Think Again
The New York Times
May
3, 2009
God
Talk
In the opening sentence
of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry
Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly
talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty,
scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science,
reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed.
“What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links
between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of
countless millions of men and women?”
Eagleton acknowledges
that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been
done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more
than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and
destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent
source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it
generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of
what we say and do.”
The other projects, he
concedes, provide various comforts and pleasures, but they are finally
superficial and tend to the perpetuation of the status quo rather than to
meaningful change: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire,
managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the
depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised.”
By theological
questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first
place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do
our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”
The fact that science,
liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer —
such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.
And, conversely, the
fact that religion and theology cannot provide a technology for explaining how
the material world works should not be held against them, either, for that is
not what they do. When Christopher
Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the
microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,”
Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of
anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric
toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”
Eagleton likes this turn
of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point:
“[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is
like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is
a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The
positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something
else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement.
Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet (and Chekhov); it’s after
something else.
After
what?
Eagleton, of course, does not tell us, except in the most general terms: “The
coming
Progress, liberalism and
enlightenment — these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that
in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures
for diseases every day? Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and
offer the promise of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over
medieval superstition?
Eagleton punctures the
complacency of these questions when he turns the tables and applies the label
of “superstition” to the idea of progress. It is a superstition — an idol or “a
belief not logically related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary)
— because it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of
enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police
state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy,” all in
the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty suburbanism that produces ever more
things without any care as to whether or not the things produced have true
value.
And as
for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery wreaked by racism
and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism, the generation
of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring all this and much more can the claim of
human progress at the end of history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious
myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist
belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer
world.”
That kind of belief will
have little use for a creed that has at its center “one who spoke up for love
and justice and was done to death for his pains.” No wonder “Ditchkins” —
Eagleton’s contemptuous amalgam of Hitchens and Richard
Dawkins, perhaps with a sidelong glance at Luke 6:39, “Can the blind
lead the blind? Shall they not both fall into the ditch?” —
seems incapable of responding to “the kind of commitment made manifest by a
human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and
bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a
transformative love.”
You won’t be interested
in any such promise, you won’t see the point of clinging to it, if you think
that “apart from the odd, stubbornly lingering spot of barbarism here and
there, history on the whole is still steadily on the up,” if you think that
“not only is the salvation of the human species possible but that contrary to
all we read in the newspapers, it has in principle already taken place.” How,
Eagleton asks, can a civilization “which regards itself as pretty well
self-sufficient” see any point in or need of “faith or hope”?
“Self-sufficient” gets
to the heart of what Eagleton sees as wrong with the “brittle triumphalism” of
liberal rationalism and its ideology of science. From the perspective of a
theistic religion, the cardinal error is the claim of the creature to be
“self-originating”: “Self-authorship,” Eagleton proclaims, “is the bourgeois
fantasy par excellence,” and he could have cited in support the words of that
great bourgeois villain, Milton’s Satan, who, upon being reminded that he was
created by another, retorts , “[W]ho saw/ When this creation was…?/ We know no
time when we were not as now/Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised”
(Paradise Lost, V, 856-860).That is, we created ourselves (although how there
can be agency before there is being and therefore an agent is not explained),
and if we are able to do that, why can’t we just keep on going and pull
progress and eventual perfection out of our own entrails?
That is where science
and reason come in. Science, says Eagleton, “does not start far back enough”;
it can run its operations, but it can’t tell you what they ultimately mean or
provide a corrective to its own excesses. Likewise, reason is “too skin deep a
creed to tackle what is at stake”; its laws — the laws of entailment and
evidence — cannot get going without some substantive proposition from which
they proceed but which they cannot contain; reason is a non-starter in the
absence of an a prior specification of what is real and important, and where is
that going to come from? Only from some kind of faith.
“Ditchkins,” Eagleton
observes, cannot ground his belief “in the value of individual freedom” in
scientific observation. It is for him an article of faith, and once in place,
it generates facts and reasons and judgments of right and wrong. “Faith and
knowledge,” Eagleton concludes, are not antithetical but “interwoven.” You
can’t have one without the other, despite the Satanic
claim that you can go it alone by applying your own independent intellect to an
unmediated reality: “All reasoning is conducted within the ambit of some sort of
faith, attraction, inclination, orientation, predisposition, or prior
commitment.” Meaning, value and truth are not “reducible to the facts
themselves, in the sense of being ineluctably motivated by a bare account of
them.” Which is to say that there is no such thing as a bare
account of them. (Here, as many have noted, is where religion and
postmodernism meet.)
If this is so, the basis
for what Eagleton calls “the rejection of religion on the cheap” by contrasting
its unsupported (except by faith) assertions with the scientifically grounded
assertions of atheism collapses; and we are where we always were, confronted
with a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly
hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason and a progress that has no
content but, like the capitalism it reflects and extends, just makes its
valueless way into every nook and cranny.
For Eagleton the choice
is obvious, although he does not have complete faith in the faith he prefers.
“There are no guarantees,” he concedes that a “transfigured future will ever be
born.” But we can be sure that it will never be born, he says in his last
sentence, “if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire
flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals . . . continue to
stand in its way.”
One more point. The book
starts out witty and then gets angrier and angrier. (There is the possibility,
of course, that the later chapters were written first; I’m just talking about
the temporal experience of reading it.) I spent some time trying to figure out
why the anger was there and I came up with two explanations.
One is given by
Eagleton, and it is personal. Christianity may or may not be the faith he holds
to (he doesn’t tell us), but he speaks, he says, “partly in defense of my own
forbearers, against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their
lives is worthless and void.”
The other source of his
anger is implied but never quite made explicit. He is angry, I think, at having
to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of
school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.