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April 22, 2004
The Conceit of Being Well-Read
I suspect that Hitchens is on a roll with his anti-religious rants in preparing himself to ramp up his rhetoric against the scourge of jihadism. It's almost enough to get me to put down Neal Stephenson in favor of Salman Rushdie. Not.
Last night he had a fair salvo of invective against Christianity's nut of forgiveness, but like most anti-theists his focus centers on the hole instead of the donut. All men are afraid of the dark, so what does it matter that one creates God and another creates Science if the purpose is obliviate fear? Well the conduct of those systems of belief does matter, and anyone is right to criticize a means that creates more fear than it settles. There is plenty of evidence that religion bears a great responsibility for that. Amis said that the purpose of philosophy is to show the proper way to prepare for death, and admirable goal. And so it works equally in that the age of Maoism and Stalinism and other like political philosophies a great deal of preparation was made of an ungodly amount of death.
It is only being well read that diffuses the conceit of any monotheism or single political ideology. But being well-read is a conceit as well, especially in that it arms one with a kind of grip which allows one to swing a more or less straight path through any jungle of diverse trees without getting bogged down in the fruits of just one. Such swingers as Hitchens, and Amis to a lesser extent, can quickly find the nut of contradiction in any single system given the broad understanding a life of sampling gives one. And yet it is only conceit that could justify ignoring the fruits of systems of belief entirely.
Goedel famously suggested, (and if your belief in math is total, you could say he proved beyond a shadow of a doubt) that it is impossible for any single system of proofs to be both complete and consistent. I generally take the example of Judaism to be exemplary of this. There are a huge number of rules which must be scrupulously followed by the faithful, and yet in the holy of holies, in the temple where G*d, who must not be named, there is only one human who can go to the single place. And yet what he sees must be nothing at all. Judaism, like every other monotheism is a faith around a void, and that non-existence is the article of faith which legitimize everything around it in perfect harmony with Goede's Incompleteness Theorem.
That such religions have a singular proveable flaw make them more consistent than the forest of trees the well-read swing through on their random paths toward enlightenment. For all such swingers must examine & abandon, revise & review their world view. This is called being progressive, and although it should be incredibly tiresome, men such as Hitchens remain faithful to its discipline. They cannot stop reading. They cannot stop writing. Their task is never complete for there are few settled truths.
Those that are, must then be observed religiously, and one is apparently the rejection of theism. This principle may often be practically correct, although I've yet to hear any anti-theist reject the principles of Buddhism. It is a conceit nonetheless, so let's not forget that.
I am not here to suggest that all things are relative. It is only that I am convinced all things are not which makes me conservative. I know of what it is I conserve and so I am not so likely to be swinging through forests of logic. I honestly believe I can be honest without knowing who Leni Reifenstahl was. (Although Google helps)
And that's all I have to say about that.
Posted by mbowen at April 22, 2004 08:30 AM
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Comments
Buddhism is a curious belief system. Although spiritual, it can be said to be agnostic. It's hard to refute an "I don't know" position. That epistemological middle ground tends to draw less fire.
Posted by: Jim at April 22, 2004 10:19 PM
Hitchens' swinging a straight path through any jungle of diverse trees allows for the discovery of more lands, to carry out the analogy. It isn't that Hitchens has not committed to a value set, but rather that his value set is not based upon any single religious paradigm. My thesis advisor in college told me that the religion of the intellectual was skepticism, which struck me as profound at the time. If religion is based upon faith, which by definition does not rest on logical proof or material evidence, then how is religious belief reconciled with intellectual curiosity beyond one mitigating the other? Being well read is an symptom of being thirsty for knowledge, a thirst that can never really be quenched or fully satisfied. One might argue that Socrates too swung a straight path in illustrating that man's knowledge is tenuous, by revealing the inadequacies of various beliefs. The pursuit was knowledge, nonetheless, and many fruits were harvested in the act of pursuing. That never ending journey results in the exploration of ideas and the strengthening of a foundation for knowledge. Maintaining faith in a religion is much more of an endpoint: One may simply find a grove in that jungle and sit in it peacefully enough. Faith is sufficient unto faith, that is, until reason challenges it. As Hitchen has said, "the laws of nature do not respond to petitions" and "what can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof."
OK, just a little Devil's advocacy [excuse the pun, kind of] to stir the pot. My personal belief is that religion does provide concrete foundations of value, which I believe is a very good thing, but I do struggle with the faith vs. skepticism concept.
Posted by: Zachariah at April 23, 2004 10:27 AM
Briefly, I would say that the idea of a Social Contract is predicated on the belief that man has a soul - that there is some transcendent value in human beings. I would argue that before the discovery of non-zero sum games, it was indeed a leap of faith that anchored altruism. People hoped 'enlightened self-interest' would work better en masse, but they couldn't prove it. But the inclination towards it was for the betterment of society which originates in the populism of Jesus and continues with the individualism of the Reformation.
Posted by: Cobb at April 23, 2004 11:14 AM
Great point. Philosophy and religion criss-cross throughout history, and I think you are correct to add faith to intellectual undertakings that have brought civilization to where it is now. The social contract is one excellent example, but also technology has much to do with faith, as when Newton researched the laws of nature to understand God's purpose better. I guess this may be the heart of it: it is indeed conceited to somehow surgically remove or ignore the fruits of a particular system of belief entirely when one aspect of it is found lacking somehow, but the persistence of skepticism must inherently push the boundaries of faith beyond many religious traditions. Hitchens is certainly biased in this regard. We're wanting in wisdom to determine just exactly how that mix can be optimized, as I guess we have since before Aquinas struggled to explain the world within his theological structure.
Great blog, by the way.
Posted by: Zachariah at April 23, 2004 11:29 AM
black people have been relying on godfor so long
now you seek to relegate him to something i am deeply ofended at the place you wihs to put my god at you need to check yourself or perhaps you dont have a god
Posted by: s rhodes at April 23, 2004 10:26 PM