Salon has an atheist write a critique of Hitchens' critique of religion. He accuses Hitchens of intellectual dishonesty, but I guess in Salon's view, you have to be an atheist to have any credibility in pointing that out. Nevertheless, it's worth a read. Sample graf:
As critics have observed since its publication, one enormous problem with Hitchens’s book is that it reduces religion to a series of criminal anecdotes. In the process, however, virtually all of the real history of religious thought, as well as historical and textual scholarship, is simply ignored as if it never existed. Not for Hitchens the rich cross-cultural fertilization of the Levant by Helenistic, Jewish, and Manichaean thought. Not for Hitchens the transformation of a Jewish heretic into a religion that Nietzsche called “Platonism for the masses.” Not for Hitchens the fascinating theological fissures in the New Testament between Jewish, Gnostic, and Pauline doctrines. Not for Hitchens the remarkable journey of the first Christian heresy, Arianism, spiritual origin of our own thoroughly liberal Unitarianism. (Newton was an Arian and anti-Trinitarian, which made his presence at Trinity College permanently awkward.) Not for Hitchens the sublime transformation of Christian thought into the cathartic spirituality of German Idealism/ Romanticism and American Transcendentalism. And, strangely, not for Hitchens the existential Christianity of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, and, most recently, the religious turn of poststructural thought in Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Žižek. (All of these philosophers sought what Žižek calls Christianity’s “perverse core.”) And it’s certainly not that he didn’t have the opportunity to acknowledge these intellectual and spiritual traditions. At one point he calls the story of Abraham and Isaac “mad and gloomy,” a “frightful” and “vile” “delusion,” but sees no reason to mention Kierkegaard’s complex, poetic, and deeply felt philosophical retelling of the story in “Fear and Trembling”. In this way, Hitchens is often as much a textual literalist as the fundamentalists he criticizes.
"Christianity's perverse core"? I've been familiar with Zizek as a rising philosophical star, but wasn't familiar with the phrase or his quest. So to find out what he means by this peculiar phrase I, of course, googled it, and found this article at the top of the stack: "What would Zizek Do: Redeeming Christianity's Perverse Core", which reviews several of his books. It, too, is worth a read in its entirety. Sample graf:
Slavoj Žižek's subtitle – "The Perverse Core of Christianity" – seems to promise an account of all that is corrupt in the Christian faith. Readers aware of Žižek's reputation as a leading Leftist theorist but unfamiliar with the Slovenian philosopher's thinking might open The Puppet and the Dwarf expecting a neo-Nietzschean or post-Marxist critique of Christianity. But Žižek doesn't censure Christians for subscribing to a 'slave morality' or becoming addicted to an 'opiate for the masses.' Instead, it's liberals, especially Western intellectuals with disavowed spiritual tendencies, whom Žižek targets for rebuke. Their misguided ethical convictions and corresponding lack of political gumption have facilitated the spread of a global corporatism that benefits a relatively small economic elite at the expense of the world's oppressed masses. With the need to combat this exploitative New World Order informing his philosophizing, Žižek prescribes a dose of Christianity to an anemic and largely impotent Left he diagnoses as suffering from a debilitating malady – postmodern ethical relativism.
Exactly. And then this interesting paragraph:
The Left must understand that its ultimate commitment is not to liberal tolerance or "all-encompassing Compassion" (32) but to eliminating material inequality. Radical changes in the social order are needed, and a crucial starting point is to denaturalize the existing capitalist order, to make people aware that market forces are not omnipotent. But consciousness raising alone will not suffice. What's needed is a willingness to introduce a "radical imbalance into the social edifice" (95). Žižek's wager is that "Christian love" – defined as "a violent passion to introduce a Difference, a gap in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others" (33) – can be a catalyst that will provoke the Left to resume collectively its emancipatory struggle.
The review goes on to talk about the problem of belief:
Žižek does contribute something new to Anglo-American debates about the status of belief in postmodern societies with his account of disavowed belief, which begins with a simple premise: "today, we believe more than ever" (6). The catch is that contemporary believers are confused and fail to recognize the extent or the nature of their beliefs, particularly when it comes to "religious matters" (5). Thus, to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's oft-cited formula of cynical reason – "I know what I am doing; nonetheless, I am doing it … " – Žižek adds a final clause: " … because I don't know what I believe" (5).
I wrote a couple of posts about the problem of "believing" in 2006 that I think still hold up pretty well. Here's an excerpt from one of them that relates to the reviewer's theme:
So the question for me is whether a saying No as the Marxists and postmodernists say is possible to join with a Yes which the Christians have said. And it starts with the acknowledgment of the opportunity now being afforded to us because we are at a new stage of cultural development in which believing has become rehabilitated—it’s at the heart of the Romantic impulse as it continues to operate in the popular culture. ‘Believing’ is one of the best things you can do. “You gotta believe” is a commonplace in our sports and pop psychological worlds. We are constantly admonished to believe in ourselves and to believe in one another. And the assumption that lies beneath these admonitions is that our believing it’s so will make it so if we have enough faith. Believing is what gives life meaning and purpose. It doesn't matter really what you believe, just so long as you do it one way or the other.
Now I don’t want to equate this popular idea of believing with the deeper and more mysterious phenomenon we recognize as religious faith, but it bears a family relationship to it. The practical benefits of belief have a long heritage from St. Augustine’s De utilitate credendi, to Pascal’s “wager” to the pragmatism of William James, to the prescriptions of our current health care professionals who have noticed that people who have religious practices live happier, healthier lives.
This is just another way of saying that the metanarrative precedes the ethical. What we believe shapes how we live, whether our beliefs are superficial or profound. Whatever narrative we ultimately choose opens up certain possibilities and closes off others; it shapes what we can see and what we are blind to. But most important, the narrative we choose points to and defines that which we most deeply long for. Every narrative is shaped in one way or another by hope. Even nihilism. If you live with a materialistic narrative, your longing focuses on materialistic goals; if a spiritual narrative, spiritual goals.
To relate this to themes I've been writing about recently, it's one thing what I believe in isolation; it's not unimportant for me and those who interact with me, but the health of a culture depends on the narrative it embraces as a collective project. The argument here for years has been that when a culture is decadent, it has no collective sense of future possibility. In America this means that we have reverted to two basic narratives. One that embraces "fragmentation" as normative and desirable as Libertarian and much of academic postmodern secular thought do, and the other is a reversion to an old narrative that makes no sense anymore, as cultural conservatives do. (Reversion is not the same as retrieval, which is essential for living into the future.) I reject both fragmentation and nostalgic reversion.
The review also points out that Zizek's fundamental philosophic project is to reactualize (retrieve) German Idealism, a project I have deep sympathies with. I guess Zizek will be on my summer reading list.
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