A sudden realization

[fpb]

I suddenly realized the reason for the fad for the Sorry Trinity - Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hutchens. By all sane critical standards, their criticism of what they call "religion" is astonishingly incompetent; much worse than the notorious pamphlet by Bertrand Russell that gave Christian apologists so much matter for mirth and so many easy scoring points in the early twentieth century. However, it is representative of a large section of - Heaven help us - the educated public. I mean the people who really do read and enjoy books, who select their movies for artistic quality, who visit museums when they travel abroad, who enjoy classical music, jazz and sixties pop as well as more recent items. A person such as me does not find it easy to understand - save in the case of people like cette_vie, born wholly outside the Christian tradition - but it is wretchedly possible to become an educated adult without once having had to meet with any kind of religious thought, let alone having formulated an intelligent reaction to any.

It would be useless to list all the ways in which the attention of educated people is distracted from the very idea of religion, but its final result is what is today called culture. I just had an experience of what that means. There is a German "Digital Library" series, which I am getting free of charge and which I find quite diagnostic of what modern Germans regard as culture. Some of these are highly and nevitably local (the complete works of Martin Luther), some amusingly quirky (a historical compilation of textbooks of good manners), some of universal interest - the complete works of Shakespeare and of Goethe, a "Philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche". Even this last item, though, is slanted towards a historicistic doctrine that I heartily disapprove of: the organization clearly suggests that classical philosophy ends with Nietzsche, the destroyer. This seems to me at least arguable: what is wrong with Husserl, Max Scheler, Josiah Royce, Bergson, Benedetto Croce, Popper, Wittgenstein, or Alistair MacIntyre, to mention only those that spring to my mind? It is not the first time that the death of philosophy has been proclaimed from the rooftops, only to find that the supposed corpse has plenty of kicking left.

However, the really enlightening experience was not that. I knew, after all, that historicistic ideas of philosophy and modernity are still around in various unenlightened corners. What really stunned me was that, alongside these volumes full of high culture, local culture, and quirky culture (the books of good manners), one finds a volume of "Erotic Literature". Presented, if you please, with the exact same seriousness and convinction as the collections of German poems or the dictionaries or the atlas.

What I am trying to say is that this kind of presentation implies that being familiar with "erotic literature", as a field of study as much as a genre, is part of "culture" at the same level as, say, reading Goethe or studying psychology or history or biology. Now it so happens that I have some acquaintance with the better-regarded pieces of literary pornography: I have read many of the dirtier classics - the smutty parts of Catullus, Juvenal, Martial, Lucianus of Samosata and so on - as well as Anais Nin, Pauline Reage, Henry Miller, and, for my sins, the required bit of de Sade. And the notion that it could be placed on the same level as the study of Virgil or Beethoven is simply nonsense. It is not only morally repulsive, it is plainly false. If there is such a thing as a scale of literary achievement, with Dante and Shakespeare and Aeschylus and the likes on the very top, and, say, Dickens and Horace and Cervantes just one step below, and so on, then the best of erotic literature just reaches to its bottom. Someone like Anais Nin was without doubt a major writer, in the sense that her work is worth preserving. But to speak of the field in which she is prominent as if it were a part of culture in the same sense as Augustine or Nietzsche or J.S.Bach is simply to falsify standards. No piece of writing on an erotic subject exists that can in any way be compared with the greatest literature.

(The same is not true of painting or sculpture. The great nudes by Tiziano or Velazquez are indubitably among the heights of artistic achievements, as are the great Greek statues. That is to do with the nature of the visual arts, in which the visual impact of beauty is a legitimate part of the subject. And it is worth noticing that nobody tries to isolate the Rokeby Venus or Bernini's Apollo and Daphne or Canova's Three Graces in a genre of "Erotic art"; they are treated as a part of the great figurative tradition of Greek and European art.)

You see what I am saying. To treat this as if it were "culture" on the same level as Schubert or Virgil is to make culture a mere field of curiosity, to break down sane scales of evaluation. There are people today who seriously live in this kind of world of categories; which is why the greatest fanfic writer I know wastes her talent writing smutfics. But to deny the existence of levels of merit, value, and achievement, also means that people are never encouraged to raise their eyes to the heights. At best, culture is learned as a kind of embellishment on a polished spirit; at worst, as a sign of caste. But culture is worthless unless it is worth knowing of itself; that is, unless it has itself something to teach, something that is worth knowing - unless, in the old expression, it "instructs by delighting". And what does Anais Nin have to instruct us about? The best thing one can say about her world is that one would swear castity to escape it. Her pimps and whores, her women without a past or a future, are among the most desperate depictions of existence ever delivered. The same might be said of her friend Miller. And in general, the better, in a literary sense, the pornography is, the more desolate an impression it leaves - think of the dreadful, muffled collapse at the end of Histoire d'O.

My point is that a person can reach the level of an educated person without once having had to confront any fundamental issues about life and the universe - without having had to think about anything more serious than the issues touched on in the average modern book (and no, I do not mean Doktor Faustus or The Master and Margarita), especially if they have never had to seriously grapple with writers of the past who really did care about that sort of thing. There is a whole intelligentsia, and a public probably in the millions, who really never even bothered to take a look at Christianity or any other kind of religion - but especially at Christianity - to see what kind of thing it was and what made it tick. They could not, of course, fail to see it from the corner of their eyes, in the various buildings it has sown across the country, and in some of the folkloric manifestations that attend those features of life in which they have the least interest and which they attend most rarely.

What this excludes, unconsciously, without thought or precept, is that Christianity could possibly be a serious factor in anyone's life, that it might appear in one's life and throw any kind of shadow on one's path. This part of the educated public is unable to cope with that; it is, to them, an unnatural invasion of reality by something that has no business being there. It is dirt in the sense of the memorable definition of the great Catholic anthropologist, Mary Douglas: "Matter out of place". Their reaction is therefore uncomprehending inner revolt: dirt does not arouse curiosity or any desire to re-evalue one's categories, it arouses rage. And when people as ignorant as Dawkins or Hutchens spend hundreds of pages setting forth their ignorance, their misunderstanding, and their prejudice, they find an easy public: not because they have anything to teach them (God help us if they do!), but because they echo and reinforce their anger.

Comments

[jamesenge.livejournal.com]

Much of the so-called New Atheism seems to be exercises in self-righteousness, which is always easiest when one ignores an inconvenient fact or twelve.

I'm not sure I follow you about erotic literature. Certainly the abusive obscenity in Catullus and Juvenal, though not without entertainment value, nowhere rivals Vergil. But Catullus' earlier love poems to Lesbia/Clodia (e.g. "Vivamus mea Lesbia, atque amemus") and his later disillusioned poems about her (e.g. "Nulli se dicit mulier mea nubere malle") seem to me as great as anything Vergil ever wrote (and I'm a big Vergil fan). Then there's book 4 of the Aeneid... But it could be I'm reading "erotic" in a different way than you intend.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely. Some of Catullus' pieces are of a piercing and profound intensity - those that are purely about love, rather than indulging his potty-mouth tendencies. And a few of the insulting ones are rather impressive, at least in the cases where he tells the most powerful men in Rome - Caesar and Cicero - what he thinks of them. Poets of the Imperial age would certainly never again dare to speak with such freedom. But I do not think that most of his dirtier items deserve higher praise than "cheerfully irreverent and well-expressed". Juvenal and Lucian are more complex cases, but I do not think that their erotic passages show them at their best. Juvenal is out to condemn, and sometimes he does it amazingly well, but when he describes what he imagines that a lesbian couple would do with sacred altars, it is hard not to have a sense that he is half aroused himself. Certainly it falls below his great plea for human decency in Satire 12: "What man who is good and worthy of the mysterious torch,/ Who is such as the priest of Eleusis would want him,/ Considers anyone's misfortune as no business of his?"

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am not sure I answered your question, so I will try again. What I meant is that to treat "erotic literature" as a field with its own cultural validity, on the same level as high art, destroys the sense of discrimination and comparative value in art. What this means is that everything that is "culture" becomes equally valuable, and that you are equally well educated if you are au fait with the history of nineteenth-century under-the-counter literature as if you were familiar with English poetry or Schubert's songs. And this deprives culture of its most important function - that of pointing above and beyond itself, to the truths of life and reality.

[filialucis]

"...to treat "erotic literature" as a field with its own cultural validity, on the same level as high art, destroys the sense of discrimination and comparative value in art."

But then we seem to be well on our way to abandoning the distinction between high art and trivial art altogether, and anthologies like the one you describe are typically put together by those who would actively foster this development. Essentially, we're being conditioned to believe that pop culture isn't just every bit as good as "high" culture, it's the only real culture there is, because every idiot can grasp it. No Moron Left Behind. After all, the truths of life and reality don't have much market value these days.

(Don't mind me; I'm reading Blaise Pascal while semiconscious with the flu, which is possibly a dangerous combination.)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

AS a lover of comics and pop music, I cannot altogether agree with the point as you made it. I would rather say that the same scale of merit ought to be applied to all the various arts, and in that scale of merit, such people as Bruce Springsteen or Hayao Miyazaki rank pretty high. But it worries me to hear arts as such being discriminated. Remember, there was a time when only poets and writers were treated as proper sages, while musicians, painters, sculptors and architects were seen as high-end craftsmen.

[fuzzybunny916.livejournal.com]

I know this is off topic, but what was the name of your LJ that you do on religion? I found it once before, but I don't know where it is anymore.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It's a community, called fpb_de_fide. http://community.livejournal.com/fpb_de_fide/. And thank you for your interest.

Mainly just curious

[culturalnomad.livejournal.com]

If it's a "community", does that mean others can join and post to it (as opposed to merely responding to what you post)? How? If not, what distinguishes it from a regular LJ?

Re: Mainly just curious

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You can post with my permission as moderator. On a couple of occasions, I asked people who had written exceptionally good essays on religious topics permission to publish them. I doubt whether you are allowed to publish at your will, but I might be wrong.

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

No piece of writing on an erotic subject exists that can in any way be compared with the greatest literature.
Song of Songs?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I mean about sex, not love. The SoS is about love preluding to marriage, and the delights it implies are those of the marriage bed. There is a whole literary genre on this subject, rather out of fashion today (I wonder why?), called epithalamium. "Erotic literature" either decouples sex from marriage or even from relationships - achieveing orgasms, in some Anais Nin short stories, is a goal in itself - or else abuses marriage or any kind of relationship by using them as an excuse for elaborate descriptions of coition. This sort of trick, however, is usually pulled by hack writers with no claim to produce "erotic literature" in the "culture" meaning of the term: as a rule, the more genuinely meritorious a piece of pornography is, the more it is desolate in its setting and conclusions. An unprejudiced reading of Anais Nin should be enough to get any sensible human being to swear chastity out of mere self-defence.

[theswordmaiden.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That must explain why I swore chastity out of self-defense! But seriously, it was this reply here that finally explained to me what exactly you meant by "erotic literature." And I've been thinking. I seem to remember that Anais Nin wrote her erotica for some anonymous buyer, and that as she was sending him stories, he kept on writing her to do "less poetry, more sex" or something of that nature. She hated the idea of making sex into some mechanical thing, apart from emotions, and she felt that her characters were just caricatures.

At least, that's what she said later. Also I believe she also wrote these stories along with some other writers, and they disliked it as much as she did. They did get a kick out of trying to write about the most ridiculous sexual situations possible.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, but it was she - now I do not claim to be some sort of NIn expert (all the facts that follow come from one TV documentary and one newspaper article), but she was the one who set out on the path of writing about sex for its own sake. The buyer's objection was not, IIRC, to passionate descriptions of love, but to flowery and lyrical passages in the description of coitus itself. She went on writing on the same subject long after she had ceased to depend on a single customer. She also cast her own public image in that light, as the great sexual revolutionary, and did so until her death, that is until well into her sixties. And even after her death, she left more sexual writings to be discovered, including some sort of account of an incestuous affair with her own father. The woman, God help us, believed in what she was doing.

[theswordmaiden.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'm pretty sure that the buyer's objection was to both descriptions of love and to poetic descriptions of sex. And everything else except the coitus, I think. I know that Nin wanted to write erotica anyway, and I sure know that she wasn't quite right in the head, but it didn't seem like she wanted to write about sex devoid of emotions or anything else.

As how much she believed in what she was doing, I don't know. She wanted to write erotica, but not always the way she was told to do. She wanted to have numerous sexual encounters, but I'm unclear as to how much her "analyst" influenced her regarding that, including the incest.

You had the TV documentary and newspaper article, and I pretty much had this: http://www.geocities.com/arsenio_grilo/a_nin_1.html :)

So feel free to make up your own mind. And maybe explain it to me. ;)

[culturalnomad.livejournal.com]

Hear! Hear! Bravo!

I'd say more, but at this point I can't think of much to add.

That is just what it is like

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

"This part of the educated public is unable to cope with that; it is, to them, an unnatural invasion of reality by something that has no business being there."

Well said. I was trying to explain to one of my Christian-from-the-cradle friends what it is like to be ab ex-atheist. The central part of the atheist experience is disgust, contempt, and sometimes rage: because there is no reasonable explanation for why perfectly intelligent and sane people believe in what you (to your atheist eyes) looks like a silly superstition combined with an absurdly transparent con game.

As an atheist, you have the same feeling you would have if you walked into a room at a party, and every one there was pretending to talk to Harvey, the invisible 6-foot-tall bunny from the old Jimmy Stewart movie. It would be funny at first, but then, as they kept talking to someone in the room you could not see, and getting him drinks, and thanking him for his help, and saying he was a doctor who could heal the sick, and saying he was a miracle-worker who could raise the dead, the frustration would begin to eat at you. Why won't your friends shut up about the invisible bunny? Why is it not obvious that no one is there? And, in order to preserve your own sanity, your reaction is one of rage, contempt, disgust. You think your friends are madmen, or liars, or outrageously gullible, of some combination of the three.