, and tension between, the influences of three gunas in the psyche of Maurice. In fact, these contradictory urges are pulling him apart:

“When Jascha was sixteen, it had already been obvious that there would be no life for him outside of music. But Maurice could imagine himself easily into a great number of mutually exclusive lives.
“He would have liked, at one and the same time, to be both a talmid chachem, a disciple of the wise, and also to be one of those bright lights who danced away every night at the Astoria Hotel, buying drinks for the prettiest and fastest girls in all of Warsaw.
“He would have liked to be a thorough-going rationalist, a professor of physics or philosophy at some famous German University, and a the same time to be a Cabalistic mystic, seeing divine emanations in every puddle.
“He would have liked to be an American millionaire, but also a kibbutznik living in collective penury in Palestine.
“Every single one, and more, of these imagined lives called out to him, and he would, if he could, gladly take hold of them all. But the thing was simply impossible. The talmid chachem’s existence would run counter to the bright light’s. The rationalist and the mystic would trip each other up. The millionaire and the kibbutznik could not possibly keep house in the same puny precincts of his person.
“One life is definitely not enough, which is why the Cabalistic idea of reincarnation had always appealed so much to him.”

Regarding the nature of, and opposition to, such contradictions, Simone Weil writes in the Notebooks (p. 387):

“Contradiction is not conceived by the mind without an effort on the part of attention. For without this effort we conceive one of the contraries, or else the other, but not the two together, and above all not the two together in the character of contradictories. Moreover, contradiction is that which our mind tries to get rid of and is unable to. It comes to us from outside. It is real.”

… “Either the mind maintains real within itself the simultaneous notion of the contradictories, or else it is tossed about by the mechanism of natural compensations from one of the contraries to the other. That is what the Gîtâ meant by ‘having passed beyond the aberration produced by the contraries.’ It forms the very basis of the notion of dharma.”

In other words, in order to fulfill one’s existential destiny, one must focus the attention on one’s every act, in the moment that it is undertaken. One must complete the act without reference to the imaginary ends of the action taken. As we have seen below: “Action for action’s sake, not for its fruits” which is achieved by “Ordering of finite means with a view to an infinite and transcendent end”. In this way, one forges for oneself an authentic existence, in complete accordance with one’s dharma. And one acts without the accretion of ever more karmic debt. One dispenses with the need to live another life on the material plane in order to achieve that perfection required of every human being by God: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." (Matt 5:48 KJV) It is not enough to be a Good Joe; one must be a Saint Joseph.

We shall see how Weil relates these ideas to those of Christian salvation.

Readings: The Good Argument

I am currently reading a very interesting, and I think, well-constructed novel, entitled The Mind-Body Problem, by the American philosopher and writer of fiction Rebecca Goldstein. The protagonist of the novel is a hypo-confident female graduate student in philosophy at Princeton University who marries a world-class mathematical genius and member of the faculty. Through the acquisition of this “trophy husband,” the protagonist, who is as physically beautiful as she is intellectually insecure, is afforded the status within the Princeton community that she has been unable to acquire through her own efforts. That’s the plot.

What I want to write about here, however, is a passage in which the proper attitude to take towards argument is portrayed. Noam, the math genius husband, has engaged in stormy philosophical arguments with the protagonist’s good friend, Ava, a graduate student in physics—a field which Noam, who lives his intellectual life somewhere out in Plato’s heaven of Ideas, feels to be inferior since, unlike mathematics, it deals with the empirical and the material. Renee, our heroine, is made extremely uncomfortable by these heated shouting matches between her husband and her friend and confidante, Ava:

"The first few times when Noam called some statement of Ava’s idiotic, her view nonsense, I suffered on my friend’s behalf. Until I noticed that the insults didn’t bother her in the least. Both of them have the same impersonal attitude toward ideas, whether their own or others’. It’s the validity that matters, not the person incidentally attached."

Deeply felt arguments can become whipped up to the emotional level when occurring face-to-face. In a comment box duel, where there is no danger of being answered with a stiff left jab to the jaw, this is even more likely. We should, therefore, always try to remember that it is ideas, and not personalities, that we visit blogs to wrangle over. With regard to our interlocutors and intellectual adversaries, along with Ava we should say: “The only thing I feel towards Noam is grateful that he takes me seriously enough to call me dumb.” A little humility is good for the soul.