Stillborn God: Rest of chapter 5

 He spends some time discussing various liberal theologians, particularly in 19th century Germany. They were so sure that they'd come up with rational ways to reconcile modern society and religion and steer Europe away from the passions of the religious wars.

And then World War 1 happened. Oops. Even if WW2 had never happened, the first World War is more than enough to show that Christian Europe had not really sorted out its problems.

Near the end (page 248) Lilla gets at something that had been hinted at since the start of the book: Once you have a modern system of ideas that doesn't really require God, why have God?

Once the liberal theologians had succeeded, as they did, in portraying biblical faith as the highest expression of moral consciousness and the precondition of modern life, they were unable to explain why modern men and women should still consider themselves to be Christians and Jews rather than simply modern men and women.

Indeed. Religion was measured against its ability to help people express and live by modern values, not by its access to truth that would otherwise be unavailable.

I'm coming more and more to believe that everyone needs religion. Or, at least, they need religion when locked inside and fearing death, which has been the condition of our world since March 2020. From the confessional rites of penitent white liberals during the summer of 2020 to the idiots screaming about freedom while rampaging inside the US Capitol (and nearly rampaging inside the Michigan state capitol last year) everyone is invoking the sacred. Yes, many of the right-wingers are Christians, but I think the Christian faith of the hard right is over-estimated. Whether talking about the more libertarian-leaning elements of the right, or the definitely-not-religious Steve Bannon faction, not everyone on the right is high on Christianity. But that doesn't mean they aren't religious. I mean, they brought a shaman in furs to the Senate chamber with them.

Stillborn God, Chp. 4 and start of Chp. 5

 Chp. 4 spends a lot of time on Hegel. I don't feel like I can summarize his entire summary, I'll just quote one point (regarding Hegelian thought, not necessarily Lilla's own preferences) from near the end of the chapter (pages 206-207):

Now we know what it is to live in freedom: It is to live in modern bourgeois societies where we exercise control over the machinery of political life, hardly noticing its gentle hum. These societies will be complex, comprised [sic] of organically connected social spheres, in which we play different roles: citizen, producer, consumer, newspaper reader, club member, parent, friend. Those who are educated and cultured will have no trouble reconciling themselves to such a system, since they will understand its rationality and appreciate its freedom. Those less gifted may still need religion and patriotic symbols to win their loyalty and sacrifice, but these, too, can be provide within the ambit of the bourgeois state.

One could argue that Trumpism and the sacking of the Capitol show what happens when the less cultured (at least by the measures favored by people like Hegel, and me, apparently) feel like the system is run by people who don't actually share their beliefs in religion and patriotic symbols. That's hardly a complete diagnosis of what led to the current troubles, but it's a factor, and a way of pointing to a bigger cultural divide that fuels a lot of things. Lilla has summarized so many political philosophers as conceding a need for some sort of religion to control the worst in people and/or channel the best. If religion is not heartfelt worship then it is a noble lie, and noble lies only work when delivered convincingly. If they aren't even delivered then there's no solidarity. 

Not everyone on the right (even the hard right) is as religious as people think, but if they reject revealed religion they still adhere to a "civic religion" that reveres a particular vision of the Founders and the Constitution. It isn't theology in the sense that most of the political philosophers discussed by Lilla probably thought of it, but it is religion. It is a narrative that tries to explain the origins of the setting in which people live, and offer morality tales. It's mostly BS, if for no other reason than that the Founders disagreed with each other on so many things, so one can't ascribe a consistent belief system to them.

And it's disrespected. I just called it BS. I'm part of the disrespect. And they know it. They also know that the federal government rejects this originalist religion, as it does far more than the Constitutional Convention ever contemplated. We have a priestly caste of Supreme Court Justices who interpret the original texts and proclaim that the federal government's actions are consistent with their reading of the Constitution, but it is, on some level BS. I don't offer that as a revolutionary statement or a call to an uprising. It's just a fact that basically every modern society on earth has a government that does far more than our Constitutional Convention contemplated. It's how the modern world works. Which is arguably fine, but to have a priestly caste say that the sacred text authorizes this requires mental gymnastics.

On the other side of the culture war, inclusivity is the new religion. I've said plenty about that and don't need to rehash it.

So back to Lilla. He says that the religious wars of post-Reformation Europe led to a desire to separate church from state, or at least remove church authority from any possible meddling in the state, and leave at best an "opiate of the masses" that could be used to suppress the worst and/or bring out the best in people, in accordance with some plan. He's focusing on the debate between those two sides, but I'm left wondering how you get people to buy into either form of religion if they can tell that the elite classes supervising the delivery of this religion, like shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, very obviously don't believe it.

Anyway, he is focusing a lot on Germany part-way through chapter 5, noting that many Germans believed Protestantism should be an integral part of a modern state, while England and the US believed that religion would benefit from religious freedom. (I gather that by that time the UK had largely stopped persecuting Christians who eschewed the Church of England.) He even notes that many Jews in Germany thought that their values were sufficiently similar to those of Protestantism that they could be assimilated into this new Germany. (Lilla adds that we know how that worked out, in a moment of dry understatement.)

One other thing I notice at this point is that he focuses so much on Catholic-Protestant tensions and doesn't mention the Eastern Orthodox churches. I gather it's because he's talking about debates in Christian Europe, and most Eastern Orthodox Christians either lived under Ottoman rule or Russian rule.  Russia was/is, of course, Christian, but it's also on the geopolitical edge of Europe and poorer than most European Christian countries. And Christians under Ottoman rule couldn't really have religious politics.

One other thing about chapter 4: On page 189 he notes that Hegel found Greek religion interesting because their gods were so human. While it meant it would be hard for Greek gods to have final moral authority, he saw it as a window into Greek cultural appreciation of humanity as humanity. Christianity, at least in many forms, tells us to look to the next life, not to lust for this world, while the Greeks could appreciate human life as embodied life in this world that even the gods had gusto for. Lilla notes later that, for all of Catholicism's otherworldly pretensions, it became a very worldly power. The reaction was a Reformation that focused on individual faith rather than adherence to an institution, and somehow wound up producing a Protestant work ethic that led to great worldly prosperity while focusing minds on salvation.

Stillborn God, Chapters 1 and 2

 My previous post was about the short introduction to The Stillborn God. I've since read the first two chapters.

Chapter 1, "The Crisis" is largely about Christian political theology and its origins. I cannot comment on the accuracy of the history, but the insights provide some food for thought. He gets at the core issue pretty early, noting two things I've remarked on before. Page 22:

God's intentions themselves need no justification, since he is the last court of appeal. If we could justify him, we would not need him; we would only need the arguments validating his actions.

I'm not sure I completely agree with that, but I get the argument. I think there would be ways to say something about the importance of the final authority while hiding his rationales behind a veil of mystery. But maybe that argument just reduces to what I've said before about the need for a final authority so you don't have agonize over your postulates.

On pages 22-23, he makes an interesting comment about Greek political philosophy:

In ancient Greece, some imagined a first cause or "unmoved mover" without personality who embodied divine law, which philosophers could contemplate to understand the cosmic order and man's place within it. Other Greeks entertained thoughts about a panoply of deities with conflicting personalities but whose natures were still intelligible to human reason. Such gods were never thought by the Greeks to exercise revealed political authority because they created man and the cosmos--and perhaps that is why political philosophy was first able to develop in ancient Greece.

I've made the point before that pagan pantheons provide no moral authority because there is no power monopoly and no consistent behavior between the deities. There is instead strife, and most of the point of morality in society is to avoid or resolve strife.

He goes on to talk about the challenges facing Christianity, which has a 3-fold deity with very different roles in the world, and a history that started as a minority faith and then accidentally acquired an Empire. Christ was a hippie figure but his followers were running the Roman Empire. He over-simplifies when he occasionally contrasts with Judaism and Islam, but he isn't really writing about them. He's making the point that Christianity had a dilemma in constructing a political theology, but at least had a divinity with a monopoly on moral authority that could, in principle, provide the final axiom. I'm not sure that Christianity is as unique as he claims in having dilemmas around political theology, but he never pushes hard on the claim of uniqueness, so I guess I can let it slide. I'm sure that there are differences between Christianity's problems and other religions' problems. 

Chapter 2 dissects the history and struggles around that. I like the point on page 59 about how Christian cosmology is a rather strange thing:

The Christian conception of the cosmos was always a patchwork affair. It had been cobbled together in the Middle Ages from biblical sources, the speculations in Plato's dialogue Timaeus, the systematic scientific treatises of Aristotle (filtered through Muslim commentators), and the ancient astronomical works of Ptolemy. Why it was fashioned at all is something of a puzzle. The Hebrew Bible does not engage in systematic speculation about the structure of the cosmos; it assumes that nature was created good but has nothing fundamental to teach us about how to live. The Torah is complete. The Christian New Testament takes a similar approach to nature: it is there, it is good, but it is not grace.

In The Meaning of Creation, Conrad Hyers argued that Genesis sought to demystify the world, treating it not as the playground of disparate pagan deities but a place that one God made with one purpose, and it is good. And the explanation of God's creation involves a work week ending in rest, just as a righteous adherent of the faith would work all week and devote the 7th day to worship and rest. Trying to tie this to some sort of natural science was never the goal, and if the Church had grasped that point the Galileo Affair might not have been an issue.

Much of the chapter concerns Hobbes. I am taking a big risk by offering summary of a summary of Lilla's Hobbes and his work Leviathan, but how else will I recall anything if I don't write about what I read? Hobbes argued that human existence is at perpetual risk of a state of war, and for fear of death and loss they hand power to a sovereign who can guarantee peace. This is the basic argument that an effective government basically has a monopoly on the use of force within its territory. Worse, people who look into the depths of their own souls will see dark desires, project their desires onto others, and see a need for violence because whoever moves first has the advantage. In Lilla's read, Hobbes reduces the problem of evil to game theory: Conflict is a natural state and you have to be aggressive. Forget demons and original sin and all of that, there's a much simpler explanation of the darkness of human existence.

Lilla also argues that while the task of a king is to keep peace in his territory, churchmen cheat by speaking directly to the people and offering messages that don't necessarily fit into the sovereign's plan.

Lilla summarizes Hobbes' proposal as being not to abolish the fears that drive humans, but rather:

...focus it on one figure alone, the sovereign. If an absolute sovereign could ensure that his subjects feared no other sovereigns before him, human or divine, then peace might be possible.

At the root of all power is fear and force, and the hope is that absolute power will bring absolute peace. Well, um, yeah, we know how well that works. But then again, no state has ever been truly effective, especially back then, so I guess I see the temptation.

But to Lilla, the most important thing in Hobbes is not his case for an absolute sovereign but that he turns political questions into questions about human nature and how people see the world. Everything is driven by human fears and how they project their own flaws onto others, so perception is ultimately everything.

Interestingly, Lilla claims that while Hobbes was OK with a state religion to help ensure compliance, he was not too concerned with whether people honestly believed, only with whether they demonstrated obedience. He reads Hobbes as being interested in vanquishing the interplay of church and state because it led to churchmen bypassing kings, and in this way Lilla sees some continuity between Hobbes and much more liberal thinkers that came after. If they were interested in taking away the power of churchmen and finding a better way to enforce harmony then Lilla sees them as being in some sort of continuity with Hobbes.

What I find interesting in all of this is how the problem of perception is tied in with the problem of power. It ultimately comes down to who the armed men will listen to. What they perceive and fear determines what they respond to and how they respond. In this regard there's some overlap with Plato, whose book The Republic is concerned with governance but goes deep into the allegory of the cave: How can we know if what we see is reality or something put there to fool us? We only know what we perceive, and that will affect our conduct, including the conduct of those entrusted with power. Just 9 days ago we saw how this plays out: A mob stormed the Capitol because they perceive an election as rigged, and armed men defended it because, whatever they might personally think about the particulars of whatever allegations, they were loyal to the system that certified Biden. Mind you, I have every reason to believe that Biden's win was legitimate, but the facts of legitimacy are less important than the perceived facts. How do I honestly know that it was legit? How do they honestly know it wasn't? We have our preferences that determine whom we trust, and a critical mass of people in the right places put their trust in the system and hence fought back against the mob, while a disturbing number of people put their trust elsewhere and stormed the building.

The roots of power are dark and fundamental stuff, and what I'm hoping to learn is what Lilla sees as the fallout from removing God from that equation. He says that a lot of political philosophy in Europe arose from religious wars, bloody battles between people who all believed in the God of Abraham, the Bible, and Jesus, but were loyal to different clergy. Before reading this I assumed that the problem of mixing religion and state was solely about the passions for control that come from religion, and the excesses that those passions can lead to. Most kings wind up being practical, hoping that they can get some tax revenue, keep the place running, and keep themselves running it. How a peasant prays is rarely their biggest headache. But neighbors and local clergy can be terrible. The take I'm getting here is that it's not just about them, it's about the fact that they are a separate center of power. That's interesting to me, because my liberalism leads me to believe that a society needs many centers of power. I've said much about how bad it is for economies and "the good jobs" to be monocultures. I still think that's true, but there are obviously more angles here. Take away religion and you take away its problems, but you don't take away the needs it fulfilled, and yet you do take away a center of power, with all of its advantages and drawbacks.

Food for thought.

Next Read: The Stillborn God by Mark Lilla

The next book that I'll blog is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. Lilla is examining what he calls political theology, i.e. politics rooted in religion. He doesn't necessarily mean strict theocracy like the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Puritan settlements of New England. He just means a society where people look to religion for guidance on social structure. From page 7:

Human beings everywhere think about the basic structure of reality and the right way to live, and many are led from those questions to speculate about the divine or to believe in revelations. Psychologically speaking, it is a very short step from holding such beliefs to being convinced that they are legitimate sources of political authority.

Indeed, as much as I value religious freedom and the religious neutrality of the public square, how can we expect people to not be influenced by their religion? I believe whole-heartedly that we can and should find secular rationales for public policy, but if that public policy touches on matters of morality, how could we expect a person to NOT be influenced by their religion? You can come up with secular rationales for all sorts of things that various religious denominations might approve of, and members of those denominations should appeal to those rationales so that they can coexist in the public square with people who aren't in their religion, but let's not kid ourselves about the role of their beliefs. I say that not to dismiss their secular arguments as pretextual, but rather to make a point about coexistence. I am a state employee, but I teach in part because of things instilled in me in Catholic school. That's not a priori a church/state violation.

He also makes an important point about the role of stories in human understanding and child psychology:

We are still like children when it comes to thinking about modern political life, whose experimental nature we prefer not to contemplate. Instead, we tell ourselves stories about how our big world came to be and why it is destined to persist. These are legends about the course of history, full of grand terms to describe the process supposedly at work--modernization, secularization, democratization, the "disenchantment of the world," "history as the story of liberty," and countless others. These are the fairy tales of our time. Whether they are recounted in epic mode by those satisfied with the present, or in tragic mode by those nostalgic for Eden, they serve the same function in our intellectual culture that tales of witches and wizards do in our children's imaginations: they make the world legible, they reassure us of its irrevocability, and they relive us of responsibility for maintaining it.

He goes on to say that his book is no fairy tale, because he will discuss the fragility of the modern world. He was writing in 2008, with 9/11 on his mind, but it applies today. Indeed, just 8 days ago barbarians entered the Capitol and chased away the representatives of the people. Their rationales were more complex than a single slogan about modernity and its critics or whatever, but many were in that vein.

In the introduction he argues that we secular westerners are the unusual ones, not necessarily because we don't live in a theocracy but because we don't live in a society where appeals to divine authority are common and accepted. I think about this a lot, and not just because I am religious. If you push hard enough on a chain of "Why?" questions you eventually reach your fundamental axioms, the bare assumptions that you can't derive from other assumptions. And then you say "But why those axioms?" and people kind of stall. You can appeal to personal desires and preferences, but besides the fact that those desires are almost by definition selfish, this world has many people desiring many different things. Why should you desire what you desire instead of something else? A king could provide an answer to that, but the leaders of a democratic society cannot (unless you subscribe to a very vulgar and illiberal majoritarianism). You could appeal to consequentialist arguments, and say that without these principles guiding a society you get chaos, but we have seen more than one type of society enjoy extended eras of peace (or at least internal peace). 

You soon reach a "Well, that's my opinion" stage, and the obvious modern/postmodern response is "But that's just your opinion, man!" We have no real base if you dig deep enough. One motive for religion is not merely fear of death but fear that all we have is each other and our equally idiosyncratic and arbitrary preferences. Wouldn't it be nice to have some authority to sort it out? Not just because humans are weak and sheep and all that, but because we've built up some pretty impressive things despite our ostensible weaknesses, and it's terrifying to think that they sit on sand. Surely we must have a rock under them! Surely there must be some foundation for prosperous, liberal, tolerant civilization. 

Perhaps part of why social justice and diversity talk gets so religious is because they want to just take the tolerance and diversity that we should preserve and put that itself on God's pedestal. It's a nice idea, except it eventually results in guilty liberals confessing sin in pointless training sessions while somebody tries to remove Shakespeare from the curriculum, and none of this stops barbarians from storming the Capitol. We thus get to the true root of power, which is force, and then we have to ask about the factors that make (hopefully most of) the men with guns loyal. Those factors rarely involve training sessions on implicit bias. If there is a God in our politics, it's whatever keeps the armed men at the base of the system from turning disloyal.

Anyway, let's see what he has to say about the loss of religion and its consequences.

"Indifference" and the restlessness

 An article by Mark Lilla in the new journal Liberties (only available in print, alas) solidified some of my thinking on the restlessness. He talks about the concept of "indifferent" acts in ethics and theology. Do all of our actions carry inevitable moral weight? Is it possible to engage in some small activity without being good or bad, or is even a small act of leisure a sin? What if that act of leisure promotes morality? We see this all the time in modern lefty discourse, with endless articles about how "problematic" something or other is. One needn't be amoral or nihilist to recognize that you'll go crazy if you agonize over the ethics of every small deed. But people do that nonetheless. Just a few hours ago I was scolded over some small joke, because even though the person I told it to totally got it, some outside observer might lack context and think I was doing something bad. Lilla goes through the history of indifference in theology and philosophy, and I won't attempt to rehash it here. But I will note that the modern scolds of political correctness are searching for sin everywhere, and the modern restless educators feel like we must keep trying to further purify everything.

Next book: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

My next book blogging will be about Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by Rene Girard. I came across a reference to this book, while reading something about political correctness. I can no longer find the essay that I read, but the title of this book stuck with me. The reference said that this book discusses the roots of religion, and since the social concerns at the root of political correctness also sit at the root of much that maddens me in modern education, it's worth studying.

The book seems to be very focused on the theme of mimicry as the root of social strife. It's dangerous to try to fit all of human society into one single social theme, but my impression of 20th century French intellectuals is that they engaged in these over-simplifications for playful reasons. They felt that if you want to understand an idea you must take it as far as it can go and then some, and try to fit absolutely everything into it. Even if the fit is awkward, you must keep trying. They never say explicitly that the awkwardness of the fit might be telling in its own way, but instead expected you to figure that out for yourself.  So I'm reading him forgivingly. Also, his ideas about mimicry, and how it can lead to rivalry and contests, while repeated on every page, also seem to be more of an invitation to bigger questions, rather than something that he seriously intends you to fit everything into.

Mostly it has me thinking about religion in general. Abrahamic faiths seem to be particularly versatile religions, in that they provide at least 4 things:

1. A cosmology: God made the world, and that explains it.
2. Morality: You must do good when possible, and atone and repent by the rules of the faith when you fall short, and God will reward you.
3. Ritual: The year is organized by a religious calendar, with rituals for different facets of life at different times of the year. This focuses our time and endeavors, provides cohesion and outlets for our communities, and provides, in the words of Ecclesiastes, a season for all things.
4. Community: The community of believers is distinct from other tribes.

When I contrast with older polytheistic faiths, one omission that I see is morality. One reason is that in ancient mythology it isn't clear which god you should look to for morality. The universe has no undisputed moral leader, but rather a strife between deities with conflicting agendas. And many of those deities are deeply flawed (the Greek gods being particularly flawed, but not unique in having flaws). Are we to look to these murderous adulterers for morality? At least the Old Testament God, when He smites the wicked, has an uncontested claim to moral arbiter status.

Instead, polytheists appeal to different deities for different purposes.  Want victory in war? Sacrifice to the god of war. Want a bountiful harvest? Sacrifice to a harvest deity, or maybe a weather deity. And so forth. Also, while ancient polytheists were deeply concerned with tribal identity, alien tribes have deities whom some societies considered real rivals to their deities, rather than figments of alien imagination.

(Hinduism has morality, but there's also an idea that the multitude of gods reflect some deeper, higher order behind the world, something that might not be a single God like the God of Abraham, but at least brings unity.)

Political correctness offers morality and community, and increasingly ritual (e.g. land acknowledgments), but not (yet) a cosmology. I suspect that as they edge toward "noble savage" tropes we'll see a re-emergence of religious cosmology, particularly as the astronomy community struggles to reconcile their need for mountaintop observatories with traditional religious beliefs about sacred mountains, but we're not yet at the point of a PC cosmology. Maybe we'll eventually get myths about certain groups having not just more sustainable lifestyles but supernatural connections to the land, but we're not quite there (as far as I know).

Or maybe not. Ancient religions didn't check all of the boxes that Abrahamic faiths check, and much of the world gets by without all of those boxes being checked in their belief systems. Still, since PC seems to be quite Christian in its roots, being so focused on guilt and redemption, I am open to the possibility that eventually a full-scale recreation of Christianity will emerge.

Thoughts on "The Meaning of Creation"

Hyers doesn't shy away from the fact that the first two chapters of Genesis contradict each other, if read literally. This is a point that is kind of problematic for Biblical literalists. His answer is that if you read it in the original Hebrew, you see that there's a lot of metaphorical language, and some decidedly non-standard language. For instance, the sun and moon are referred to with Hebrew words meaning "the greater light" and "the lesser light" rather than by their standard Hebrew names, because their original Hebrew names share etymologies with the names of pagan deities. The purpose of each creation story, particularly the first one, is to distinguish their belief system from that of neighboring tribes.  This reading makes a lot of sense if you consider how much of the Old Testament is about conflict between Israel and neighboring peoples!

So the first chapter of Genesis has parallels with the creation stories of the pagan Babylonians, except that words for the natural world are stripped of supernatural connotations. Divinity is found not in the vast pantheons of warring deities and nature spirits that pagans worshiped, but in one creator God who stands above all of nature. The natural world is the work of a creator, not the dwelling place of numerous deities with their own domains and constant conflicts. The account of the creator is fit into the rubric of six days of work and one day of rest to make analogies with the lives of people on earth, God's children whose intellectual and emotional capacities are images of the greater intelligence and love in their intelligent creator.

The parallels with pagan accounts, and the stripping of pagan details, is deliberate, as the first chapter of Genesis dates to the Babylonian exile, and was a reminder to the people of Israel that they must resist the temptations of pagan society. Whenever they look upon the splendors of their neighbors' cities, they must remember that the world that they see is not the world of a pagan pantheon but a single God. The world is indeed a fine place, and full of wonders, but those wonders come from Yahweh.

Hyers argues that the metaphorical nature of Genesis was apparent to the audience. I don't know Hebrew, so I can't judge the validity of his claim, but I can note this: If there's anyone who's engaged in serious scholarly analysis and debate over the Book of Genesis, it's the rabbis, who have a deep literature of commentary and analysis (e.g. the Talmud). And we almost never see Jews protesting evolution at school board meetings.  Yes, it's a big country with lots of people, I'm sure that somewhere out there a rabbi is railing against biology textbooks, but you just never see as much of it. In fact, at the risk of stereotyping, Jewish families seem to prefer preparing their kids to study science rather than preparing them to protest against science textbooks. Granted, many Jewish scientists are secular, but plenty are religious, yet we rarely hear them complain about evolution and cosmology.  It's almost as though people who engage in careful study of the Old Testament in the original language, along with ages of commentary written by the society that the book was originally aimed at, are able to appreciate the metaphorical nature of the text, and find spiritual meaning and fulfillment in it because of rather than in spite of the metaphorical language.

Perhaps the most interesting point made by Hyers is this: In offering a metaphorical cosmology purged of paganism, the rabbis who compiled the Book of Genesis from older oral traditions separated the material from the divine. In many pagan traditions, spirits are everywhere in nature. But if the world was made by a creator above, then the material world is subject to a single divine plan, rather than a contest between numerous nature spirits. That mindset leaves room for a world governed by physical law, and it can be traced to the first chapters of the Bible.

Of course, reading Hyers' analysis as a persuasive rebuke to creationism requires consideration of what the focus of religious belief is. For a modern Christian, the text that they engage with is not the Hebrew original, but the English translation. And these translations didn't get printed yesterday. They have their own centuries of tradition built up around them. Expecting a Biblical literalist to prefer a theology professor's linguistic and historical arguments over the traditions of their own families and communities may be a bit much for some. Reading the King James Version is as much a tradition for many Christian families as Hebrew School is for many Jewish families. And what is the Old Testament if not an account of a people maintaining their faith and traditions in a world of challenges from alien tribes?

However, Hyers' approach does provide one possible answer, though he hasn't stated it quite as I'm about to: If we read Genesis in historical context, then we are engaging not with a timeline but with a community going through great trials, both material and spiritual. The Old Testament is a book of people holding to faith through trials of all sorts, and finding strength in their faith and community. For that matter, many of Paul's letters in the New Testament are advice to new communities going through trials in their formation. If we read Genesis in this context, as a microcosm of the Bible's great themes, we have the opportunity to encounter through words and stories the faith challenges of people who worship the same God as us. Surely there's comfort, strength, and insight in that.

New book to (maybe) blog about: Meaning of Creation--Genesis and Modern Science

Nearly a quarter of a century ago I read a book called The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science, by theology professor Conrad Hyers. My recollection is that he looked at what the Bible meant in the original language and argued that the first two chapters of Genesis were never offered as literal timelines. I want to see if my recollection is accurate, so I will reread the book and (maybe) blog about it.

Bell on religion

On page 155, Bell cites Emile Durkheim, who apparently viewed religion as dividing the world not into men and gods but sacred and profane.  Seen in that light, the religiosity of a society is measured not by supernatural belief but by extremes of moral convictions.  I think our modern politically correct era is a very religious one.  However, it's a religion that cannot identify itself as one, so we lack the language and customs to respect it, critique it, constrain it, and channel it.

One more thing from the Deresiewicz essay

I forgot to quote this part:

I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”
...
When my student wrote about her churchgoing friend, she said that she couldn’t understand why anyone would feel uncomfortable being out as a religious person at a place as diverse as Scripps.

There's a belief that tolerance is about bringing together people whose identities are different, not people whose beliefs (or lack thereof) and practices are different.  There's an idea that diversity of the first sort--a diversity achieved through presence, not practice--not only confers moral legitimacy but also automatically exudes a sense of comfort.

I remember encountering bits of this in college in the 90's.  It was different from intellectual relativism, postmodernism, etc.  Those ideas involved hard reading and mental challenges that went deeper than smiling and saying "Thank you for sharing that."  It was not as developed as what's going on now, but the stirrings were there.  Contra Deresiewicz, it didn't come from Foucault or the humanities faculty, it came from Student Affairs.  It is the process of academia replacing academics with administration.  Academic work should exhaust the mind when it's done right, not make everyone feel happy-shiny and smug.

Make a whole new religion, a falling star that you cannot live without

William Deresiewicz just published a nice essay on political correctness. It is longer than it needed to be, but it still has plenty of good stuff.  I don't have time to frame a single, cohere response, so I'll just address it in bits and pieces.

Selective private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism but an extreme version of the belief system of the liberal elite: the liberal professional, managerial, and creative classes, which provide a large majority of students enrolled at such places and an even larger majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized, and not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

...

What does it mean to say that these institutions are religious schools? First, that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern.

This seems accurate, though I think it's important to emphasize (as he does later) that this is to a large extent an elite phenomenon.  The viewpoints he describes go beyond the most elite institutions, but the rigidity of the code, and particularly its power over the wider student body, is not as bad everywhere as it is in the places that he's talking about.

As to this:

The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and collective virtue, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth. This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.

The first sentence seems wildly inaccurate.  I can't speak to humanities, but I haven't heard anyone mention Foucault (outside of a few libertarian friends with decidedly non-leftist views on power) since the 1990's.  Frankly, if today's campus identity liberalism were rooted in Foucault it would be a step up--at least Foucault is a hard read!  The writings that matter in identity liberalism on today's campuses seem to be shallow think-pieces at the level of Slate and Huffpo, emotional personal accounts, and egregiously misapplied/misinformed social science, not French intellectuals.  Indeed, the last sentence notes the unscholarly attitude of identity liberalism, further casting doubt on the assertion that it's rooted in thinkers like Foucault.  They don't want thick treatises, they want 3 Quick Tips For Implementing Best Practices!

Also, French postmodernists would have cast a disparaging eye on claims to objective truth, whereas today's identity liberalism holds that privilege blinds one to truth and oppression opens one to it.  There is an objective moral code, an idea of settled questions, as Deresiewicz notes.  French postmodernists would laugh at the idea of settled truths, let alone settled moral truths.

But of course, Scripps and its ilk are only diverse in terms of identity. In terms of ideology, they are all but homogeneous. You don’t have “different voices” on campus, as these institutions like to boast; you have different bodies, speaking with the same voice.

...

 Elite private colleges are ideologically homogenous because they are socially homogeneous, or close to it. Their student populations largely come from the liberal upper and upper-middle classes, multiracial but predominantly white, with an admixture of students from poor communities of color—two demographics with broadly similar political beliefs, as evidenced by the fact that they together constitute a large proportion of the Democratic Party base. As for faculty and managerial staff, they are even more homogenous than their students, both in their social origins and in their present milieu, which tends to be composed exclusively of other liberal professionals—if not, indeed, of other liberal academics. Unlike the campus protesters of the 1960s, today’s student activists are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves (a reason that administrators prove so ready to accede to their demands). If you want to find the counterculture on today’s elite college campuses, you need to look for the conservative students.

This I agree with 100%.

And this:

There is one category that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize—that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal: class. Class at fancy colleges, as throughout American society, has been the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. And the exclusion of class on selective college campuses enables the exclusion of a class. It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white. In fact, more than 40 percent of poor Americans are white. Roughly 60 percent of working-class Americans are white. Almost two-thirds of white Americans are poor or working-class. Altogether, lower-income whites make up about 40 percent of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they amount, at most, to a few percent and constitute, by a wide margin, the single most underrepresented group. 

We don’t acknowledge class, so there are few affirmative-action programs based on class. Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed. The recent presidential campaign may be understood as the return of that repressed—and the repressed, when it returns, is always monstrous. 

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in perpetuating class, which they do through a system that pretends to accomplish the opposite, our so-called meritocracy. Students have as much merit, in general, as their parents can purchase (which, for example, is the reason SAT scores correlate closely with family income). The college admissions process is, as Mitchell L. Stevens writes in Creating a Class, a way of “laundering privilege.”

Here's the most important part:

The culture of political correctness, the religion of the fancy private colleges, provides the affluent white and Asian students who make up the preponderant majority of their student bodies, and the affluent white and Asian professionals who make up the preponderant majority of their tenured faculty and managerial staffs, with the ideological resources to alibi or erase their privilege. It enables them to tell themselves that they are children of the light—part of the solution to our social ills, not an integral component of the problem. It may speak about dismantling the elite, but its real purpose is to flatter it. [Emphasis added]

Exactly.  That's why people eat that shit up like pita chips and humus from Trader Joe's.

Later in the essay, Deresiewicz acknowledges the role that class plays, and the difference between elite private and non-elite public institutions:

But public schools are very different places from private ones. Their student bodies, for the most part, are far more diverse, economically and in every other way, which means these institutions do not have to deal with a large bolus of affluent, sheltered white and Asian kids who don’t know how to talk to black and brown people and need to be “educated” into “awareness” by the presence of African-American and Latino students (who are, in turn, expected to “represent” their communities). When different kinds of people grow up together, rather than being introduced to one another under artificial conditions in young adulthood, they learn to talk and play and study together honestly and unselfconsciously—which means, for adolescents, often frankly and roughly—without feeling that they have to tiptoe around sensitivities that are frequently created by the situation itself.

I'm at a non-elite public institution, and while few of the faculty were first-generation students, some definitely came from more privileged backgrounds than others.  The politics correlate pretty well with the level of parental privilege.

Post title explained:

Quick thoughts on Averroes

This book didn't make a strong impression on me.  He starts by noting some places where the Koran proclaims that some fact of religion is apparent from observation of the world, and from that concludes that reasoning from those facts is also commanded. Commanding people to embrace a lesson that is easily apparent from observation is different from commanding them to engage in subtle reasoning and laborious deduction.  To be fair, he concedes that people can err in long chains of deduction, and thereby be led astray.  Consequently, he argues that literalism is fine and even best for the ordinary masses, and philosophical inquiry is only for those who are skilled enough to not be led astray.

In this regard he is making an argument similar to that of Galileo's critics--the Church was unperturbed when Copernicus published heliocentric theory in Latin and as a hypothesis, but they were quite upset when Galileo published heliocentric theory in vernacular Italian and proclaimed it as a truth that he could expound without clerical permission.  So I am unlikely to assign Averroes for a comparative perspective on science/religion debates if I ever teach the Galileo affair.  OTOH, I do understand now why the faculty at Paris cited arguments by Averroes 400 years earlier when the Church was upset about Aristotelian philosophy: Averroes only defended the right of the intellectuals to pursue truth in scholarly debate, not indiscriminate dissemination to the masses.  And the faculty at Paris were seeking similar rights.

Current reading: Decisive Treatise by Averroes

I'm reading the Decisive Treatise by Averroes, a 12th century Muslim philosopher from Spain.  Averroes argued that the logical study of philosophy is not contrary to the will of God, a theme somewhat similar to Galileo's argument in his letter to the Grand Duchess Cristina.

Bala, first three chapters

The first few chapters of Bala's book are mostly occupied with critiquing previous studies of the rise of science.  Bala notes that when historians take up the "Why not there?" question in regard to some other society, they often wind up citing factors that could also apply to the West in the late Renaissance and early modern eras (when science emerged).  For instance, the Chinese bureaucracy is sometimes critiqued for making society too orderly, but the Western European countries that made important contributions to the Scientific Revolution also had reasonably efficient civil services (except Italy, which gave us Galileo despite not having enjoyed orderly, punctual, and efficient bureaucracy since the Roman era).

Also, when critics get to the Greeks, instead of asking "Why didn't the ancient Greeks develop modern science?" the response is never "Well, they were deficient in X, Y, and Z..." but rather "Oh, come on, cut them some slack!"  If the justification for the slack is the magnitude of their contributions, well, I certainly agree that the Greeks did amazing things for math and philosophy (and also technology, at least via Archimedes), but the Chinese had some pretty amazing technological achievements by the standards of the pre-scientific era. And the Muslims did a lot to preserve and extend Greek achievements, with Ibn Al Haytham decisively debunking some bad Greek ideas about light and vision. Why do historians respond to "Why not China?" or "Why not the Muslims?" with a list of defects rather than a list of excuses?

On the other hand, some historians apparently cut Greece some slack because of a perceived continuity between the Greeks and modern science.  If the continuity is simply that the early modern scientists were influenced by the Greeks, well, yes, especially in regards to mathematics, but remember that Galileo's greatest achievement was to debunk Aristotelian physics rather than improve it.  On the other hand, if it is perceived cultural continuity, I don't really know what that means.  Modern science mostly came from Western Europe, not Greece.  The Europeans who gave us science had a range of religious views, but they were mostly from Christian backgrounds (plus a handful of Jews), not pagan Greek backgrounds.  If we're going to say that Aristotle and Newton came from the same culture then I think we have to include Mesopotamia and Egypt in that culture as well.  The cultural lines from Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece are at least as clear as those from Greece to England.  Frankly, the English are weird.  Separated from the Continent in multiple senses, they charted their own path after the collapse of Rome.  They have a legal tradition built on Anglo-Saxon law rather than Roman law.  They split from the Roman Catholic Church (and in a very different manner than the Greek Orthodox Christians).  Even the language is weird compared to most other European tongues.

Besides the fact that Egypt and Mesopotamia gave us writing, arithmetic, geometry, agriculture, sailing, walled cities, etc. etc. etc., European culture was strongly influenced by an Abrahamic faith. Of course, Judaism had many differences from other Semitic religions, and Christianity picked up influences from Mithraism and Zoroastrianism, but if you want to go there you aren't going to find an argument that clearly separates Christianity from the Middle East, because Mithraism and Zoroastrianism have deep Iranian roots.

Anyway, that was a long digression on things besides the emergence of science, but if we're going to draw a line from Aristotle to Newton then we have to include a whole lot of other people in the same civilization.  Otherwise we have to recognize that modern England and ancient Greece were two very different civilizations, and we can't cut the Greeks any slack that we wouldn't cut for other civilizations.

Besides, if the Greeks taught us anything, it's that you can be awesome at math and bad at physics.  That's an important lesson.

One other thing that I learned from Bala:  While Greek mystical and philosophical traditions treated the heavens as being very different from the earth, the Chinese treated them as being subject to the same principles.  They would have been OK with Galileo finding mountains on the moon and moons around Jupiter, and Newton assuming that objects fall to earth for the same reason that the earth is attracted to the sun.

Hoffer gives us an insight on the technocrat

The first twenty pages of Between the Devil and the Dragon are a collection of very short pieces, most of them just a few sentences or a couple paragraphs.  I usually skip such things, but out of curiosity I read, and I'm glad I did.  On pages 12-13, Hoffer has an intriguing insight into the technocratic mind:

Both the scientist and the savage postulate the oneness of man and nature.  The difference between them is that the savage tries to influence nature by means which have proved their efficacy in influencing human nature, while the scientist wants to deal with human nature the way he deals with matter and other forums of life.  The scientist reads the equation human nature = nature from left to right, while the savage reads it from right to left.  Yet it is worth noting that Darwin, too, read the equation from right to left when he read cutthroat capitalist competition into the economy of nature. 

The remarkable thing is that the fanatic deals with men the way the scientist deals with matter.  There is a startling similarity between Bacon's prescription for mastering nature--"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed"--and Loyola's formula for manipulating men--"Follow the other man's course to your own goal."

I never thought of it this way before, but the analogy to shaman religious belief is fascinating in light of the interplay between religious and technocratic language in educational matters, especially when people are trying to play off the fruits of social science research, as I have touched on before.  On the other hand, a few pages earlier Hoffer discusses how the Abrahamic faiths separate man from nature, unlike many other faith traditions of the ancient world, and cast man as being made in the image of God.  Of course, the ordering of human affairs will thus inspire religious passion in one who sees man as being in God's image as much as it will in one who sees man as being part of the same supernatural world as the animals and plants around them.

(Somebody might object that a lot of technocrats are atheists, at least in modern academia, and thus do not see man in the terms of either religious tradition, but cultural leaves a heavy imprint on us.  We are often most like the things that we reject, because we rejected those things after feeling the burn of their brand.)

Anyway, this is something to ponder more fully.

The inclusiveness of the 1700's

The next section of Hofstadter's documentary history of American higher education deals with the movement toward non-denominational institutions.  The pre-Revolutionary portion of the 1700's saw intense debates over whether institutions of higher learning should favor one particular Protestant sect or be open to all sects.  The majority view favored non-denominational institutions, though there were arguments that the best way to protect freedom of conscience was through denominational institutions, to avoid compromises.  The most vocal debates seem to have been over Columbia University (then called King's College), which ultimately settled on a non-denominational approach.  Brown chose to have explicit religious quotas on its board of trustees, so that all of the major Protestant sects would be represented.

It would be easy to look back at these debates over which Protestant white males to favor and see a hopelessly unenlightened society.  If we look only at where the society was at in its evolution then I agree with that criticism.  However, if we look at the pace of the evolution, and the energy devoted to expanding inclusion, protecting conscience, and checking sectarian forces that could fuel conflict, then there is much to praise in the movements of that time. It was a time of great progress and great energy for reform.  If they did not go as far as we have gone it is only because of where they started, and not for lack of attention to inclusion across social and ideological divides and the implications thereof.

On the other hand, while this attention to matters of inclusion bears much resemblance to academic concerns of today, there is one crucial difference:  They were not seeking to achieve a balance of Protestant sects, just to allow a balance of Protestant sects.  They were inclusive in spirit but there was no affirmative action here.  I use the phrase "affirmative action" not in any loaded sense involving trade-offs in admissions criteria, but only in the sense that there was no deliberate action.  They allowed people of many sects but did not express any urgency about seeking out a balance among students of many sects.  They wanted colleges and universities that stayed out of sectarian conflicts, not colleges and universities that sought to redress conflict by enrolling balanced student bodies.  For all of the parallels with the modern dialogue on inclusion and diversity in academia, this is one key difference.