Tag: Terry Eagleton

What do Bigfoot believers, ‘Intelligent Design’ cheats, and ‘Panaphonic’ and ‘Somy’ electrical gear fraudsters have in common?

big-foot-steveSeeing is believing – this shows incontrovertible proof that bigfoots exist!

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. What do Bigfoot believers, ‘Intelligent Design’ cheats, and ‘Panaphonic’ and ‘Somy’ electrical gear  fraudsters have in common?

– my response to Brendan Cook’s article ‘Bears in the Woods’

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Brendan Cook has written an extraordinarily well-crafted piece entitled – The Bears in the Woods. It clinically exposes various kinds of fraud and fraudulent thinking.

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This post of mine is by way of an appreciative response, and an attempt to show what underlies the kinds of fraud about which Brendan so eloquently writes.

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The subjects of The Bears in the Wood are a roll call of evils buzzing around in our world – deception, self-deception, sowing confusion, superstition, fundamentalism, forms of truth-telling masquerading as their opposite number……

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These, and a whole fist-full of others, are the symptoms – but what is the disease?

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The disease is the inability, or unwillingness, to understand the different forms of truth-telling.  Ken Wilber has described the three ways of truth, and their telling, in two or three of his books.  He called them the ‘I’ ‘WE’ and ‘IT’ voices, three means by which we investigate reality and express ourselves.

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There’s nothing strange about I, WE and IT they are our forms of expression that correspond to the three major academic groupings the Arts, The Sciences and The Humanities.

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If you are a Scientist you are concerned, primarily, with IT-truth i.e. the kind of truth-telling about objective reality, using the methodologies of science.

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If you are an Arts-person you are primarily concerned with I-truth – the subjective truth that says ‘this is how it looks and feels to me, where I am, being me’.

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If you are a Humanities person you are, primarily, concerned, primarily with moral truth – as action in the world.

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Of course each form of truth-telling makes use of the other two – we are after all a single individuation of the human spirit!

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Interestingly spiritual-mystical experience is inevitably an ‘I’ form of truth-telling – it can be no other, and the mystical is the core of religion and religiosity.  However the study of religion and the action of religion falls under the moral truth of the Humanities.

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Religion is harmful, useless even, not only if it is the cause of conflict but also if it fails to lead to right action, in the world, in service of others.

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I have published 21 posts (of varying length and quality!) on our three I, WE and IT ways of being, expressing, and doing,  i.e.  HERE

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The reasons that people are deceived, or self-deceive, are of course, a different subject.  They might include the need for a security blanket, the need for certainty, the need to be right, the need to be on a side that looks like the winning group, the desire to be of the chosen people etc.

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Of course there are also plenty of snake-oil salesmen willing to start a religious group through which  they can manipulate and exploit those with such needs as I’ve listed above.  Fundamentalism is as Karen Armstrong says ‘the lust for certainty’.  Intelligent design is an unwillingness to focus on the real benefit of religion as an inspiring story and focus instead on mind-bending, mind-destroying literalism.

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Karen Armstrong is one of two writers who brilliantly expose the nonsense of misappropriating the methods and claims of one form of truth-telling in trying to operate in another.  (Terry Eagleton is the other).  Key to this understanding is the restitution of Mythos (heart-knowing, intuition) as the partner to Logos (reason, head-knowing).  For more on this see my posts, (of variable length and quality!) – HERE

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There is I believe a positive correlation between the historic subjugation of women and the sustained attempt to eliminate the voice of Mythos. Although the in-validation of Mythos is not strictly a gender issue, more the invalidation of the feminine, heart-knowing ,voice.    (Mythos unlike Logos isn’t in the WORD 2007 dictionary – it slipped away like women in history)

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Armstrong again writes at length about the restitution of Mythos, to counter-balance Logos, in her latest book HERE

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Two of the key phrases in The Bears in the Woods are;

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1) ‘and his standard of proof changes‘ – (the Bigfoot believer, Intelligent Designer believer etc) –  this of course points up the need to have moral integrity and the ability to understand the positives and negatives of the three major forms of truth-telling.  Above all it points up the hypocrisy of relying on a set of criteria only when it suits pre-judice.

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2) ‘he’s doing for personal fulfillment‘ (the Bigfoot believer) – this is a clear example of what happens when we are demanding one set of truth by misapplying and distorting one set of truth-telling rules.  The individual, the big-foot believer should be doing art about fantasy creatures instead of trying to justify the unjustifiable via unwarranted ‘scientific’ assertions.  This of course is ‘scientism’.

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Is ‘religionism’ a co-equivalent term for scientism? – to describe the mis-application of its form of truth-telling?  There is dire need for such a term.

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Another excellent cultural critic Terry Eagleton has also recently published a book highly relevant to this discussion.  There is a review of both Armstrong’s book and the Eagleton book –  HERE

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What do Bigfoot believers, ‘Intelligent Design’ cheats, and ‘Panaphonic’ and ‘Somy’ electrical gear fraudsters have in common? – ultimately an aversion to truth and integrity and honesty.  What is the antidote?

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Education is the answer, but between the cynical exploitation of children and youth, as in the deification of wretched specimens like Michael Jackson, and the equally cynical exploitation of the parents by snake-oil religionists it takes special souls to escape the morass!

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Understanding the difference between I truth, IT truth and WE truth can help some.  Others are just on the make, or simply feel snug in their fundamentally-wrapped-up world.

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Why see shades of grey when black and white thinking gives so much more self-satisfaction?

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Dawkins the ‘fundamentalist’ takes a left and a right to the chin!

Good and EvilLiving in this post-modernist time one of the problems is knowing who the bad guys are.  I’m sure fundamentalism is a bad thing – because it bears bad fruit.

For me Terry Eagleton is the best writer about the human aberration known as fundamentalism.  (SEE Chap 7 of After Theory)

His new book is Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

Karen Armstrong is the best popular presenter of the historic perspective of religions and their fundamentalisms. (SEE The Battle for God)

Her new book is The Case For God

Saying that science has made religion redundant is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov, says Terry Eagleton in this gloriously rumbustious counter-blast to Dawkinsite atheism. Eagleton, who is perhaps Britain’s most venerable cultural critic, is not a Christian, though he was in the 1960s. But he continues, unfashionably, to be a Marxist, and his critique of the New Atheists is rooted in the historical materialism of revolutionary socialism, but with a thread of poetry woven through it.
In Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, his starting point, perhaps paradoxically – and paradoxes sparkle throughout this coruscatingly brilliant polemic – is that Dawkins, along with fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens (or Ditchkins, as he mischievously conflates the pair) purport to be advocates of science and reason. And yet they are disgracefully cavalier with both.
Eagleton is not anti-science or reason. He merely points out that science has produced Hiroshima as well as penicillin. And liberal rationalism, in addition to its many undoubted triumphs, has provided the intellectual underpinning for exploitative capitalism and the wanton destruction of the environment on an unprecedented scale. Indeed Eagleton is stronger on reason than Ditchkins, for he thinks carefully about what his opponents say whereas Dawkins & Co prefer knockabout rhetoric to serious engagement with mainstream religious thought.
This is, then, a demolition job which is both logically devastating and a magnificently whirling philippic. Ditchkins, he says, makes the error of conflating reason and rationality. Yet much of what seems reasonable in real life turns out not to be true. And much that is true, like quantum physics, seems rationally impossible.
For all that, the book levels a broadside at faith too. The history of religion is “a squalid tale of bigotry, superstition, wishful thinking, and oppressive ideology.” Just as communism has misunderstood Marx, he argues, so the Church has betrayed Christ by backing an establishment of warmongering politicians, corrupt bankers and exploitative capitalists for centuries. The Jesus of the gospels, he insists, was as radical a revolutionary who took the side of “the scum of the earth”. The love he offered was as transformative as true socialism. It is easy to see why a lot of people will not be happy with this book. Much of what it says is too true.
Karen Armstrong is radical in a different way in The Case For God which is subtitled What Religion Really Means. What it does not mean, she agrees with Eagleton, is the fundamentalism cited as normative by Ditchkins. Armstrong surveys the intellectual history of religion in a way that is more comprehensive and measured but much less fun. What it shows is that the modern way of thinking about God, as a big bloke with superhuman powers, is a comparatively modern invention. Until 300 years ago almost no-one thought that, and nor do many religious believers today.
Religion, she argues, is traditionally not something that people believe, but something they do – using liturgy, ritual, prayer, meditation and spiritual exercises to discover an awareness of the transcendental inside themselves. It is not rooted in what the Greeks called logos (reason) but mythos (stories which may not be factual but which carry some universal truth about how humans behave). It is not something to be comprehended but something beyond the limits of language which is to be absorbed intuitively like music.
After the Enlightenment, when science and reason became the dominant lens through which we viewed the world, this truth was downgraded. God became a being who stood outside the world to create it, rather than the apotheosis of all that is good in it. This crude reduction suited both fundamentalists and dogmatic atheists alike; atheism in any period always seeks to define the God it doesn’t believe in. The subtlety of theologians like Aquinas, who happily posited the possibility that the world had no origin at all, is forgotten. The intuition of the pre-modern era for spiritual imagination and meditative humility has now calcified into scientific literalism.
So we see a number of revealing shifts in meaning. “I believe” has become scientised to mean “I assert these propositions to be empirically correct.” What it originally meant was “I pledge my heart and my loyalty”. Jesus was asking for commitment not credulity. Similarly the word dogma now means a ruling laid down by authority. But originally it meant a teaching that cannot be expressed verbally but which is intuited through the liturgy.
Fundamentalists, of both the bible-bashing and the Dawkinsite variety, are very anxious to make clear assertions about the God they believe in or reject. By contrast this older apophatic tradition was much keener to assert what cannot be said about God than what can. Ditchkins thinks rationality can bring him to a place of absolute certainty; the old tradition, dating back to Socrates, used reason to arrive in a place where we realise we really know nothing at all. Eagleton makes the same point. Reason operates in a social and cultural context. Modern atheists have their myths and unexamined assumptions too, like the idea that humanity is riding an upward-bound escalator of progress. So wedded is Dawkins to this that he once described the Holocaust as “a temporary setback”. The old Marxist is scathing. “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route towards a finer world.”
Terry Eagleton’s is a more realistic and darker vision which he characterises as “tragic humanism”. But it holds out the possibility of revolutionary transformation.
Ditchkins’ liberal rationalism, by contrast, is defeatist and has endorsed a cruel and irrational capitalism in which the poor get poorer, the rich richer and the planet overheats. Religion might not have the answers but it asks the better questions.
Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion
The Oxford academic, Richard Dawkins, came to prominence as an ardent atheist, expounding on his gene-centred theory of evolution in his book, The Selfish Gene. His most recent work, The God Delusion, published in 2006, argues that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that faith qualifies as a delusion or false belief. The book has been a runaway success; selling more than 1.5 million copies by November 2007 and translated into 31 languages.

Both are well-reviewed HERE by Paul Vallely

Both according to Vallely make room for God, or at least being human in a non-narrow-materialist way.

Here are a couple of tasters from Vallely’s review.  Firstly about Eagleton;

In Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, his starting point, perhaps paradoxically – and paradoxes sparkle throughout this coruscatingly brilliant polemic – is that Dawkins, along with fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens (or Ditchkins, as he mischievously conflates the pair) purport to be advocates of science and reason. And yet they are disgracefully cavalier with both.

Eagleton is not anti-science or reason. He merely points out that science has produced Hiroshima as well as penicillin. And liberal rationalism, in addition to its many undoubted triumphs, has provided the intellectual underpinning for exploitative capitalism and the wanton destruction of the environment on an unprecedented scale. Indeed Eagleton is stronger on reason than Ditchkins, for he thinks carefully about what his opponents say whereas Dawkins & Co prefer knockabout rhetoric to serious engagement with mainstream religious thought.

This is, then, a demolition job which is both logically devastating and a magnificently whirling philippic.

and about Armstrong,

Religion, she argues, is traditionally not something that people believe, but something they do – using liturgy, ritual, prayer, meditation and spiritual exercises to discover an awareness of the transcendental inside themselves. It is not rooted in what the Greeks called logos (reason) but mythos (stories which may not be factual but which carry some universal truth about how humans behave). It is not something to be comprehended but something beyond the limits of language which is to be absorbed intuitively like music.

After the Enlightenment, when science and reason became the dominant lens through which we viewed the world, this truth was downgraded. God became a being who stood outside the world to create it, rather than the apotheosis of all that is good in it. This crude reduction suited both fundamentalists and dogmatic atheists alike; atheism in any period always seeks to define the God it doesn’t believe in. The subtlety of theologians like Aquinas, who happily posited the possibility that the world had no origin at all, is forgotten. The intuition of the pre-modern era for spiritual imagination and meditative humility has now calcified into scientific literalism.

So we see a number of revealing shifts in meaning. “I believe” has become scientised to mean “I assert these propositions to be empirically correct.” What it originally meant was “I pledge my heart and my loyalty”. Jesus was asking for commitment not credulity. Similarly the word dogma now means a ruling laid down by authority. But originally it meant a teaching that cannot be expressed verbally but which is intuited through the liturgy.

I really hope that Armstrong and Eagleton consider working in co-operation – they are both great truth-tellers.

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To read the article to which this post refers go HERE

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