In his LRB essay Butler has an interesting reference, towards the end, about how he is “a member of a group historically tortured and murdered under the rubric of Sodom.” Indeed, I’ve heard from others that the story of Abraham and Isaac has been invoked by parents of gay children as justification for their own “child sacrifice” — their willingness to sacrifice a healthy relationship with their child in order to preserve a proper obedience to God. To them, they’ve found something more meaningful than their child’s happiness. To an atheist, they’ve sacrificed a truly meaningful thing for a meaningless one.
As for me, I’m haunted by the tension between the magnificence of being willing to make a sacrifice, and the horror of making the wrong sacrifice. A God is a very dangerous thing to have. Atheism — even meaningless atheism — would be preferable to worshiping the wrong one.
WelI, I sincerely hope there’s something between Divine Command Theory and the “rationalist safety blanket.” I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition (sorry, couldn’t help myself) and many people live their lives somewhere in the middle, smugness being a temptation for almost everyone. Were the peasants in olden times really so satisfied? Did none wonder at the difference between belief and experience? I’m doubtful. Replicability is a great advance and I’m not sorry for it. It also doesn't have to be strictly scientific. God tests Abraham. Why doesn’t Abraham test God?
Yes, it would likely ruin salvation history. Ha ha. But perhaps the existence of Isaac after so many years of waiting was proof enough of God’s loyalty so maybe I should ease up a little on Abraham. Still a disturbing story and not sure I can agree with Kierkegaard, but I’ll have to read Fear and Trembling for more context. I definitely resonate with Butler. His final sentences are quite haunting.
My point in the essay was not so much a moral one as much as a psychological one. That a completely rationalized world loses something very human, very important. That at it's core, a world that can be sorted out that way is not going to be fully satisfying. Because in making everything at least potentially explicable, by making claims that at the limit mystery will not exist, it desacralizes and banalizes.
"But Dawkins is wrong: this does not make science majestic. Indeed, the opposite is true — in its manifest progressive usefulness, scientific knowledge is rendered banal. And if we anchor our entire existence in these banal certainties, we lose something vital."
This^ is great. It absolutely is an illusion of certainty. Something of a privilege for us Americans as long as there are no hurricanes or wildfires nearby.
The only question left is who converts to Christianity first, Shadi or Damir?
Damir offers an excellent point about smugness. Humility is a virtue, especially the intellectual kind. I would submit that the question: Does God exist? isn't particularly useful. There is no answer, at least not one that science can proffer. Unless you know the mind of God, you can't run an experiment. Maybe God only helps people It likes. Maybe God only helps people with certain initials on every second Tuesday. It's why even Dawkins, when he's pushed, will say he can't be 100% sure that God doesn't exist. So putting that question aside, the issue of what enchants life is a question worth asking. And studying what role religion/spirituality plays in fostering it is a useful place to start, even for an empiricist. I know many people who go to worship services who will say they don't believe a word of the creed, yet get teary-eyed from the music and ritual elements of the service itself. And for those who reject religion altogether, psychedelics have become an option of choice (with the nightmares and wonder they sometimes bring). I think we all have a deep seated inclination toward the transcendent (however we define it). We just often stuff it down in our pursuit of productivity, logic, and life-hacks.
A wonderfully rich essay as always Damir. On the New Atheists time has showed their philosophical frailty ultimately. Dawkins wanders around as a bore shouting at ever smaller numbers of people and the 'Hitch Slap' videos which were once so popular have lost their lustre. I went through a New Atheist phase at 15-18 and look back with shame at how insufferable I was and am just amazed actual adults still maintain this.
Living skeptically I think is a noble goal but is it realistic? Do we not all have things we take for granted? Is that not in some way a good thing- I know dogmatism is traditionally labelled as something to be avoided but is there not some need to take important fundamentals for granted in our lives. I'd say this is not simply a matter of intellect but deep personal issues such as faith and family which get to the core of who we are.
That Weber quote is so incredibly profound, and sad. Weber is slept on and should be quoted more frequently. Thanks for doing it here to add to your excellent argument.
Utter nonsense. Kant was right. That Issac story and that God and that worldview are seriously fucked up. Pumping up the “horror” of that story and calling it mysticism is bullshit and spiritually impoverished.
Science and enchantment exist side by side. Take a look at the Hubble and Webb images. They don’t make me an anxious man at death fretting over complexity. They show me where I came from and where I’m going. And they’re as beautiful as anything Caravaggio ever created.
Knausgaard has explored the topic of the removal of death from modern life throughout his oeuvre, tracing the consequences and as a result, re-enchanting life in the process. Poetry, prose, beauty - all have this power.
I had no idea Damir was a mystic. Are there not other alternatives between theism and atheism? Ie does one have to choose between them? If one does not believe in any GOD it is likely fair to say your life is in some sense meaningless. Why is that a problem? Once you accept the ultimate meaninglessness of your life you are then free to create your own meaning. The agency required to live a meaningful life of your own creation is its own reward. Can we thus leave Sisyphus happy?
What makes you say they aren't doing the work of articulating it? Is the average maker of their own meaning really that much worse than the average cliche-spouting Christian? Putting a philosophy into words can be hard, but that doesn't mean the underlying feeling has no true engagement to it.
I have a hard time giving credence to anyone who does what they do but cannot articulate why they do it. Usually that's a good indication they don't even realize what they are doing... such is the wisdom of crowds.
Now to your point, people who live in uninterrogated stereotypes and who like to tell everyone else how to walk without trying on their shoes are just as bad. I hope you don't confuse me for one of them.
I was imagining the anecdotes of people I care about, who don't really engage with the fact they will die, and they don't really know what happens to them afterwards. (Knowing, not as a factual knowing, but as a confidence in conviction knowing). These friends seem to me to be living shadow lives... constantly in denial and seeking distraction from the hard realities of life. They are very much all for the here-and-now. But they do not know how to grieve when a loved one dies, they avoid pain and suffering at all costs, they prefer their soma, to borrow from Huxley.
At best these friends when asked, allude to some variation of Moral Therapeutic Deism, the sharpest of the bunch insist they are Atheists, but the contradictions left untouched are too many to count.
So, I guess that is the question... what is an example of someone engaging an underlying feeling without words?
Lots of people feel things without being able to articulate them. It is a theme of this very discussion that one can be too reasonable, that one’s actions can be too explainable, that there ought to be room for the inexplicable in the human psyche. Far from believing that people ought to be able to articulate their reasons, it seems to me that Damir is claiming the opposite.
Now, you might very well protest that you were trying to refer to a very different type of person: not the one who is silent before the inarticulable but the one who never considers it in the first place. But judging others in this manner is a perilous enterprise. I would rather be alert to people’s potential hidden depths on so personal a topic than be pre-emptively dismissive of all who have not proved themselves to me. Why should they have to prove anything to me in the first place?
Good points, I choose that latter example: The one who never considers it in the first place. And I agree, we should look out for hubris when judging others. But to be fair, I don't dismiss these sorts... they are all around me, and in my community. Which is why you should want them to prove that they are asking hard questions and wrestling with the "why?" of their lives. In my view, they owe it to me to think deeply and I to them. We are after all small group mammals, built for tight knit communities, and these enterprises inform the culture which we're all critiquing. My harrumphing above was mostly that I feel I'm one of the few doing the work... I suppose.
As Shadi says: the human being contains multitudes... I try to remember that. But there's also a tension for me in that I believe people should be able to show me faith AND works, (to reappropriate St. James.)
I can't help but think that people write essays like Damir's because deep down, they really, *really* don't like being told they're responsible for developing their own sense of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment (in the Max Weber sense) in their lives. Not very charitable, perhaps, but it's probable at least.
I mean… I guess that’s a plausible meta-read? But isn’t the essay more a critique of the limits of sense- and meaning-making? That we can’t escape that at the limit, sense fails us? And that this recognition itself is important and resonant?
"he articulated how the very idea of human progress ends up sucking out all meaning from the marrow of life"
Forgive me for thinking there was never any marrow in life to suck out in the first place. Religion, spirituality, mysticism, mythology, "enchantment" -- all developed primarily as a way to keep societies and civilizations orderly and cohesive in a low-information, high-scarcity world. (I want to learn more about Julian Jaynes' theory of the bicameral mind, but based on what I do know it seems a very plausible hypothesis for the origins of spirituality and the idea of enchantment.) As humanity became better at more accurately observing and determining the laws of nature and how the universe works, and as poverty and material suffering declined, the utility of religion (using the term in its broadest sense) also declined -- I have to imagine it's harder to hold a spiritual/mystical worldview when the scientific method finds overwhelming evidence against its factual claims, and technological progress was (at least at first) rendering the need for paradise in the afterlife obsolete. It's hard not to conclude that there was never any "there" there to begin with.
This essay makes good points about smugness and the dangers of dismissing and ignoring the more ego-crippling aspects of life, but the people who truly value science and rationality understand full well that complete certainty about "ultimate ends" or just about anything is impossible, that as full an understanding of the universe as is possible must necessarily involve understanding and accepting that which is ego-crippling, that rationalist modes of inquiry and progress invoke enchantment instead of "sucking out all meaning from the marrow of life," and that the meaninglessness of death does not mean life is devalued as well (Michael Shermer has done a great job articulating this). If anything, science (or "scientism," if one really wants to go there) is not necessarily what leads to the smugness and banality so deplored here -- in fact, quite the opposite. Meanwhile, it's very common to find expressions of spirituality, whether from traditional religion or more New Age-y practices, to be teeming with their own kind of smugness and certainty, with anything indicating otherwise being nothing more than throat-clearing misdirection. Smugness, the illusion of certainty, the "safety blanket" -- these are more a result of universal human nature than specifically a byproduct of Kantian/Dawkinsian rationality.
Actually, the God of the ancient Hebrews being a just God by His very nature, and they themselves being surrounded by more powerful neighbors "among whom they moved, and lived, and had their being," the meaning of this paradoxical story, at least as I understand it, is that Abraham and his descendants had to learn to love justice more than life itself if they expected to survive. Hasn't this been the story of the Jewish people throughout much of their history?
In his LRB essay Butler has an interesting reference, towards the end, about how he is “a member of a group historically tortured and murdered under the rubric of Sodom.” Indeed, I’ve heard from others that the story of Abraham and Isaac has been invoked by parents of gay children as justification for their own “child sacrifice” — their willingness to sacrifice a healthy relationship with their child in order to preserve a proper obedience to God. To them, they’ve found something more meaningful than their child’s happiness. To an atheist, they’ve sacrificed a truly meaningful thing for a meaningless one.
As for me, I’m haunted by the tension between the magnificence of being willing to make a sacrifice, and the horror of making the wrong sacrifice. A God is a very dangerous thing to have. Atheism — even meaningless atheism — would be preferable to worshiping the wrong one.
WelI, I sincerely hope there’s something between Divine Command Theory and the “rationalist safety blanket.” I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition (sorry, couldn’t help myself) and many people live their lives somewhere in the middle, smugness being a temptation for almost everyone. Were the peasants in olden times really so satisfied? Did none wonder at the difference between belief and experience? I’m doubtful. Replicability is a great advance and I’m not sorry for it. It also doesn't have to be strictly scientific. God tests Abraham. Why doesn’t Abraham test God?
Why doesn’t he, indeed? Wouldn’t that take something vital away from the story?
Yes, it would likely ruin salvation history. Ha ha. But perhaps the existence of Isaac after so many years of waiting was proof enough of God’s loyalty so maybe I should ease up a little on Abraham. Still a disturbing story and not sure I can agree with Kierkegaard, but I’ll have to read Fear and Trembling for more context. I definitely resonate with Butler. His final sentences are quite haunting.
My point in the essay was not so much a moral one as much as a psychological one. That a completely rationalized world loses something very human, very important. That at it's core, a world that can be sorted out that way is not going to be fully satisfying. Because in making everything at least potentially explicable, by making claims that at the limit mystery will not exist, it desacralizes and banalizes.
"But Dawkins is wrong: this does not make science majestic. Indeed, the opposite is true — in its manifest progressive usefulness, scientific knowledge is rendered banal. And if we anchor our entire existence in these banal certainties, we lose something vital."
This^ is great. It absolutely is an illusion of certainty. Something of a privilege for us Americans as long as there are no hurricanes or wildfires nearby.
The only question left is who converts to Christianity first, Shadi or Damir?
😂
I’m baptized already, my great uncle demanded I be.
That's a whole podcast right there! It's not just baptism that makes a Christian... or is it?
Didn’t suggest it did. I suggested that I’m more turnkey than Shadi.
Haha! Touche sir
Damir offers an excellent point about smugness. Humility is a virtue, especially the intellectual kind. I would submit that the question: Does God exist? isn't particularly useful. There is no answer, at least not one that science can proffer. Unless you know the mind of God, you can't run an experiment. Maybe God only helps people It likes. Maybe God only helps people with certain initials on every second Tuesday. It's why even Dawkins, when he's pushed, will say he can't be 100% sure that God doesn't exist. So putting that question aside, the issue of what enchants life is a question worth asking. And studying what role religion/spirituality plays in fostering it is a useful place to start, even for an empiricist. I know many people who go to worship services who will say they don't believe a word of the creed, yet get teary-eyed from the music and ritual elements of the service itself. And for those who reject religion altogether, psychedelics have become an option of choice (with the nightmares and wonder they sometimes bring). I think we all have a deep seated inclination toward the transcendent (however we define it). We just often stuff it down in our pursuit of productivity, logic, and life-hacks.
A wonderfully rich essay as always Damir. On the New Atheists time has showed their philosophical frailty ultimately. Dawkins wanders around as a bore shouting at ever smaller numbers of people and the 'Hitch Slap' videos which were once so popular have lost their lustre. I went through a New Atheist phase at 15-18 and look back with shame at how insufferable I was and am just amazed actual adults still maintain this.
Living skeptically I think is a noble goal but is it realistic? Do we not all have things we take for granted? Is that not in some way a good thing- I know dogmatism is traditionally labelled as something to be avoided but is there not some need to take important fundamentals for granted in our lives. I'd say this is not simply a matter of intellect but deep personal issues such as faith and family which get to the core of who we are.
That Weber quote is so incredibly profound, and sad. Weber is slept on and should be quoted more frequently. Thanks for doing it here to add to your excellent argument.
Utter nonsense. Kant was right. That Issac story and that God and that worldview are seriously fucked up. Pumping up the “horror” of that story and calling it mysticism is bullshit and spiritually impoverished.
Science and enchantment exist side by side. Take a look at the Hubble and Webb images. They don’t make me an anxious man at death fretting over complexity. They show me where I came from and where I’m going. And they’re as beautiful as anything Caravaggio ever created.
ha, to each their own… I would only take an interest in images of outer space if it could be proven to me that God made those stars
Knausgaard has explored the topic of the removal of death from modern life throughout his oeuvre, tracing the consequences and as a result, re-enchanting life in the process. Poetry, prose, beauty - all have this power.
I had no idea Damir was a mystic. Are there not other alternatives between theism and atheism? Ie does one have to choose between them? If one does not believe in any GOD it is likely fair to say your life is in some sense meaningless. Why is that a problem? Once you accept the ultimate meaninglessness of your life you are then free to create your own meaning. The agency required to live a meaningful life of your own creation is its own reward. Can we thus leave Sisyphus happy?
I'm amazed by how many people choose this path, most of which don't do the work to articulate that this is what they are choosing.
What makes you say they aren't doing the work of articulating it? Is the average maker of their own meaning really that much worse than the average cliche-spouting Christian? Putting a philosophy into words can be hard, but that doesn't mean the underlying feeling has no true engagement to it.
I have a hard time giving credence to anyone who does what they do but cannot articulate why they do it. Usually that's a good indication they don't even realize what they are doing... such is the wisdom of crowds.
Now to your point, people who live in uninterrogated stereotypes and who like to tell everyone else how to walk without trying on their shoes are just as bad. I hope you don't confuse me for one of them.
I was imagining the anecdotes of people I care about, who don't really engage with the fact they will die, and they don't really know what happens to them afterwards. (Knowing, not as a factual knowing, but as a confidence in conviction knowing). These friends seem to me to be living shadow lives... constantly in denial and seeking distraction from the hard realities of life. They are very much all for the here-and-now. But they do not know how to grieve when a loved one dies, they avoid pain and suffering at all costs, they prefer their soma, to borrow from Huxley.
At best these friends when asked, allude to some variation of Moral Therapeutic Deism, the sharpest of the bunch insist they are Atheists, but the contradictions left untouched are too many to count.
So, I guess that is the question... what is an example of someone engaging an underlying feeling without words?
Lots of people feel things without being able to articulate them. It is a theme of this very discussion that one can be too reasonable, that one’s actions can be too explainable, that there ought to be room for the inexplicable in the human psyche. Far from believing that people ought to be able to articulate their reasons, it seems to me that Damir is claiming the opposite.
Now, you might very well protest that you were trying to refer to a very different type of person: not the one who is silent before the inarticulable but the one who never considers it in the first place. But judging others in this manner is a perilous enterprise. I would rather be alert to people’s potential hidden depths on so personal a topic than be pre-emptively dismissive of all who have not proved themselves to me. Why should they have to prove anything to me in the first place?
Good points, I choose that latter example: The one who never considers it in the first place. And I agree, we should look out for hubris when judging others. But to be fair, I don't dismiss these sorts... they are all around me, and in my community. Which is why you should want them to prove that they are asking hard questions and wrestling with the "why?" of their lives. In my view, they owe it to me to think deeply and I to them. We are after all small group mammals, built for tight knit communities, and these enterprises inform the culture which we're all critiquing. My harrumphing above was mostly that I feel I'm one of the few doing the work... I suppose.
As Shadi says: the human being contains multitudes... I try to remember that. But there's also a tension for me in that I believe people should be able to show me faith AND works, (to reappropriate St. James.)
What are the contradictions of atheism?
This is a bigger question I spent the weekend mulling over. I don't have as clear an answer as I alluded to above, so I apologize.
I can't help but think that people write essays like Damir's because deep down, they really, *really* don't like being told they're responsible for developing their own sense of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment (in the Max Weber sense) in their lives. Not very charitable, perhaps, but it's probable at least.
I mean… I guess that’s a plausible meta-read? But isn’t the essay more a critique of the limits of sense- and meaning-making? That we can’t escape that at the limit, sense fails us? And that this recognition itself is important and resonant?
Sure, but I don't believe spirituality and mysticism is necessary to make that point.
How about art?
Again, helpful but not necessary.
Doesn't art get at something important? Something that's not reachable by other means?
is Janan Ganesh too aloof to go on Wisdom of Crowds? a shame if so
"he articulated how the very idea of human progress ends up sucking out all meaning from the marrow of life"
Forgive me for thinking there was never any marrow in life to suck out in the first place. Religion, spirituality, mysticism, mythology, "enchantment" -- all developed primarily as a way to keep societies and civilizations orderly and cohesive in a low-information, high-scarcity world. (I want to learn more about Julian Jaynes' theory of the bicameral mind, but based on what I do know it seems a very plausible hypothesis for the origins of spirituality and the idea of enchantment.) As humanity became better at more accurately observing and determining the laws of nature and how the universe works, and as poverty and material suffering declined, the utility of religion (using the term in its broadest sense) also declined -- I have to imagine it's harder to hold a spiritual/mystical worldview when the scientific method finds overwhelming evidence against its factual claims, and technological progress was (at least at first) rendering the need for paradise in the afterlife obsolete. It's hard not to conclude that there was never any "there" there to begin with.
This essay makes good points about smugness and the dangers of dismissing and ignoring the more ego-crippling aspects of life, but the people who truly value science and rationality understand full well that complete certainty about "ultimate ends" or just about anything is impossible, that as full an understanding of the universe as is possible must necessarily involve understanding and accepting that which is ego-crippling, that rationalist modes of inquiry and progress invoke enchantment instead of "sucking out all meaning from the marrow of life," and that the meaninglessness of death does not mean life is devalued as well (Michael Shermer has done a great job articulating this). If anything, science (or "scientism," if one really wants to go there) is not necessarily what leads to the smugness and banality so deplored here -- in fact, quite the opposite. Meanwhile, it's very common to find expressions of spirituality, whether from traditional religion or more New Age-y practices, to be teeming with their own kind of smugness and certainty, with anything indicating otherwise being nothing more than throat-clearing misdirection. Smugness, the illusion of certainty, the "safety blanket" -- these are more a result of universal human nature than specifically a byproduct of Kantian/Dawkinsian rationality.
The essay is, I think, mostly a cry against smugness. It’s not obscurantist/mystical in intent.
Actually, the God of the ancient Hebrews being a just God by His very nature, and they themselves being surrounded by more powerful neighbors "among whom they moved, and lived, and had their being," the meaning of this paradoxical story, at least as I understand it, is that Abraham and his descendants had to learn to love justice more than life itself if they expected to survive. Hasn't this been the story of the Jewish people throughout much of their history?
Agree. But that also means that justice is God, it is not Reason. That has implications.