It's a lovely and poignant tribute. I miss the man already. Whenever something of great import happens, there is always the thought at the back of my mind: I wonder what Hitchens will have to say about it. And I knew that in a matter of days his thoughts would be somewhere published. Now this event has taken place and no Hitchens to look forward to, for some consolation or challenge or hitherto eluded insight.
Most of my acquaintances on the left, who remain those because my roots, like Hitchens,' are in the left, were aghast, dismayed, and revolted by his “betrayal” in supporting the Iraq war. What they failed to see was that he identified with the essentially humanistic, democratic, liberationist impulses of the theoreticians of Neo-conservatism. As Buckley mentioned, this remained Hitchens’ ethos—humanistic, full of the belief in human potential to aspire to be greater than we are. To my knowledge, he never recanted his support, despite what he may have seen as faults in the transition between theory and practical geopolitical implementation.
But I do not wish to relive that argument. This is about the man, not the war. The fact remains that here stood a giant of integrity that hued to his core principles and defended them unbowed and brilliant, unafraid to direct his own unstrictured gaze upon any subject he chose, and refuse to exist under some ossified label. He was that rarest of things, an original thinker.
He and his brother, Peter, were not on good terms, though they did try to patch things up in more recent years. Here is a beautiful tribute from the brother who identified the core virtue of what made Christopher such a model intellectual, namely, genuine courage:
"The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it."
The original Guardian article has been removed, but text exists forever in hypermedia. Here is Amis on Hitchens. http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/04/amis-on-hitchens.html
Amis is amazing and unparalleled. The part of the whole that resonates most strongly with me is this conclusion.
"The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a "higher intelligence" – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it. Anyway, we do know what is going to happen to you, and to everyone else who will ever live on this planet. Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars. Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the sun, will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out to consume what is left of us, about six billion years from now."
I don't want to get too far into the metaphysical weeds here, but I recognize this: what Amis is intuiting is that WE are the self-consciousness, and the evolutionary product, of our own genesis. We are the universe (or multiverse) self-recognized, if not fully realized. We ARE the mind of god, so to speak. As an atheist, I reject the naive anthropomorphic conception of god as personality; nevertheless, I also perceive our humanistic nature as divine, in so far as we are divine. We are the universe contemplating itself. Our quantum essence is eternal and indestructible. Our atoms, if not our personality, continue in a cosmic matrix. This is eternity, and perhaps our greatest solace.
I'm a much simpler atheist. I just don't believe there is anything more than we can create with our own minds and wills. If humanity pooled together its inclination to good rather than evil, then our world could be more harmonious and peaceful, as the Biblical prophets imagined. God is the artifact of a civilization and civilization is man made. It is all up to us.
These two formulations are not antithetical. It is indeed all up to us, hah. We are the only species (within our present empirical knowledge) who has reasoning, both concrete and abstract, physical science, an aesthetic sense, language, moral judgement, and a sense of self existence, magnified by our ability to contemplate all these things. We think, therefore we are, and what could possibly be more divine than this?
Oh, the cherry. We choose. We are our own angels and devils. We are gone in the blink of an eye. We are, in the words of that 70s rock anthem, "Dust in the Wind." Isaiah said it long before, that all flesh is like grass. I took that perspective in a recent poem. We are here, we are gone, and yet, we get to choose our own fate.
A favorite poet of mine wrote this:
We are stardust we are golden billion year old carbon caught in the devil's bargain
So: I say again, what could possibly be more divine than this?
I didn't mean to suggest what I said was antithetical. Just making conversation, you know, trying to clarify an idea? Carrot juice is very good for you. Lots of Vitamin A, I believe. And I hate to say the following but if one does not accept the presence of God in this life why use the adjective "divine"? I don't really understand what it means in this context.
Call it poetic license. The word is entirely unnecessary. You didn't suggest you were being antithetical. We do indeed make similar points, I think, about personal responsibility. I was just being expansive and having a little fun, a little flight.
A few years ago I researched the subject of friendship for a paper and then for a course. And took a page out of that paper to post on my blog. Here is something about Amis and Hitchens:
Great friendships that are known for their uniqueness are rare. There are the literary models of Achilles and Patroclus from the Greeks; David and Jonathan from the Bible. There is the real experience from Montaigne and La Boetie. A famous modern example that comes to mind is the friendship between British novelist Martin Amis and writer/essayist Christopher Hitchens, a modern day version of Montaigne’s model of friendship, described by Amis like this: “ My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.”[1] There is a clear echo here, I don’t know if conscious or intended, of Montaigne’s own avowal of friendship: “The love of friends is a general universal warmth, temperate moreover and smooth, a warmth which is constant and at rest, all gentleness and evenness, having nothing sharp nor keen”.
_______
I'm wondering how Amis will deal with his friend's absence. Montaigne grieved for his loss for years and years after La Boetie had gone.
"It is a sweet thing, friendship, a dear balm, a happy and auspicious bird of calm”
-Shelly
“Friendship is Love without his wings!”
-Byron
A curious and unfathomable thing to me, this kind of true fellowship between minds, a radical understanding of the other that goes far beyond shared backgrounds or similar circumstances--more than mere affinity, a true conversation, something complementary that enlarges both participants.
Although I wish to keep this discussion focused on Hitch, and also on friendship, which we have discovered in its various aspects from what precedes here, indulge me a brief sidebar about your use of "tactility" in your description of Amis' writing.
I wrote that post 5 years ago so I can only guess now at what I meant then. In the context of the analogy to a painter's way with his paints, I think I meant that there are different brush strokes, some are light like a water colour, others are more decisive, others are like paint being laid on the canvass very thickly, that they protrude from the surface almost like relief. The words he uses do not just pass by, they invade you in some way. They make you react to them physically, you want to get closer and dive into their meaning.
The tendency we have to observe triads everywhere is an artifact of perception, and perhaps a key to understanding certain neurological structures. The popular imagination sees it as a curious, mystical thing.
When I googled your post about Havel/Hitchens, what I came up with was some sort of teleological argument about the existence of the human construct of "justice," which is then expanded as evidence for a justice dispenser or originator--which is then used as an argument against atheism.
This would be laughable if it weren't so prevalent and so ancient. This was essentially CS Lewis' argument--that the existence of a moral sense in man presupposes some origination point in an external morality. This was also Aquinas' argument of a "first mover unmoved," and before that the tableau in Plato's cave.
The lack of justice in this world, of course, does not necessitate any kind of judgement to come in an unobservable reality. Dawkins would likely characterize the evolution of a moral sense as an evolutionary imperative hard-wired for survival.
The teleological argument against atheism is always an inductive one, though it often clothes itself as deduction. It assumes that a (perceived) design necessitates a designer--when in fact, this perception actually tells us more about ourselves and our biology. The atheist sees no reason to assume anything, and proceeds deductively.
The best example of this dichotomy between the non-cognitive and the cognitive is Anthony Flew's parable of "the invisible gardener."
I thought the twit I quoted was given in jest, relying for its wit, acerbity and ultimate ironic punch on exactly the kind of magical thinking about triads and the human compulsion to look for meaningful designs.
If the original was ironic, your point, and Flews, and Gould's is doubly made. The discussion of the triad of Hitchens/Havel,Il Sung that I happened upon demonstrates just the sort of magical thinking you describe. It came from a Christian blog.
One definition of irony I encountered recently was made by a psychologist: "making the unconscious conscious". Irony seems to play an important role in psycho-analysis. That twit was actually playing on all those subterranean belief patterns you talked about. Nobody could help noticing the trend this week: Hitchens, Havel ... Kim Jong Il. Two righteous gents followed by an evil one. A mystifying pattern. Until Joe found the key to demystify the design.
The inductionist that proceeds from some revealed or intuited truth will always fit any new evidence into the original a priori assertion. Therefore, the total debunking of 911 truthers by Popular Mechanics magazine turns into yet more evidence of a yet wider conspiracy. This is the point of Flew's description of ever-escalating qualifying statements--there is always a "yes, but..." The original assertion cannot be falsified by any examination at all. Fundamentalists of all stripes share this error. You cannot engage them in rational discourse, because they speak words that proceed from assertions that are always "true." there is no more dangerous animal than the True Believer.
I went to see the new movie "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" which I greatly recommend. I wrote elsewhere that it is a very fine movie, for grownups. A slow, painstaking process of putting together an intricate jigsaw puzzle.
Here is one of the quotes that lingered in my memory:
Smiley about his arch enemy, Karla (his counterpart at the KGB): "I know he can be beaten. He's a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt."
When these words were spoken, you could hear a low, reverberating gasp from the audience.
The point being that fanatics or true believers, are incapable of irony. Anger and sarcasm, yes, oodles of. But not irony. That's why they can be defeated. They cannot forever dupe all the people all the time.
The Panglosses outnumber the Candides. Civilizations frequently fall to barbarian hordes. Perhaps we should not be secure in our eventual triumph. Saw a recent survey which indicates that a burgeoning Christianity has now elevated itself to a predominant place among religions. The percentage of the U.S. population that avows belief in god remains consistently high. All of this does not portend optimism. Ah, back to the Amis/Hitchens.
The difference between you and I in this issue is that you are worried about the rise in Christian fundamentalism while I am worried about Islamic fundamentalism. I do hope that you are not an adherent of Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher who thinks American Evangelicals are more dangerous than the Taliban.
No,not more dangerous, at least in their present iteration. But they do share a kind, a kin, a ken in the basis for their thinking. Islamists are of course more militant, though one can observe militancy on the fringe of Christian Fundamentalism--the historic rise of both ideologies reflects this. Islam was almost immediately spread by the sword, while Christianity took some centuries to acquire characteristics of the crusade. Nevertheless, both are adherents of mistaken thinking that leads inevitably to a bizarre twisting of both reason and reality.
We of the West have an obligation to defend civilization, but not because the roots of our civilization depend on Christianity. We have the advantage of a Renaissance devoted to classical reason, and an Enlightenment that expanded that thinking. Islamism, despite its contributions to poetry, mathematics, and language, never had this transformation. But we of this classical model are not predominant within our own sphere, which is full of contradictions that do not transcend the mediaeval.
Islamism has not contributed anything to poetry, mathematics, and language. It is Islam you are talking about, I think. Islamists perfected the suicide bombing and gave us an updated, religious version of Nazism. The difference between the two civilizations is that in one, the core principle extolls the golden rule as the best way to live a good life. The other is about submission to the word of God, as mediated by "those who know". The only reforms in Islam have been those that frowned upon modernization and relaxation of religious observance. Irshad Manji is a voice lost in the desert.
Western civilization evolved from the moral thinking of Moses, Jesus and Socrates, none of whom were military campaigners. That means something today.
It's a lovely and poignant tribute. I miss the man already. Whenever something of great import happens, there is always the thought at the back of my mind: I wonder what Hitchens will have to say about it. And I knew that in a matter of days his thoughts would be somewhere published. Now this event has taken place and no Hitchens to look forward to, for some consolation or challenge or hitherto eluded insight.
ReplyDeleteMost of my acquaintances on the left, who remain those because my roots, like Hitchens,' are in the left, were aghast, dismayed, and revolted by his “betrayal” in supporting the Iraq war. What they failed to see was that he identified with the essentially humanistic, democratic, liberationist impulses of the theoreticians of Neo-conservatism. As Buckley mentioned, this remained Hitchens’ ethos—humanistic, full of the belief in human potential to aspire to be greater than we are. To my knowledge, he never recanted his support, despite what he may have seen as faults in the transition between theory and practical geopolitical implementation.
ReplyDeleteBut I do not wish to relive that argument. This is about the man, not the war. The fact remains that here stood a giant of integrity that hued to his core principles and defended them unbowed and brilliant, unafraid to direct his own unstrictured gaze upon any subject he chose, and refuse to exist under some ossified label. He was that rarest of things, an original thinker.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHe and his brother, Peter, were not on good terms, though they did try to patch things up in more recent years. Here is a beautiful tribute from the brother who identified the core virtue of what made Christopher such a model intellectual, namely, genuine courage:
ReplyDelete"The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it."
And he ends the eulogy with a quote from Eliot:
‘We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time’
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/12/in-memoriam-christopher-hitchens-1949-2011.html
The original Guardian article has been removed, but text exists forever in hypermedia. Here is Amis on Hitchens. http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/04/amis-on-hitchens.html
ReplyDeleteThat last link is truncated, apparently due to copyright. If anyone can find the full text of Amis' comments, I would appreciate it.
ReplyDeletehttp://ensdetunis.blogspot.com/2011/04/amis-on-hitchens-hes-one-of-most.html
ReplyDeletePeter's eulogistic comment, now THAT's Proustian.
ReplyDeleteAmis is amazing and unparalleled. The part of the whole that resonates most strongly with me is this conclusion.
ReplyDelete"The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a "higher intelligence" – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.
Anyway, we do know what is going to happen to you, and to everyone else who will ever live on this planet. Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars. Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the sun, will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out to consume what is left of us, about six billion years from now."
Well, he uses your favourite vocabulary, of course it would resonate. You probably understand what he's saying which I don't, not really.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to get too far into the metaphysical weeds here, but I recognize this: what Amis is intuiting is that WE are the self-consciousness, and the evolutionary product, of our own genesis. We are the universe (or multiverse) self-recognized, if not fully realized. We ARE the mind of god, so to speak. As an atheist, I reject the naive anthropomorphic conception of god as personality; nevertheless, I also perceive our humanistic nature as divine, in so far as we are divine. We are the universe contemplating itself. Our quantum essence is eternal and indestructible. Our atoms, if not our personality, continue in a cosmic matrix. This is eternity, and perhaps our greatest solace.
ReplyDeleteI'm a much simpler atheist. I just don't believe there is anything more than we can create with our own minds and wills. If humanity pooled together its inclination to good rather than evil, then our world could be more harmonious and peaceful, as the Biblical prophets imagined. God is the artifact of a civilization and civilization is man made. It is all up to us.
ReplyDeleteMm. Carrot juice. Divine, no kidding.
ReplyDeleteThese two formulations are not antithetical. It is indeed all up to us, hah. We are the only species (within our present empirical knowledge) who has reasoning, both concrete and abstract, physical science, an aesthetic sense, language, moral judgement, and a sense of self existence, magnified by our ability to contemplate all these things. We think, therefore we are, and what could possibly be more divine than this?
Oh, the cherry. We choose. We are our own angels and devils. We are gone in the blink of an eye. We are, in the words of that 70s rock anthem, "Dust in the Wind." Isaiah said it long before, that all flesh is like grass. I took that perspective in a recent poem. We are here, we are gone, and yet, we get to choose our own fate.
A favorite poet of mine wrote this:
We are stardust
we are golden
billion year old carbon
caught in the devil's bargain
So: I say again, what could possibly be more divine than this?
Second verse, same as the first. That's American cultural slang, by the way.
ReplyDelete“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
I didn't mean to suggest what I said was antithetical. Just making conversation, you know, trying to clarify an idea? Carrot juice is very good for you. Lots of Vitamin A, I believe. And I hate to say the following but if one does not accept the presence of God in this life why use the adjective "divine"? I don't really understand what it means in this context.
ReplyDeleteCall it poetic license. The word is entirely unnecessary. You didn't suggest you were being antithetical. We do indeed make similar points, I think, about personal responsibility. I was just being expansive and having a little fun, a little flight.
ReplyDeleteThanks again for the Amis article. All three pieces--his, Buckley's and Peter's--alternatively tugged at me and made me laugh out loud.
ReplyDeleteAmis' gentle prod to his friend, the distance between his characterizations of "agnostic" and "atheist" is really a distinction without a difference--
ReplyDelete"...what divides you and me (to quote Nabokov yet again) is a rut that any frog could straddle."
A few years ago I researched the subject of friendship for a paper and then for a course. And took a page out of that paper to post on my blog. Here is something about Amis and Hitchens:
ReplyDeleteGreat friendships that are known for their uniqueness are rare. There are the literary models of Achilles and Patroclus from the Greeks; David and Jonathan from the Bible. There is the real experience from Montaigne and La Boetie. A famous modern example that comes to mind is the friendship between British novelist Martin Amis and writer/essayist Christopher Hitchens, a modern day version of Montaigne’s model of friendship, described by Amis like this: “ My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.”[1] There is a clear echo here, I don’t know if conscious or intended, of Montaigne’s own avowal of friendship: “The love of friends is a general universal warmth, temperate moreover and smooth, a warmth which is constant and at rest, all gentleness and evenness, having nothing sharp nor keen”.
_______
I'm wondering how Amis will deal with his friend's absence. Montaigne grieved for his loss for years and years after La Boetie had gone.
An analog I have from my own tradition:
ReplyDelete"It is a sweet thing, friendship, a dear balm, a happy and auspicious bird of calm”
-Shelly
“Friendship is Love without his wings!”
-Byron
A curious and unfathomable thing to me, this kind of true fellowship between minds, a radical understanding of the other that goes far beyond shared backgrounds or similar circumstances--more than mere affinity, a true conversation, something complementary that enlarges both participants.
I must confess, it baffles.
Well, you are correct in being baffled. friendship is not at all easy to do. I mean genuine friendship:
ReplyDeletehttp://contentious-centrist.blogspot.com/2006/12/noganote-on-vanished-friendships.html
Although I wish to keep this discussion focused on Hitch, and also on friendship, which we have discovered in its various aspects from what precedes here, indulge me a brief sidebar about your use of "tactility" in your description of Amis' writing.
ReplyDeleteI wrote that post 5 years ago so I can only guess now at what I meant then. In the context of the analogy to a painter's way with his paints, I think I meant that there are different brush strokes, some are light like a water colour, others are more decisive, others are like paint being laid on the canvass very thickly, that they protrude from the surface almost like relief. The words he uses do not just pass by, they invade you in some way. They make you react to them physically, you want to get closer and dive into their meaning.
ReplyDeleteCited on the Internet:
ReplyDelete"I'd like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third."
What a week.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteTwo thoughts.
ReplyDeleteThe tendency we have to observe triads everywhere is an artifact of perception, and perhaps a key to understanding certain neurological structures. The popular imagination sees it as a curious, mystical thing.
When I googled your post about Havel/Hitchens, what I came up with was some sort of teleological argument about the existence of the human construct of "justice," which is then expanded as evidence for a justice dispenser or originator--which is then used as an argument against atheism.
This would be laughable if it weren't so prevalent and so ancient. This was essentially CS Lewis' argument--that the existence of a moral sense in man presupposes some origination point in an external morality. This was also Aquinas' argument of a "first mover unmoved," and before that the tableau in Plato's cave.
The lack of justice in this world, of course, does not necessitate any kind of judgement to come in an unobservable reality. Dawkins would likely characterize the evolution of a moral sense as an evolutionary imperative hard-wired for survival.
The teleological argument against atheism is always an inductive one, though it often clothes itself as deduction. It assumes that a (perceived) design necessitates a designer--when in fact, this perception actually tells us more about ourselves and our biology. The atheist sees no reason to assume anything, and proceeds deductively.
The best example of this dichotomy between the non-cognitive and the cognitive is Anthony Flew's parable of "the invisible gardener."
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/flew_falsification.html
I thought the twit I quoted was given in jest, relying for its wit, acerbity and ultimate ironic punch on exactly the kind of magical thinking about triads and the human compulsion to look for meaningful designs.
ReplyDeleteIf the original was ironic, your point, and Flews, and Gould's is doubly made. The discussion of the triad of Hitchens/Havel,Il Sung that I happened upon demonstrates just the sort of magical thinking you describe. It came from a Christian blog.
ReplyDeleteYou doubt that it was ironic?
ReplyDeleteConspiratorial thinking draws on the same kind of perceived designs and a hidden guiding hand.
ReplyDeleteViewed out of context, I at first missed the irony. I do not doubt it now.
ReplyDeleteI was going to bring up the same pattern of thinking in conspiracy theories, but you just did it for me.
One definition of irony I encountered recently was made by a psychologist: "making the unconscious conscious". Irony seems to play an important role in psycho-analysis. That twit was actually playing on all those subterranean belief patterns you talked about. Nobody could help noticing the trend this week: Hitchens, Havel ... Kim Jong Il. Two righteous gents followed by an evil one. A mystifying pattern. Until Joe found the key to demystify the design.
ReplyDeleteThe inductionist that proceeds from some revealed or intuited truth will always fit any new evidence into the original a priori assertion. Therefore, the total debunking of 911 truthers by Popular Mechanics magazine turns into yet more evidence of a yet wider conspiracy. This is the point of Flew's description of ever-escalating qualifying statements--there is always a "yes, but..." The original assertion cannot be falsified by any examination at all. Fundamentalists of all stripes share this error. You cannot engage them in rational discourse, because they speak words that proceed from assertions that are always "true." there is no more dangerous animal than the True Believer.
ReplyDeleteI went to see the new movie "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" which I greatly recommend. I wrote elsewhere that it is a very fine movie, for grownups. A slow, painstaking process of putting together an intricate jigsaw puzzle.
ReplyDeleteHere is one of the quotes that lingered in my memory:
Smiley about his arch enemy, Karla (his counterpart at the KGB): "I know he can be beaten. He's a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt."
When these words were spoken, you could hear a low, reverberating gasp from the audience.
The point being that fanatics or true believers, are incapable of irony. Anger and sarcasm, yes, oodles of. But not irony. That's why they can be defeated. They cannot forever dupe all the people all the time.
ReplyDeleteBTW, if you have an hour to spare you might do worse than watch this conversation between Hitchens and Amis about Saul Bellow.
ReplyDeletehttp://contentious-centrist.blogspot.com/2009/07/martin-amis-and-christopher-hitchens-in.html
There never seems to be a shortage of available dupees, which is a reason for pessimism. I will devote the hour.
ReplyDeleteThe Panglosses outnumber the Candides. Civilizations frequently fall to barbarian hordes. Perhaps we should not be secure in our eventual triumph. Saw a recent survey which indicates that a burgeoning Christianity has now elevated itself to a predominant place among religions. The percentage of the U.S. population that avows belief in god remains consistently high. All of this does not portend optimism. Ah, back to the Amis/Hitchens.
ReplyDeleteThe difference between you and I in this issue is that you are worried about the rise in Christian fundamentalism while I am worried about Islamic fundamentalism. I do hope that you are not an adherent of Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher who thinks American Evangelicals are more dangerous than the Taliban.
ReplyDeleteNo,not more dangerous, at least in their present iteration. But they do share a kind, a kin, a ken in the basis for their thinking. Islamists are of course more militant, though one can observe militancy on the fringe of Christian Fundamentalism--the historic rise of both ideologies reflects this. Islam was almost immediately spread by the sword, while Christianity took some centuries to acquire characteristics of the crusade. Nevertheless, both are adherents of mistaken thinking that leads inevitably to a bizarre twisting of both reason and reality.
ReplyDeleteWe of the West have an obligation to defend civilization, but not because the roots of our civilization depend on Christianity. We have the advantage of a Renaissance devoted to classical reason, and an Enlightenment that expanded that thinking. Islamism, despite its contributions to poetry, mathematics, and language, never had this transformation. But we of this classical model are not predominant within our own sphere, which is full of contradictions that do not transcend the mediaeval.
ReplyDeleteIslamism has not contributed anything to poetry, mathematics, and language. It is Islam you are talking about, I think. Islamists perfected the suicide bombing and gave us an updated, religious version of Nazism. The difference between the two civilizations is that in one, the core principle extolls the golden rule as the best way to live a good life. The other is about submission to the word of God, as mediated by "those who know". The only reforms in Islam have been those that frowned upon modernization and relaxation of religious observance. Irshad Manji is a voice lost in the desert.
ReplyDeleteWestern civilization evolved from the moral thinking of Moses, Jesus and Socrates, none of whom were military campaigners. That means something today.