The success of "the New Atheists" on getting the discussion of science, secularism, religion onto the public sphere

Thank God for Michael Dowd!
from Zaadz: ~C4Chaos' Blog (Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

Unless you've been living in a cave in the past year, you've probably noticed that the religion vs. science is one of the most important issues taking center stage on mainstream media. Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion alone already sold more than 1.5 million copies and it's in the process of being translated into different languages. The combined bestseller successes of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, their presence on TED as well as a number of conferences, university lectures and debates, the high profile visibility of the courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the issue of religion taking center-stage in the presidential elections, are testaments to the success of "the New Atheists" on getting the discussion of science, secularism, religion onto the public sphere. In short, it's hip to be an Atheist nowadays (except for Sam Harris) ;)

As expected, a lot of religious conservatives rose to the challenge by protecting their deeply held beliefs and dogmas. As a result, most of the time, the discussions end up taking pot shots at science and religion. No synthesis. No integration. Only more shouting and misunderstanding.

For the past few months I've been surfing the wave of this important national conversation about science and religion, and lately taking sides in favor of what the New Atheists stand for: a critical reflection on the irrational claims of religion.

Previously, I've lamented my observation that integral voices are absent from this national conversation. Yes, integrally-informed people are ranting on their blogs, but that's about it. There are no integrally-informed representatives engaging the philosophers, scientists, politicians, and thinkers on this very important national debate on science and religion. Or is there?

Enter, Rev. Michael Dowd.

Michael Dowd is a former evangelical minister who has embraced Evolution and is now preaching the gospel of Evolutionary Christianity. His book, Thank God for Evolution!, has been praised by Nobel laureates, professors, scientists, politicians, religious leaders, and spiritual teachers (e.g. Andrew Cohen). The endorsements alone made me want to read his book.

I haven't read the book yet, but just by this WIRED interview alone, I get the sense that Michael Dowd is one of the sane integral voices that are badly needed to join the national conversation on science and religion...

If you think Michael Dowd's philosophy sounds Wilberian, you're not far off. Check out one of the charts he uses. And here's a video of Dowd in action.

Although Michael Dowd is still preaching under the banner of Christianity, his approach is very skillful. He (and his science writer wife, Connie) meets people where they're at. By adopting evolution, he's providing a healthier narrative for Christians--a much better translation mechanism for religious people to embrace both science and spirituality in the process. Very fluffy.

I'm interested see a conversation between Michael Dowd and the New Atheists and see Dowd respond to their arguments. I'm sure there will be points of disagreements, especially for Atheists who abhors Theology, but I think that there will be more points of agreements, synthesis, and possible integration.

Move over Dinesh D'Souza. Michael Dowd's Evolutionary Christianity should be heard by the American public.

P.S. Serendiptously, Michael Dowd has a profile on Zaadz. Check it out and send him some love :)

For Kierkegaard, to read the New Testament correctly is to understand that the church is actually there before the cross

Eric Lee Says: Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at 10:49 am
Nate,
Thanks for the comments. My aim in entering this conversation was two-fold: to question JD’s spurious invocation of Graham Priest and also to attempt some clarification by what he meant by paradox, which didn’t seem that coherent.
That being said, I do not mean a kind of ratio, especially in the sense that per Kant, this is the best he can do with analogy (see Milbank’s critique of this in the first chapter of his Word Made Strange).
Three things on this, though. First, this is a real clear limit to language here, right? Kierkegaard wants to think that which cannot be thought. So, it is necessarily difficult to articulate something that ultimately has nothing to do with thought outside of any excess, etc. So, I admit some of my language may be a bit confused as I am still working through these things myself.
Second, when I spoke about paradox signifying some sort of truth about a contradiction, I was not speaking in the Kierkegaardian nor de Lubacian sense — but at the most general level, as I have been thinking about paradox in general and then how different people articulate this (and have recently finished another paper on contradiction and paradox but this time in the work of Graham Priest). Reading through Sainsbury’s work on paradox, Sorensen’s history of the paradox, etc., they all have different readings as to just what it is or is not. And these are all very different from what Kierkegaard and de Lubac say. With that being said, I would need to clarify that my definition can only go so far. Kierkegaard uses ‘infinite qualitative distance’, so there is some ratio of sorts, but it’s also thereby infinite, so it also seems not to be. (I’m almost starting to sound like talk about the analogia entis here.) A second sub-point here: when I presented my paper on paradox in Kierkegaard and de Lubac in Granada, the first question I received had to do with my use of paradox because it was not the ‘usual one’ — the usual one being some sort of mere limit of thought itself (Zeno, Eubulides, name your paradoxer and your paradox), but that there was a kind of opening up of one beyond, and I was very specific about the Christological nature of this in the paradox of the God-Man and how very different this is because it requires faith. I don’t know Marion or phenomenology that much really, so I do not even want to say ‘excess’, let alone the fact that I don’t know what those connotations are, as I do not mean that, either (because wouldn’t that imply some sort of phenomenological reduction of sorts? I don’t know, that isn’t what I have in mind — hah, see, but it’s not in my mind?).
Lastly, I really don’t think that Kierkegaard’s deployment of ‘paradox’ in the Mystery of the Supernatural is the same as when he is giving a treatment of Kierkegaard in Drama of Atheist Humanism. Kierkegaard’s use is so much more halting, abrupt, forcing a decision. Whatever this ‘beyond’ is, for Kierkegaard it was more halting and disruptive, but for de Lubac it is more of a sense of calling one, ultimately, toward one’s divinized end, no? De Lubac focuses quite a bit on the ‘more’ which language cannot describe. (In a discussion between Amy Laura Hall and John Milbank, for instance, Hall made the point that it does not seem like Kierkegaard actually goes beyond the cross, and this language of his is very indicative of that, I think.) In DAH, de Lubac would rather say ‘mystery’ or ‘marvelous’ where Kierkegaard says ‘paradox’ or ‘improbable’ (p. 110). So we already see that de Lubac is distancing himself from Kierkegaard and does not ‘employ’ it in the same way at all. I really don’t see how one can say that de Lubac is talking about the same thing when he is critiquing Kierkegaard on this point. De Lubac would much rather side with Kierkegaard’s “deeper immersion in existence” (as he ends his treatment quoting, p. 111) than this halting moment, and this is very evident as something different all throughout Mystery of the Supernatural, I think.
I know that was a bit belabored, but now it’s your turn, if you don’t mind: how would you describe that which cannot be described, which has no intellectual ratio? Thanks for calling me to clarify. I don’t know if I’ve done an adequate job, but there ya have it.
Peace,
Eric
Eric Lee Says: Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at 11:41 am
Nate, to directly answer your question (sorry), no, I do not think that Kierkegaard nor de Lubac’s use of ‘paradox’ is one that is fundamentally a modality of intellection.
Anticipating a possible answer to the question I asked you, would you perhaps say that one ultimately needs to go beyond any kind of apophatic or cataphatic language about the Supreme Paradox into a language of praise? (I’m culling directly from an account of Marion on Augustine that he gave at a recent conference.)
Peace,
Eric

JD Says: Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at 1:33 pm
How was my invocation of Priest “spurious?” Have you been thinking this whole time that I was appealing to him in support of my position? I was actually just saying, even keeping in mind that Priest has shown us that certain contradictions are true, this is not necessarily “paradoxical” in the Lubacian sense of opening out to mystery. And, then, as a separate thought altogether - but, one which was wholly suggestive - I mused that, in light of this fact, it might be helpful for us to reconsider Lubac’s comments, favoring “contradiction,” precisely because, post-Priest, that term better fits his use of “paradox.”
So, I really don’t think you need to make comments like “spurious” or charge me with incoherence.
Two other things:
First, Lubac’s deployment of the term “paradox” may be fluid, but it is intimately linked with the basic concerns of his entire authorship: the recovery of thick, organic, integral, humanist vision of sacramentality, catholicity, communion, scripture, culture, spirituality (mysticism), etc. I mean, it is clear, his reason for rejecting Kierkegaard’s contradiction is that it is too “thin,” too “dialectical” - he specifically says dialectic always requires synthesis, meaning a telos, in a specifically Platonic-Idealist register (this may be in Sur les chemins de Dieu, an equally early work) - too “individualistic,” etc. Lubac wants the encounter with paradox to open out onto something more; but, in a world where certain contradictions can be true, the temptation is to mistake the paradoxical truth of the contradiction to be, simply by virtue of the fact that it is true, functioning so as to open out to “something more” as it does in Lubac. Thus, I suggest “contradiction” might better serve those purposes now.
But, most likely where one comes down on that matter will be determined by how one judges the value of Lubac’s argument for an integral, organicist vision - which is not to be equated with an assessment of an integral, organicist vision in general.
Second, I think that it is most likely Milbank’s discussion of ratio in the essay your quote that Nate is implicitly rejecting.
Third, just as a pet peeve I have regarding the English use of French proper names (I was corrected by Lacoste): as Edward D. Seeber puts it, “the particle de may be used after a given name or title, but not with a surname alone: one writes, for example, ‘Alexis de Tocqueville,’ ‘Tocqueville,’ but not ‘de Tocqueville’” The exceptions are: “(1) in one-syllable names(De Retz, De Thou) or two-syllable names that end in mute e, i.e., that are pronounced as one syllable (De Gaulle, De Grasse, De Maistre); (2) in names that begin with a vowel or mute h (D’Alembert, D’Holbach)…”
(Citation and first page of article here. for those that care about such things. I found it helpful.)
Eric Lee Says: Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at 2:21 pm
JD, no I had no illusions whatsoever that you were appealing to Priest for support, I just wanted more clarification, so thank you for now doing that. You made that claim in a footnote, after all.
Nate Kerr Says: Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 1:14 am
Eric:
Okay, this got too long to be one comment. So I am going to break it up into two comments. The first a response to your remarks on Kierkegaard, and the second (probably tomorrow evening) a (briefer) response to your question as to “how I would describe that which cannot be described.”
So first let’s begin with Kierkegaard. I have four points.
(1.) There is an important point to be made here, which is that it was Climacus who said, “The passion of the thinker is to think that which cannot be thought.” Climacus says this on his way to saying that “Truth is subjectivity,” and precisely thereby, on his way to saying “subjectivity is untruth” — sin. The all-important point here is that from the ethical point of view, “faith” can only ever be described as the paradox of thought. The paradox as such remains governed by the “caprice” of metaphysics. This is the whole subtle message of Climacus’ authorship, as I read it: “Paradox” in-itself and as such is nothing more than a marvel, and is not itself sufficient to, nor simply a “given” of, faith. The paradox comes instead only as the giving of the condition (qua the paradox of thought) for the grace by which occurs the movement into the paradox of existence — faith. Within Kierkegaard’s dialectic, however, the paradox of thought is thus at one and the same time the condition for sin, one becomes sinful precisely as one recognizes the paradox of thought as a condition for faith, and yet seeks to retain the paradox as such, qua the paradox of thought. To confuse the condition with the means, is thus to evade faith, through recollection. To make the movement of faith, however, is to be transformed “from para-doxa to para-doxa, if you will, by way of repetition. It is also interesting to note too that the language of “mystery” and “marvel” is used by Kierkegaard in the pseudonymous works as terms according to which the ethicist describes faith. “Mystery” and “marvel” are how one describes faith from the perspective of unfaith, that is, from the perspective one still caught within the logic of the universal and of recollection.
(2.) On the “haltingness” of the Moment, or the “disruptive” grace of paradox: We have to understand this very specifically within Kierkegaard’s (apocalyptic-eschatological) suspension of “teleology.” Kierkegaard actually would not deny the language of “divinization” (certain passages in his journals suggests he quite likes it); what he would deny is that we can at all speak of “one’s divinized end,” in-itself and as such. Apart from the irruption (the Moment), Kierkegaard says, any talk of one’s “end” will remain teleological, and will reduce again to some form of the logic of recollection. Furthermore, it will simply not work to juxtapose this irruption/rupture to some kind of “deeper immersion into existence.” This is in part because, on the one hand, the whole language of “deeper immersion into existence” belongs to that “inwardness” language according to which subjectivity becomes and remains “untruth” — sin. And it is also due to the fact that, on the other hand, Kierkegaard doesn’t himself juxtapose the language of rupture to the language of “existence.” The rupture, or the Moment, is rather the ever-new transformation into a qualitatively new existence, via repetition. The Moment is, then, not an evasion of deification, but rather our very participation in eternity, which is itself alone “the true repetition.” So much, then, for the myth that Kierkegaard eschews either “participation” or “deification”: No, he alone may save them from the “caprice” of metaphysics.
(3.) This is all premised upon what Kierkegaard calls the “infinite qualitative distinction between eternity and time.” Contrary to what you say, Kierkegaard never uses the phrase “infinite qualitative distance,” as you attribute it to him above. This is why the paradox cannot remain for faith the paradox of thought, precisely because as such it still thinks the eternity-time relation according to a hierarchical distance, which qua distance would still seem to be a ratio “of sorts,” and yet qua infinite would seem “not to be,” as you say. But this is just another kind of (phenomenological) description of the paradox as a coincidentia oppositorum, which for Kierkegaard is the “passion of thought” brought to its highest intensity, the apex of “metaphysical caprice,” the sin of unfaith. Insofar as you can move smoothly from “paradox” to talking of a coincidentia oppositorum to talking of an analogia entis, as you do, Kierkegaard would say that you are yet once-again duty-bound to the hierarchical metaphysics of recollection. But if we are speaking rather of an infinite qualitative distinction, then we find ourselves within that space of an impossible possibility by which eternity might in fact enter time, irrupt it, and transform us into the time of repetition.
(4.) Finally, on the (presumably detrimental) point that Kierkegaard does not go “beyond the cross.” Kierkegaard’s response would plainly be that the very logic of Christendom is not to go “beyond the resurrection.” That is, Kierkegaard would say that the real failure is not to “not go beyond the cross,” but rather to not know Christ as the one who is ascended to the right hand of God the Father and is to come again in glory. Any espousal of a resurrection which would move one “beyond the cross” would for Kierkegaard be precisely the very denial of the resurrection as an event, and would instead make of the resurrection a hermeneutical key for some kind of teleo-eschatological schematic of recollection. On the other hand, not to move beyond the cross in history is precisely to believe that Christ is resurrected as ascended and coming again, for the sake of our own apocalyptic-eschatological participation in his resurrected life, via the movement of repetition. And this, to say it plainly, seems really to be the more “creedal,” the more primitive (and yes, one might even say “radically”) “orthodox” perspective. Any theological jutification of Christendom would require precisely the denial of this Credo, and the illusory construction of its own creedal “matrix.”
That should suffice for Kierkegaard. And all of that is prefatory to my forthcoming reply to your real question, which now, thanks to this tortuous post, can be much briefer.

Eric Lee Says: Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Nate,
Thank you. Mainly, I think you protest too much and are reading far too much into what I said. I will only address number 4 and 3, in that order.
All I mean about ‘moving beyond the cross’ is that Kierkegaard does not seem to give much of an account of what life in the church is beyond this non-identical repetition. That is fine. I honestly don’t think it is detrimental to him as you took me to think, nor did I mean it that way, as I really love Kierkegaard; I was just merely stating this as something that is indicative of his situation: if he actually were already living within something like a non-Christendomized community, then he might have something to point to that would constitute more descriptions of that life beyond what he give us. Honestly, that’s all I meant (and that’s all I took Amy Laura Hall to say as well in the context of their talk). So that being said, you would be right if I meant the other thing in the way you took it to mean.
Regarding your stuff about whether or not Kierkegaard said ‘distinction’ or ‘distance’. I will have to say I just messed up on that because I didn’t have the texts in front of me and I forgot, but that being said, I still think you protest too much; so, what you say doesn’t really follow, I don’t think, as if my getting ‘distance’ mixed up with ‘difference’ somehow unravels all my thought. In my own writing on this I got it right, and he actually uses ‘infinite qualitative difference‘ (which is what I meant, sorry, I know this is important though), at least as Anti-Climacus. Now, there are most likely some issues here concerning his pseudonyms (as your rightfully pointed out), but these are from Anti-Climacus’s work The Sickness Unto Death:
“God and man are two qualities separated by an infinite qualitative difference. Humanly speaking, any teaching that disregards this difference is demented—divinely understood, it is blasphemy. In paganism, man made god a man (the man-god); in Christianity God makes himself man (the God-man)” (p. 126).
“The existence of an infinite qualitative difference between God and man constitutes the possibility of offense, which cannot be removed” (p. 127).
And these are from Practice in Christianity, also written by Anti-Climacus:
“And thus it is unrecognizability, the absolute unrecognizability, when one is God, then to be an individual human being. To be the individual human being or an individual human being (in a certain sense it is a matter of indifference when he is a high-ranking or a low-ranking person) is the greatest possible distance, the infinitely qualitative distance, from being God, and therefore it is the most profound incognito” (pp. 127-8).
“The possibility of offense, as we have tried to show, is present at every moment, confirming at every moment the chasmic abyss between the single individual and the God-man over which faith and faith alone reaches. … But take away the possibility of offense, as has been done in Christendom, and all Christianity becomes direct communication, and then Christianity is abolished, has become something easy, a superficial something that neither wounds nor heals deeply enough; it has become the false invention of purely human compassion that forgets the infinite qualitative difference between God and man” (pp. 139-40). [These are all from the Princeton Hong translations]
Oh wait, Kierkegaard actually does say ‘distance’ there in that penultimate quotation from Practice. See, I just don’t think you can make as much out of what you’re saying, unless you want to claim that that is a bad translation, and that would be a fine argument to make, but still, the word before it in that quotation is also translated as ‘distance’. He obviously does use ‘distinction’ and ‘difference’ a lot more (depending upon your pseudonym), but you just can’t make the case that he 1) avoids it altogether (unless you want to make a case of bad translation, which I do not have the skills to do at this point), and 2) that he a fortiori argues explicitly against using ‘distance’ as if this would somehow unravel what he means precisely because we have at least one instance where Anti-Climacus uses it.
(There is probably something to be said concerning the difference between Climacus and Anti-Climacus here, as well as the fact that I am ignorant of the fact of whether or not ‘distinction’ and ‘difference’ and ‘distance’ are the same Danish word being translated differently.)
But other than that, this has been very helpful, so thank you. You are a far more adept reader at Kierkegaard than me, and I still haven’t had a chance to read all of his works yet, either, so I have more work to do.
Peace,
Eric
Eric Lee Says: Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Nate, just so you know, I think all your points about Kierkegaard breaking out out the metaphysics of recollection are correct (as Climacus points out in Fragments), I just don’t think you can build your case on a single word. There’s probably more to it than that.
JD Says: Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 4:42 pm
I think this may be empirical proof of at least part of my claim in the prior post.
Dave Belcher Says: Friday, December 7, 2007 at 12:15 am
I know this is just one of his quirks, like when he says “blah, blah” every once in a while, but when he employed the Kantian distinction between negative and infinite judgment (negation of a predicate as opposed to the affirmation of a non-predicate) in relation to the claim: “Material reality is all there is,” and he said: “This is Idealism: ‘Ha Ha, there is something else,’” I about lost it.
Nate Kerr Says: Friday, December 7, 2007 at 1:07 am
Eric:
That is a very interesting passage from Practice in Christianity. I wish I were at my office so that I could look it up in the text. I will do that straightaway when I get to school tomorrow.
We could go round and round on this Kierkegaard stuff, and I’m not entirely interested in doing that, and mostly because I wouldn’t know when to stop. But I would like to insist that the whole set of points (and for that matter any “case”) that I was making in my previous post does not simply turn on (my analysis of) your use or misuse of the word “distance” in Kierkegaard. I was arguing against several things. For one: the way you moved from the idea of the “infinite qualitative distance” in Kierkegaard to reading him as allowing a “ratio” of sorts, a coincidentia oppositorum, and an analogia entis is entirely inconsistent with either his articulation of the paradox of faith, or his use of the phrase in question, in any of its variations. But also I wanted seriously to call into question your idea that you could have Kierkegaard’s “deeper immersion in existence” without the halting, irruptive, apocalyptic Moment, as Lubac seems to want. Or even that one could properly think of divinization apart from this halting, decisive, irruptive Moment. Those issues, as much if not more than your use of the word “distance,” are what signal to me the inability finally to escape the idealist metaphysics of recollection. There is even for Kierkegaard a notion and usage of the idea of “repetition” that does not escape this metaphysics, insofar as it still thinks repetition as merely a matter of “recollecting forward.” This kind of “recollection forward” is what I fear is going on when one eschews the apocalyptic Moment for the teleological “calling” to divinization. And this understanding of “repetition,” just as the “paradox of thought,” still yet requires a “ratio” between divinity and humanity, if even a negative one. So I wouldn’t too quickly dismiss my challenges as a matter of protesting too much over the usage of a single word.
On the question of Kierkegaard’s failure to “move beyond the cross” with respect to his talk of the church, I have to admit that I really have no idea what it would mean to do this. I could write too much on Kierkegaard and the church, so let me just say this. For Kierkegaard (and I really am drawing upon journal entries here), to read the New Testament correctly is to understand that the church is actually there before the cross, in the whole journey of the disciples with Jesus to Jerusalem, and preeminently in the Last Supper. It is precisely the church itself, as the eucharistic “brotherhood” [sic!], that prevents us from going “beyond the cross.” Why? Because the church is through eucharistic repetition precisely the cruciform movement of reconciled humanity setting it’s face upon the new Jerusalem (and this as it exists within the space opened up by the resurrection/ascension and the second coming of Christ). It is clear that Kierkegaard really does believe that the “eucharist makes the church,” as Lubac would say. He interprets the New Testament as articulating the Lord’s Supper as “the originally true center in the church.” The Lord’s Supper “squeezes the church together.” So, tellingly, what Kierkegaard critiques about “Christendom” is precisely its loss of the proper sense according to which the eucharist does indeed “make the church”: a loss of the “communion of saints” as a liturgically existential, and not merely metaphysico-ontological, reality of faith. So I really don’t have any idea what Amy Laura Hall is talking about, if she means what you say she means. (And I’m not sure here: I know the conversation you’re referring to, and I remember reading that and thinking that it was part of that whole weird concession on her part to Milbank’s total rejection of the tragic.)
Now, I should answer your question, if not least because I said I would do so. How does one describe that which cannot be described, or “thought”? My answer would be that you do not “describe” it, insofar as for theology faith is not a “given” which is there for description. Theology is not reducible to a “higher phenomenology” in this regard. When it comes to description, faiths transports us to the realm, again, of what Kierkegaard calls “silence.” That silence can only speak as a lived testimony, a witness, a confession. Faith for the theologian is not a occasion for language, as a description of the “higher,” but is rather the exigency of an act. So you are right to anticipate that the direction I would turn here is towards doxology. But doxology is not here a “language of praise,” in any usual sense of that phrase. This is the problem I have with much use of “doxological” trope these days: doxology is not merely a manner of speaking which opens us onto the “mystery” or the “marvel,” or onto the filial “distance” of the Son and the Father (to use Marion’s imagery). Doxology is rather, to use Kierkegaard again, the work of “praising love.” Doxology just is discipleship — the outgoing movement of love by which we follow Christ into a world in which he is always-already ahead of us, in a manner that itself “repeats” our ecclesial “coming after.” Yes, that is paradox! But it is most decisively doxology as liturgy, where our lives are so wholly participatory in Christ that there can be no evasion of the singularity of action which his historicity requires, by way of appeal to a supposedly “doxological” or “liturgical” participation in or enactment of something which is somehow, albeit concretely, more “universal” — “transcendence,” “excess,” the “divine esse,” etc. Theology, I think, is not the description of the paradox of faith, but rather an enactment of it, as a certain work of “praising love.” (And I surmise that theology would look quite a bit different and would be quite a bit more unruly and unpredictable than what is usually carried out under the label “theology,” if we were to take this work seriously.)

Religion as a subject should (non-confessionally) be taught in schools

D.Dennett from Indistinct Union by cjsmith

Here’s Dan Dennett talking at TED on his new book (Breaking the Spell) where he calls for teaching religion (all religions) to children as a natural phenomenon. The Spell is not religion as such but the taboo against treating it as a natural phenomenon.
Though to be fair, sociology of religion, psychology of religion, folkloric studies, anthropology of religion has been treating religion as a natural phenomenon for nearly 200 years. But this would be the application of Natural Selection to religion.
I’m not totally against it. I think religion as a subject should (non-confessionally) be taught in schools. Stephen Prothero, Camille Paglia, Thomas Berry among many others have called for something similar. I think there are however major issues with the proposal that have not been deeply examined. (more…)

Steyn should have more confidence in the infectious values of the Enlightenment

guardian.co.uk/commentisfree > Ali Eteraz Articles Latest Show all

Ali Eteraz December 6, 2007 3:30 PM

This difference in opinion among Muslims is direct evidence that all Muslims do not act the same, nor interpret their religion uniformly, nor conform to Steyn's stereotypes about imposing sharia law.
Steyn should have more confidence in the infectious values of the Enlightenment, which can make even the Muslim Council of Britain become more tolerant.
Unfortunately, what should have been an opportunity for Canadians to debate the merits of Steyn's argument, of which there are very few, as Johann Hari demonstrated, has become another instance of the wilful ignorance of the principle of free speech by a mainstream Muslim organisation in the west.
There is no such thing as a fundamental right to rebut. Macleans owes no duty to the CIC. The CIC does not speak for all Muslims and, even if it did, its stance would be incorrect. Furthermore, why should it be the CIC, or an organisation at all, or even, for that matter, a Muslim that gets to make this rebuttal? The only fundamental right here belongs to Macleans: to choose what it prints.
The CIC should drop its case, and the Ontario Human Rights Commission should completely and utterly reject the complaint. The CIC's tactics are going to lead it down a dangerous track where adversarial tactics will be the only way it can ever assure being heard. In fact, the CIC has now threatened the MCC with "corrective action".
Where will the CIC's tactics go next? Is its intention to halt debate among Muslims as well as in the press? Is it going to bring another Muslim group before the Human Rights Commission?
The CIC should understand that there is no likelihood of Steyn-inspired mass deportations, especially since Steyn's excerpted passage in Macleans is not even talking about Canada. It should focus on grooming a culture of openness and debate within its members. It should train its individuals to be individuals and not beholden to the herd mentality of an organisation.
If it wants to challenge Steyn - and by all means, I think Steyn should be challenged - the way to do it is through participation in public discourse, not by short-circuiting the public sphere, and fellow Muslims, by using adversarial tactics. del.icio.us Digg it Tailrank Reddit Newsvine Now Public Technorati keywords: islam canada marksteyn canadianislamiccongress macleans ontario Their own worst enemies When Muslim groups try to silence the press, they live up to the most negative prejudices about Islam Ali Eteraz Nothing sets back the eradication of Islamophobia more than Muslim groups' crying wolf against inaccurate punditry.

How to beyond oppositional democracy and create a higher order

Intention Download Series Luncheon with Barbara Marx Hubbard Tue, December 11, 2007 11:30 am US/Pacific Organized by SIA Listen to the audio download now

Barbara Marx Hubbard has long been a visionary leader, helping us all to imagine a bold and evolutionary future that we can co-create. In this interview with IONS President James O’Dea, she explores the power of entering into imaginal realms in order to link our creative intent with the power of the universe. Her personal journey began with great questions that drove her to find answers, which in turn led her to clarify her life’s purpose. The most powerful intentions, she believes, come from the journey of the soul towards greater knowing, which then leads us into seeing our role in the larger design. She explores such fascinating subjects as vocational arousal, the genius code, the power of shared excitement, social synergy, and the birthing process of the planet, as well as how to clarify our personal vision and pair it with gratitude. She concludes with her vision of how to beyond oppositional democracy and create a higher order.

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Guru-Principle

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "None of the main writers and teachers in the Integ...":

I think this quote applies to the conceipts of this self appointed ADOLESCENT "expert" on religion and spirituality---and indeed to all the self-important talking heads involved in the "integral" movement.

"Any one and every one who doubts and quibbles about the necessity (and the True Nature and Great Function) of a true Adept-Guru (or Adept Sat-Guru) is, simply, not yet ready, willing, and able to enter the esoteric (and, necessarily, self-surrendering) Ordeal of the advanced and the ultimate stages of life....

Those who doubt the Guru-Principle, and the unique value and ultimate necessity of the Adept-Guru, are those for whom the Great and (soon) Spiritual Way Itself is yet in doubt." Posted by Anonymous to Savitri Era Open Forum at 11:34 AM, December 06, 2007

for Rancière, the purest form of democracy would be selection by lot (with frequent rotation and replacement), rather than “representative” elections

The Pinocchio Theory “If you fake the funk, your nose will grow.” — Bootsy Collins

« Rancière (1) Rancière (2) by Steven Shaviro

So… democracy. Rancière doesn’t see democracy as a form of government, or form of State. It is something both more and less than that. States are all more or less despotic, including supposedly “democratic” ones. And non-State forms of authority tend to be based on other forms of unequal power relationships, with authority grounded in age (patriarchy), birth (aristocracy), violence and military prowess (I’m not sure of the name of this), or money and wealth (plutocracy). Our current neoliberal society combines the rule of Capital with the rule of bureaucratic States with their own levels of authority based upon expertise and guardianship of the “rights” of property or Capital. Even though we have a legislature and executive that are chosen by majority, or at least plurality, vote, our society is not very democratic by Rancière’s standards. The role of money in the electoral process, the fact that there are career politicians, the management of increasing aspects of our lives by non-political “experts” (e.g. the Federal Reserve), all militate against what Rancière considers to be even the minimal requirements for democracy.

To a great extent, Rancière uses the idea of “democracy” adjectivally (a society may be more or less democratic) rather than as a noun. For democracy is a tendency, a process, a collective action, rather than a state of affairs, much less an organized State. Democracy is an event; it happens when, for isntance, people militate to change the distribution of what is public and what is private. In the US, the civil rights movement and (more recently) the alterna-globalization protests would be examples of democracy in action. Rancière rightly stresses the activity, which always needs to be renewed, rather than the result. This might be thought of, in Deleuzian terms, as a revolutionary-becoming, rather than an established “revolutionary” State, which is nearly always a disappointment (if not something worse). While I am inclined to agree with Zizek that State power often may need to be actively used in order, for instance, to break the power of Capital, I still find Zizek’s apparent worship of State forms and Party dictatorship reprehensible (it would seem that Zizek has never found an ostensibly left-wing dictator he doesn’t like — except for Tito and Milosevic). Collective processes should not be reduced to State organization, though they may include it. Chavismo is more important than Chavez (whereas Zizek seems to admire Chavez because, rather than in spite of, his tendency to do things that allow his opponents to apply the cliche of “banana-republic dictator” to him). It is admirable that Chavez is using a certain amount of State power, as well as extra-State collective action, in order to break the power of Capital; but to identify a revolutionary process with its leader and authority figure is worse than insane.

But I digress. To value the process of revolutionary-becoming, as Deleuze does, and as Rancière does in a different way, rather than the results of such action, is not to gvie up on lasting change. It is rather to say that change continues to need to happen, as against the faux-utopia of a final resting place, an actually-achieved utopia (which always turns out to be something more like “actually-existing socialism,” as they used to say, precisely because it congeals when the process comes to a stop).

I need to be cautious here about assimilating Rancière too much to Deleuze and Guattari. I am only trying to say that Rancière’s notion of democracy gives substance to something that often sounds too glib and vague when Deleuze and Guattari say it. For Rancière, “democracy” means that no one person or group of people is intrinsically suited to rule, or more suited to rule than anyone else. Democracy means radical contingency, because there is no foundation for the social order. Democracy means absolute egalitarianism; there is no differential qualification that can hierarchize people, or divide rulers from ruled, the worthy from the unworthy. In a democratic situation, anybody is as worthy of respect as anybody else. This means that, for Rancière, the purest form of democracy would be selection by lot (with frequent rotation and replacement), rather than “representative” elections. Selection by chance is grounded in the idea that anyone can exercise a power-function, regardless of “qualifications” or “merit” (let alone the desire to rule or control; if anything, those who desire to have administrative or legislative power are the ones least worthy to have it — to the extent that we can make such a distinction at all).

It is unclear to me whether Rancière actually believes that a total democracy could exist in practice — as opposed to being an ideal to strive for, a kind of Kantian ethical imperative, something we must strive for to the utmost possible, regardless of the degree to which we succeed. (In my previous post, I was privileging both the political and the aesthetic at the expense of the ethical. Here I would add that Kantian morality is not ethics, but perhaps can be seen as the limit of ethics, the point at which it comes closest to politics).

But here’s the point. For Rancière, egalitarianism is not a “fact” (though we can and should continually strive to “verify” it), but an axiom and an imperative. That is to say, it has nothing to do with empirical questions of how much particular people are similar to, or different from, one another (in terms of qualities like manual dexterity or mathematical ability, or for that matter “looks” and “beauty”). Egalitarianism doesn’t deny the fact that any professional tennis player, even a low-ranked one, could effortlessly beat me at tennis, or that Rancière’s philosophical writings are far more profound than mine, or that I couldn’t pass a sophomore college math class. And egalitarianism doesn’t mean that somehow we all ought to be “the same,” whatever that might entail, genetically or experientially. What egalitarianism means, for Rancière, is that we are all intelligent speaking beings, able to communicate with one another. Our very social interaction means that we are on the same level in a very fundamental sense. The person who follows orders is equal to the person who gives orders, in the precise sense that the one who obeys is able to understand the one who commands. In this sense, Rancière says, equality is always already presupposed in any social relation of inequality. You couldn’t have hierarchies and power relations without this more fundamental, axiomatic, equality lying beneath it.

This seems to me to be (though I presume Rancière wouldn’t accept these terms) a sort of Kantian radicalization of Foucault’s claim that power is largely incitative rather than repressive, that it always relies, in almost the last instance (i.e. up to the point of death) upon some sort of consent or acceptance on the part of the one being dominated. Without these fundamental relations of equality, it would not be possible for there to be elites, masters, bosses, people who tell other people what to do, and who have the backing or the authority to do this. So the question of equality is (in Kantian terms) a question of a communication which is not based upon the quantitative rankings that are imposed by the adoption of a “universal equivalent” (money as the commodity against which all other commodities are exchanged) — therefore this, too, relates to the Kantian problematic that I discussed in my previous posting on Rancière.

Of course, in our personal lives, we never treat everyone else with total equality. I love some people, and not others. I am always haunted by Jean Genet’s beautiful text on Rembrandt, where he mourns the way that Rembrandt’s revelation of the common measure, or equality, of everybody means, in a certain register, the death of his desire, the end of lusting after, and loving, and privileging, one individual in particular. But the power of Genet’s essay resides in the fact that, in the ultimate state of things, this universal equality cannot be denied any more than the singularity of desire can be. And that is why, or how, I think that the lesson Genet draws from Rembrandt is close to the lesson on equality that Rancière draws from, among others, the 19th-century French pedagogue Jacotet (the subject of Rancière’s book The Ignorant Schoolmaster).

Democracy, or egalitarianism, is not a question of singular desire; but it is very much a question of how we can, and should, live together socially, given that we are deeply social animals. Which is why I see it a kind of imperative, and as something that we always need to recall ourselves to, amidst the atomization — and deprivation for many — enforced by the neoliberal State and the savage “law” of the “market.” To that extent, I think that Rancière is invaluable.

There is something I miss in Rancière, however, and that is a sense of political economy, as opposed to just politics. This absence may have something to do with Rancière’s rejection of his Althusserian Marxist past. He is certainly aware of the plutocratic aspects of today’s neoliberal network society. He doesn’t make the mistake of focusing all his ire on the State, while ignoring the pseudo-spontaneity of the Market and its financial instruments. But he never addresses, in the course of his account of democracy, the way in which economic organization, as well as political organization, needs to be addressed. Here, again, is a place where I think that Marx remains necessary (and also, as I said in the previous post, Mauss — as expounded, for example, by Kevin Hart). Exploitation cannot be reduced to domination, and the power of money cannot be reduced to the coercive power of the State or of other hierarchies. Aesthetics needs to be coupled with political economy, and not just with politics. So I still find a dimension lacking in Rancière — but he helps, as few contemporary thinkers do, in starting to get us there. This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Books, Politics, Theory. RSS 2.0 feed. leave a response, or trackback 5:25 AM

None of the main writers and teachers in the Integral Movement so far, really understand what Sri Aurobindo actually taught

Zaadz: M. Alan's Recent Blogs

So far I'm working with the idea of five major hypostases. These are (with Sri Aurobindo's terminology in brackets for the first three)
o The Unmanifest Absolute Reality (Sachchidananda)

o The Manifest Absolute Reality (Supermind)
o The Noetic Reality (Overmind)

o The Nondual Reality (standard Enlightenment)

o The Prakritic Reality (the Cosmos, planes of existence, gross and subtle matter)

Readers familiar with the traditional meme of the "Great chain of being" or ontological spectrum will understand what is being described here. More unusual, to those unfamiliar with Sri Aurobindo's insights, is that the "nondual" state of Enlightenment (normally considered the very highest state of consciousness, the Absolute Reality) has a relatively low position, second from the bottom. If this arrangement seems strange, especially to those used to the comparison tables and charts provided by Wilber and others, consider that none of the popular Gurus in the West, and none of the main writers and teachers in the Integral Movement so far, really understand what Sri Aurobindo actually taught (on my website I mention the misunderstandings of Adi Da, of Osho, and of Ken Wilber in this regard).

This is in no way to criticise the sincerity of those Integralists who study Sri Aurobindo from an intellectual perspective only. But inevitably mistakes creep in, because Sri Aurobindo represnets a much higher level of consciousness than that attained by even the most enlightened in the cutting edge consciousness paradigm in the West. Pop Gurus (1960s onwards), New Paradigm transpersonal psychology and spirituality (1970s onwards), the Integral Movement (1990s onwards), and all the rest, go as far as the Nondual stage, but no further. What is described here will be the esoteric perspective, based on Plotinus (another great teacher who has been misunderstood in the mainstream Integral Movement), Sri Aurobindo, and other teachings. Progress report and comments

No amount of erection of physical structures will advance the cause of Hinduism

While celebrating Hinduism's refusal to fit any straight jacket, it attempts to design its own straight jacket to encompass all Hinduism. This ideology's proponents believe that this feature of Hinduism is a nice little add-on that can be dispensed with. But they miss the point: this feature is the core of Hinduism and without it Hinduism loses its essence.

The fact is that Hinduism is uniquely unsuited for a centrally organized administration. That is its biggest strength: for those who want to attack Hinduism, there is no clear target. Hinduism resides in individual Hindus in their millions. No amount of destruction of physical structures will make a dent in the healthy body of Hinduism. By the same token, no amount of erection of physical structures will advance the cause of Hinduism. It is an ironic, but an undeniable, fact that this knowledge escapes the attention of those who claim to be the guardians of "Hindu pride". It is tempting to end with the statement that this book is an example of an unconvincing argument for a questionable cause. But the issues are considerably more grave than that summary suggests.

Religion has a latent tendency to bring to the surface the most irrational and animalistic urges in human beings. Hinduism is not above such tendencies and endeavor should be to negate them. But the ideology that guides Lies has exactly the opposite intention. While there is reason to believe that the inherent flux at the core of Hinduism will ensure the ultimate failure of all such ideologies, there is no room for complacency. Book Review: Lies, Lies and More Lies from Desicritics by Krishna

Gandhi’s moral rigidity betrayed a spiritual emptiness

Moralism vs. Enlightenment from The Stumbling Mystic by ned

When I see people comparing Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo, inwardly I cringe, because there really is no comparison. Now, only God knows the truth of our souls, but honestly Gandhi was much more of a moralistic Christian traditionalist than a spiritual Hindu. Gandhi’s moral rigidity betrayed a spiritual emptiness that one can even detect in his autobiography. His bizarre opposition to contraception, his phobia of modernity and technology, his dogmatic nonviolence (he told the Jews to commit mass suicide when the Nazis were oppressing them!) — all criticized harshly by Sri Aurobindo — indicate that he was far from being spiritually transformed.

The ancient Hindu texts do value morality, but they also understand that morality and moralism have their limits. You find this to be the over-arching message of the Bhagavad-Gita — because ultimately the Gita’s message is of a supraethical surrender. Whatever you are doing, however foolish or ignorant, just surrender and consent to be transformed, and the Supreme will indeed deliver you if you are sincere... As the Mother never tired of saying, moralism is the greatest obstacle to genuine spiritual self-giving.

A simple booklet on world religions was enough to help me in my psychological development

D'Souza vs. Dennett: The Aftermath from Zaadz: ~C4Chaos' Blog (Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com) I just finished watching the 15-part video of the D'Souza vs. Dennett debate held at Tufts University...

D'Souza agreed with Dennett (see Part 4) as long as Atheism is also included in the curriculum. Sounds fair enough to me. Why?

Allow me to answer this from personal experience. I was raised in the only Christian country in Asia. By virtue of birth, my religion is Roman Catholic. We had religion classes in elementary and high school but the curriculum is all Christian (Roman Catholic to be exact). No religious comparison. No religious evaluation. We're required to memorize the Creed. We're required to make confessions and participate in Holy Communion. No reasoning was offered. It's basic dogmatic indoctrination. I reached college without being exposed to other religious beliefs (aside from Protestants which are essentially also Christians). The only time I got exposed to other religions was when I went out of my way and self-educated myself by reading a small booklet about world religions. That booklet was enough to stretch my understanding beyond the psychological fence of my own religion. I can't remember the exact title of that book and the name of the authors but I'm still grateful for it after all these years. It has been my stepping stone that guided my psychological development, enabling me to hold different perspectives at the same time and form value judgments based on a combination of those perspectives.

If a simple booklet on world religions was enough to help me in my psychological development, I think that teaching children about different religions (and their pros and cons; including Atheism) from a very young age will speed up their psychological development and minimize religious fundamentalism in the future, not to mention that children will be more alert with the pitfalls of some New Age hubris and cultish thinking. This would pave way for more secularization as well as "healthy" versions of religions. This is the truest sense of religious freedom.

In this sense, by making D'Souza agree to teaching different religions to children, Daniel Dennett had advanced his agenda a little further. So I think Dennett has some small victory to celebrate for, even if he was out-debated by D'Souza.

With the world caught in the whirlwind of commerce, can Auroville resist?

The City of Dawn is alive and well Claude Arpi

Indo-Asian News Service Email Author December 02, 2007 www.hindustantimes.com Home

Was it a mirage? Five thousand people of different races and nationalities assembling on a piece of totally barren land in Villupuram district! They had been invited by Unesco to inaugurate a new city in this desert of red laterite, a city that would "belong to nobody in particular, but humanity as a whole".
The event took place in February 1968, some 12 km north of the former French colony of Puducherry, on a little hill that was being swiftly eroded. Youngsters representing 121 countries and 23 Indian states ceremoniously deposited a handful of soil from their respective countries in a lotus-shaped urn at the centre of the future city. As stated in its four-point charter, the international township of Auroville was to be a "site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity".

The project was based on a 'dream' of The Mother, spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian freedom fighter and philosopher who continues to inspire millions the world over. A few years earlier, she had written: "There should be somewhere on earth a place...where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world; a place of peace, concord..." Forty years later, one may ask: what has happened to her dream?
The first pioneers had their job cut out, to prevent further erosion. They did not have an easy life but their enthusiasm matched the tremendous difficulties. Their 'environmentally-friendly' actions (they planted millions of trees) were not moved by an ideology, nobody talked about 'ecology' in the 60s, but simply to get shade and prevent the sand storms.

Eventually they acquired some expertise; the world over, Auroville - The Mother called it the City of Dawn - is today synonymous with sustainable development, alternative energies and architecture. Ditto for those who began the first cottage industries, most of them had no prior skills in the field of handicrafts, they just needed to generate some income to build this "city the earth needs". It was much later that 'Auroville crafts' became a brand name.
To create the necessary physical base for a representative laboratory for an experiment in human unity, Auroville's founder envisaged a township for 50,000 people.
The progress was slower than expected, but today the city with its four zones (cultural, residential, industrial and international) is slowly emerging around the Matrimandir - the soul of Auroville - a place for silence and concentration. This spherical building is sometimes compared to a spaceship emerging from the earth.

Nearly 2,000 members (including 20 active seniors above 80 years old and 400 children) from 44 different nationalities contribute to one of the most cosmopolitan experiments in collective living in the world.
Asked what he thought has been Auroville's main achievement during the last 40 years, Alain Bernard, a former French executive who joined the community in the early 1970s, says: "The miracle is that it still continues to exist, despite the changes around us."
He rejoices that Auroville has kept its multicultural features and that more Asians, particularly from countries like Korea, are coming to the international city.
A few years ago, the prestigious French Newspaper Le Monde reported: "Waiting to know the fate of their utopia, Aurovilians carry on their quest for another way of life. Their doubts and the fragility of the undertaking are the guarantors of the authenticity and the value of the experiment that they pursue against all odds."

Nearly a century ago, Sri Aurobindo had used the Latin saying to explain his yoga: solvitur ambulando - while walking and progressing, problems get solved. This could be Auroville's motto because there is no readymade recipe or formula or even rules for such an experiment.
The world has indeed drastically changed since the 1960s. Puducherry, then a sleepy French settlement getting reconciled to being Indian, has become a buzzing industrial town.
The Mother had spoken of "a place where money would no longer be the sovereign lord", but with the world caught in the whirlwind of commerce, can Auroville resist?

Marx forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil

19. We must look briefly at the two essential stages in the political realization of this hope, because they are of great importance for the development of Christian hope, for a proper understanding of it and of the reasons for its persistence. First there is the French Revolution—an attempt to establish the rule of reason and freedom as a political reality. To begin with, the Europe of the Enlightenment looked on with fascination at these events, but then, as they developed, had cause to reflect anew on reason and freedom. A good illustration of these two phases in the reception of events in France is found in two essays by Immanuel Kant in which he reflects on what had taken place. In 1792 he wrote Der Sieg des guten Prinzips über das böse und die Gründung eines Reiches Gottes auf Erden (“The Victory of the Good over the Evil Principle and the Founding of a Kingdom of God on Earth”). In this text he says the following: “The gradual transition of ecclesiastical faith to the exclusive sovereignty of pure religious faith is the coming of the Kingdom of God.” 17 He also tells us that revolutions can accelerate this transition from ecclesiastical faith to rational faith. The “Kingdom of God” proclaimed by Jesus receives a new definition here and takes on a new mode of presence; a new “imminent expectation”, so to speak, comes into existence: the “Kingdom of God” arrives where “ecclesiastical faith” is vanquished and superseded by “religious faith”, that is to say, by simple rational faith. In 1795, in the text Das Ende aller Dinge (“The End of All Things”) a changed image appears. Now Kant considers the possibility that as well as the natural end of all things there may be another that is unnatural, a perverse end. He writes in this connection: “If Christianity should one day cease to be worthy of love ... then the prevailing mode in human thought would be rejection and opposition to it; and the Antichrist ... would begin his—albeit short—regime (presumably based on fear and self-interest); but then, because Christianity, though destined to be the world religion, would not in fact be favoured by destiny to become so, then, in a moral respect, this could lead to the (perverted) end of all things.” 18

20. The nineteenth century held fast to its faith in progress as the new form of human hope, and it continued to consider reason and freedom as the guiding stars to be followed along the path of hope. Nevertheless, the increasingly rapid advance of technical development and the industrialization connected with it soon gave rise to an entirely new social situation: there emerged a class of industrial workers and the so-called “industrial proletariat”, whose dreadful living conditions Friedrich Engels described alarmingly in 1845. For his readers, the conclusion is clear: this cannot continue; a change is necessary. Yet the change would shake up and overturn the entire structure of bourgeois society. After the bourgeois revolution of 1789, the time had come for a new, proletarian revolution: progress could not simply continue in small, linear steps. A revolutionary leap was needed. Karl Marx took up the rallying call, and applied his incisive language and intellect to the task of launching this major new and, as he thought, definitive step in history towards salvation—towards what Kant had described as the “Kingdom of God”. Once the truth of the hereafter had been rejected, it would then be a question of establishing the truth of the here and now. The critique of Heaven is transformed into the critique of earth, the critique of theology into the critique of politics. Progress towards the better, towards the definitively good world, no longer comes simply from science but from politics—from a scientifically conceived politics that recognizes the structure of history and society and thus points out the road towards revolution, towards all-encompassing change. With great precision, albeit with a certain onesided bias, Marx described the situation of his time, and with great analytical skill he spelled out the paths leading to revolution—and not only theoretically: by means of the Communist Party that came into being from the Communist Manifesto of 1848, he set it in motion. His promise, owing to the acuteness of his analysis and his clear indication of the means for radical change, was and still remains an endless source of fascination. Real revolution followed, in the most radical way in Russia.

21. Together with the victory of the revolution, though, Marx's fundamental error also became evident. He showed precisely how to overthrow the existing order, but he did not say how matters should proceed thereafter. He simply presumed that with the expropriation of the ruling class, with the fall of political power and the socialization of means of production, the new Jerusalem would be realized. Then, indeed, all contradictions would be resolved, man and the world would finally sort themselves out. Then everything would be able to proceed by itself along the right path, because everything would belong to everyone and all would desire the best for one another. Thus, having accomplished the revolution, Lenin must have realized that the writings of the master gave no indication as to how to proceed. True, Marx had spoken of the interim phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessity which in time would automatically become redundant. This “intermediate phase” we know all too well, and we also know how it then developed, not ushering in a perfect world, but leaving behind a trail of appalling destruction. Marx not only omitted to work out how this new world would be organized—which should, of course, have been unnecessary. His silence on this matter follows logically from his chosen approach. His error lay deeper. He forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man's freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil. He thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favourable economic environment.

22. Again, we find ourselves facing the question: what may we hope? A self-critique of modernity is needed in dialogue with Christianity and its concept of hope. In this dialogue Christians too, in the context of their knowledge and experience, must learn anew in what their hope truly consists, what they have to offer to the world and what they cannot offer. Flowing into this self-critique of the modern age there also has to be a self-critique of modern Christianity, which must constantly renew its self-understanding setting out from its roots. On this subject, all we can attempt here are a few brief observations. First we must ask ourselves: what does “progress” really mean; what does it promise and what does it not promise? In the nineteenth century, faith in progress was already subject to critique. In the twentieth century, Theodor W. Adorno formulated the problem of faith in progress quite drastically: he said that progress, seen accurately, is progress from the sling to the atom bomb. Now this is certainly an aspect of progress that must not be concealed. To put it another way: the ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil—possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth (cf. Eph 3:16; 2 Cor 4:16), then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.

23. As far as the two great themes of “reason” and “freedom” are concerned, here we can only touch upon the issues connected with them. Yes indeed, reason is God's great gift to man, and the victory of reason over unreason is also a goal of the Christian life. But when does reason truly triumph? When it is detached from God? When it has become blind to God? Is the reason behind action and capacity for action the whole of reason? If progress, in order to be progress, needs moral growth on the part of humanity, then the reason behind action and capacity for action is likewise urgently in need of integration through reason's openness to the saving forces of faith, to the differentiation between good and evil. Only thus does reason become truly human. It becomes human only if it is capable of directing the will along the right path, and it is capable of this only if it looks beyond itself. Otherwise, man's situation, in view of the imbalance between his material capacity and the lack of judgement in his heart, becomes a threat for him and for creation. Thus where freedom is concerned, we must remember that human freedom always requires a convergence of various freedoms. Yet this convergence cannot succeed unless it is determined by a common intrinsic criterion of measurement, which is the foundation and goal of our freedom. Let us put it very simply: man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope. Given the developments of the modern age, the quotation from Saint Paul with which I began (Eph 2:12) proves to be thoroughly realistic and plainly true. There is no doubt, therefore, that a “Kingdom of God” accomplished without God—a kingdom therefore of man alone—inevitably ends up as the “perverse end” of all things as described by Kant: we have seen it, and we see it over and over again. Yet neither is there any doubt that God truly enters into human affairs only when, rather than being present merely in our thinking, he himself comes towards us and speaks to us. Reason therefore needs faith if it is to be completely itself: reason and faith need one another in order to fulfil their true nature and their mission.

ENCYCLICAL LETTER SPE SALVI OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF BENEDICT XVI TO THE BISHOPS PRIESTS AND DEACONS MEN AND WOMEN RELIGIOUS AND ALL THE LAY FAITHFUL ON CHRISTIAN HOPE Given in Rome, at Saint Peter's, on 30 November, the Feast of Saint Andrew the Apostle, in the year 2007, the third of my Pontificate.

Can we know the truth from the events on the surface?

The Afro-Asian Students Conference following the great Conference of Afro-Asian leaders who formulated the famous Panchsheel. It had no direct impact on my creativity, but it changed my attitude to reality. In the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Khrushchev described the horrors perpetrated by Stalin who, for us, was the very symbol of justice. The report shocked and bewildered me. Had I died before the 20th Congress, I would have rested with the trust that Stalin could do no wrong. Can we know the truth from the events on the surface? The questions broadened the scope of my quest. Literary Review www.hinduonnet.com

Manoj Das has to his credit about 40 books in English and an equal number in his mother tongue. A critic, columnist, educationist and a devoted student of mysticism and Integral Yoga, he lives in Pondicherry and is a Professor of English Literature at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.

The Pope is a man who is electrified by ideas

Vox Nova Catholic perspectives on culture, society, and politics Home About the Contributors About Vox Nova Holding fast to what is true and good

I sometimes am asked by Vox Nova readers why Karl Marx is included in our blog banner given the atrocities committed by 20th century communist states. I tend to reply that there are many good ideas in Marx’s writings, and that not all of it must be jettisoned because “Marxism,” which is its own animal, has had a cold, bloody and unjust face. But, more importantly, Marx has so profoundly shaped our understanding of economics, politics and the alienation the individual feels within both that one can no longer “do” political theory without passing through Marx, for better or for worse, much like one can no longer “do” philosophy without first passing through Kant. They have fundamentally changed the way we “do” these crafts.
Pope Benedict XVI thinks along very similar lines, and he has displayed this in his new encyclical Spe Salvi. He draws upon the neo-Marxist school of thought known as Critical Theory, which has its roots in the revolutionary work of the Frankfurt School. When making a point about the need to critique modernity, which I myself attempted here a while back, he draws from the philosophical and political theory of those great Frankfurt thinkers, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. What the Pope shows is that we can take many good ideas from thinkers who we would otherwise discard as non- or a-religious, politically questionable (I think here especially of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre), or whatever else we may believe about them. Hold fast to what is good and true!
Consider Spe Salvi 22 on the need for a critique of the idea of progress. Pope Benedict XVI draws from Adorno’s sober look at both the limits of modernity and the folly of uncritical trust in progress:

On this subject, all we can attempt here are a few brief observations. First we must ask ourselves: what does “progress” really mean; what does it promise and what does it not promise? In the nineteenth century, faith in progress was already subject to critique. In the twentieth century, Theodor W. Adorno formulated the problem of faith in progress quite drastically: he said that progress, seen accurately, is progress from the sling to the atom bomb. Now this is certainly an aspect of progress that must not be concealed. To put it another way: the ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil—possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man’s ethical formation, in man’s inner growth (cf. Eph 3:16; 2 Cor 4:16), then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.

Pope Benedict XVI displays a very discerning eye when he comments on Horkheimer’s critique of religion, holding to the latter’s criticism of atheism but abandoning, of course, the latter’s univocal concept of image in terms of a positive religion:

A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power—whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts—will cease to dominate the world. This is why the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism and theism. Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the image of a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the Old Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a “longing for the totally Other” that remains inaccessible—a cry of yearning directed at world history. Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which naturally meant the exclusion of any “image” of a loving God. On the other hand, he also constantly emphasized this “negative” dialectic and asserted that justice —true justice—would require a world “where not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone.” This, would mean, however—to express it with positive and hence, for him, inadequate symbols—that there can be no justice without a resurrection of the dead. Yet this would have to involve “the resurrection of the flesh, something that is totally foreign to idealism and the realm of Absolute spirit.”
Christians likewise can and must constantly learn from the strict rejection of images that is contained in God’s first commandment (cf. Ex 20:4). The truth of negative theology was highlighted by the Fourth Lateran Council, which explicitly stated that however great the similarity that may be established between Creator and creature, the dissimilarity between them is always greater.32 In any case, for the believer the rejection of images cannot be carried so far that one ends up, as Horkheimer and Adorno would like, by saying “no” to both theses—theism and atheism. (42-43)

The Pope is a man who is electrified by ideas. Whether it be his use of Descartes, Nietzsche and Plato in Deus Caritas Est or his use of Kant, Adorno and Horkheimer in Spe Salvi, he demonstrates that ideas in themselves can be good and true despite how those ideas may have been implemented or lived out throughout modernity. Not all Catholics need to be intellectuals–God knows, we may need less!–but those who choose to go that route cannot miss the cue given by the Pope: the battle for faith and hope is taking place in response to, and in dialogue with, modernity.
A side thought: Who would have thought that there would be more citations of Adorno than St. Thomas Aquinas in an encyclical on hope?!? Wow.

This entry was posted on November 30, 2007 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Philosophy, Politics, Pope Benedict XVI, Vox Nova. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. 7 Responses to “Holding fast to what is true and good”
radicalcatholicmom Says: November 30, 2007 at 5:46 pm
The first time I ever read Marx, I was blown away by him. I found I agreed with him on the problem, but did not quite agree with him on his solutions. But I found his voice echoed in Dorothy Day’s writings, too. Many people don’t think there is a problem so just agreeing on that point is half the battle.
Interesting. I will have to read the Pope’s latest work.
Katerina Ivanovna Says: November 30, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum also recognizes the truths contained in the concerns that brought about the communist approach, but obviously, he does not agree with the route its implementation took.
Truth is truth no matter where it comes from or who says it.
Zach Says: November 30, 2007 at 6:41 pm
RCM, if it’s possible to state concisely, could you describe “the problem” according to Karl Marx, and how/why you agreed with him?
Blackadder Says: November 30, 2007 at 7:41 pm
My experience with Marx was somewhat different. When I read the Manifesto in college, I was struck by a couple of things. The first was the Marx seemed to be much more motivated by hatred of the bourgeoisie than it was by concern for the poor and the downtrodden (hatred of the bourgeoisie is apparently a common phenomenon; Merton confesses that he harbored such a hatred in the Seven Storey Mountain, and that it was only reading the works of the Little Flower, that great bourgeois saint, that helped him get over it). It also seemed pretty clear that anyone who actually tried to put into practice the policies advocated by Marx in the Manifesto was bound to commit the sort of atrocities that have in fact been committed in every Communist country.
Later, a friend whose opinion I valued told me that while Marx’s economics were wrong, he had some good things to say about alienation. So I read his The Alienation of Labor, and was similarly unimpressed. One wants to say that something that has spoken to so many must have something to it, but if there is I can’t see it.
My feelings on the matter are expressed (better than I ever could in my own words) in the following article by Theodore Dalrymple entitled “How - and How Not - to Love Mankind”:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_3_urbanities-how_and_how_no.html
Policraticus Says: November 30, 2007 at 9:07 pm
I always felt that Marx’s (and Engel’s) Communist Manifesto was overrated and not a good guide to the philosophical and economic views of Marx. I think the early economic and political manuscripts (1840’s) and his Das Kapital are much better for gaining a grasp on what Marx was trying to do. With regard to alienation, alienation of labor is only one of his forms of alienation, and think his account of alienation from nature and from one another is very accurate.
Kyle R. Cupp Says: December 1, 2007 at 12:41 am
My first questions when I approach any philosopher (whether he is Aquinas or Marcuse, Derrida or Marx) are, what can I learn from him? What questions is he asking? What are his projects? What contributions does he make to knowledge?
Donald R. McClarey Says: December 1, 2007 at 1:17 am
Marx has a consistent record as an economic prognosticator: virtually every one of his predictions failed to come true. As an organizing force for most of the left in the 20th century he does have a claim to historical significance. I think this is the true central tenet of Marxism:
” Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.’
The old bohemian was both wrong and right. Religion is not illusory, certainly not Judaism and Christianity. However Marx did help create an illusory substitute for religion: Marxism. His faith has never been the faith of the people. However, it has frequently been the faith of intellectuals of the Left alienated from their own societies. Fascists borrowed Marxian concepts, substituting the Nation and Race for Proletarians and Class. Marx gave to the World new faiths to fight and kill for. An amazing, albeit disastrous, achievement for a lazy, cranky, reading room revolutionary.

Vox Nova
"In their patriotism and in their fidelity to their civic duties Catholics will feel themselves bound to promote the true common good; they will make the weight of their convictions so influential that as a result civil authority will be justly exercised and laws will accord with moral precepts and the common good." Second Vatican Council, Apostolicam actuositatem 14 Our Purpose

Where are things being done?

Where’s Agency? from Larval Subjects

Rather than asking the question what is to be done?, perhaps the question should be where are things being done? That is, where are the tendencies of change and transformation in the world today. The virtue of this question is that it takes the onus of change off the shoulders of the theorist– a rather narcissistic and self-congratulatory perspective to begin with, that lends itself easily to hierarchical, top-down models –and directs attention to the social field and those tendencies or potentialities where social structurations are shifting and changing.

This accords well with Marx’s own attentiveness to questions of where the real motor of history is to be found. Regardless of how problematic they are, this is one of the things I find appealing about Negri and Hardt. Negri and Hardt do not propose a program– as far as I know –nor give a set of prescriptions as to what is to be done. Rather, they look to those places in the social field where existing social structures are undergoing transformation and change as a result of the productions of various, heterogeneous, multitudes. That is, it is these divergent, heterogeneous, multitudes that are the motor of change, not the theorist remaking society in his imagination from his armchair.

If anything, the theorist perhaps brings a little more clarity to these struggles and points of deterritorialization. In his defense, Badiou is very clear that it is not philosophers that create truths or engage in truth-procedures (qua philosophers). For Badiou it is always artists, scientists, those engaged in political struggles, and lovers that engage in truth-procedures. The philosopher names truths, articulates them as truths (one need not be aware that they are engaged in a truth-procedure to be engaged in a truth-procedure) and strives to think the compossibility of the four conditions of truth.