Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Hitch, Fish and Tel
While in the States, I heard Christopher Hitchens lacerating some Christianist on one of those God-bothering radio stations they have over there. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Not that Hitch was remotely persuasive but he has mastered the art of using expensive words and arcane references crushingly. I've tried this on my occasional appearances on American radio and I've failed. But Hitch has a kind of fruity loquacity that seems to make the yanks feel like downtrodden colonials with a bad case of culture cringe. Admirable but, of course, wrong about everything of importance. This came to mind while reading Stanley Fish. I don't normally do this as Fish always uses 500 words when five will do, but something kept me going. He's writing about Terry Eagleton, a thinker I admire slightly less than I mistrust. He always seems to be about to say something amazing and then doesn't. On that basis, I won't, unless paid to do so, read the Eagleton book Fish is writing about, Reason, Faith and Revolution. Yet what he seems to be saying - that science, reason etc don't fulfil the human needs that religion does - seems sound if a touch obvious to all but the Hitchs of this world. Also he is right to defend faith for the sake of his forebears - 'against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void'. Right on, Tel. Fish ends with a swipe at 'the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens'. Well, it was just enough to cheer me up in Luxembourg airport.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
HA! SCHOOL-YARD!
ReplyDeleteI was about to say something amazing, but its escaped me. Sorry, can I try again later?
ReplyDeleteJohn Robertson Nicoll
Michael Heller is popping over to the UK at the end of May, and giving a talk on the 27th at the Royal Greenwich Observatory:
ReplyDeleteDiscover how Professor Michael Heller, cosmologist and Catholic priest, tackles the challenges involved in reconciling religion with the fast-moving world of 21st century science.It's free, so you'll be able to go even if no-one is paying you Bryan.
Terry E's book is the write up of his Terry Lectures at Yale last year. There're online here - http://www.yale.edu/terrylecture/eagleton.html - if you want a taster. Be amused rather than distrusting!
ReplyDeleteYou're right. Eagleton went to my school (and was something of a fashionable Howard Kirk zeitgeist figure back in the '70s) but has always left me underwhelmed.
ReplyDeleteHe used to believe that we are who we are not because of some alchemy between genetic inheritance and particular environment but rather because of the institutions of the state. Never trusted him since then!
hey, presumably his forebears are enjoying everlasting life with God and shouldn't need defending. their lives would only need defending if this was not the truth.
ReplyDeleteI read Fish's piece, and I honestly couldn't figure out what he was getting at beyond Tradition: Good, Truth: Bad.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was at Oxford in the early 80s Terry E. was very much the self-conscious enfant terrible, scandalizing the ancien regime with his bloodcurdling talk of Althusser and Lacan and other dodgy sounding French types. These enthusiasms went along with what looked to many of us like fairly blatant careerism and empire building within the Eng Lit faculty.
ReplyDeleteTo judge by his recent writings, he seems to have come out the other side of poststructuralist theory and found himself somewhere not too far from the popular left-leaning Catholicism of his very early career (whether he believes in God in any ordinary sense of the word I have no idea). In his way, he is a very good writer: has that rare gift for making abstruse ideas not just clear but memorable and funny. Probably not over scrupulous in argument, I imagine. His demolition of Dawkins in The London Review of Books was one of the most heartening things I read last year (first sentence: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology"). You can read it at:
www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html
I think I'm a bigger fan of Hitch than some of the chaps wot frequent this blog. However, I read an interesting anecdote about him a couple of years back (can't remember where, sorry) that sounded fairly plausible.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the gist of the thing was that, in any conversational situation in which the other person is somebody who is not an established crony, Hitchens always works to be in control of the exchange and his lead gambit is invariably to devote the opening phase of the conversation to discovering those topics about which the other person knows very little. This achieved, he then proceeds to talk about absolutely nothing else save for those things about which the other person enjoys no expertise.
The charitable explanation is that he is working to enable the other person to lift his or her veil of ignorance and broaden the old horizons and whatnot. The cynical explanation is that this is a quick route toward permitting Hitchens to seem substantially more erudite and clued up than he actually is.
Not sure how true the allegation is. Still like him, though.
Not sure how true the allegation is. Still like him, though.
ReplyDelete'Cause of the allegation, eh?
Given that Dawkins was writing about religion in general rather than theology in particular, it's reassuring to know that Eagleton began his 'demolition' of Dawkins with a straightforward category error.
ReplyDeleteCriticising a book about the general nature of religion for paying insufficient heed to the details of theology, is akin to criticising a book about the general nature of science for paying insufficient heed to, say, the details of string theory.
Last night I attended the first night of the Alpha Course at Holy Trinity Brompton, the church where that little movement began, the largest adult education phenomenon in history. I'd never been before but a friend brought up a Catholic who hasn't been to church for 25 years was willing to give it a try. She greatly enjoyed it.
ReplyDeleteThe reason for that scene setting was that I was well impressed by the one mention Hitchens and Dawkins got last night. It was almost entirely positive, from a speaker describing his journey from militant atheism. He still loved their passion. The only point being: why the hunger? You're telling me there's nothing to satisfy it and you may well be right. But why the hunger?
I didn't, surprise surprise, need to be convinced that there was more to be said than Hitchens would ever give me. But that moment probably more than any other convinced me that some are serious about listening as well as dishing it out.
Eagleton isn't entirely stupid but he is annoying. Whenever he gets a chance he starts banging on about the evils of Capitalism etc. etc. - but he does occasionally get some things right. i tend to distrust anyone who makes a successful career for themselves in academia, especially by being controversial and attacking The Man - it rings false. i hear that while he's happy to attack Capitalism he's also quite rich. Let's see him give up his entire fortune and then i might listen, or half-listen.
ReplyDelete