The Amplifier
Some more on that terrific Simon Blackburn article ‘Religion and Respect’. So much of it is so exactly what I think myself, and have been saying here with tedious iteration – naturally I think it’s terrific. But it is, all the same.
But, I argued to myself, why should I
“respect” belief systems that I do not share? I would not be expected to respect the beliefs
of flat earthers or those of the people who believed that the Hale-Bopp comet was a recycling facility for dead Californians, and killed themselves in order to join it. Had my
host stood up and asked me to toast the Hale-Bopp hopefuls, or to break bread or some
such in token of fellowship with them, I would have been just as embarrassed and indeed
angry.
Just so. We’re expected (all but coerced, at times) to ‘respect’ some beliefs, but not others.
‘Respect’, of course is a tricky term…The word seems to span a spectrum from simply not interfering, passing by on
the other side, through admiration, right up to reverence and deference. This makes it
uniquely well-placed for ideological purposes.
Exactly. As do words like faith, and community, and spiritual – words that span a spectrum and mean different things for different purposes. It is necessary to be always, permanently, without fail, tirelessly vigilant about and attentive to words like that. They have designs on us (which is to say, people who resort to them have designs on us). It is essential to foil their knavish tricks.
People may start out by insisting on
respect in the minimal sense, and in a generally liberal world they may not find it too
difficult to obtain it. But then what we might call respect creep sets in, where the request
for minimal toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellowfeeling,
or esteem, and finally deference and reverence.
Bingo. Respect creep – that’s exactly it. (And come to think of it, it also makes a nice nickname for Galloway – but that’s another story.) There’s a huge difference between respect in the sense of leave me alone, and respect in the sense of see me and my beliefs as special and devout and good and superior. The first does not entail the second. Crucial point.
In postmodernist writings on religion, it is the done thing to distinguish between
theology and ‘onto-theology’, or religion and ‘onto-religion’. Onto-theology makes
existence claims. It takes religious language in the same spirit in which people calling
themselves scientific realists take science. It makes claims about what exists, and these
claims are more or less reasonable and convincing, and when they are true they point to
explanation of the way things are in one respect or another…In more sophisticated circles, onto-theology is old hat. Instead we should see
religion in the light of poetry, symbol, myth, practice, emotion and attitude, or in general
a stance towards the ordinary world, the everyday world around us…
Yes. We’ve seen that ‘sophisticated’ line more than once. I’ve been known to call it harsh names. In fact, amusingly, I made a note while reading page 11 that I would put it more strongly than SB does: I would call it a cheat. On page 15, SB does exactly that, which made me laugh a good deal. Snap!
But equally perhaps ‘God exists’ functions largely as a license to demand respect
creep. It turns up an amplifier, and what it amplifies is often the meanest and most
miserable side of human nature. I want your land, and it enables me to throw bigger and
better tantrums, ones that you just have to listen to, if I find myself saying that God wants
me to want your land. A tribe wants to enforce the chastity of its women, and the words
of the supernatural work to terrify them into compliance.
Brilliant image. Tantrum-amplifier, threat-amplifier, enforcement-amplifier.
I think
that the ontological imaginings do their work at a slightly different place. They work to
close off questions and doubts, and in effect to fend off reason. They cement a particular
way of associating ‘ought’ and ‘is’ and insulate it from criticism…By closing its eyes to this bit, expressive
theology in fact repudiates everything that makes religious language the power that it is.
Yet again – just so. But you’re going to get tired of reading me saying ‘Exactly,’ so I’ll stop. That’s only a fraction of the ‘exactly’s in the article. I give it my personal secular award for today.
When faced with a ‘demand for respect’, I’ve always replied that courtesy is granted, but respect earned. I like the term ‘respect creep’, kudos to Blackburn for that one. You find it most of all, of course, in the phrase ‘respect for authority’. Children should show more respect for authority, blah, blah, soldiers should respect their superior officers, et caetera, et caetera. Well, no, they shouldn’t: they’ve got brains for a reason.
Theists must respect Blackburn’s arguments.
I’m rather surprised at your enthusiasm, OB. I found that a very unphilosophical exercize in avoiding any data — as in, the sociological meaning of respect, how the word is used other than in instances one makes up off the top of one’s head, etc. — and therefore any attempt to probe how a certain characteristic of an ethos translates into a rhetoric. Since such things are ‘stances’ towards the world, which is apparently something Blackburn, by some superpower, can dispense with, I suppose he didn’t feel the need for mere data. To my mind, this is fiction creep — the philosophic use of an imaginary situation which is then stretched to make a semantic, or, in Blackburn’s case, sociological point.
On the ethos of respect, and its relationship to honor, I’d see Fox Butterfield’s book, All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence for a starter. As for the Enlightenment theory of respect in argument — that one preserve the integrity of one’s opponents arguments, rather than making a silly composite of them and claiming boldly that the composite exists — I rather appreciate that tradition. Blackburn is a funny man — on the one hand, it won’t do to talk about symbols or poetry when it comes to God, he wants the straight facts; and on the other hand, he makes several claims about the existence of things like “respect creep” that can only be, well, symbols and poetry. I guess he thinks there are no facts about stances, so he can make it up as he goes along. But the name for that isn’t philosophy. It is punditry.
“on the one hand, it won’t do to talk about symbols or poetry when it comes to God, he wants the straight facts; and on the other hand, he makes several claims about the existence of things like “respect creep” that can only be, well, symbols and poetry.”
But the God of onto-theology isn’t the same kind of ‘thing’ as respect-creep. Respect creep is merely a description, God is a person who makes things happen. God is a lot more thingy than respect-creep, so the comparison seems to me to be worthless.
God can be a person. Or people can worship a certain feeling they call god, say a stance towards the world. There’s no call for atheists to make themselves a branch of the Inquisition, making sure all the faithful are worshipping ‘persons,’ first — yes, before we show you people that God doesn’t exist, let’s get it straight that you can’t worship this soft feely touchy god. That’s right out. Anybody who does that has committed a foul.
The persons concept has no application, say, to the God of the Daoists or Buddhists. The deal about intellectual respect is that you do not project your own superstructure of concepts on another person’s belief if you want to discuss it critically. If I want to say scientology is bogus, I can’t first say that scientologists really belief in Christian Science. You “quote” the belief. I must say, I think it is rather funny that Blackburn gets so huffy about Gods he can’t even disbelieve in. Set those theologians straight, Goddamn it!
Roger, did you read the article at all? You are objecting that not all religious believers are what Blackburn would call onto-religionists.
His whole point is that if most practitioners of religion really “worship a certain feeling they call god”, religion would lose its punch, its ontological force – because we’d all know that religion was just a stance towards a feeling – you aren’t going to have much luck persuading me to put the infidels to the sword if we’re just worshiping a feeling.
I couldn’t give a flying fuck if god’s personhood doesn’t apply to Daoists or Buddhists – it applies to Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and many others – they make factual claims about the world and no bait and switch arguments about god being a stance towards the world will change that.
OB, that’s where I’d say Blackburn would have to use data to make an argument that, to me, seems totally wrong — because I don’t see that the religious punch is ontological in the least. I think it is sorta bizarre to think that religion gets its force from theology — hence the poetry and the symbol and the way church services (as I remember, distantly, from my youth), made huge appeals to feeling and hardly any to Anselm.
Religion can so well survive the attack on the incoherence of the notion of the person of God that it flourishes now, when almost every factual claim made by Christians, Jews, Muslims and the like has long been exploded. That is a social fact which hints, perhaps, that philosophers should shift towards thinking about understanding what animates the religious stance towards the world. A secularism that triumphs over an empty battlefield is a secularism that has become sadly irrelevant.
Which is why I find Blackburn’s floundering about, doing ad hoc sociology, rather less inspiring than you do.
“Religion can so well survive the attack on the incoherence of the notion of the person of God that it flourishes now, when almost every factual claim made by Christians, Jews, Muslims and the like has long been exploded.”
Roger, what alternative world are you talking about? What do you mean ‘exploded’? You think all 6+ billion people on the planet consider those factual claims ‘exploded’? You think when people use the word ‘God’ they all mean a metaphor? If so, what makes you think so? The fact that that’s how you see it yourself?
Talk about ad hoc sociology!
And speaking of onto-religion versus expressive religion, Roger, check out this article in the Telegraph. “The words “miracle, healing, faith” were merely a statement of its belief in the Christian Gospel, it argued, and most people were aware of the Christian belief in the miraculous.” Therefore their poster procliaming those things is not fraudulent advertising. Looks pretty onto-religious to me.
Roger- I have a feeling I’ve missed something. SB ignores ‘hard data’ and everybody knows that Eve didn’t come from Adam’s rib? Roughly half of Americans are quite happy to make their views on the subject very clear. But obviously we are not talking about that because it’s way too obvious.
Also why do you feel comfortable using your example of how you felt at church when you were a kid but accuse SB of using an imaginary situation to make his point?
I think this comment thread has reached a saturation point, but one more time.
a. Instancing my church experiences is an instance of an experience. A nice place to actually start.
b. Religio — cults — begin in feeling, the feeling of reverence, or whatever, and accrue a structure of ontological claims. To be technical, you can’t eliminate a stance towards the world in claims about persons, because they are intensional objects. But Blackburn’s more comic complaint seems to be that theologians are talking about myths instead of getting down to whether God’s existence is his essence and the like. Well, they’ve been doing that since Schleiermacher. Theology is, I think, a joyless thing to begin with, so if they have decided to move on from Thomas Acquinas, I wish them the best.
c. My argument is that few people proceed from believing in intelligent design to believing in God as a person. The movement is the other way around. There are few hymns about the intelligent complexity of flagella among bacteria in the hymnbooks, and many hymns about the great feeling of being washed in the blood of the lamb.
d. If the idea that respect can lead to a slippery slope means that this is inherent to respect, I’d have to say no. Making the claim that one’s argument is variously inarguable can happen by referencing scientific authority, or patriotism, or any number of intellectual positions, and it is a function of a particular rhetorical pattern. Parents find this out quickly when they start out encouraging curiosity and end of saying, I don’t want any more questions.
e. For some work about the social coding of respect and disrespect, Blackburn could have gone to Phillipe Bourgeois, or Axel Honneth, or any number of the works on honor systems that have become fashionable lately. As it is, his composite portraits of various straw men that haunt his dreams seems to me pretty silly.
f. Finally, Stuart, I do wonder if you can cite one well known figure who has said that x is his position and it shouldn’t be argued with because such argument would show lack of respect for who he is (okay, besides Bush).