Culture & Barbarism

Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism

Terry Eagleton

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labeled “Atheism,” hosting anti-God manifestos by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, and might even now be contemplating another marked “Congenital Skeptic with Mild Baptist Leanings”? Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical era, has the God question broken out anew?

Can one simply put it down to falling towers and fanatical Islamists? I don’t really think we can. Certainly the New Atheists’ disdain for religion did not sprout from the ruins of the World Trade Center. While some of the debate took its cue from there, 9/11 was not really about religion, any more than the thirty-year-long conflict in Northern Ireland was over papal infallibility. In fact, radical Islam generally understands exceedingly little about its own religious faith, and there is good evidence to suggest that its actions are, for the most part, politically driven.

That does not mean these actions have no religious impact or significance. Islamic fundamentalism confronts Western civilization with the contradiction between the West’s own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so. The West now stands eyeball-to-eyeball with a full-blooded “metaphysical” foe for whom absolute truths and foundations pose no problem at all—and this at just the point when a Western civilization in the throes of late modernity, or postmodernity if you prefer, has to skate by on believing as little as it decently can. In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism. All this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence.

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Commonweal – A review of religion, politics and culture.

Terry Eagleton

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Charles Taylor. A Secular Age. Harvard University Press. September 2007.

Books on atheism have been selling like—well, like spiritual self-help books. The unexpected publishing success of Dawkins and Dennett, Hitchens and Harris has left some of us, at least on the more religious side of the Atlantic, fantasizing that we might be at the dawn of a secular New Age. Suddenly it no longer seems the most natural thing in the world that public figures should be compelled to flaunt their faith on pain of political suicide or that matters of war and peace should be routinely referred to the putative wishes of supreme beings armed with super powers. Cracks have appeared in the mandatory public piousness. One can perhaps glimpse a day, not too far from now, when we will wonder how we ever came to play by the rules of that game.

For the moment, however, the game goes on. And there are reasons, of course, for not simply demanding a halt to it. As reviewers have very properly noted, the faithful lend their time and energy to some laudable causes, and they tend to be disproportionately poor and socially marginal. Respect for the person may not entail respect for the ideas the person holds, yet in practice the two are hard to disentangle, and there is a more or less well-founded fear of the political consequences of respect withheld. In the US, the perceived importance of so-called “values” voters in the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 plunged the secular left into a crisis of self-scrutiny. (Demands for accommodation with Christian fundamentalism were thankfully more muted in 2008.)

Read more here: Disenchanted | n+1.

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I’ve been re-reading some Ruskin this week, while I perspired on the tube to work: Unto This Last. Quite a book for its day (1860), and for our day too, given his polemic against the idiocy of the classical economists, their assumptions about ‘rational man’, and the supposed primacy of narrow self interest  in the market  and in society generally (=‘greed is good’). It was a controversial work, and not at all well received by some of his target audience – the Victorian Bourgeoise. (For a bit more on what Ruskin has to say in this book , see the post I reblogged from Jonathan Glancy on Unto this Last; click on the ‘Ruskin’ tag at the foot of the post).  Reading Ruskin again, I was impressed by another aspect of his polemic.

I was  struck again by the sense that with Ruskin there is an assumption that his audience shares with him a grounding in Christian teaching, particularly the New Testament. Its language and imagery pervades the book (including the title). Of course it’s a Victorian, protestant version and not one that everyone, even at that date, was taking literally. Ruskin certainly wasn’t: he had moved well away by then  from the evangelical creed in which he had been raised. This was due to a number of reasons, but Darwin’s Origin of Species and the accumulating evidence of the great age of the earth played a large part in making the religion of his parents unacceptably simple minded and  narrow. Still, when Ruskin wants to talk about justice, or love, or even the dismal science of economics, he turns to the Bible.

Which leaves me with this thought. What shared language do we have now, when we want to talk about such matters? I’m very far from thinking that no God = no morality, and I’m also alive to the evil Christians have sometimes done. I just wonder whether, when you erase a tradition and a shared discourse in which love and justice find a natural place, you find much left standing. What’s left? economics? evolutionary psychology?

Nietzsche makes a remark somewhere, apropos George Eliot, that the English, having killed their God, were still proceeding as if nothing had changed, that nothing would change in their moral universe. I think he added that they would wake up to what had been lost ‘sometime in the next century’ (i.e. the 20th century). Into the moral vacuum of the late 20th century rushed the promotion of private advantage over the public good. It spoke the language of Gordon Gekko and Milton Friedman  and it  colonised almost every area of public life. Now we live with the results.

This seems to me to be a political and social question, not just one for private moral reflection. Do Darwin, Dennet and Dawkins lead to market fundamentalism? I ask this because it’s a naive piece of liberal ideology to hold that ‘morality’ is somewhow just for the private life, with a neutral state acting as a polceman and the market ensuring the efficient impersonal distribution of goods. The state, for them, has a greater or lesser role in suplying a safety net for the injured, or acting as an equal opportunities  enabler for the less fortunate; it  has no substantive vision of the good life that would go beyond this. That’s the point of liberalism.

But if the only driver for social change lies in capitalism itself, then only the self interest of  persons (increasingly imagined as consumers) will stand against the worst that the market can do to jobs, families, and lives. Liberals were keen to finish off socialism (with its Judeo-Christian and Marxist heritage); keen to launch into culture wars against all that would stand against the logic of the indivdual and the market. But what have they got to show in its stead? The selfish gene?

We need to recover the language, and  practice of public justice, and social solidarity. The promotion of the Good Life that lies beyond the horizons of the dismal science of economics. This is a public thing: the  res publica . And it’s a matter for all of us, as citizens, not mere consumers. So perhaps we need more, not less, of the wisdom of Solomon, the ethic of the New Testament, the polemics of Ruskin and the analysis of Marx. Otherwise what’s left? Sir Alan Sugar? Sir Fred Goodwin? I’m reminded of another of Ruskin’s titles: The  Ethics of the Dust.

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Culture & Barbarism

Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism

Terry Eagleton

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labeled “Atheism,” hosting anti-God manifestos by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, and might even now be contemplating another marked “Congenital Skeptic with Mild Baptist Leanings”? Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical era, has the God question broken out anew?

more at:

Commonweal – A review of religion, politics and culture.

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