Month: January 2007

"Like his hero Joe McCarthy, [Dinesh D’Souza] has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. People on the left, especially those who have been subjects of D‚ÄôSouza‚Äôs previous books, will shrug their shoulders at his latest screed. I look forward to the reaction from decent conservatives and Republicans who will, if they have any sense of honor, distance themselves, quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University," – Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review.

Dean Barnett proves up to the task of distancing himself from D’Souza here. Keep hope alive.

A reader writes:

Andrew, I’ve got to tell you, I’ve had a rough couple of days, and in that context there was something so inspiring about your HDTV post. From a certain perspective, that’s pretty pathetic, I know. My pastor mentioned having to have HDTV as an example of being rich in the world rather than rich in Christ. I agree with him, basically. Yet it is really nice to read about your appreciation of this sunrise program, and it’s important to realize that bourgeois comforts don’t have to make us forget God, or numb us to the terror of the abyss, or make us blink and think we’ve invented happiness. 

I’ve always believed God was neutral toward technology in principle, but on balance was probably dismayed at the extent to which it has made it so much easier to forget Him. It’s important to look at the good sides too, and realize that technology can also provide the good pleasures that God intends for us to experience on this Earth.

Technology, like all human creations, is capable of good and evil. But we can too easily forget the good. I went to see "Children of Men" last night, a superb, dystopian vision of the future, that makes it seem as if every day we are sliding toward an unspeakable apocalypse. But as we walked outside that vision of hell, the streets were calm, the shops full, the bars filling, the city pulsing with the weekend energy. We need to remember the normalcy we still have, rather than the fear that Islamists want us to feel.

The genius of Western technology is part of that spectacular normalcy. And it certainly doesn’t seem to me to be inherently morally suspect. We have technologies that allow for all of us to see nature so much more intensely than most humans ever have had at their disposal; we have pharmaceuticals to extend our lives and ease our pains; we can listen to the greatest music ever written via a tiny box at any time of the day or night. These are great achievements – wonders to previous generations. And they’re achievements of a free society, of free minds, of the West, by and large. When we are terrified by the nihilism of Islamist terror, we need to remind ourselves that they are terrified too: terrified of our achievements. While they reinvent death, we reinvent life. They are a physical threat – but not a serious ideological or spiritual one. One thing we Westerners need to do is keep our nerve. And part of that nerve is unapologetic pride in our civilization – and its superiority to an ideology that puts women in burkas and men in suicide vests.

Here’s my response to Sam Harris’ recent post in our blogalogue on faith. The full dialogue so far can be accessed here.

Sam

You raise so many points that I hope you’ll forgive me for focusing for a moment on just a couple. I want to address the main point of your latest post: your disdain for religious "moderates" (including, I assume, me). You say first of all that religious moderates "don’t tend to know what it is like to be truly convinced that death is an illusion and that an eternity of happiness awaits the faithful beyond the grave." We allegedly under-estimate the real power of religious fundamentalism.

I plead emphatically not-guilty. In many ways, we religious "moderates", because we are embedded in communities, churches, mosques and synagogues that may be prey to fundamentalist rigidity, know this phenomenon much better than you, an atheist outsider, ever could. We have read the scriptures not searching for gotchas, but for truth. Some of us have battled the fundamentalist version of this truth for much of our lives. Some of us have come out of fundamentalism ourselves. In my book, I describe my own fundamentalist periods in the past. As a gay Catholic, I know what the cold draft of fundamentalism is like; I’ve felt its dogmatism and dismissal and denial close at hand. So spare me the thought that you know it better than I do.

I’m also aware that it might not be as simple as you claim it is.

I have met fundamentalists whose convictions are extreme but whose spiritual humility nonetheless leads them to great tolerance for dissent and doubt among others and great compassion for the needy. I have met those who are utterly uncompromising on the issue of sexual morality and yet have never shown me anything but interest, empathy and friendship. I have seen fundamentalists do amazing work for the poor and forgotten – driven entirely by their fundamentalist fervor. Try and think of how many souls and bodies the Salvation Army has saved, for example, how many sick people have been treated by doctors and volunteers motivated solely by religious conviction, how many homeless people have been taken in and loved by those seized by the fundamentalist delusion.

I disagree with many of fundamentalism’s theological assumptions; when fundamentalism enters politics, I will resist it mightily as an enemy of political and social freedom; when it distorts what I believe to be the central message of Jesus – love and forgiveness – I will criticize and expose it. But when I see it in the eyes and face of a believer, and when she glows with the power of her faith, and when that faith translates into love, I am unafraid and uncritical. I know I cannot know others’ hearts; I cannot know their souls. I know further that the mystery of the divine will always elude me; and that beneath what might appear as a bigot may be a soul merely seized by misunderstanding or fear or even compassion. My sense of the fallibility of human reason and the ineffability of God’s will leads me not to dismiss these "extremists" as fools or idiots, but to wonder what they have known that I may not know, even as I worry about their potential for evil as well as good (a potential we all have, including you and me).

I also disagree that religious moderates simply have less faith. You write:

"Religious moderation is the result of not taking scripture all that seriously."

Blogger, please. In many ways, the source of much of today’s religious moderation is taking scripture more seriously than the fundamentalists. Take the Catholic scholar Garry Wills. Read his marvelous recent monographs on Jesus and Paul and you will see a rational believer poring through the mounds of new historical scholarship to get closer and closer to who Jesus really was, and what Paul was truly trying to express. For me, the deconstruction of a crude notion of Biblical inerrantism is not a path to a weaker faith but to a stronger one, unafraid of history, of truth, of the past, or the inevitable confusion that the very human followers of a divine intervention created after his death and resurrection. I find in this unsatisfying scriptural mess very human proof of a remarkable event – the most remarkable event, in my view – in the history of humankind.

This is a real faith, a modern faith, a mature faith that cannot be dismissed as glibly as you’d like. Going back to Pope Leo XIII struck me as a very weak move. Have you heard of the Second Vatican Council? Are you aware of the development of doctrine, the evolution of theories of ecclesiastical authority that aren’t reducible to some comic-book depiction of nineteenth century papal diktats? You say others cherry-pick the Scriptures, but you have done some of the more egregious cherry-picking in describing the priorities of Christianity. No, Sam, the Gospels really aren’t, to any fair reader, about owning slaves, the age of the planet, or the value of pi. They are stories about and by a man who preached the love of the force behind the entire universe, and the need to reflect that love in everything we do. Yes, there are contradictions, internal clashes, vagueness, politics, cultural anachronisms, and any number of flaws in a divinely inspired human endeavor. But there is also a voice that can clearly be heard through and above these things: a voice as personal to me as it was to those who heard it in human form.

I also find in your last email a form of intolerance that reminds me of some of the worst aspects of fundamentalism. Take these sentences:

Anyone who thinks he knows for sure that Jesus was born of virgin or that the Qur’an is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe is lying. Either he is lying to himself, or to everyone else. In neither case should such false certainties be celebrated.

What you are doing here by the use of the word "lying" is imputing to the believer an insincerity you cannot know for sure. When we speak of things beyond our understanding – and you must concede that such things can logically exist – we are all in the same boat. Your assertion of nothingness at the end of our mortal lives is no more and no less verifiable than my assertion of somethingness. And yet I do not accuse you of lying – to yourself or to others. I respect your existential choice to face death alone, as a purely material event, leading nowhere but physical decomposition. Part of me even respects the stoic heroism of such a stance. Why can you not respect my conviction that you are, in fact, wrong? Why am I a liar in this – either to myself or to others – and you, in contrast, an avatar of honesty? Isn’t this exactly the sort of moral preening you decry in others?

God bless
Andrew

(Painting: Tintoretto‘s "Last Supper.")

A thought on torture:

A reader responds to this YouTube:

Absolutely riveting! Thanks for posting that!

A fascinating aspect: neither man is calm; both are clearly seething; each wants to put the other down, neither is really open to the other’s point of view – and yet, as a matter of ironclad decorum, they affect the appearance of calm, they refrain from raising their voices, they respond to one another’s points with care even though they don’t remotely suppose they might convince one another.

Result: substantive things get said and arguments are advanced. Civilized form wins out over testosterone and adrenaline. In other words, a proper debate.

What killed this off? The dynamics of TV itself? The tastes of the mass public? 

But we have the blogosphere.

My friend, Nick Cohen, unloads on what he sees as the betrayal of left-liberalism in the last few years of a terror war. Money quote:

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders?

Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can’t those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?

In short, why is the world upside down?

Good questions. The right has a lot to answer for these past few years. But so too does the left. I’m glad Nick Cohen is around to insist on answers to these questions.

Benedict’s high-fashion papacy and GQ secretary have generated a new fashion line from Donatella Versace. You go, Georg.

Putney, London, noon.

George Will reminds me why I am a big fan of Barney Frank’s intelligence and wit; and a big worrier about his political agenda. Still: even Barney Frank couldn’t spend as much as George W. Bush and Tom DeLay.