Eagleton again, gawdelpus
Typical sinister bullshit from Terry Eagleton.
There is no quarrel about how to treat those whose scorn for liberal values takes the form of blowing the legs off small children. They need to be locked up.
But everyone who doesn’t blow the legs off small children is perfectly all right. In particular those who strip women of all rights and beat them up for breathing incorrectly, we have no quarrel with them.
Writers such as Martin Amis and Hitchens do not just want to lock terrorists away. They also tout a brand of western cultural supremacism. Dawkins strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq, but preaches a self-satisfied, old-fashioned Whiggish rationalism that can be wielded against a benighted Islam. The philosopher AC Grayling has an equally starry-eyed view of the stately march of Western Progress. The novelist Ian McEwan is a freshly recruited champion of this militant rationalism. Both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie have defended Amis’s slurs on Muslims. Whether they like it or not, Dawkins and his ilk have become weapons in the war on terror. Western supremacism has gravitated from the Bible to atheism…Liberals are supposed to value nuanced analysis and moral complexity, neither of which are apparent in the slanderous reduction of Islam to a barbarous blood cult. They are noted for their judicious discriminations, rather than the airy dismissal of all religion as so much garbage. There is also an honorable legacy of qualifying too-absolute judgments with an awareness of context: the genuine liberal is appalled by Islamist terrorism, but conscious of the national injury and humiliation that underlie it.
He thinks Islam can be slandered – and he thinks that the people he named slander it. Again it’s only terrorism that is mentioned as appalling, and then instantly whisked out of sight in favour of the ‘national injury and humiliation’ explanation. What about the injury and humiliation of countless women? Doesn’t register. He’s too busy lifting his leg on naughty naughty naughty Amis Hitchens Dawkins Grayling and Rushdie. What a spectacle.
I would say more but have to go. Maybe tomorrow.
Please do. I truly feel dumber for having read what can only charitably be described as a brain dropping.
Militant rationalists unite! You have nothing to lose but your barbarous blood cults!
Our Mr. Eagleton seems, as do so many “genuine liberals” of his ilk, to confuse religion with nation. As slippery rhetorical trick as the Islamist one of equating national issues with religious ones.
That is, as slippery “a” rhetorical trick…
I refuse to read anything Terry Eagleton writes so as not to do any permanent brain damage. Just OB’s quotations of his willful stupidity actually caused my prefrontal lobe to ache.
G: To my eternal regret I ignored your warning. The Guardian is renowned for publishing tuppence-short-of-a-fare pieces like Eagleton’s. I should not have followed the link. At 1:31 PM it is far too late in the day.
None the less, in my usual manner I have copied it into Word and filed it away on a flash drive in case I ever want to refer to it some time later when in a better humour. My practice with this type of shambolic thinking is to highlight the howling parts in yellow (through to the end) and then hit ^S. That has left my copy of Eagleton’s opus looking like one of those mottled canaries one might pick up cheap in some flea market.
Where could one possibly start? Is he for liberalism or against it?
Perhaps the best bit was this: “…A more cynical view is that advanced capitalism is inherently faithless; as long as you pay your taxes and refrain from beating up police officers, your opinions are mostly neither here nor there.”
I think that is perhaps a genuine cry from the heart, but in code. In translation it says: “… as long as I pay my taxes and refrain… [etc], my opinions are mostly neither here nor there. “
And if that is his message, he is almost certainly right.
I had to comment on this one at length, so I’ll see you over at my place.
http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2009/04/and-speaking-of-bullshit-try-this.html
“The agnosticism peddled by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens …”
What agnosticism? I thought both these writers have taken pains to distance themselves from agnosticism.
The senile old fart has probably spent too much time shuffling ironic teacups in academia.
Delete! Delete! Don’t press SUBMIT. No! – keep dignity don’t press SUBMIT- you gonna regret this – you …
aw buggerit
Sorry to bore – me again.
Remember Eagleton on suicide bombers –
Ophelia’s WONDERFUL comment is one of the favourites in my word.doc library:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=696
Mags: Yes indeed. Vintage OB.
I cannot believe that Eagleton could be so bloody crass. “People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round.”
The poor buggers were both murdered by the armed forces of the state for Christ’s sake. Where’s he been? What wanking planet does he come from?
Good one Russell. As soon as I saw that Eagleton had written another article on this topic I groaned and thought, What crap has he come up with now. You’ve elaborated on that theme, managing to be very coherent on Eagleton’s incoherence.
On some things eg poets and writers Eagleton can be intelligible and full of insight. It’s when he gets on to general political and cultural themes he falls to pieces.
Really, KB Player? Are you sure? The kind of idiocy that Eagleton betrays here, and in so many other places, must show up in his lit crit. Has to. No one can be insightful about literature and be so stupid about life. So there must be signs of mental disturbance practically everywhere in his writings, if this isn’t just a one off – and it isn’t.
Eagleton writes with consistent stupidity about culture and politics. That’s quite common in literary critics.
Reason:-
“Literary critics are used to looking at texts rather than facts – the “facts”, the data they deal with are the words, expressions, allusions, character development – everything that the literary art work contains within three, four, five volumes. They can understand these language facts, and may discourse on them brilliantly. Their language sense is sharpened and they can hold texts in their minds, find their way around the map of an author or a period. They can assert with easy reference and quote. Extra-literary facts are more slippery, more difficult to arrange and instead of being available in the finiteness of an author, however great, are in that indistinct, open-ended thing called the situation, the state, the world. But their desire to bring down a judgement does not desert them. They will write with equal self-confidence on non literary matters even though there is no actual text for them to close read, just some second-hand opinions floating about which they grab and display.”
That’s quoting from me as I’m too lazy to re-write it. I was talking about Stanley Fish and some garbage he wrote about freedom of speech, and why literary critics are so intolerable when they start writing about extra-literary stuff.
There have been v. good literary critics who were good social critics as well – Edmund Wilson & Christopher Hitchens spring to mind. But they did take some care in learning about politics and society before writing about it.
I can’t give any links to some Eagleton essays which impressed me off the top of a google search, but I have read them and they have annoyed me by confounding my prejudices in being clever and insightful.
But it’s not uncommon. Mark Steyn writes really well about songs but has some very dodgy political opinions – will write in praise of Sarah Palin for instance.
I thought the Eagleton piece was dreadful – but I happen to have been rereading parts of his study of tragedy, ‘Sweet Violence’ which is excellent – eloquent and scholarly.
And yet there’s also a widely-held belief that literature and story-telling help to foster empathy. I tentatively and with disclaimers believe it myself.
But maybe the get-out is that that applies to readers and practitioners more than to academic literary critics – who have as a subspecies become remarkably self-important and over-confident in the past few decades. Eagleton is a classic of the genre, with his easy assumption of expertise in all subjects.
I’ll have to have a look at Sweet Violence.
Good piece on Eagleton here:-
http://martininthemargins.blogspot.com/2009/04/eagletons-evasions.html
I was going to snarl at him myself at length but everyone else has saved me the trouble. He seems to have aroused a collective groan.
KB Player
Thank you for
http://martininthemargins.blogspot.com/2009/04/eagletons-evasions.html
A really good commentary.
The Groan has seven pages of comments on Eagleton’s article, most of them approving and in fairly predictable ways. Those I am more inclined to support include:
“There is a hint of an idea somewhere in this article but it needs an awful lot of reworking before it is presentable. I recommend a re-write, with heavy use of all editing features of the word processor.”
*********************************
“This article spectacularly misses the point of the writing of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al.: Namely that they are right. Claims made by witches, warlocks, imams, muftis, and priests are so much unsubstantiated hogwash. The truth is superior to all other claims, so these rationalist writers are doing the world a favour by calling attention to it.
Oh, and Western civilisation IS superior to Islam. Unless you geniuinely do believe that amputating the hands of thieves is acceptable justice? Or that the word of a man is truly worth twice that of a woman?
Well, do you?”
************************************
“This is the usual confused nonsense we have all come to expect from Eagleton.”
************************************
“Criticising an opinion is not in contradiction to free speech, and pointing out that Eagleton and his ilk are wrong is not the same as oppressing them.”
*************************************
“We also had the obligatory pomo reference to ‘late capitalism.’ Apparently it has been on the verge of collapse since the 1960’s!”
*************************************
“I have read this article 3 times and still dont know what he’s trying to say!! is a liberal west a good thing or bad thing?!!”
[This latter commenter should be given a purple heart anyway.]
And that is just a selection from the first of those seven pages.
Ian MacDougall
What is “the Groan”?
Mags: Greetings. The Groan = The Guardian. As far as I can gather, it got that name in the blogosphere because certain traditionally loyal readers-turned-bloggers got dissatisfied with its editorial line after 9/11. So they started calling it The Grauniad – an anagram; make of it what you will. From there ’twas but a short step to The Groan.
Perhaps it would better be called The Curate’s Egg; good in parts. It can run brilliant stuff like the article from Martin Amis that Eric MacDonald linked to recently, and later come up with a truly lamentable piece of head-banging like this from T. Eagleton.
Ian – The Guardian was called The Grauniad long before blogs existed. It was famous for its spelling errors. It was Private Eye that started calling it The Grauniad several decades ago.
From Grauniad it’s an easy move to Groan.
I used to like calling it the Graun now and then, but then I noticed that G. Tingey invariably called it that, so I had to stop. G. Tingey put me off a lot of formerly-useful vocabulary. G. Tingey is annoyingly like a parody version of me, which makes me very uneasy.
KB: Thanks for that bit of fine-tuning. ;-)