Future, Present, & Past:



Speculative
~~ Giving itself latitude and leisure to take any premise or inquiry to its furthest associative conclusion.
Critical~~ Ready to apply, to itself and its object, the canons of reason, evidence, style, and ethics, up to their limits.
Traditional~~ At home and at large in the ecosystem of practice and memory that radically nourishes the whole person.

Oυδεὶς άμουσος εἰσίτω

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Moderatio


R. Joseph Hoffman has opined, in the fine old tradition of legitimate hyperbole, that
Complacency is what killed European Christianity. The fruits and comforts of the industrial revolution killed it. Not education and science; not curiosity; not Darwin’s dangerous idea. Just the creeping rot of not really giving a damn about anything.
Hoffman, who is writing as a non-Christian (albeit a scholar of early Christianity), has the good sense to be on the right side of the "accommodationist" debate ("Can religion and science be compatible, ever, ever, ever?") His point in his admirable post is that the negative answer to this question arises from the excesses of an over-reaching intellectual ambition; and he sees this excess as the equal and opposite cultural reaction to the aforementioned complacency, a complacency which, I might add, was widely diagnosed in the 19th century (read Nietzsche, or Kierkegaard, for instance, though I take my lead here from Baudelaire, whose opening poem in the Fleurs du Mal famously names it Ennui). Hoffman's answer to this complacency is simple and has a venerable philosophical lineage:
The opposite of complacency is not excess. It is moderation.
What's important here is not just that the back-&-forth we are enduring now over this question--the stupid tug-of-war between a superstitious Bibliolatry which was already withering away, and a hubristic scientism that has allowed itself to be distracted from "the business of finding things out" into a tar-pit of unwinnable polemics--that this tension is essentially the spasms of one excess answering another, over the abyss of a fundamental apathy:
American culture is not hardwired to evoke curiosity about science, religion, or anything else. It’s designed to breed complacency. If Theodore Roethke had lived today, he would write about the inexorable sadness of shopping malls and gated communities and universities where nothing happens and a society where conscience dies daily in the onslaught of the latest economic data.
One can quibble, if one likes, with Hoffman's diagnosis, or try to resist the cynicism one detects here, but despite the brief signs of life one glimpses in the #Occupy movement, it is hard for me to dispute the gist of this. As I have said before, there is an oscillation between fear and boredom at work in us. (I don't think this is unique to post-Christian or late-capitalist society; the ancient ascetic spiritual struggle has always been against the Midday Demon-- melancholia and panic).

As regards saving both religion and science from their own excesses: this temper-tantrum-with-two-backs has an answer in the tradition of common sense and ordinary wisdom. As Hoffman points out, it goes by the venerable name "Moderation", the ratio between extremes, the key to virtue in Confucius, the Buddha, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Spinoza. (Not to mention Jane Austen, which really ought to be enough.) Does moderation sometimes look like timidity? Certainly; and vice-versa--timidity sometimes styles itself "moderation." After all, moderation, as pursuit of a mean, will partake of the extremes it attempts to balance. And who said keeping one's balance was easy--especially when everyone at either end is pulling you back and forth?

Point is, all that energy that goes into the pulling, is being generated by something. The "Accommodationism" argument is a symptom of a deeper malaise in our culture--I would say a spiritual malaise, if the word wasn't so loaded. But then, that loadedness is the problem, isn't it?

10 comments:

  1. To alter Hoffmann's blog's headline 'essay longa, vita brevis'. Looking at his other offerings I find them likewise diffuse. It brings out the wisdom of Pascal who wrote "the present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter". Is it really complacency or the ample cushions of modern life that has eroded the practice of religion? Have people stopped dying, have they stopped being afflicted with pain, suffering and durance vile? Only a small percentage of the gen pop ever engaged with religion in a committed way even if they were regular attenders. Matthew 13 has it right and that I think is true for all the major traditions. The last few seeds that land on viable ground with, in the immortal words of the gardener, 'tilth like fine breadcrumbs', produce one hundred fold.

    I am bemused by atheist students of religion. Why?

    ReplyDelete
  2. "I am bemused by atheist students of religion. Why?"

    Some, I suppose, are consciously motivated by the scientific spirit, as they understand it -- a methodological naturalism which, when it turns to anthropology, sees it as an obvious phenomenon to be accounted for. Folk like Marvin Harris and Pascal Boyer are here. Then there are those who are more like art critics or historians, trying to account for the spirit of the age. These (and I count Hoffman among them) likely have, at least in part, what we used to call existential motives. And some start out with a conscious religiosity which they lose it along the way, but maintain their professional interest. I would not presume to diagnose any of these as secretly or unconsciously "believers", or as already anticipating their own private foxhole -- these things are more complicated than that -- but of course I am committed by my own philosophical anthropology to the notion that there is in all of these a dimension of their soul which answers to religion, even though we may want to argue till the end of the world about how we talk about that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I was going to add to the tail of my comment - because it's there. As a phenomenon it will attract the naturalist but the tools they bring are not apt. They chip away at the deposit of faith hoping to bring a chronology into question here and to recover primitive understandings there and always missing the central connection with the living god. I can imagine a general sociologist studying the effect of religion on society but to study religion as closely as a theologian while thinking it is essentially absurd is a ponder too far for me. Intellectually I get what you mean but for a life's work you need some reasons of the heart to keep going.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Though i am not an atheist i find nothing surprising about atheists being fascinated by religion. I find myself fascinated by all sorts of things that i do not personally experience...like trees and stars. More charitably, i find women fascinating and i hope they do not find me condescending when i do so. But perhaps they will find my tools inadequate to the task....whatever they may think of me, my perceptions and experiences about them are not irrelevant, at least not to me. Perhaps i should not be so rude as to publicly say what i think they need or want. Perhaps i should never look behind the veil. Perhaps i should just shut up.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dyongenes,
    If one believes something is absurd then I would submit that it is hard to put an effort into the gaining of an expertise in it. The sort of things that you might think important tend not to affect the believer very much. For instance you might think that commitment to a creed that you do not know the details of, even in a general way, does not count as commitment at all. What would be your response to Saint Silouan of Mount Athos whose father hardly knew the Creed and yet the saint was in awe of his holiness and faith.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I dont think that seeing something as absurd necessarily means you cannot believe in it. Most modern believing Christians for instance, would, i believe, admit that at least parts of their scriptures are absurd.

    I belabored the point of comparing belief to romantic love because I think both are sure to make fools of us, at least at times. I don't see that in any way a counter argument much less a refutation. Such creatures are we.

    I find your saint fascinating and even admirable. I am also grateful that I don't share his affliction.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "I don't think that seeing something as absurd necessarily means you cannot believe in it."

    It is logically possible for someone to say "I know that P is false, but I believe in it all the same" only because it is logically possible for anyone to hold contradictory beliefs.

    But mere logical possibility is philosophically insignificant except as a correction to a mistaken claim of logical impossibility.

    Even in the case of a person who holds contradictory beliefs, it is invariably true that he or she does not see or know the contradiction.

    In all normal cases, a person can only profess to believe what they know to be false, e.g., "Holy Lying" in religion. Obviously, professing to believe is not equivalent to belief.

    Our brains are hardwired to eliminate contradiction because it yields null information, e.g., if you want to know my height, I am giving you no information (except that I am contradicting myself!) if I say to you "I am over 6 ft tall and under 6 ft."

    Therefore, anyone who seriously claims "I know that P is false and yet I believe that P is true" is either lying or suffering from a cognitive disorder.


    "Most modern believing Christians for instance, would, i believe, admit that at least parts of their scriptures are absurd."

    This is vague. It is unclear on what these "modern believing Christians" typically believe.

    If they believe that everything in their scriptures is true, they cannot, except on pain of the charge of (holy) lying or cognitive disorder, also admit that "at least part of their scriptures are absurd."

    ReplyDelete
  8. "both religion and science from their own excesses"

    The central notion of "excess" remains unclear.

    What is an "excess" of religion?

    Would making claims unsupported by evidence (inclusive of claims about the efficacy of religious belief) be an example of "excess" in religion?

    If so, religion is permeated by "excess"!

    What is an "excess" of science? Speculations, e.g., string theory, theories of time travel, theories of "artificial intelligence", etc., unconstrained by the requirement of experimental evidence and passing off as confirmed truths?

    If so, skepticism about these speculations is in order.

    But a vast gulf still separates "excess" in religion and "excess" in science.

    There are internal criteria in science to demarcate speculation from confirmed hypotheses. There are no such criteria in religion.

    "Anything goes."

    Was Paul "Silly" Feyerabend trying remake science in the image of religion?

    ReplyDelete
  9. Never having believed, and being from a secular country (NZ) surrounded by many other non believers, and people of many different (liberal) faiths and cultures, I have always been fascinated by what other people think. When I finally specialised in religion after two broad degrees, my choice was natural as it is the history of human beings, ideas, beliefs, cultures and societies that inspires me. Definitely no personal agenda to explain it away or seek personal enlightenment. The history and evolution of ideas and people encapuslates so much important to the planet. By the way there is a slight error - Hoffmann has two enns ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  10. Steph,

    I suspect your enumerated motives are those of many. It's the human condition, after all. It's bound to be fascinating. Thanks for pointing out the sp. mstk, too.

    ReplyDelete