Year: 2013

Reviewing Noel Malcolm’s massive new scholarly edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan, David Runciman shows that it was not the text’s authoritarian political doctrines that provoked the scorn of his contemporaries; rather, what “scandalized them were the parts of the book that modern readers skip over: the assault on religion”:

[B]etween the political parts – the first two sections and the final one – come parts three and four, which are concerned with religion. This bit of the book, which makes up nearly half the total, is entirely uncompromising. Hobbes uses it to demolish all those claims to religious authority that he despised, whether coming from Presbyterians or Catholics, bishops or Bible-bashers. He deploys a combination of selective biblical citation and his own materialist philosophy to lay into every absurd religious idea he can find: demons, fairies, the holy spirit, the life everlasting, the immortal soul. Life, for Hobbes, means motion, and when motion ceases, there is only death.

This all-out assault on religious superstition and stupidity is what makes Leviathan a very different book from De Cive, which contains no equivalent. Hobbes’s urgency in 1649–50 derived in large part from his fear that a new political order might provide a fresh opportunity for the peddlers of religious charlatanry to get their hooks into the state. Parts three and four also reinforce the impression that what marks out Leviathan is not simply that it was written in English, but the kind of English in which it was written. The prose is expansive, sometimes wild, replete with metaphors and the occasional extravagant insult. Hobbes was taking the fight to his enemies.

Progressive theologian Hans Küng describes the characteristics he’d like to see in the next pope:

A pope who is not intellectually stuck in the Middle Ages, one who does not represent mediaeval theology, liturgy and religious order. I would like to see a pope who is open first to suggestions for reform and secondly, to the modern age. We need a pope who not only preaches freedom of the Church around the world but also supports, with his words and deeds, freedom and human rights within the Church — of theologians, women and all Catholics who want to speak the truth about the state of the Church and are calling for change…

The best man for the job should be elected. There are no more candidates who belonged to the Second Vatican Council. In the running are candidates who are middle of the road and toe the Vatican line. Is there anyone who won’t simply continue on the same path? Is there anyone who understands the depth of the Church’s crisis and can see a way out? If we elect a leader who continues on the same path, the Church’s crisis will become almost intractable.

Similarly, Peter Steinfels hopes that the next Pope institutes drastic reforms, from women voting in the conclave to a new conception of term limits:

To begin, Pope Novus, as we might call him, should declare that his predecessor’s wisdom in resigning reveals a permanent insight into the realities of a modern papacy. Henceforth, popes will either serve a term of twelve years or resign at the age of eighty-two, the choice depending on each pope’s reading of the church’s needs at the moment. Papal interventions to determine the church’s choice of a successor, something Benedict has adjured but another pope might not, will be formally prohibited.

Sophie Pinkham reviews an exhibition by Yevgeniy Fiks at the Winkleman Gallery:

Homosexuality Is Stalin’s Atom Bomb to Destroy America explores how players on both sides of the cold war did their own appropriating, using the idea of homosexuality as a political weapon. The exhibition includes photos of atomic explosions printed with quotations from US politicians, for instance: “You can’t hardly separate homosexuals from subversives. Mind you, I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive, and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual. But a man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied up together.” Such absurd equations show how homosexuality became a floating signifier, associated with whatever political tendency one most disliked. Rather than representing a certain group of people, it represented everything that was wrong—whatever that meant. America’s Red Scare bled into its Lavender Scare; the Soviets associated homosexuality with capitalism and fascism. But empty as it was, the political use of the trope of homosexuality had a devastating effect on real people from both countries.

Sarah Ngu explores the work of Jimmy Linn, who brings a theological perspective to his work on cancer, seeing it as “hijacking the processes that give life and bending them towards destructive ends”:

This parasitic understanding of evil, as something that twists what is good but remains dependent on it, is not a scientific invention, but an old idea that can be traced to the fourth-century theologian Augustine. If Lin has a high view of cancer because he has a high view of our God-created bodies, it is not too much of a stretch to add that we ought to have a high view of sin that stems from our high view of the good. For those who bemoan the loss of morals with each successive generation, perhaps the task at hand, then, is not to make sin look darker, but to illuminate the background of good against which sin is preformed. All sin is a grasping for the good, and always points to the good things that make sin possible.

Reviewing A.C. Grayling’s forthcoming book, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, Bryan Appleyard sighs at the outspoken atheist’s approach to religion:

Like it or not, religions are here to stay. Grayling sort of gets round this by ignoring the primary argument for their continued existence – that religion is a beneficial adaptation. He argues that religion is kept in place by, in essence, political power. This is altogether too weak and too inconsistent to explain the prevalence of religion and most thinkers accept some sort of evolutionary explanation. If you do accept at least some version of the adaptive argument – or, indeed, if you are a believer – then the study of religion becomes an obligation. Religious faith is not remotely like the belief in fairies; it is a series of stories of immense political, poetic and historical power that are – again, like it or not – deeply embedded in human nature. Seen in that light, to dismiss all religious discourse as immature or meaningless is to embrace ignorance or, more alarmingly, to advocate suppression. It will also make it impossible for you to understand the St Matthew Passion, Chartres Cathedral and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) shows that most of us possess unconscious biases about gender, race, or ethnicity. Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, co-author of the new book Blindspot and an expert on these hidden biases, discusses with Tamar Gendler of Yale the best ways to rid ourselves of these stereotypes:

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You can watch the entire conversation here and subscribe to the Mind Report here.

In a rumination on the life and work of David Foster Wallace, David J. Michael spots this passage from The Pale King:

It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

Previous Dish coverage of Wallace here, here, here and here.