A sudden realization
Jan. 22nd, 2008 05:03 pmI 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 ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
