tragic humanism
I am sympathetic to these thoughts by Terry Eagleton:
The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.
Richard Dawkins seems really and truly to believe that if he could just make religion disappear we would have a “paradise on earth”. This is too frivolous for words. Eagleton by contrast is at least trying to confront the darkness humans always and everywhere seem to harbor within them. Anything short of that is just wishful thinking.
It’s pretty clear to me he’s being hyperbolic in that interview.
Here’s an example: I think cancer is bad, and efforts should be made to eradicate it. When people pop up and try to tell me how great they think cancer is, I reply with arguments to the contrary. I even write a book called “The Cancer Delusion”, where I reprint all those arguments and address the spurious arguments of the pro-cancer movement.
None of that is to say that I think that if I could just make cancer disappear we’d have a paradise on Earth. Dawkins doesn’t believe the Earth becomes a paradise in the absence of religion; merely that the Earth becomes less hostile to reason and there’s a less excuses for people to kill each other.
He calls that “paradise on Earth”; I don’t think you would.
Denying human progress is pretty frivolous, too. Things are getting better for the human race, albeit slowly. Is there something about being religious that blinds you to that? I guess if it was a major keystone of my faith that humans were fundamentally evil – not bad, not complex, but actually evil I’d be blind to human progress, too.
— Chet · Mar 30, 01:35 AM · #
Dawkins may very well believe it. He says it, and says it so loudly and so constantly, because it has meant professional success and intellectual celebrity for him. As I have said before, the purpose of the vast rump of contemporary atheist literature is not to enlighten and not to convince. It’s only to self-aggrandize, through the denigration of others. It’s an exercise in personal elevation through contempt.
The last thing Dawkins and his kind want is to genuinely eliminate religion. If they did, how would everyone know what brilliant, tough, pragmatic men they all are? How would we know how much better they are than the rubes?
— Freddie · Mar 30, 01:50 AM · #
Things are getting better for the human race, albeit slowly
Nothing could be less scientific than the teleologist’s mindset, of course. An almost religious faith in every other system of human improvement is, I find, an almost unavoidable corollary to antitheism, even though it makes no sense at all.
— Freddie · Mar 30, 01:52 AM · #
Right, because nobody ever heard of Richard Dawkins until he started writing about atheism. It’s not like he’s got a shelffull of books about evolution and bioinformatics, after all.
Extrapolating future trends from past ones is the essence of science.
— Chet · Mar 30, 02:19 AM · #
In the comments on this website alone, Chet, you have boiled down about a dozen different “essences of science,” each of which is somehow “the essence of science.” Maybe you could bottle them all and sell them from a horse-drawn wagon.
— Matt Frost · Mar 30, 03:27 AM · #
And Chet: Alan mentions “the darkness humans always and everywhere seem to harbor within them.” Has he or anyone else actually espoused the view that humans are “fundamentally evil… actually evil,“ or is it just another convenient godbag strawman?
For the record, I believe in both the fundamentally flawed nature of humans and historical progress.
For the record, I believe in both the fundamentally flawed nature of man and historical human progress.
— Matt Frost · Mar 30, 03:36 AM · #
If you’re not aware that this is the position of mainstream Christianity, you’re simply not familiar enough with Christianity to comment, I’m afraid.
I sat in the pew for four years hearing about how humans were fundamentally base and evil in a completely normal, mainstream church in rural Minnesota. I’m aware of a number of minor Christian sects that reject this point of dogma but a strawman it most definitely is not.
— Chet · Mar 30, 03:52 AM · #
“I’m aware of a number of minor Christian sects that reject this point of dogma…”
Haha, I’ve heard of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Episcopalian Churches too!
— symeon · Mar 30, 04:05 AM · #
If you’re not aware that this is the position of mainstream Christianity, you’re simply not familiar enough with Christianity to comment, I’m afraid.
As a mainstream Christian I disagree. There is a distinction that can be made between being “fundamentally evil” or “actually evil” and having a “sinful nature” or being “totally depraved.” The Bible says God made man in his image, and declared his creation good. I find it very hard to believe, using the internal logic of Christianity, that God could make anything that would fall so low as to become “fundamentally evil.” It is not anti-Original Sin to say that the fundamentals of human nature are strong. What remains is a corruption, a taint, which is driven toward sin.
Christianity also has a necessarily progressive view of human history and of humanity. Otherwise, where is this whole end times thing coming from? Humanity goes from Garden to Garden City, that seems progressive to me. The Incarnation was a progress, the Resurrection was a progress, Justification, Sanctification, are all progresses to an end.
If there was no progress, and if we are fundamentally evil, shouldn’t we then do what Job’s wife suggested? Curse God and die?
— Keljeck · Mar 30, 04:06 AM · #
It’s right at the beginning. Of the Bible, I mean. I know a lot of Christians don’t read it, though.
Funny, but every church I’ve ever been to took it the opposite way – man’s sinful nature only becomes worse and worse, necessitating Armageddon. An inherently regressive view of human nature – starting in the perfection and holiness of Eden, and ending in the Lake of Fire.
That’s what the end-times means to end-times Christians. You should talk to a few.
Curse God – or better yet realize there’s no such thing – and live.
— Chet · Mar 30, 04:26 AM · #
It’s right at the beginning. Of the Bible, I mean. I know a lot of Christians don’t read it, though.
The part where he says, “Let us make man in our image?” Or the part where he declares his creation good? Or are you talking about the part where he delivers a series of curses which culminate in the promise of death?
I don’t see anywhere here where Adam and Eve become “fundamentally evil.”
Funny, but every church I’ve ever been to took it the opposite way – man’s sinful nature only becomes worse and worse, necessitating Armageddon.
I thought you’d say that. By that logic Karl Marx does not have a progressive view of history. Because Capitalism is necessarily faulty and will build into a Revolution. It’s the same principle with that view of the End Times, though I don’t share it. It’s a reaction to the fall of Christendom, they see a new structure arising which lets out the worst in people, and is building up human sinfulness (Not their nature!) to an awful climax, but of course, the result (As in Marx) is that things are better off than they were before. In fact, in Christianity, things end up better than they were in the beginning.
Curse God – or better yet realize there’s no such thing – and live.
I’m dead? I didn’t even know I was sick!
— Keljeck · Mar 30, 04:44 AM · #
The fall from grace. The point of the story. You said you couldn’t believe that man could fall so low. The story of Genesis is there to explain how that fall happened.
I don’t recall saying he does. I don’t think that he does.
— Chet · Mar 30, 04:52 AM · #
In other news, it turns out Newton didn’t believe in gravity.
— John Schwenkler · Mar 30, 05:00 AM · #
The fall from grace. The point of the story. You said you couldn’t believe that man could fall so low. The story of Genesis is there to explain how that fall happened.
Where do I reject a fall from Grace? I completely accept the Fall, I’m a Christian after all. And I don’t see what I said that would make you believe that I reject the Fall. I believe in Total Depravity, I believe in the Sinful Nature. What I do not believe is that man is, down to his fundamentals, evil (or “actually evil”). And my entire point is that I do not need to view humanity as “fundamentally evil” to believe that it is “totally depraved.” I believe humanity still has the imago dei no matter how tainted or covered up it may be. And I’m saying, that I do not think it is proper to say that it is Christian doctrine that man is “fundamentally evil.” It is a strawman. Christianity is much more finely tuned and nuanced than you would wish to suppose, in this instance.
— Keljeck · Mar 30, 05:12 AM · #
I’m extremely sympathetic to the quote (as someone who is both more-or-less humanist and more-or-less illiberal), but something about the phrase “radical remaking” and the insistence that humanity could get there “sooner” if we weren’t sandbagged by the Dawkins Group sends shivers up my spine. Doesn’t the kind of revolution capable of “transfiguring” the future require that we already know what we want that future to look like? Doesn’t that take its own hubris?
— Dara Lind · Mar 30, 06:36 AM · #
The Christian doctrine of Total Depravity does not say that man is totally evil. It does say that sin has effected every part of us. In other words, there is not one aspect of our being which has not been tainted with our rebellion against God. It does not mean we are as evil as we could possibly be, or that we are unable to be ‘good’ people, only that we are not perfect and cannot achieve God’s perfect standards on our own (which is of course why he sent Jesus).
A drop of poison does not render a glass of water totally poison, but the poison does taint all of the water in the glass.
One needs only look at the newspaper to realise that the popular secular humanist idea that mankind is basically good is a whole load of rubbish. Humans are basically selfish, and that (not specifically religion) is the cause of most of the world’s problems.
— Andrew · Mar 30, 07:23 AM · #
Dara, I too wonder what “radical remaking” connotes, and what means Eagleton would employ to achieve it. He’s still a Marxist, I think, but there are Marxists and then there are Marxists. And if I didn’t know about Eagleton’s political commitments I could read that in techno-utopian or Nietzschean ways. It’s an exceptionally slippery phrase.
— Alan Jacobs · Mar 30, 12:40 PM · #
Right, because nobody ever heard of Richard Dawkins until he started writing about atheism. It’s not like he’s got a shelffull of books about evolution and bioinformatics, after all.
Sure, he wrote books. He was an academic. Now he’s a celebrity. Which do you think he values more? And what do his current priorities, in terms of what he publishes and speaks about, say about which he values more?
Curse God – or better yet realize there’s no such thing – and live.
Living in spite of something that you don’t believe in is one of the weirdest things I can imagine. Requiring an absence of belief in order to “really live” suggests to me a kind of mental poverty that I find very frightening.
— Freddie · Mar 30, 01:18 PM · #
This is all very Hamm-ish:
“The bastard!! He doesn’t exist.”
http://tr.im/hZ6F
— Tickletext · Mar 30, 01:31 PM · #
Eagelton’s language is very imprecise, pushed and pulled by polemical prose more than logic or detail. (heh) For instance, he confuses ‘liberal democracy’ with ‘capitalism’ throughout, which seriously undermines his points. And his tangent on Radical Islam, The Reaction is deeply ironic coming from a secular historical materialist.
Ditto on the “radical remaking” stuff. It’s employ is always discomfiting.
He writes, “Civilizations kill to protect their material interests, whereas cultures kill to defend their identity. These are seeming opposites; yet the pressing reality of our age is that civilization can neither dispense with culture nor easily coexist with it” and later asks “Does the West need to go full-bloodedly metaphysical to save itself?” Given Habermas’s idea of “Constitutionalism”, I think it’s deeply interesting that Eagleton is so viscerally repulsed by the one recent example we have of the West hitching a crusading culture-spirit to secular humanist values, i.e., neoconservatism.
On the whole, though, Eagleton’s essay was well worth the read. Thanks for the heads up, Alan.
— JA · Mar 30, 02:15 PM · #
re Freddie:
I see your point, but I wonder if you overstate the case against a teleological mindset. For instance, modern biology adopts such a mindset when it talks about the “ultimate cause” of a trait (like how the blind fractal logic of ‘branching’ creates solutions to the problem of unidirectional sunlight). It is not ‘unscientific’ to teleologically interpret the results of a nonteleologically-steered process, so long as you remember that all such retrospectives are evidentially underdetermined.
— JA · Mar 30, 04:19 PM · #
JA:
Doesn’t teleology imply (or at least imply something like) Aristotle’s “final cause”? Isn’t what you are describing simply verbal shorthand? (I’m not familiar with the specific effect you reference, but have seen language like this used a lot in operational science.) That is, even though we use the phrase “ultimate cause”, don’t we assume as scientists that this cause can ultimately be reduced (at least in principle) to particles interacting according to rules, more like what Aristotle considered material and/or efficient cause?
Doesn’t the scientific method inherently banish final cause from consideration, that is, proceed as if all processes are non-teleological.
— Jim Manzi · Mar 30, 06:30 PM · #
“Living in spite of something that you don’t believe in is one of the weirdest things I can imagine. Requiring an absence of belief in order to “really live” suggests to me a kind of mental poverty that I find very frightening.”
I don’t think that’s a fair interpretation of atheism at all. Perhaps of Chet’s quote, but not of atheism. Why do you think an “absence of belief” reflects any kind of mental poverty?
— James F. Elliott · Mar 30, 07:04 PM · #
discomfiting
There’s that word again.
— Tony Comstock · Mar 30, 09:37 PM · #
Jim,
Kinda. You’re right in the sense that the goal is not encoded in the process. My blood cells carry oxygen and this keeps me alive, but they don’t carry oxygen to keep me alive. The big picture is entirely absent from the underlying logic.
Nevertheless, it’s possible to obtain scientific insight by interpreting biological processes as systematically goal-driven. That’s because the “goal-function” of life is subsumed by definition; included within the logic of evolution is the primary “goal” of the selfish gene, i.e., survival of vehicle until reproduction. This is so even though RNA does its transcription without having any such goal built-in. RNA will transcribe genetic content that is guaranteed to fail, it will transcribe genetic content that is phenotypically robust, and it will do both with equal acumen and gusto. No algorithm exists, at that level, that can tell RNA which code is good or bad (kind of like Turing’s thesis that no general solution to the Entscheidungsproblem exists; to solve the halting problem, recourse must be made to a vantage outside the system — a non-logical step). In this way, RNA is functionally non-teleological as a matter of fact.
Nevertheless, these logical processes are “always already” radically situated. They exist at particular times and places surrounded by a sea of “life-problems”, i.e., dangers and opportunities that are themselves the effective results of non-teleological processes. The cumulative results of these reductively non-purposive interactions give rise to a new, emergent level of logic. This is the level of evolution by natural selection. (As you know, we’re still trying to figure out how this happened).
This new logic is determined by many things, most specifically the time-like trajectories of topological structure (mortality) and the transmission mechanism of encoded rules of development (DNA). Living structure can’t last forever; it has to be rebuilt episodically. To be rebuilt, though, it’s necessary to have in existence a faithful blueprint and a way to execute it.
We can interpret these as natural barriers to entry (and natural barriers to continued playing) in the game called life. When we factor in the iterative nature of the game and the fact that it has been going for a while, we can read into the results of this game — the facts of now — a kind of superstructural teleology: to transmit your genetic material you have to still be around, to still be around your DNA needed to have encoded a lot of minimal solutions (principle of parsimony) to a lot of recurring, reifiable life-problems when and as they were operative.
The slip happens when you forget that a) any teleological interpretation is merely an evidentially underdetermined retrospective reconstruction (to use Habermas’s phrase) of the developmental logic that led to a fact, and b) it is nothing more than a corruption of the concepts of algorithm, computation and emergence as they manifest in the biological realm. This kind of slip most often appears in arguments from necessity, rank and inevitable progress.
Still, adopting the standpoint of teleology can provide predictive power and great insight, and is most definitely ‘scientific’ when used appropriately. So to answer your question: more than short-hand, less than metaphysical proposition.
— JA · Mar 30, 10:22 PM · #
Why do you think an “absence of belief” reflects any kind of mental poverty?
Either you misread me or I misspoke; I am an atheist.
— Freddie · Mar 30, 10:57 PM · #
I must have misread what you were taking issue with. Apologies.
— James F. Elliott · Mar 30, 11:26 PM · #
JA:
I think that your emphasis on the word interpreting correctly highlights the hotspot. It seems to me that there is a level-of-abstraction issue at play here. I won’t try to recap the whole argument in a combox, but if you’re interested in my take, this article from NR lays out my take in a little detail on the algorithmic inetrprtation of evolution and its relation to teleology: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_18_59/ai_n27386004
The reason (or at least a reason) I’m diving in on this is that I’m writing a book that spends a lot of time on it, and I’m right in the middle of the section on the exact topic of the rleation of scientific method to teleology literally this week. Weird (or maybe not so weird).
— Jim Manzi · Mar 31, 01:34 PM · #
Jim, when I heard you were writing a book on this stuff, I searched and found that very article to see where you were coming from. It’s a very good article, and I have probably eight pages of notes on it stored in my Zotero. I’ll see if I can put it all together and post it on my information processor site. May be helpful, may not, but I’d be glad to put it up either way.
I’ve got two judicial opinions to write today, so it may not be up until tomorrow. I’ll let you know, though.
— JA · Mar 31, 02:50 PM · #
JA:
I’d love to see it. Feel free to email it to me at jim.manzi.nro@gmail.com if that’s easier.
— Jim Manzi · Mar 31, 09:02 PM · #