[I've continued this post since I posted it last night.]
Marilynne Robinson isn't totally useless, if only to argue with. Yes, I'm still slogging through When I Was a Child I Read Books, and I'm now in the second essay, "Imagination and Community," which contains this nugget on page 24:
From time to time I, as a professor in a public university, receive a form from the legislature asking me to make an account of the hours I spend working. I think someone ought to send a form like that to the legislators. The comparison might be very interesting.
But you know, lots of people could have written that. Having delivered herself of one pithy observation, Robinson returns to bloviating. On the same page:
In fact, we in America have done pretty well. By human standards, which admittedly are low.
Where will you find higher ones? Among paramecia? I suppose she means divine standards, since she goes on to prattle about the importance of "overlapping communities," but first she'd have to be able to find them.
I identify with my congregation, with my denomination, with Christianity, with the customs and institutions that express the human capacity for reverence, allowing for turbulence within these groups and phenomena. Since we are human beings, turbulence is to be expected ... Those of us who accept a historical tradition find ourselves being burdened with its errors and excesses, especially when we are pressed to make some account of them. I would suggest that those who reject the old traditions on those grounds are refusing to accept the fact that the tragic mystery of human nature has by no means played itself out, and that wisdom, which is almost always another name for humility, lies in accepting one's inevitable share in human fallibility [26-27].
The trouble with reverence is that it's almost always selective. The original Christian reverence, for example, entailed irreverence, to put it mildly, toward "the old traditions" of Judaism and the old gods of the "pagans." In that respect, as I've suggested before, the scientistic secularists at whom Robinson looks down her nose are arguably the true heirs not just of the primitive Church but of the fire-and-brimstone revivalists of the glory days of American religion. Like their religious predecessors, they take pleasure in knocking the stuffing out of Man's pretension: You think you're at the center of the universe? Ha! You think you're a special creation? Why, you're just descended from apes! "The wisdom of the world is foolishness before God," Paul gloated in his first epistle to the Corinthians (3:19), as Robinson must surely know, and that quip doesn't stand alone in the New Testament. He wasn't just talking about the worldly, but about "the Jews" to whom a crucified Messiah was a scandal (1 Corinthians 1:23). Humility is in notably short supply in the early Christian writers, as is civility. The first Christians gleefully threw out all kinds of traditions, which led to their being called atheists because they refused reverence to the old gods, and it wasn't for a century or more that some began to yearn for worldly philosophical respectability, and began mixing Plato into their theology. Robinson tries to smooth out these little "turbulences" in the service of her agenda, but they're important.
Later in the essay she mentions the social movements of the Sixties, but she doesn't seem to want to remember how disruptive they were, how at odds with the sweet reasonableness and civility and humility she values -- to say nothing of reverence for old traditions. "Just at that time the great social transformation began, set in motion by Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others, which called into doubt the whole system of discrimination that had governed most lives, not only in America but throughout the world" (29). Of course those "transformations" had begun long before, and it's no disparagement of Parks and King to point out that they didn't "set [them] in motion" but rode, like surfers, on waves that others had churned up. For someone who claims to value learning, Robinson is notably and tendentiously ignorant about her subjects. She really needs to attend to the beam in her own eye before poking at the specks in others'.
My own style of atheism avowedly steals from any older wisdom that looks helpful, whether it's called religious or not, since religion is a human invention, and I am heir to all human cultures, for better or worse. (So are you.) I agree with Robinson on the importance of humility, and I think that looking at what other human beings have said and thought and done will make you humble, because it's virtually impossible to find any bright new idea that wasn't thought of someone else before, probably a couple of thousand years ago. On one hand, my predecessors' feet of clay entitle me to look at their works critically; on the other, they remind me that I'm human too, and as prone to embarrassing error. Judge (as Walter Kaufmann modified Jesus' exhortation), so that you may be judged.
I'm not yet done with Marilynne Robinson, however. In "Freedom of Thought," the first essay in When I Was a Child I Read Books, she lays down the law on Religion.
Early in the essay, Robinson declares:
But the “physical” in this sense is only a disappearingly thin slice of being, selected, for our purposes, out of the totality of being by the fact that we perceive it as solid, substantial. We all know that if we were the size of atoms, chairs and tables would appear to us as loose clouds of energy. It seems to me very amazing that the arbitrarily selected “physical” world we inhabit is coherent and lawful. An older vocabulary would offer the word “miraculous” [10]
Would it? I’m not so sure. "Miraculous" is a word that has lost most of its meaning, from what I can tell. (See the quotation from David Hume near the beginning of this post.) In any case, Robinson falls right into the Shabby Friar’s fallacy here, which marvels that God in his wisdom so arranged matters that rivers and seas were placed adjacent to the larger cities and towns. This is related to the Creationist / Intelligent Design claim that the Creator arranged conditions in the Universe within the disappearingly thin slice of temperature and other physical constants that would enable the emergence of life -- but also to the popular evolutionist image of a series of figures, from Less Advanced (perhaps an apish Cave Man) to Most Advanced (a modern white man, of course).
It might surprise Robinson to know that I agree with her assertion that many critics erase "all evidence that religion has, anywhere and in any form, expressed or stimulated thought", though I don't agree that there's a conflict between that and what she calls the "anthropological bias" that "regards all religion as human beings acting out their nature and no more than that" (12), since acting out our nature seems to me to leave lots of room for development. And nothing she says begins to make a case that religion can't be explained fully as a human production.
This is the anthropologists’ answer to the question, why are people almost always, almost everywhere, religious.
Ah, when you concede that “almost,” you’ve got yourself in trouble already, because then you have to explain the exceptions, and Robinson is barreling along too quickly to pause for such trivia.
Another answer, favored by those who claim to be defenders of science, is that religion formed around the desire to explain what prescientific mankind could not account for. Again, this notion does not bear scrutiny. The literatures of antiquity are clearly about other business.
Except, as she admits, when they’re not. But even when they are, you've got all those literatures with their different gods and their different requirements. Subsuming all "religions" under Religion won't do, it really won't.
Some of these narratives are so ancient that they clearly existed before writing, though no doubt in the forms as we have them they were modified in being written down. Their importance in the development of human culture cannot be overstated. In antiquity people lived in complex city-states, carried out the work and planning required by primitive agriculture, built ships and navigated at great distances, traded, made law, waged war, and kept the records of their dynasties. But the one thing that seems to have predominated, to have laid out their cities and filled them with temples and monuments, to have established their identities and their cultural boundaries, to have governed their calendars and enthroned their kings, were the vivid, atemporal stories they told themselves about the gods, the gods in relation to humankind, to their city, to themselves [12-13].
Where do I begin to explain what is wrong with this paragraph? First, I suppose, “religion” is itself an eighteenth or nineteenth century concept, not something that the “ancient” people applied to their understandings and stories and rites. And we moderns haven’t stopped telling stories of gods or Big Men: the US has plenty of them, especially around election time but also in professional sports.
Second, stories are almost certainly far older than the written versions we have, because writing is a very recent invention compared to language itself. It’s fairly obvious that Robinson is thinking only about the Middle Eastern and East-Mediterranean “religions.” But that was only part of the world and of humanity. Isn’t it miraculous that her picture of human culture and “religion” is able to draw on that particular part of the world, and not China, or the Pacific, or the Australian aboriginals, or the pre-Columbian Americas? God must have wanted her to write this essay.
Finally, even in the part of the world she’s writing about, most people didn’t live in “complex city-states,” which like writing are a fairly recent development. Primitive agriculture predates the city-states. We know that pre-city people also had their stories to orient themselves in the world (or to orient the world around themselves), though of course we know less about them because they weren't written down.
It seems to me that people tell stories for their own sakes, simply because we like narratives. But like any other form of play, the stories we tell are not something completely separate from the real world: they emerge from our minds, and they are assembled from pieces of the world, however repurposed. (Coyote in American Indian story, for example, is partly a coyote, with certain human traits projected onto him, just as Bugs Bunny is only partly a rabbit. And gods are also projections of human traits; only later philosophers try, without success, to depersonalize them and turn them into principles.) It seems to me that because human beings love and need to find patterns and make connections, we put meanings into our stories, which may be about our kings and our cities but may also be about our next-door neighbor and his wife and children.
Meanwhile, it's not as if people ever stopped telling stories, so it's not clear to me why Robinson stresses the antiquity of those old tales. As I suggested earlier, there must have been still older stories that flourished and faded before the invention of writing, perhaps for thousands of years, and yet are lost to us forever. We moderns and postmoderns (terms which also allude to myths about the nature of history and time) still have our totems and idols and spiritual beings, and our origin stories that just happen to culminate in Us, the goal toward which creation was always striving. I’m not sure that the corporate sponsors and logos are any more debased than those of the great kings of antiquity, who may simply look more profound to us now because they’re so distant from us in time. At least some of those great tombs and temples were built to glorify the divine kings who commanded their construction, but who were not more divine than the immortal, invisible Corporate Persons who put their names on stadiums, museums, and other great public works today. As Terry Pratchett once wrote, wisdom is the only thing that looks bigger the farther away it is.
In Craig Womack's Red on Red (Minnesota, 1999), he writes about the function of stories in American Indian societies, pointing out that when "folk tales" and other oral materials are collected in print anthologies, the use of those stories is lost with their cultural context. A storyteller in an oral culture tells his or her tale to an audience that is present for the telling, who knows the mythos (or backstory) of the tale; he or she might choose a story or slant the telling to make it refer to contemporary persons or events, but there's always a larger context in which the story is given meaning by the teller and the audience. For Womack,
I would argue that oral traditions – legends and myths, if you will – performed in their cultural contexts have always been nationalistic and are told for the purpose of cultivating a political consciousness. If one considers the comments of elders telling stories in The World and Way of the Creek People, virtually all of them indicate the purpose of the stories is to inculcate a sense of Creekness in Creek listeners – what it means to form a clan, a town, a nation; their storytelling constitutes an act of Creek survival. Creek nationalism is created through a Creek narrative; the two from an interdependency, not an oppositional discourse. Although Adams is surely justified in critiquing the way “myths and legends” are often used as a diversion from political discussion, this is not an inherent characteristic of the discourse itself. “Legends and myths” might provide strategies for nationalism instead of functioning as a distraction, and this may be more closely linked to their original purpose [61-2].
My disagreement with Womack here is that, on his own account, at least some of those oral traditions are older than European contact, so even if they were 'originally' about nationalism, they would have referred to different enemies in different times. A story's "original purpose" can't be known, especially in an oral culture where there's no way to record earlier versions and contexts from a hundred, a thousand, two thousand years ago. A story's "original purpose" is both unknown and unimportant; what matters is what it is made to mean by each teller and each audience.
And then too, none of this is specific to American Indians, as Womack is unhappily aware. The invading Europeans had their own legends and myths told for the purpose of cultivating a political consciousness and inculcating a sense of what it means to build a nation: Columbus, the Pilgrim Fathers, Pocahantas and John Smith, the first Thanksgiving, the glorious patriots of the Revolution, and so on -- all told and shaped, and eventually written and published, to provide an origin myth for America, the land of the free and the home of the slave. Anyone who looks at the history of the interpretation of the Christian Bible can see the same process at work: the old stories are pulled and pushed to fit the needs of the moment, some are discreetly ignored, others are brought up front and embellished. Political candidates in their campaign speeches seek to situate themselves in the glorious story of our nation's history. Partisans want a version of history taught to schoolchildren that will make them feel proud to be Americans. And so on. Stories are still very much part of human communication and connection.
The disagreement isn't over whether to tell stories, but over which stories, how they're to be told, and by whom. Womack mentions a scholar who "points out an important characteristic of the Creek nation – its tendency to 'swallow up' smaller groups that moved into Creek country (these groups would often become assimilated Creek, most eventually adopting the Creek language)… This 'swallowing up' effect is important because it demonstrates that Creeks were able to view nationalism as a dynamic, rather than a static, process" (30-31). Am I being unduly cynical if I wonder how this dynamic process was viewed by those who were "swallowed up"?
That takes me back to Marilynne Robinson, who points out that the Paul, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin all "quote the pagans with admiration. Perhaps only in Europe was one form of religion ever so dominant that the fact of other forms could constitute any sort of problem" (12). That's a one-sided distortion of the way Christian writers used "the pagans". (It also conveniently forgets that at about the same time, Muslims were translating the "pagans" into Arabic and learning from them -- indeed, it was through the Muslims that Christian Europe 'rediscovered' numerous pagan thinkers.) The attractive aspects of the old religions they saw much as Robinson says modern secularists see religion: as a primitive, inchoate foreshadowing of the perfect truth of Christ (or Science), just as the parts they disliked were blamed on demonic deceptions or the influence of the flesh. The tendency she attributes to moderns "to make a sort of slurry of religious narratives, asserting the discovery of universals that don't actually exist among them" (ibid.), isn't new either: it can be seen in someone like Herodotus, puzzling over the different customs and gods they have in Foreign Parts, or in the syncretism that led to the gods of one nation being identified with the gods of others: Venus with Aphrodite, or Artemis with Isis, or Alexander the Great with Ammon.
Robinson's a curious character. We've all encountered the young iconoclast who's just discovered the different creation and universal-flood myths of the ancient Middle East, or the dying and rising god myths that bear a vague resemblance to the Christ story, and triumphantly declares that Christianity stole all these motifs from the earth-based religions! Such kids, whose patron saint is C. S. Lewis, are prime material for midlife re-conversions to Evangelicalism, or sometimes Eastern Orthodoxy. Robinson seems to have taken the next step: having picked up some popularizations of late twentieth-century physics, she's ready to declare Rationality a myth, and Science a parasite on spirituality! I'll agree with her to a point: scientists and rationalists have their own myths, and their own disinclination to look at the pre-rational roots of their disciplines and methods. But the flaws in the neo-Darwinian synthesis don't mean that Genesis is a true account of the origin of the world. As literary company, alas, Robinson is inferior to Lewis, and much closer than I suspect she'd like to think to Francis Schaeffer or his angry son Frank. As a partial corrective I'd recommend to her Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (ET Chicago, 1988), who's much better-natured and wiser besides:
[R]eason has not won (the problem of myth was forgotten rather than resolved); it was not fighting for a good cause (the principle of “current things” was the bastion of all prejudices – in its name Epicurus and Saint Augustine denied the existence of the Antipodes); and, finally, it was not reason that was engaged in the battle, but only a program of truth whose presuppositions are so strange that they elude us or astound us when we do grasp them. One never possesses a complete vision of truth, falsehood, myth, or superstition, or evidence of them, an index sui. Thucydides believed in oracles, Aristotle, in dream divination; Pausanias obeyed his dreams [74].
I may have made a mistake today: I checked out Marilynne Robinson's new book, When I Was a Child I Read Books (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2012), from the library. Another blogger almost read it, for much the same reason I checked it out: gender parity. But I have other reasons: one is that, since I saw right away that it's a collection of meditations on the state of America today, I wanted to see what, if anything, Robinson will have to say about her man Barack, whom she supported passionately in 2008.
Reading the book's opening pages on the bus, I noticed right away that she was being careful not to name names.
We have the passive pious, who feel they have proved their moral refinement in declaring the whole enterprise bankrupt, and we have the active pious, who agree with them, with the difference in that they see some hope in a hastily arranged liquidation of cultural assets [2].
Excuse me? I'm not sure who she means by "the passive pious"; the Christian Right, as Robinson must know, formerly rejected political involvement, but they were hardly "passive" even then: they put pressure on schools not to teach Darwin, they opposed school desegregation (were they in the mobs that harassed and threatened black kids attending "white" schools?), they built a network of segregated Christian schools to get around civil rights legislation. Are nuns who work with the poor "active" or "passive"?
What if we have ceased to aspire to Democracy, or even democracy? What if the words "Democracy" and "America" are severed, and no longer imply each other? It is not unusual now to hear that we have lost our values, that we have lost our way. In the desperation of the moment, justified or not, certain among us have turned on our heritage, the country that has emerged out of generations of attention to public education, public health, public safety; access to suffrage, equality under law. It turns out, by their reckoning, that the country they call the greatest on earth has spent most of its history acting against its own (great) nature, and that the enhancements of life it has provided for the generality of its people, or to phrase it more democratically, that the people have provided for themselves, have made its citizens weak and dependent [2].
"Certain among us"? If it weren't for the second half of the last sentence I quoted, I'd have thought that Robinson was talking about those of us who emerged out of generations of attention to public education to criticize our country and its government for its violence and oppression, not just at home but around the world. But then she makes it more or less clear that she's talking about those "conservatives" who want to dismantle the social programs that have made better the lives of the mass of citizens. A better-informed critic would point out that those "enhancements of life" were always controversial and bitterly opposed by powerful interests, often in the name of "Democracy" itself; it's the conflict itself that is our heritage.
Our national ancestors generally managed, by the standards then prevailing, to avoid encouraging the same [inter-religious] conflicts here. Now it is seen as un-American in certain quarters to reject participation in the bitter excitements that can surround religious difference. This is a critically important instance of self-declared patriots attacking the very substance of our heritage [3].
"In certain quarters." This may have been written before the Roman Catholic hierarchy claimed that being required to supply health insurance to their employees was liberal persecution. This was disingenuous at best, but it has to be disentangled by reason and evidence, not innuendoes. But Robinson is disingenuous herself, for "our national ancestors" generally came to the New World, not for religious freedom, but for the freedom to persecute others. As one of them put it, religious tolerance was "Satan's doctrine." True, the religious wars that ravaged Europe didn't happen here, but that wasn't because of the colonists' enlightened views on difference.
Something else struck me about Marilynne Robinson's "The Tyranny of Petty Coercion," which I criticized before. She wrote there (The Death of Adam pp. 258-9):
I am myself a liberal. By that I mean I believe society exists to nurture and liberate the human spirit, and that large-mindedness and openhandedness are the means by which these things are to be accomplished. I am not ideological. By that I mean I believe opportunities of every kind should be seized upon to advance the well-being of people, especially in insuring them decent wages, free time, privacy, education, and health care, concerns essential to their full enfranchisement.
To paraphrase Henry Kissinger trying to appease Richard Nixon, there are liberals and then there are liberals. Trying to solve the problem by definition isn't the most responsible way to sort out the difficulties we face. People who call themselves liberals often mean very different things by the label, from "classical liberals" who pretend they agree with Adam Smith (but don't) on free markets, and who accept Lockean notions of the atomized individual and the social contract, to people like Robinson with a mushy, kissyface huggybear conception of what "society" should do. I'm not saying they shouldn't call themselves liberals -- both meanings are valid enough as labels, and others besides. Remember Paul Feyerabend's sly dig at Ernest Gellner: "Thus, being a liberal, I do not have to admit that Puritans have a chance of finding truth.All I am required to do is to let them have their say and not to stop them by institutional means.But of course I may write pamphlets against them and ridicule them for their strange opinions." Feyerabend's conception of liberalism was valid too.
Now, I basically agree with the values Robinson assigns to liberalism. I'm just not not sure they are liberal, or that it matters. Rather than standing up for "liberalism," I'd rather stand up for what it represents -- decent wages, education, free time, and so on. Getting tangled up in the word "liberal" is a diversion, though of course many opponents of decent wages, free time, education, and the rest will want a diversion ("Oh, you must be a liberal!"), and it takes a certain amount of focus to stay on topic. Robinson herself has trouble doing so -- notice her claim that she's not "ideological." Maybe she's using the word as code for "leftist"? In any case there's nothing wrong with being ideological.
Robinson goes on to criticize "liberalism, not in principle but as a movement", and to deplore the capitulation of the Democratic Congress (which she tellingly identifies with liberalism or at least "the liberal movement") to Bush, and to "the embrace of illiberalism" as though this were some new development. "These solons," she opines, "were cowed not so much by being out of power as being out of style." (Things didn't change when the Democrats regained a majority in Congress in 2006, after this essay was published.)
Now, Robinson is old enough to remember the Reagan administration, when Democrats and liberals also capitulated, gratefully, happy to leave the twisted values of the Sixties behind. Of course the pattern is much older than that. Liberals have such a long history of abandoning their high principles when the going gets tough that they've made it part of the definition of being a liberal, along with rising up boldly from time to time to lament the degradation of the noble name Liberal by the spineless and the wicked. (Another part of the historical pattern is liberals going wild over some new, charismatic young politician and projecting all their fantasies onto him, defending him against all critics -- especially the ideologues of the Left -- as he carries on with the illiberal agenda.)
It is sad to consider how much first-rate courage must be devoted in this world to struggling out of the toils of sheer pettiness. The Saudi women who first drove automobiles risked and suffered penalties, overcame inhibitions, and shattered norms, heroic in their defiance of an absurd conviction. We have our own Rosa Parks. That such great courage should have been required to challenge such petty barriers [!] is a demonstration of the power of social consensus. ...
"Our own Rosa Parks." I wonder if Parks considered herself a liberal; I don't think Martin Luther King Jr. considered himself one. White liberals were notorious for cautioning moderation to the Civil Rights Movement more than for supporting it. Robinson really should lay aside the theology for a time and study some 20th century American history.
For more historical perspective, there's this cozy conversation between American right-wing icon William Buckley and Brit literatus Malcolm Muggeridge. In the 1960s Muggeridge made a splashy conversion to Christianity (and later to Roman Catholicism), which accounts for Buckley's assumption -- not always borne out by reality, as you can see -- that he and Muggeridge were on the same page.
This part, for example:
MUGGERIDGE: When I say that I am a man of the Left, I mean by that that I am instinctively against authority, and on the side -- or hope that I, I always wish to be on the side -- on the weaker side.
BUCKLEY: Why would that make you distinctively a leftist?
MUGGERIDGE: Because what is good in the Left position is precisely that. What's bad is its connection, and sometimes identification, with what you in America would call a liberal view of life. That's the bad side. The good side is an instinctive, almost chivalrous feeling, that you should be on the side of the weak.
BUCKLEY: Well, would you say that there is a curious, then, ah ah, congruity between the Left as defined in England and the Conservative as defined in America, who is singularly the opponent of authority, especially state authority?
MUGGERIDGE: I've always had a considerable sympathy with the Right in America ...
Watching stuff like this reminds me why I'm baffled when people, including liberals and leftists, pay tribute to Buckley's great intellect and shrewd debating skills. (Plus, he totally made conservatism cool.) Muggeridge professes to admire his writing, but when I see them talking together I sense a certain condescension toward Buckley, even a mild embarrassment at his shallowness, quickly passed over as Muggeridge (a much better speaker) moves on to his own next point. Buckley's claim that the Right is the opponent of authority in America is, of course, laughable -- as a Roman Catholic he was always a supporter of authority, and as far as the state went I'm not aware that he ever opposed its use of force against foreigners or, within our borders, uppity Negroes. (According to Katrina van den Heuvel's eulogy, he turned against Bush's war on Iraq, but only safely after the fact -- "If I had known back then in February 2003 what we know now ..." -- and did oppose the surge.)
But that's not the issue. Condenscension is. It's probably a good thing for the upper classes to be "on the side of the weak," at least when you consider the alternative, but there still seems to be assumption that the better classes should be running things. Most monarchs would have claimed the same thing: protect the weak, don't let them protect themselves. After all, it's the rulers against whom the weak must usually protect themselves. Robinson also writes from the perspective of enfranchising the lower orders from above, though she is more tolerant than Buckley of those who struggle on their own behalf against "petty barriers" like Jim Crow. I'll be more inclined to take her principles seriously when she starts applying them to Barack Obama.
One thing I wondered about but didn't try to fit into my earlier post was how Marilynne Robinson felt about Barack Obama. I suppose I could have predicted that she'd be a fan -- indeed, she's "passionate" about Obama, and donated $1000 to his election campaign.
When the conversation veers toward President Barack Obama, another Midwesterner recently relocated to the East coast, Robinson leans forward like a slightly giddy teenager. She praises the president for "riding a wave of interest in public speaking—the oldest tradition in American life." The admiration, it turns out, is mutual. "He has a Facebook thing," she says—quickly adding that it was her students who found the page online, not her. Sure enough, Obama's personal page on the social network lists Robinson's novel Gilead as one of his "Favorite Books," alongside the Bible and Lincoln's Collected Writings.
Ah, public speaking, the oldest tradition in American life, and just as prone to hucksterism as public writing. I did some searching but couldn't find anything more substantial than this remark, and this was the only comment I could find on President, rather than Candidate Obama; during the campaign she was mainly tooting Iowa's horn, for defying stereotypes about the Midwest and supporting a black candidate. Robinson's enthusiasm for Obama seems to be merely formal. But the trouble with George W. Bush was not that he was a poor public speaker, though it wouldn't surprise me if that was a major complaint of Robinson's. I can't speak about all her writing, but she seems to be more concerned about form than content.
Take this famous exchange.
I remember watching the Bentsen/Quayle debate at the time, and part of me loved Lloyd Bentsen -- or more precisely, I loved his performance. The benign grandfatherly manner. The way he actually seemed to be listening to Quayle's babbling, smiling ruefully, making notes to himself, and then making a quiet, devastating reply that answered what Quayle had been saying. That, it seems to me, is the way debate should be done, but it rarely seems to be done that way in the US. (Britain, famously, is different.)
I watched a couple of presidential debates after that, and found that they didn't equal the standard Bentsen had set. I recall a news pundit remarking on Bentsen's putdown of Quayle, saying that it had surely been prepared. Of course it was! The odd thing, given the heavy preparation for these little shows, is how unprepared the candidates generally seem. But that may be part of the intention, especially since the pundits declared Quayle the winner in his encounter with Bentsen, because he was so ineffective.
The corporate media don't like smart people, even minimally smart ones. In The Bush Dyslexicon Mark Crispin Miller discusses, and quotes at length (pp. 68-70), an ABC News bull session from October 22, 2000, in which Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson complained that talking about substance was too "cerebral," preferring to talk about image and likability. Which isn't that far from gushing because Barack Obama was "riding a wave of interest in public speaking." That's very nice, but what was he saying?
I don't think debate has ever been popular, in the US or elsewhere, because, as Lady Augusta Bracknell remarked, "I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing." Or, as many of my contemporaries remark, "debating on teh internet is like competing in the special olympics - even if u win, your still retarded lol lol lmao!"
She has never had a live encounter with Dawkins. "I'm a little nervous about live encounters, because everything's a shouting match. I'm thinking of television of course [she doesn't own a television], but so much of it is who can bully, in effect. Not that I couldn't." She smiles dangerously.
Well, no, debate is not a shouting match, nor is it bullying. Many Americans may think it is, and American corporate news networks may like it that way, but the clip of Bentsen and Quayle shows that it shouldn't be. For that matter, you can find clips of debates at the Oxford Union online, such as this, or this. For someone who appeals to intellectual traditions, Robinson seems oddly ignorant of this one. Maybe someday I might aspire to a live debate -- though I prefer written ones -- with Marilynne Robinson (he smiled dangerously).
I recently saw a new book by Marilynne Robinson, the novelist and essayist who wrote a good (though uneven) dissection of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. (The review used to be available online, but now you can only see it if you're a Harper's subscriber.) The new book is called Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self; I hadn't seen the subtitle until I looked the book up on Amazon, and it looks like something you'd see in The Onion, but apparently she's serious. The book is apparently based on her Terry Lectures, just like Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, which I finally found embarrassing and unreadable. Robinson appears to be a more careful, rigorous thinker than Eagleton, but I'm not ready to spend money on the new book, and it's not in the library yet.
So I took one easy way out. Robinson's earlier book of essays, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (Picador, 2005) was in at the public library. The last essay, "The Tyranny of Petty Coercion," looked interesting. And so it was. Robinson is concerned with the courage to express dissenting opinions, which she seems to think is in shorter supply now than in younger, happier days. "Physical courage," she writes (255), "is remarkably widespread in this population. There seem always to be firefighters to deal with the most appalling conflagrations and doctors to deal with the most novel and alarming illnesses. It is by no means to undervalue courage of this kind to say it is perhaps expedited by being universally recognized as courage. Those who act on it can recognize the impulse and act confidently, even at the greatest risk to themselves." Those who act on it, I'd add, can also expect respect and praise for doing so, unlike those who say or write unpopular things.
Moral and intellectual courage [she continues] are not in nearly so flourishing a state, even though the risks they entail -- financial or professional disadvantage, ridicule, ostracism -- are comparatively minor. ... Indeed, consensus is so powerful and so effectively defended that I suspect it goes back to earliest humanity, when our tribes were small and vulnerable, and schism and defection were a threat to survival. But it should never be forgotten how much repression and violence consensus can support, or how many crimes it has justified.
It is true that in most times and places physical courage and moral and intellectual courage have tended to merge, since dungeons, galleys, and stakes have been extensively employed in discouraging divergent viewpoints. For this reason our own society, which employs only mild disincentives against them and in theory positively admires them, offers a valuable opportunity for the study of what I will call the conservation of consensus, that is, the effective enforcement of consensus in those many instances where neither reason nor data endorse it, where there are no legal constraints supporting it, and where there are no penalties for challenging it that persons of even moderate brio would consider deterrents [256].
Whew! She does run on, almost as much as I do. Anyway, she then offers an example of what she's complaining about:
Here is an instance: for some time the word "bashing" has been used to derail criticism of many kinds, by treating as partisan or tendentious statements that are straightforwardly true or false. To say that the disparity between rich and poor in this country exceeds any previously known in American history ... is to say something falsifiable -- that is, for practical purposes, verifiable, and in any case arguable. But such statements are now routinely called "Bush bashing." In other words, something that is objectively true or false is dismissed as the slur of a hostile subgroup. Perfectly sensible people flinch at the thought that they might sound a trifle Jacobin, and they are shamed out of saying what they believe to be true in the plainest sense of the word "true." Nor is it the critics alone who lose their bearings when these strategies are employed. Those who identify with the group toward whom the criticisms are directed -- in this case, the present administration -- can hear irrational attack where they might otherwise hear a challenge to their values or to their theories and methods.
So the exchanges that political life entirely depends on, in which people attempt in good conscience to establish practical truth and then candidly assign value to it, simply do not take place [257].
As I read this, I couldn't help wondering if Robinson has ever read the writings of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman on the ways in which dissenting views are muffled in a society which does not use violence to suppress them. Nina Eliasoph's Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge, 1998) also addresses this problem, as did George Orwell's preface to the original publication of Animal Farm, which was not published until 1972. Quite a number of people have noticed and studied conformism, self-censorship, and the ways in which such behavior is produced, encouraged, and enforced. The "exchanges that political life entirely depends on" rarely take place, and it's an uphill battle to make them happen at all.
I'd also point out that the tactic Robinson deplores is ancient. The Romans dismissed the early Christians as atheists, and the Bible (both Testaments) is among other things an anthology of bad arguments against opponents, be they "pagans" or other Christians or Jews. Jennifer Wright Knust's Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (Columbia, 2006)
describes how,
From biblical tradition, to Greek invective, to early Christian polemics, "the opponents" -- be they gentiles or slaves or barbarians or heretics -- were universally said to devote themselves to sexual excess. Though there may have been licentious gentiles, slaves, rulers, philosophers, barbarians, heretics, or Christians, the sources I have been exploring will not help us find them. Instead, these sources indicate a widespread attempt to employ moralizing claims regarding sexual behavior and gender deviance to validate authority. Still, there is a sense in which all this sex talk was actually about sex: by strategically claiming superiority on the basis of a strict sexual morality, early Christians were under tremendous pressure to display the sophrosyne they had defined for themselves. Therefore, all of this highly charged sex talk was necessary. Christians had to be convinced to live up to sophrosyne, displaying it for all to see. Moreover, the content of in-Christ self-discipline required frequent renegotiation and reiteration in light of the changing circumstances of the first Christians. Charges against the heretics provide further clues regarding the contested claims of Christian sophrosyne as well as the imagined constitution of the group [160].
On the other hand, many of Bush's liberal critics were more obsessed by his Texas accent and his inability to pronounce "nuclear" the way they thought he should, as well as his often-incoherent speaking style, than by his actual crimes. They welcomed the advent of Barack Obama because, as so many said, it was such a relief to finally have a President who wasn't an embarrassment as a public speaker! If anything, this was a convenient way of ignoring Obama's actual stated policies, and those who criticized Obama from the left were also accused of bad faith by his devotees, just Bush's critics were. But I've dealt with this issue often before.
I suppose Robinson is aware of all this, and is only citing instances from the Bush II administration as a contemporary example rather than a novelty, but some acknowledgment that she's not a lone voice crying in the wilderness would be nice.
Which brings me to my next point. No doubt some people were inhibited from criticizing the Bush administration by the fear of being accused of "Bush-bashing," but many more were not. There was no shortage of criticism and attack during those long eight years, though admittedly not as much, or as substantial, as one might have liked in those media we call Mainstream. What actually happened (another verifiable, or at least arguable, claim about truth) was that many critical voices were excluded by the corporate media, but 1) there were probably more alternative venues for criticism than at any other time I can remember in my lifetime, especially on the Internet, but even so there was plenty of criticism of Bush at a personal level, in letters to the editor, and elsewhere, undeterred by the accusation of "bashing"; and 2) the corporate media have never been friendly to critical voices; I think there was more rational political discussion going on during the Bush years than there was during the 1960s on Vietnam or the Civil Rights Movement. You don't have to read Chomsky and Herman's writings to know this, but they're convenient, well-known (and therefore frequently misrepresented and demonized) and well-documented; many other students have covered the same ground, with much the same results.
But Robinson is really aiming at something else, I think: the claim that what one is doing and saying, though many other people are doing and saying it, is in fact hardly being said or done by anyone, and therefore one is speaking out at great personal risk, if only risk of being accused of Bush- or Obama-bashing or of Political Correctness.
This is a time when it actually requires a certain courage to declare oneself a liberal, even among presumptively like-minded people. That might seem a minor act after the instances I have just cited, in which people defied prejudice, custom, and law. But the purely arbitrary nature of this little coercion isolates the impulse to enforce consensus, even when absolutely nothing is at stake for the enforcers and the one subject to coercion risks no penalty -- except the embarrassment of seeming not to know that a word is passe, that posture is, well, as of now a little ridiculous [260].
Does it "actually" require a certain courage to declare oneself a liberal, "even among presumptively like-minded people", in these troubled times? I don't know, since I'm not a liberal. Nor, living as I do in a college town among the presumptively like-minded, have I needed much courage to declare myself gay, atheist, and of leftist opinions. But I have often noticed people, like Robinson, telling the world how courageous they are for stating their views, often in front of audiences of the presumptively like-minded. And I'll bet you can guess what comes next.
To illustrate this point, I will make a shocking statement: I am a Christian. This ought not to startle anyone. It is likely to be at least demographically true of an American of European ancestry. I have a strong attachment to the Scriptures, and to the theology, music, and art Christianity has inspired. My most inward thoughts and ponderings are formed by the narratives and traditions of Christianity. I expect them to engage me on my deathbed [260-261].
Parenthetically, I'd like to point out that much of what Robinson says here is true of me, and I'm an atheist: I also have a strong attachment to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, etc. and they (along with the other cultural products of Western civilization -- which would be a good idea, as Gandhi quipped) inform the way I think. (See, for example, the poems I wrote using the Bible and Christianity as source material.) But then, I could say the same of Greek and Roman "narratives and traditions," and I daresay so could Robinson. The philosopher Walter Kaufmann said the same of Judaism, which he contended with even long after he'd ceased to be observant or to believe in Yahweh. If I'd grown up in China, the same would be true for me with respect to Chinese narratives and traditions. What Robinson is doing is sort of like bragging that she's attached to the English language, simply because she grew up in an English-speaking country.
The reason this tactic annoys me, I think, is that I associate it mainly with bigots and other reactionaries, like the people on Facebook who declare that they are Christians and dare you to copy the same declaration to your status, only a few will have the courage -- will you? When I declared that I was an atheist in response to one of these, they attacked me for denying their right to believe. I guess they didn't have the courage to declare their faith in Christ unless absolutely everybody around them agreed with them. (Given their beliefs, they should worry, considering what the gospels show Jesus saying about those who will not acknowledge him before men.)
Over the years many a good soul has let me know by one means or another that this living out of the religious/mystical/aesthetic/intellectual tradition that is so essentially compelling to me is not, shall we say, cool. ... Now, I do feel fairly confident that I know what religion is. I have spent decades informing myself about it, an advantage I can claim over any of my would-be rescuers. I am a mainline Protestant, a.k.a. a liberal Protestant, as these same people know. I do not by any means wear my religion on my sleeve. I am extremely reluctant to talk about it at all, chiefly because my belief does not readily reduce itself to simple statements [261].
Again: Hey, most of this is true of me too! Robinson's claim reminds me of an exchange I once saw between William F. Buckley and Malcolm Muggeridge on Buckley's TV show, where Buckley said basically the same thing as Robinson says here, and Muggeridge said that he found that people were intensely interested when they found out he was a Christian. (Hey, here it is! Starting at about 2:55; Muggeridge responds at about 4:30.) Maybe the reaction you get depends on your own attitude? (Muggeridge suggests as much, very tactfully.) But I'd never invite Buckley to a dinner party in the first place, and I'm having my doubts about Robinson.
The question has been put to me very directly: Am I not afraid to be associated with religious people? These nudges would have their coercive effect precisely because those who want to put me right know that I am not a fundamentalist. That is, I am to avoid association with religion completely or else be embarrassed by punitive association with beliefs I do not hold. What sense does that make? What good does it serve? [261].
This is also familiar to me, especially as a gay man. I've often been asked whether I'm not worried about being judged by those crazy Gay Pride Marches, for example. But it is also familiar in the context of the "New Atheism." As I've written before, many of my fellow atheists are an embarrassment to me, and I'm still not always sure what to do about it. (Except, I guess, to keep on learning, and take pot shots at my fellow atheists when they say especially stupid things.) But as Robinson wrote in her review of Dawkins, “The nineteenth-century abolitionist, feminist, essayist, and ordained minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson made the always timely point that, in comparing religions, great care must be taken to consider the best elements of one with the best of the other, and the worst with the worst, to avoid the usual practice of comparing, let us say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with the Golden Rule.” And as I wrote of her remarks, the question then arises of how to tell which are the best elements and which the worst, both in Christianity and in atheism. I suspect that one reason why Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett have gotten so much media attention is that they are clowns and yahoos, which the corporate media love. A more informed and nuanced discussion of the issues is too boring for the corporate media, which prefer soundbytes to analysis.
This is only one instance of a very pervasive phenomenon, a pressure toward concessions no one has a right to ask. These are concessions courage would refuse if it were once acknowledged that a minor and insidious fear is the prod that coaxes us toward conforming our lives, and even our thoughts, to norms that are effective markers of group identity precisely because they are shibboleths, a contemporary equivalent of using the correct fork. ...
The present dominance of aspersion and ridicule in American public life is a reflex of the fact that we are assumed to want, and in many cases perhaps do want, attitude much more than information. If an unhealthy percentage of the population gets its news from Jay Leno or Rush Limbaugh, it is because they are arbiters of attitude. They instruct viewers as to what, within their affinity groups, it is safe to say and cool to think [262].
"The present dominance"? I see no reason to think that what Robinson is talking about is anything new. It was true when I was young, and seems to have been true long before that. (I'm presently reading Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which shows the same processes of aspersion and ridicule being used very effectively in English life at the end of the 18th century.) But what baffles me is that Robinson is writing as though she only just figured this out, and she's eight years my senior. Well, maybe she did. Maybe she spent most of her life sheltered in "mainline Protestant" circles, and never had to try to have a discussion with people who differed with her on basic issues. But if so, that undercuts her stance as a longtime observer of the American political scene, distressed by its degeneration into aspersions and attitudes.
And finally, is it just me, or is there something of the very attitude she deplores in her own reaction to those silly billies who are so shallow as to disrespect "the religious/mystical/aesthetic/intellectual tradition that is so essentially compelling to me"? Don't they see that she's the one who's really cool after all? But I'm sure it's totally uncool of me to point that out.
P.S. Hey, Robinson is going to be teaching a workshop on theological writing at Princeton this summer. That's what happens when you make shocking statements about your faith in today's attitude-ridden secular society. For those who want to be in with the in crowd ...
