The Dish

This post on the intellectual shallowness of some New Atheists stirred a number of readers to write. One connects it to two other Sunday posts on meditation and mindfulness:

If Michael Robbins wants us to worry that the decline of organized religion implies some loss of certainty about the foundations of our ethics, we will need some data showing that religiosity correlates with ethical behavior.  Did the universal piety of the European Middle Ages really make that a more ethical time?  Today, as then, we live in a world of murderous crusaders, rapist priests, and covetous megachurches.  What’s different today is that we also have deeply ethical atheists, agnostics, and secularists who debate the fine points of moral behavior with as much rigor and passion as theologists do, and who are building great ethical revolutions such as environmentalism on the surprisingly robust foundation of a practical, secular ethics.

Much of this success rests on the self-explanatory Golden Rule.  No fear of damnation is needed to explain why it’s a good idea to treat others as you would like to be treated.  It’s a contract, and you get security and stability only if you obey it.  The obviousness of this contract also makes it a firm basis for moral innovation.  You can get 80% of the way to understanding environmentalism, for example, by seeing it as the application of the Golden Rule to more remote relationships, such as between a river polluter and fishermen far downstream, or between humans and animals, or between humans and the natural forces that sustain them.

Of course, there’s a deeper basis to secular ethics for those who seek it, and your back-to-back posts by Christopher Isherwood and Rowan Williams both refer to it.

It lies in the insight that our illusion of self or ego is the real foundation of evil.  Meditation, as Sam Harris argues in The End of Faith, can briefly relieve us of the sensation of “I.” What’s left is an emptiness (“the body as a sort of cave” as Williams puts it) out of which comes Isherwood’s certainty: “Supposed knowledge of individuality … is nothing but illusion and ignorance.”  If everything we are is relational, and there is no ego to defend, then to be good toward others arises out of the essence of what we are.  Call it the social contract, or call it a spiritual insight, or call it God, but it’s definitely not the infantilizing fear of damnation. What’s more, it’s working.

Isherwood, from the 1940s until the end of his life, was a devotee of Vedanta, a school of Hindu philosophy – you can read about it in his last major work, My Guru and his Disciple. And Williams is an Anglican priest, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. There may be a secular basis for the ethics both men point toward, but neither can be claimed for the atheist camp. Another reader:

The religion Robbins, Hart and their ilk describe is not the religion believed and practiced by the vast majority of the religious. Good grief, Christians are burning witches in Africa, the US is littered with creationist “museums”, and Robbins wants atheists to focus on “austere abdication of metaphysical pretensions”? When Robbins says his religious belief isn’t like belief in the Easter Bunny, I’m happy to agree. For the vast majority of the religious, it’s exactly like belief in the Easter Bunny.

The religious intelligentsia want to embrace the vast majority of Christians (who believe nothing like they do), as part of their faith, and at the same time decry atheists who focus on that vast majority as failing to engage “true” Christianity and the deep, meaningful arguments for the faith.

When Robbins writes: “Of course the dead in Christ don’t intervene with God to help you find your car keys, and of course the Bible is inconsistent and muddled (no matter what the Southern Baptists claim to believe), and of course I find it extremely unlikely that Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse”, that’s when he gets to criticize atheist focus.

And this from a reader who notes that it “always is your threads on belief and atheism that prompt me to write a grumbling missive to you”:

What Robbins, and by extension you and Nick Spencer, seem to want is a Christian monopoly on “good values” – charity, humility, self-sacrifice, concern for the downtrodden; essentially liberal humanism with the theological scaffolding still attached – such that an anti-Christian (opposite of Christian) morality is by definition against all of these things and for “bad values.” Nietzsche, for all his brilliance and insight, was a fiercely anti-democratic elitist who hated weakness and had no use for social justice (Ayn Rand aped much what Nietzsche was doing, but with far less wit and humor). Presumably Robbins wishes contemporary atheists would own up to this and get down with their bad selves. In value-neutral terms, he thinks Christianity is a cat and Atheism is a dog and modern “New” atheists are dogs that eat cat food.

This is wrong for at least two reasons. First is Nietzsche’s gross misreading of social history and his own time. He castigates Christianity for glorifying weakness and poverty across millennia, without noting that Europe’s nations and their institutionalized Christianity, whatever their rhetoric of altruism, operated by the values he extols: aristocracy, patriarchy, indifference to suffering. It was the conditions created by these values and systems that birthed socialism and communism, largely atheistic movements that Nietzsche loathed.The other, related reason Robbins is wrong is his ‘no true Christian’ assumptions. The Christianity of doubt that you and he seem to both favor is a lovely little thing, but it has little truck in the popular consciousness. Mainstream Christianity, especially that which is most influential in our politics, is as it ever was in Nietzsche’s time: mouthing pieties of love and sacrifice, while in practice giving cover to a plutocratic status quo, and holding contempt for anyone that doesn’t fit its definition of humanity.

It also has evolved a proud scientific illiteracy. Atheists spend so much time knocking down what Robbins thinks are self-evidently stupid ideas like Creationism, because those are the kinds of ideas that are being most advanced by American Christianity. If modern atheists are theologically illiterate, it is only because modern Christianity is too. These aren’t strawmen being knocked down; as the top comment on that Slate review points out, 46% of Americans believe in literal creationism. No atheists are going to meet Robbins in metaphysical combat, because the battle is being waged elsewhere.

To close, if atheists were the anti-humanists of the “true” Nietzschean type, there would be far fewer fellow advocates for the purported Christian values of human rights, social justice, and egalitarianism. You certainly won’t find them in the bulk of American Christianity.

Carl Zimmer suggests that religion and science coexisted easily in many Renaissance minds. The developing science of geology, for example, was influenced by 16th- and 17th-century understandings of the divine:

You don’t have to page through old books to see just how geologically-minded people in the Renaissance had become. Their paintings show us where their eyes turned when they looked at landscapes. And remarkably often, they turned to rocks. A number of the finest painters of the Renaissance incorporated exposed layers of rocks in their pictures – the fruits of careful observation. They were looking at the intricate effects of millions of years of geological change. …

“The world is not eternal,” declared the Jesuit priest Benito Pereira in the 1570s. “From its beginning to those days no more than five thousand six hundred years have elapsed.” It turns out, however, that many philosophers didn’t follow Pereira example very closely.

They accepted that the Earth had not existed forever, but they saw it as lasting far longer than a few thousand years. Some treated Noah’s Flood as a real geological event, but merely as the most recent of many great cataclysms. And for all the vigor of the Counter-Reformation, no one was burned at the stake for such claims.

Writers in Italy and elsewhere continued to develop ideas about the history of Earth. They investigated fossils more deeply, they thought long and hard about how layers of rock formed, and they considered how volcanoes and earthquakes shaped the planet. By the 1700s, the outlines of modern geology were emerging. But the proto-geologists of the 1700s didn’t see their work as a fundamental break from the past. Instead, they saw a seamless connection reaching back centuries.

(Image: Apparition of The Virgin to St Bernard, showing rocks in the background, by Filippino Lippi, 1486, via Wikimedia Commons)

Last year, Kate Kelly, a human rights lawyer and Mormon, began a campaign to open the priesthood to female leadership. Ordain Women attracted support but also significant controversy within the community, and last month the Church excommunicated Kelly – a decision she’s appealing. Cadence Woodland, a lifelong Mormon, sees (NYT) such stifling of dissent as a sign that the Church’s “Mormon Moment” – “not just the frenzy of interest that rose (and largely faded) with Mitt Romney’s campaigns for the presidency, but a distinct period of dialogue around and within the Mormon community” – has faded. She explains she stopped attended services in December:

The church will continue to lose members like me until it realizes that messages about diversity and inclusion are hollow when excommunication and censorship are the responses to dissent. While the church invests in missionary work, especially overseas, an unwelcoming posture is likely to hinder its growth.

The true legacy of the Mormon Moment might just be that the church was given the chance that many religious institutions desperately need to stay relevant in the 21st century: the opportunity to open itself to criticism and inquiry. The church has chosen not to. And it has killed its own moment by doing so.

Citing Woodland, Hemant Mehta suggests that “Mormons aren’t alone in screwing up their golden opportunity”:

For all the power evangelical Christians, Southern Baptists, the Catholic Church, and the Mormons have today, can you imagine how much more they would have if they supported marriage equality and abortion rights a decade or two ago? Instead, their own actions have forced young people to leave the institutions, drop their religious labels, and search for more welcoming communities.

Woodland is upset about that. She shouldn’t be. She did herself a favor by leaving a Church that shows no desire to improve. If more people followed suit, maybe these institutions would finally rethink their policies.

But in an interview, Kelly explains that she hasn’t given up hope:

How has the campaign been received? Has there been much support within the Church?

We have had a huge outpouring of support from men and women in the Church. It has been amazing to watch this movement grow so quickly. There has also been negative feedback and repercussions, but the good outweighs the bad, by far.

Did excommunication come as a shock?

I was completely shocked. I have lots of faith in humanity and in justice. So, I thought there was no way they would excommunicate me. There was no way they would do something that was just so plainly wrong. …

Will you give up the Ordain Women campaign?

I will not give up speaking on behalf of female ordination. Not because I refuse to do so, but because I am not able to do so. I cannot live an inauthentic life and that is what my leaders are asking of me.

 

A recent addition to the genre, Le Week-end:

The reader who pointed to Finding Mr. Right as evidence of a Chinese appreciation for romantic comedies responds to the critic who argued that culturally specific jokes don’t translate well:

It’s not true. In Finding Mr. Right, the heroine is a fanatical fan of Sleepless in Seattle, a comedy by the notoriously verbal Nora Ephron. Shakespeare in Love by the even more linguistically-oriented Tom Stoppard was a huge underground hit in China on DVD. And North American audiences have embraced British romantic comedies such as Bend It Like Beckham without even knowing exactly what the title referred to.

This reader is exactly wrong; what we often enjoy in our filmgoing experience are familiar tropes cycled through a foreign sensibility. In fact, you could argue that’s exactly what continues to make Shakespeare so popular (in all his myriad forms) with North American audiences.

Meanwhile, Megan Gibson suggests that the romcom genre peaked 25 years ago, with the release of When Harry Met Sally:

Part of what makes the movie so great is its simplicity.

First of all, the two leads aren’t thrown together due to some ridiculous bet (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, She’s All That), nor are they dealing with any kind of magic or spell (Groundhog Day, 13 Going on 30). Harry and Sally aren’t even grappling with any class or status differences (Pretty Woman, Notting Hill). Both are white and privileged, living in New York with huge apartments and loads of disposable income and time.

Instead, the Harry and Sally are simply dealing with the age-old question of the differences between men and women. The issues that the pair – along with their two best friends, Jess and Marie, excellently played by Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher, respectively – face are pretty universal in the relationships of 20 and 30-somethings everywhere: fights over possessions when moving in with someone; needing a “transitional person,” aka a rebound, after a break-up; dealing with a partner who’s “high maintenance” – a term that the movie just happened to have coined. And, of course, the tension and awkwardness that follows having sex with a good friend. What’s even more remarkable is how relevant the movie still feels today.

Watch it again. Aside from some hairstyles and sartorial choices, the film has aged remarkably well, largely thanks to its script.

Recent Dish on the state of the romantic comedy here, here and here.