Testable
Have another serving of kack, this time from good old Rabbi Michael Lerner, he of Tikkun.
In my research on the psychodynamics of American society I discovered that the left’s hostility to religion is one of the main reasons people who otherwise might be involved with progressive politics get turned off. So it becomes important to ask why.
So it becomes important to ask why, but it does not become important to ask why without at the same time carefully limiting the ways in which one asks why, and ruling out in advance the most obvious answer. It becomes important to ask why by suggesting irrelevant answers and ignoring the relevant ones. It becomes important to pretend to ask why, to ask why in a rhetorical, play-bashful way that avoids anything that might make rabbis fretful or worried.
I’ll tell you why I’m hostile to religion (since that is the ‘why’ Lerner is asking, though the way he wrote that sentence makes it look as if he’s asking why people who otherwise might be involved with progressive politics get turned off) before I bother engaging with Lerner’s cautious pseudo-answers. I’m hostile to religion because I think it makes a lot of truth-claims that are false, without ever being particularly apologetic or hesitant or tentative about it, and I get hostile when people expect me (and everyone) to believe truth-claims that there is no good reason to believe. That’s why. I experience that expectation as a kind of mental tyranny, or attempted mental tyranny, and it repels me like a force field.
But Lerner doesn’t offer that as an explanation. He offers three others, instead, and then leaves it at that.
One reason is that conservatives have historically used religion to justify oppressive social systems and political regimes…Another reason is that many of the most rigidly antireligious folk on the left are themselves refugees from repressive religious communities…Yet a third possible reason is that some on the left have never seen a religious community that embodies progressive values.
And that’s it. Next paragraph, he draws conclusions from this exhaustive analysis:
So I am led to the conclusion that the main reason that underlies the left’s deep skepticism about religion is its members’ strong faith in a different kind of belief system…The left is captivated by a belief that has been called scientism…Science, however, is not the same as scientism – the belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured. As a religious person, I don’t rely on science to tell me what is right and wrong or what love means or why my life is important. I understand that such questions cannot be answered through empirical observations. Claims about God, ethics, beauty and any other face of human experience that is not subject to empirical verification – all these spiritual dimensions of life – are dismissed by the scientistic worldview as inherently unknowable and hence meaningless.
Sigh. Familiar stuff. Familiar, dreary, feeble stuff. Philip Blond-Dylan Evans territory. What does he mean by ‘the only things that are real or can be known’, for one thing? He probably means something more like testable or reproducible, but that would narrow the definition drastically and make it much too clear that that’s a reasonable, even perhaps tautological, thing to believe, so he has to re-phrase it into something much broader, which merely happens to be something that hardly anyone believes. And then he performs the same trick with ‘unknowable and hence meaningless’. Nonsense. He says the left’s ‘members’ (all of them, apparently – he didn’t qualify the claim with ‘some of’ or ‘many of’) have a strong faith in scientism, then he says that scientism dismisses love, ethics and beauty as unknowable and hence meaningless – so he’s claiming that the left in its entirety scientistically dismisses love, ethics and beauty as unknowable and hence meaningless. That’s a ridiculous, sweeping, wild claim, lightly disguised with the usual hand-waving about meaning and what science can and can’t tell us. It’s absolutely typical of that kind of woolly-but-bossy religious fluff-talk, and I say it’s kack. I can’t measure its kackiness, I can’t empirically observe it, I can’t pick it up and throw it around the room, I can’t put it in a petri dish or feed it to the cat, but I say it’s kack just the same. Therefore, I am a devout theist. QED.
On my reading, he isn’t asking why do individual leftists reject religion; nor “why people who otherwise might be involved with progressive politics get turned off”; he is asking: why the secular left is so hostile to religion that it cannot work with believers whose politics are progressive? “To be effective, a social change movement will need to make a place for everyone who shares the same political values, even though they may belong to different religious traditions or hold different philosophical positions.”
Let us imagine a situation in which someone feels it necessary to tell me, beligerantly or maybe defensively, that she/he is a Baptist. I’m going to withhold judgement until I know whether he/she is a Tommy Douglas baptist, or a Fred Phelps Baptist.
I don’t know Rabbi Lerner, but if there are Jewish Baptists he seems to be one of the easy-going ones.
And by the way, on the subject of materialism;
http://www.jesusandmo.net/2006/02/21/step/
It is very tiresome indeed. (And I have a soft spot for Quakers too – funny, isn’t it. I like ‘Simple Gifts’, for one thing.) Tireseome, gratuitously insulting, and very very stale.
It’s another one of those arguments for the existence of God. ‘Love can’t be measured, therefore God exists.’
On the other hand, it can be hard for some people to work shoulder with shoulder with other people whom they regard as taking seriously the existence of an Entity which seems to be on the same ontological level as the Tooth Fairy.
I can manage it by (a) realizing that a lot of religious folk actually take all the God-talk as “metaphorical,” and (b) ignoring the God-talk of the rest, as long as they don’t get in my face and insist that I take it seriously, which most left religious people don’t — they seem quite comfortable with atheists, in my experience. Once in a while, you come across a Rabbi Lerner; he seems to be ticked off by secularists because he’s a pro in the religion biz and knows that they will never pay his salary.
“On the other hand, it can be hard for some people to work shoulder with shoulder with other people whom they regard as taking seriously the existence of an Entity which seems to be on the same ontological level as the Tooth Fairy.”
That’s exactly it – and what Lerner seems to be either unwilling or unable to admit and to conceive of as a reason for anyone’s hostility to religion. I would say though that it’s more than once in awhile that one comes across people who argue the way Lerner does – at least it’s more than once in awhile in newspapers and magazines. But then newspapers and magazines have to say something; right now that seems to be one of the somethings they’ve found to say.
Or, in other words, people who have a problem with religion have a problem. Because there couldn’t be a problem with religion. Period.
I’ll bet he hates Dennett’s book, too.
Once in a while, you come across a Rabbi Lerner; he seems to be ticked off by secularists because he’s a pro in the religion biz and knows that they will never pay his salary.
Although one of the odd things about us Jews is that we frequently belong to a synagogue even when we’re totally secular; my upbringing was entirely non-religious, for example, and yet we occasionally went to synagogue (usually on the High Holy Days) for mainly social or family reasons. So, if he has a congregation, the good Rabbi may well have a surprising number of secularists paying his salary :)
Regarding scientism: “the belief that the only things that are real or can be known are those that can be empirically observed and measured.”
Apart from the long-dead Francis Galton (http://galton.org/), has anyone ever even heard of a person with such an attitude?
(From memory, Galton thought that the beauty of human females could be measured on a scale, and when visiting a town would add up the ..erm.. scores of any women he met leading to a table of towns classified by the beauty of their women. I think I got this story from Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man”) .