The Dish

Reviewing the latest installment of the political theorist Isaiah Berlin’s letters, John Gray discovers a man cramped by the university life:

For some readers the most surprising revelation to emerge from these absorbing letters may be that Berlin was in no sense a natural academic. He loved Oxford and relished college life. At the same time he loathed the routine responsibilities that go with being a university teacher. Partly this was a matter of temperament. Celebrated as a lecturer, he hated public speaking. He writes of the ‘fearful time-eating occupations’ of the average university day as ‘devouring one’s substance’. (How he would react to the unending bureaucratic chores of the current academic regime can be left to the imagination.)

Berlin’s revulsion from academic life had another source, which was biographical rather than temperamental.

When he returned to Oxford after having worked as a British official in Washington, operating at the epicentre of global events, he found the academy a dispiritingly small world – so much so that for a time, when unsettling self-doubt made him almost a ghost in Oxford, he could hardly imagine how he would make the remainder of his life there. Yet he turned down other careers, opting instead to change his intellectual self-description from philosopher – ‘I couldn’t be another ordinary Oxford philosopher,’ he used to say – to historian of ideas.

He did not actually give up philosophy, but used intellectual history as a vehicle for a philosophy of his own – a liberalism that refused to sacrifice individuals for the sake of grand visions of human progress, whose roots were not in the English life he knew and loved, but sprang, as Berlin wrote to Nicholas Nabokov in June 1970, ‘from the heart of the Russian intelligentsia, like everything else that I believe’. As much as anything else, it was this distinctively Russian liberalism that led him to take up arms in the intellectual battlefield of the Cold War.

John Crace, meanwhile, finds the correspondence evidence of the social climbing that Berlin’s detractors have long noted, writing a mocking imitation of the letters:

Dear Important Person,

Thank you for your illuminating monograph on Tolstoy which perfectly reflects my own anti-existentialist interpretation of his character; one that I iterated some years ago, I recall. I wish I could say more, but I have a busy few decades of intense social-climbing ahead, starting with an irksome but necessary trip to America to have dinner with the new president. It will mean I have to miss Joan Sutherland‘s magnificent Lucia at Covent Garden, but I will be back for Callas.

You ask me for my thoughts on the Cuban question. I regret they are at present unformed as I have spent the past month wrestling with the seating plan for the All Souls Dinner. Freddie will not be happy unless he is at high table. I know I ought to be able to find a way of making this happen, but sometimes the Kantian “ought implies can” is fallible. I have also not had time to commit my apercus on the construction of the Berlin Wall to print; it is, of course, a great honour to have such a landmark named in recognition of one’s achievements, but I am not sure I have done quite enough yet to be worthy of such a legacy…

Devotees can watch a long interview of Berlin by Michael Ignatieff here. Recent Dish coverage of Berlin here and here.

In a long, moving essay on race in America, in which he details his own fraught encounters with the police and prejudice, the black poet Ross Gay reflects on the cumulative force of suspicion and fear in the lives of black Americans:

Isn’t it, for them, for us, a gargantuan task not to imagine that everyone is imagining us as criminal? A nearly impossible task? What a waste, a corruption, of the imagination. Time and again we think the worst of anyone perceiving us: walking through the antique shop; standing in front of the lecture hall; entering the bank; considering whether or not to go camping someplace or another; driving to the hardware store; being pulled over by the police. Or, for the black and brown kids in New York City, simply walking down the street every day of their lives. The imagination, rather than being cultivated for connection or friendship or love, is employed simply for some crude version of survival. This corruption of the imagination afflicts all of us: we’re all violated by it. I certainly know white people who worry, Does he think I think what he thinks I think? And in this way, moments of potential connection are fraught with suspicion and all that comes with it: fear, anger, paralysis, disappointment, despair. We all think the worst of each other and ourselves, and become our worst selves.

He ultimately appeals to mercy and forgiveness as the only way forward:

It seems to me that part of my reason for writing this — for revealing my own fear and sorrow, my own paranoia and self-incrimination and shame — is to say, Look how I’ve been made by this. To have, perhaps, mercy on myself. When we have mercy, deep and abiding change might happen. The corrupt imagination might become visible. Inequalities might become visible. Violence might become visible. Terror might become visible. And the things we’ve been doing to each other, despite the fact that we don’t want to do such things to each other, might become visible.

If we don’t, we will all remain phantoms — and, as it turns out, it’s hard for phantoms to care for one another, let alone love one another. And it’s easy for phantoms to hurt one another. So when the cop and I met that night, how could he possibly have seen the real me for all the stories and fantasies that have been heaped on my body, and the bodies of those like me, for centuries? And how could I see him?

Samantha Bee recently interviewed Matt Slick, seen above, founder of the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry. His daughter Rachel, now an atheist, describes what it was like to be raised by such a man, offering a disturbing glimpse into the fundamentalist psyche:

Conversation with him was a daily challenge. He would frequently make blatantly false statements — such as “purple dogs exist” — and force me to disprove him through debate. He would respond to things I said demanding technical accuracy, so that I had to narrow my definitions and my terms to give him the correct response. It was mind-twisting, but it encouraged extreme clarity of thought, critical thinking, and concise use of language. I remember all this beginning around the age of five.

I have two sisters, three and seven years younger than myself, and we were all homeschooled in a highly strict, regulated environment. Our A Beka schoolbooks taught the danger of evolution. Our friends were “good influences” on us, fellow homeschoolers whose mothers thought much alike. Obedience was paramount — if we did not respond immediately to being called, we were spanked ten to fifteen times with a strip of leather cut from the stuff they used to make shoe soles. Bad attitudes, lying, or slow obedience usually warranted the same — the slogan was “All the way, right away, and with a happy spirit.” We were extremely well-behaved children, and my dad would sometimes show us off to people he met in public by issuing commands that we automatically rushed to obey. The training was not just external; God commanded that our feelings and thoughts be pure, and this resulted in high self-discipline.

She goes on to chart her fall from faith, and closes with these striking thoughts:

Someone once asked me if I would trade in my childhood for another, if I had the chance, and my answer was no, not for anything.
 My reason is that, without that childhood, I wouldn’t understand what freedom truly is — freedom from a life centered around obedience and submission, freedom to think anything, freedom from guilt and shame, freedom from the perpetual heavy obligation to keep every thought pure. Nothing I’ve ever encountered in my life has been so breathtakingly beautiful.

Freedom is my God now, and I love this one a thousand times more than I ever loved the last one.

Absorbing a new study from the University of Tennessee, Andrew Brown delineates the different ways of being godless:

The largest group (37%) was what I would call “cultural non-believers”, and what they call “academic” or “intellectual atheists”: people who are well-educated, interested in religion, informed about it, but not themselves believers. I call them “cultural” because they are at home in a secular culture which takes as axiomatic that exclusive religious truth claims must be false. Essentially, they are how I imagined the majority readership of Comment is Free’s belief section. They are more than twice as common as the “anti-theists” whose characteristics hardly need spelling out here:

If any subset of our non-belief sample fit the “angry, argumentative, dogmatic” stereotype, it is the anti-theists. This group scored the highest amongst our other typologies on empirical psychometric measures of anger, autonomy, agreeableness, narcissism, and dogmatism while scoring lowest on measures of positive relations with others … the assertive anti-theist both proactively and aggressively asserts their views towards others when appropriate, seeking to educate the theists in the passé nature of belief and theology.

Nonetheless, these people made up only 14% of their sample, and all other research that I know of would place their proportion much lower.

Amanda Marcotte also discusses how the study upends stereotypes:

While atheists have a public image of being dogmatic and belligerent—an image that famous atheists like Bill Maher only end up reinforcing—researchers found that to absolutely not be true. Only 15 percent of non-believers even fit in the category of those who actively seek out religious people to argue with, and the subset that are dogmatic about it are probably even smaller than that. But that doesn’t mean that the majority of non-believers are just sitting around, twiddling their thumbs and not letting atheism affect their worldview. On the contrary, researchers found that the majority of non-believers take some kind of action in the world to promote humanism, atheism or secularism…

While most atheists limit themselves to supporting a more secular society, anti-theists tend to view ending religion as the real goal. While plenty are aggressively angry, researchers point out this isn’t necessarily a bad thing: “For example, many of the Antitheist typology had responded as recently deconverted from religious belief or socially displeased with the status quo, especially in high social tension-based geographies such as the Southeastern United States,” and being combative with believers might help them establish their own sense of self and right to non-belief.

Andrea Palpant Dilley describes her foray into the world of trendy, contemporary church services:

When I came back to church after a faith crisis in my early 20s, the first one I attended regularly was a place called Praxis. It was the kind of church where the young, hip pastor hoisted an infant into his arms and said with sincerity, “Dude, I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” The entire service had an air of informality. We sat in folding chairs, sang rock-anthem praise and took clergy-free, buffet-style communion. Once a month, the pastor would point to a table at the back of the open-rafter sanctuary and invite us to “serve ourselves” if we felt so compelled.

After two years there, she and her husband found they wanted more – “hymns and historicity, sacraments and old aesthetics” – so they started attending an Anglican church. What it taught her about the nature of religious worship:

We take communion from an ordained priest who holds a chalice of blood-red wine and lays a hand of blessing on our children. We sing the Lord’s Prayer and recite from the Book of Common Prayer — in which not once in 1,001 pages does the word “dude” ever appear.

In my 20s, liturgy seemed rote, but now in my 30s, it reminds me that I’m part of an institution much larger and older than myself. As the poet Czeslaw Milosz said, “The sacred exists and is stronger than all our rebellions.”

Both my doubt and my faith, and even my ongoing frustrations with the church itself, are part of a tradition that started before I was born and will continue after I die. I rest in the assurance that I have something to lean against, something to resist and, more importantly, something that resists me.

(Image of “Buddy Christ” via Wiki)

Last weekend the Dish featured an essay from George Will on the place of religion in the American experiment, which included this passage:

Religion’s independence of politics has been part of its strength. There is a fascinating paradox at work in our nation’s history: America, the first and most relentlessly modern nation, is — to the consternation of social scientists — also the most religious modern nation. One important reason for this is that we have disentangled religion from public institutions.

Marc O. DeGirolami pounces:

One hears this kind of “fascinating paradox” claim frequently, but what’s much more fascinating is that one hears it from both conservative and progressive quarters. For conservatives it reinforces the myth of special American religious vigor that Americans like to tell themselves is a vital source of their collective civic health. For progressives it represents a distinctively American and putatively “pro-religion” argument for keeping religion as far away from politics as possible. American exceptionalism may be out of favor in elite circles, but this particular strain of it dies hard.

His broader contrarian critique of the way we think about church-state separation:

There is nothing inevitable (or “logical,” as George Will might put it) about religious strength that follows ineluctably from its complete separation from government. There is no iron law that says: the more we separate religion from government, the stronger religion must become.

Such a claim would run headlong into many counterexamples, contemporary and ancient. The ancient examples make the claim appear patently absurd. One wants to ask: “Do you actually mean to tell me that no society which has not observed strict separation between church and state has had a flourishing religious life? So there was no flourishing religious life in any of countless pre-modern societies that existed before Milton or Locke or Roger Williams or whoever got busy?” And to take only one modern case, religion and the state have been strictly separated for some time in laic France and in other extremely secular European countries, and the strength of religious life in those countries is by all accounts much weaker than it was in prior historical periods when there was greater proximity and interpenetration of church and state.

I suppose one might argue that religious weakness in a country like France is the result of the long, noxious association of church and state that preceded separation, and that we just need some more time before a newly flourishing religiosity emerges. That seems highly dubious. Church and state have been separated in France for over a century (since 1905). How much longer is it supposed to take for this delicate flower to bloom in the desert? In fact, it seems much more likely that strict separation of church and state has either contributed to the weakening of religious life in a country like France or (even more plausibly) that it has occurred at a time when religiosity was weakening for reasons of its own–reasons unrelated to, or at least independent of, strict separationism.