From: Richard Ridge (richard_ridge@tao-group.com)
Date: Tue Jan 08 2002 - 08:30:33 MST
> In response to Richard's post,
The correct phrasing on your part would have been 'In response to the
article by Don Cupitt forwarded by Richard.' Presuming that I am in complete
agreement with everything I I forward is a somewhat precarious endeavour.
> I'd like to say that although I agree with
> the idea of a breaking with the old mystic ways, religion is not
> the path to
> take - people should think for themselves and try to make the world better
> individually, although a unification in intent would be useful. By a
> religion more suited to our own time what are you implying? -
> something like virus or what?
I do see Virus as something in a position to supplant and improve on
religion though I would also suggest that this statement from Nietzche has
some bearing on the matter:
"Substitute for religion. One thinks he is speaking well of philosophy when
he presents it as a substitute religion for the people. In spiritual
economy, transitional spheres of thought are indeed necessary occasionally,
for the transition from religion to scientific contemplation is a violent,
dangerous leap, something inadvisable. To that extent, it is right to
recommend philosophy. But in the end, one ought to understand that the needs
which religion has satisfied, which philosophy is now to satisfy, are not
unchangeable: these needs themselves can be weakened and rooted out. Think,
for example, of Christian anguish, the sighing about inner depravity,
concern about salvation--all of these ideas originate only from errors of
reason and deserve not satisfaction, but annihilation. A philosophy can be
useful either by satisfying those needs or by eliminating them; for they are
acquired needs, temporally limited, based on assumptions that contradict
those of science. It is preferable to use art for this transition, for
easing a heart overburdened with feelings; those ideas are entertained much
less by art than by a metaphysical philosophy. Beginning with art, one can
more easily move on to a truly liberating philosophical science." (From:
Human, All Too Human http://turn.to/nietzsche).
It would seem to me that Cupitt's comments were of possible interest in so
far as that transitional sphere is concerned. Although religion has
diminished over time, none of these hopes have proved well founded, if only
because increased secularisation has led to the creation of a particularly
militant religious rump. As such, I view the question of whether some
transitional sphere could be useful in accelerating the decline of religion
(or in defanging religious conservatives) in purely pragmatic terms, though
I wouldn't consider it ideal. That said, the most obvious problem with the
idea is that it has been rather difficult to develop one that would work;
for example, upon reading Darwin's Origin of Species George Eliot had
believed it to be a valuable step towards the dismantling of the Christian
religion, to be replaced by a secularist morality founded on some of the
more valuable aspects of the religion. In Robert Elsmere Mrs Humphrey Ward
had sought to depict a human religion stripped of miracle and dogma, but
retaining self-sacrifice and morality. Similarly, Matthew Arnold believed
that culture could prove an adequate ethical substitute for religion. Iris
Murdoch suggested something along these lines in Metaphysics as a Guide to
Morals ; "We must now internalise our god.... A Buddhist-style survival of
Christianity." None of these human religions ever enjoyed any great success
beyond the skulls of their respective creators.
>Also, I would like to state that my reason for enjoying and
> wanting to read the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit is not so
> much the old magica nad mysticism,
I am far from sure as to how this subject was broached. However, I find it
even equally difficult to appreciate why you would wish to read Tolkien. His
prose style is exactly what would be expected from a philologist and falls
under the leaden heading of what Dickens described as a preference for
liking his languages as dead as possible. Certainly, the murder of the
English language was something Tolkien was almost as adept at as his deathly
sense of humour
(http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/philip_hensher/story.j
sp?story=107510). As such, I'd have to agree with Michael Moorcock that
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy was a far better piece of work:
"In a recent Spectator piece, they were not sure how Lord of the Rings would
go down as a movie because the story had already been told in Star Wars.
What they meant was that the structure and stereotypes were very similar.
However, that similarity is what almost guarantees a success. As I've said
many times, if people didn't like repetition, they wouldn't like music. An
animal feels easy if it can take the same route to the waterhole every day
and not risk being eaten. To the mass audience, repetition is exactly what
comforts them and what they will pay most for. What makes Tolkien the mass
market success that Peake is not is that Tolkien can be smoothly assimilated
into the culture. His stereotypes slide easily into the world of popular
fiction. Peake's grotesques are the opposite of Tolkien's fairy tale
regulars. Peake's characters and plot are brilliantly idiosyncratic.
Tolkien's entire ensemble of greybeards, evil forces and humanoids is
instantly recognised It's the familiar, with a little gloss, that sells in
millions, not the awkwardly unfamiliar. Tolkien's stated aim was to tell
fairy stories, Peake's stated aim was to break windows. Tolkien has mass
sales, Peake has more likelihood of longevity. For Peake was an original
visionary where Tolkien was manipulating existing images."
(http://www.sfsite.com/fm/print.html?ed,20011209)
>but the morals unearthed and the way that
> (between the
> "good" characters at any rate) there seems to be very little of the
> antagonism we experience in today's commercial world - people set
> off to do
> the RIGHT thing (but only when it's clear that it is RIGHT) without asking
> what's in it for them (although of course their desires are always
> ultimately selfish).
I would suggest that this statement is, frankly, disturbing in the extreme.
What you are referring to is in essence a grotesque fantasy of good and evil
races; mostly, the good people are tall and blond and speak Nordic or Celtic
languages (I would remind you that LOTR was written in the 1940s), and the
bad ones are dark and hairy and talk a sort of Persian. Similarly, the
concept of the High Men ( Aragorn's race - the Dunedan) would certainly
appear to resemble a particularly unpleasant attempt to build a Nazi
mythology. I would contend that this is far from being accidental and that
it is indeed common to most myth of the kind you are seeking to identify; an
obvious example would be Heidegger's belief in the ''inner truth and
greatness'' of National Socialism, as a vehicle for the proving of being by
means of phenomenological analysis of human existence (Dasein) in respect to
its temporal and historical character. In other words a prelapsarian belief
in the authenticity of human being freed of the constraints imposed by
modern society .Heidegger argued that to neglect our defining moods and
actions, as the tradition of Western reason had done, was to fall into a
type of inauthentic, perfunctory existence. To gauge the cost of this
mistake on society at large, Heidegger looked at cosmopolitanism, the rights
of man, the rise of science -- what he took to be the social and political
counterparts of Western logic and reason -- and saw nothing but the
vulgarities of mass society and a soulless technology that had supplanted a
once glorious soldier ethic. Authentic Being had left the building. National
Socialism would bring it back
(http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/books/review/16RYERSOT.html)
In fact, most illiberal political projects seem to have predicated
themselves on myth of prelapsarian arcadican idylls in which man could be
more true to himself (nazism certainly fell into that category), after which
civilisation typically fell into decadence and degeneracy from a state of
virtue (the myth is almost invariably false and an invention). In terms of
British politics, the Conservative Right have always held that the
permissive society of the sixties and seventies represented a lapse from the
moral and disciplined society of the fifties (which was in reality a period
of horrific poverty and where the morality of the populace was essentially
enforced through mob ostracism and government censorship). In terms of US
politics Jerry Falwell's comments after September 11th were in much the same
vein. See:
http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,591392,00.html
Sunday November 11, 2001
The Observer
Two days after terrorists who believed they were on a mission from God flew
hijacked jets into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and the ground in
Pennsylvania, Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, told Christian
Coalition founder Pat Robertson on the latter's TV show: 'God continues to
lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what
we deserve.'
Robertson expressed his agreement, as Falwell interpreted the attack as
God's punishment to Americans for tolerating federal courts that uphold
civil liberties. He also blamed 'the pagans and the abortionists and the
feminists and the gays and the lesbians', saying: 'I point the finger in
their face and say, "You helped this happen".'
As this exchange proves, the division between secular civilisation and
fanatical religious fundamentalism does not run only between the United
States and its radical Muslim enemies - it runs right through American
culture. Increasingly, the US is polarised between a growing number of
secular, or only nominally religious, individuals and a shrinking, but still
large, number of active believers.
By the Nineties, right-wing Protestants, Catholics and Jews were setting
aside theological differences to wage political war on secularism and
humanism. The extension of the alliance of 'people of faith' to reactionary
Muslims who share their opposition to feminism, gay rights, abortion,
contraception and freedom from censorship is the logical next step.
Already, pressured by fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics,
official US delegations to international family-planning conferences have
found themselves opposing European and East Asian delegations on such issues
as contraception and abortion - and allied with Muslim theocracies and the
Vatican.
In the past two decades many conservative Christians in the US and elsewhere
have expressed sympathy for aspects of reactionary Islam.
In 1989, when a caller to Larry King Live asked William J. Bennett, then the
drugs tsar, 'Why build prisons? Get tough like Arabia. Behead the damned
drug dealers. We're just too darned soft', Bennett replied 'morally, I don't
have any problem with that at all' and went on to call for more executions
in the US.
The conservative Catholic Pat Buchanan denounced Salman Rushdie for writing
'a defamatory novel, a blasphemous assault on the faith of hundreds of
millions'. In 1998, as the Taliban in Afghanistan were banning women from
working and forcing them to wear the veil, the Southern Baptist Convention
urged wives to 'submit graciously to the servant leadership of their
husbands'.
Some US conservative Christian intellectuals have openly flirted with
sedition. In 1996 the Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus hosted a
symposium in his magazine First Things, in which Religious Right
sympathisers, including Judge Robert Bork, argued the US government was so
immoral that civil disobedience and even revolution might be legitimate.
Two years earlier, at a Religious Right conference in Florida, former
Vice-President Dan Quayle joined the audience in reciting a parody of the US
Pledge of Allegiance: 'I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the
Saviour, for whose Kingdom it stands. One Saviour, crucified, risen and
coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.'
Today the Christian Right is far more powerful in American politics than for
two centuries. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of
Independence, wrote to his nephew Peter Carr: 'Question with boldness even
the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must approve the homage
of reason rather than of blindfolded fear.'
Jefferson reassured his nephew that belief in God was not necessary for
virtue: 'If [this inquiry] end in a belief that there is no God, you will
find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its
exercise and in the love of others it will procure for you.'
These sentiments did not prevent Jefferson from serving two terms as the
third US President. Of Jefferson's rival Alexander Hamilton, the historian
Karl-Friedrich Walling writes: 'Nothing distinguishes Hamilton from Oliver
Cromwell (with whom his contemporaries sometimes compared him) more than his
hatred of puritanism, religious and political. Largely because of the
humanity he absorbed from [the atheist] Hume, he was less worried that
Americans would become decadent or corrupt than that they would become
exceedingly self-righteous, as in fact they have on many occasions in
history.'
In 2000, both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates claimed
to be evangelical Protestants who had 'found Jesus'. Al Gore's
vice-presidential candidate was an Orthodox Jew who refused to work or
travel on the sabbath and claimed that non-believers could not be good
citizens. During the 2000 presidential campaign, George Bush Senior asserted
that 'on the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created
the Earth'.
A predecessor in the White House, Woodrow Wilson, asked 78 years earlier
about his views on evolution, replied that 'of course, like very other man
of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It
surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised'.
In 1912 former President Theodore Roosevelt referred in a speech to 'the
great Darwin', and later wrote of his education: 'Thank Heaven, I sat at the
feet of Darwin and Huxley...'
Although they now control the Republican Party, ensuring that no supporter
of evolutionary biology, biotech research, abortion or gay rights can be
nominated as President or Vice-President, Christian conservatives lack the
power to impose their vision on society as a whole.
They are finding new allies, however, on the environmental Left. Quayle's
former chief of staff, William Kristol, a crusader against abortion and gay
rights and editor of Rupert Murdoch's Washington magazine The Weekly
Standard, has teamed up with the radical leftist Jeremy Rifkin to persuade
Congress to ban therapeutic cloning, which is legal in Europe. Under
pressure from the Religious Right, George W. Bush has already crippled
stem-cell research in the US, causing research projects and some scientists
to move to Britain and other countries.
Rifkin and other leftists have also joined the Southern Baptists in an
effort to outlaw the patenting of plant and animal genes.
Will Protestant and Catholic abortion clinic bombers soon be
comrades-in-arms of Greenpeace activists who destroy genetically modified
crops? The fundamentalist-green alliance against technology and scientific
research is not surprising. For the past quarter-century, Darwinian
sociobiology has been attacked by the Left, which believes human nature is
infinitely malleable, and by the Religious Right, which believes the Hebrew
Creation myth.
Both the Religious Right and a large part of the romantic Left share an
Arcadian vision, similar to that of secular fascists and Muslim
conservatives, of a premodern, rural community of spiritual people who have
not been alienated by secularism and capitalism from nature and God.
This alliance of fundamentalists and greens has found a spokesman in former
Vice-President Al Gore. Gore, a born-again Baptist, fused Christian and
environmentalist clichés in his 1992 bestseller, Earth in the Balance.
Calling environmental problems an 'ungodly crisis,' Gore echoes Right and
Left by attacking 'the froth and frenzy of industrial civilisation'.
Praising ecological activists as 'resistance fighters,' he predicts 'a kind
of global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of
civilisation's relentless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners
in the destruction'.
The greatest villain in history, he says, is Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon's
'moral confusion-the confusion at the heart of much modern science-came from
his assumption, echoing Plato, that human intellect could safely analyse and
understand the natural world without reference to any moral principles
defining our relationship and duties to both God and God's creation.' Gore
calls for science to be supervised by religious elites who would be
qualified to carry out those duties.
The dismissal of Darwin by Bush and the denunciation of Bacon by Gore prove
how far the US has drifted from the enlightened humanism of the American
founders. Jefferson claimed his rival, Hamilton, asked him at a dinner party
at Jefferson's home to identify three busts on his wall. They were his
'trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced,' Sir Isaac
Newton, Bacon, and John Locke, the host said.
Jefferson claimed Hamilton's greatest man of all time was Julius Caesar.
Evidently neither Jefferson nor Hamilton considered Moses or Jesus, whom
they considered mortals. That oversight was remedied during the 2000
campaign, when Bush Senior, asked to name his favourite philosopher,
replied: 'Jesus Christ.'
Humanist civilisation, then, is threatened today both from beyond its
borders and inside them. The liberal democracies can resist Muslim
terrorism, if they are willing to pay the price. The greatest long-term
threat to secularism, democracy and science may come from within, from the
emerging coalition of the Religious Right and the romantic Left, brought
together by a loathing of the open society they share with each other - and
with Osama bin laden."
In short, as far as Tolkien's prelapsarian mythology is concerned I would
simply add it to Nietzche's list of things that 'deserve not satisfaction,
but annihilation.'
> Also of course there are the tales
> of the "olden days" from Britain and Europe on which LOTR was based, which
> are similar in many ways to Arda's first age,
The coincidence, as suggested by Moorcock, is not coincidental and
represents what is commonly referred to as the 'sincerest form of flattery.'
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