Express your opinions forcefully and colourfully
I haven’t said enough yet about Sholto Byrnes. I’ve said a little, but that little was a mere note – a mere listing of the things he said about Does God Hate Women? that were not true. I’m not sure that was quite adequate. I’m not going to say all that I could say about Sholto Byrnes, but I am going to add a little something.
For instance I’m going to point out that his vituperative and inaccurate review was apparently not enough for him; he had to take another swipe, just in passing, while talking about a different book.
Armstrong’s god is beyond our little explanations etc etc; ‘any suggestion of literalism is to fall into a gross and idolatrous anthropomorphism.’
Although this may come as a surprise to the millions of Christians who entertain thoughts of God as a jovial beardie – a celestial Frank Dobson, if you will – it is familiar territory for any student of theology or philosophy of religion. Which is why Armstrong is right to describe the analysis of the Dawkinsites, who have made the god they wish to dismiss into just such a being, as “disappointingly shallow” and “based on such poor theology”. It is also why the poisoned darts of Armstrong’s critics (see Johann Hari’s review of Does God Hate Women? in the NS of 6 July) fail to pierce her arguments. They are aimed at territory she does not wish to defend.
No they’re not. Our putative ‘poisoned darts’ are not aimed at her woolly idea of god, they are aimed at her bad and unfootnoted pseudo-scholarship on Mohammed and his marriage to a child. They are aimed at territory she has defended in more than one book. But Byrnes is not a precise or careful writer. Byrnes just throws things – not poisoned darts so much as whatever is nearest – an old boot, a sandwich, the dog, a stale muffin that looks exactly like the Blessed Virgin if you look at it the right way. Byrnes reads a book and has reactions to it and then takes his reactions to be things resembling facts. He felt hatred for our book, therefore it became true that our book was largely “torrents of invective” – when in fact that description fits at most one page of the book.
Sadly, and rather contemptibly, the Independent and its lawyer pretended to believe this explanation. Here’s what the lawyer had to say in response to our dispute of that assertion:
This is a comment and is in keeping with the rest of what is a strongly expressed review based on the writer’s honest belief. For the proper meaning of the expression it has to be read in the context of the preceding passage, including the word “excoriating”. No reader would expect this tag to be literally true or anything more than a figure of speech, to be understood in the light of the reviewer’s transparent and openly articulated dislike of the book. Reviewers, as you know, are entitled to be opinionated and to express their opinions forcefully and colourfully. Of course, Madeleine Bunting expresses similar views in her recent article on your book.
Yes, of course, we know, and we stipulated, that reviewers are entitled to be opinionated and to express their opinions forcefully and colourfully. We do not accept that that means they are entitled to make express their ‘opinions’ so forcefully and colourfully that they grossly misrepresent the book. We think it’s absurd to complain about bad reviews, and we fully expected bad reviews for this book. Reviews that say things that are untrue are another matter. We think there is a difference.
I’m an editor. I’m an editor in more than one place. If I got a review like that – I would reject it. It’s too stupid, too crass, too vulgar, too…bad to publish. The literary editor of the Indy accepted it, and then defended it. There’s something peculiar about that.
There’s also something very odd about the goddy turn at lefty newspapers and magazines in the UK – but more on that later.
OB: “There’s also something very odd about the goddy turn at lefty newspapers and magazines in the UK – but more on that later.”
Eagerly anticipated. In my experience such moves on the Left are bound up with attempts to reach more people and/or break out of political isolation. In the UK, with the Tories poised for a win the next time round, this fits. Soft-appeasement of Islamists also.
So ‘pragmatism’ will probably get a mention or two (thousand). Ironically though, the most pragmatic course (in the sense of not driving its exponents over a cliff, off the road, into quicksand etc) is principle. I think that probably helps explain why principle exists in the first place, and why any people have any at all.
There is something very odd, especially when they praise Karen Armstrong, who is not a great thinker or a serious theologican (they do exist) by any means. I would be interested in hearing your theory on why that godish turn is occurring. Or maybe the so-called serious media isn’t as serious as one imagined it to be. Your book deserves a serious hearing and debate.
One more point. It’s obvious that religion was a practice for the majority of believers, not a doctrine, until the advent of printing and mass literacy: the majority of people could not read religious texts or were too ignorant to understand complicated doctrinal points, which certainly did exist. One only has to open any scholastic philosopher to see how seriously they took doctrine or to recall the battles within early Christianity about defining dogma against so-called heresies, battles (bloody ones) which revolved around very very fine points of doctrine, for example, the nature of the trinity.
I agree with the random spammer that posted directly above me — the trouble is you’re reading his review literally, not metaphorically. Instead you’re supposed to groove to the vibe of the review, as if it were smooth jazz.
I think the recent enthusiasm for religion on the left is the result of several converging trends.
The organic potato eaters and alternative medicine gurus have always hated reason. In the post war era those types have become increasingly associated with the left because fascism is no longer fashionable.
Religious conservatives have managed to dupe lots of “anti-capitalists” into thinking they share the same goals. This was particularly easy because anti-capitalists don’t really know what they’re for – only what they’re against.
Since the 1970’s leftists have wished to defend immigrants from the likes of the National Front and the BNP. A lot of these immigrants are Muslims, Hindus or Sikhs, and somewhere along the line standing up to racism got mixed up with standing up for these religions. Then they had to extend the same attitude to Christianity to avoid charges of inconsistency.
All of this fits nicely with the prevailing post-modernist intellectual fashions which have become associated with the left since fascism became socially unacceptable.
And don’t forget “Anti-Imperialism,” Jakob. It’s very important to be against imperialism to be properly leftist, don’t you know. And anything that in any way smacks of criticizing someone from another culture – or even your own culture – who simply believes something different than you is imperialistic. Why? It’s imperialistic because… because… because it’s imperialistic, that’s why! Never mind how much attention you pay to the whys and the wherefores and the evidence and the reasons, to say something critical in any way about someone’s religious beliefs is exactly like 18th and 19th Century attitudes about “the savages.” Sheer colonialist/imperialist arrogance on the face of it!
What Jakob (and G Felis) said about the goddification of the left, but one more thing: it can’t be a CHRISTIAN god. Christianity is patriarchal, imperialist, in fact it’s probably just a conspiracy to stop people from becoming truly spiritual and mystical, whereas all non-Western religions are truly spiritual and mystical. Puke.
Re the article: “Although this may come as a surprise to the millions of Christians who entertain thoughts of God as a jovial beardie – a celestial Frank Dobson, if you will – it is familiar territory for any student of theology or philosophy of religion.” But weren’t Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris writing for that exact audience, not the philosophers and theologians? I’d say philsophers and theologians are a tiny minority in society, and their views are often not shared by the majority, and that Dawkins et al. were explicitly refuting popular conceptions of god, and what’s wrong with that anyway? And, if Armstrong’s territory is not pierced by those strident and shrill New Militant Atheists, why do they even need to be specifically brought into the conversation for a drubbing? And, one more thing, if we can’t know anything about god, as Armstrong claims, how can we know that we can’t know anything about god?
Well that’s the thing I think; Armstrong’s territory *is* pierced by the “New” atheists, because her fuzzy, barely defined, constructed-explicitly-to-evade-criticism god is just as stupid as a daddy-in-the-sky god. They both fall at the first epistemic hurdle, regardless of what qualities they attribute to them; ie they don’t exist, there’s no good reason to think they exist, there’s no need to evoke either to explain any natural phenomenon etc. Every single one of these criticisms of Dawkins et al. on the basis that their god is *so* much more sophisticated than the one Dawkins is criticising fail to grasp that the reasons to dismiss the sky-shepherd god are exactly the same as the ones to dismiss theirs.
Actually, Byrnes is quite wrong about the evolution of Christianity towards ideas of certainty. He says:
Acually, the fixing of texts came much earlier. What happened at the Reformation with the development of printed texts is that the text escaped the imprisonment of the scriptorium. For Roman Catholics it became an offence to read the sacred text, once it was no longer possible physically to restrict the text to ecclesial contexts (monasteries, bishop’s palaces, the Vatican, etc.). The text had been fixed long before the invention of printing. That’s why the Council of Trent elevated to Vulgate to canonical standing, because, in the church’s mind, the text was fixed long before, and that fixity was being threatened.
What happened at the Reformation was that mulitple interpretations were unstoppable, and confining exegesis to the church and its authority to interpret the text was already a lost cause. But to the ecclesial mind, the text had been fixed long before. The problem was that the interpretation of the text had escaped its captivity by church authority.
As a secondary point, textual criticism became common, but, as anyone familiar with textual criticism will know, the ability to fix the text came to an end as soon a ‘scientific’ study of the text began. Byrnes doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
It can be if black people are the Christians.
As weird and bullshitty as a lot of left-wing thought is, I do want to point out that the weirdest PoMo cultural-relativistic left-wing ivory tower academic is still a gazillion times more in touch with reality, truth and common sense than the vast majority of the right-wing “intelligentsia.” I’m not making excuses, just trying to put the issue into perspective.
Orwell had an interesting hypothesis. The academic intelligentsia are fundamentally supported and privileged by the ruling class. The working people are certainly not voluntarily paying their salaries.
Some of the academic intelligentsia will directly support and justify the ruling class. Some — e.g. neoconservatives and other right-wingers — will support radical political changes that increase their privilege.
What are the rest to do?
If they were to propose a sound challenge to the ruling class, they would risk their privilege, both individually (look at Ward Churchill) and generally: the last time there was a real communist revolution, academics were gasp! forced to work on pig farms. But they have to publish something, so they retreat into critical-sounding but rationally untenable bullshit.
Whether Orwell’s hypothesis (or my interpretation of it) is specifically correct, I think the economic and social privilege of the academic intelligentsia does have a distorting effect on the truth, and it is unlikely that we’ll ever have a truly independent “Magister Ludi” academia.
Eric:
I’m not seeing how this conclusion follows from the quoted material. You are of course correct on the technical point: the texts were indeed fixed long before the advent of printing.
But it’s not at all clear to me that the Reformation led to any sort of radical change to the exegetical process: it seems to have led only to the creation of several ecclesiastical authorities establishing certainty rather than a single authoritative institution. A lot of people pay lip service to ecumenicalism, but I’m not at all convinced it is a sincere position for the vast majority of believers.
Yes, Larry, what you said. Certainly, there was no radical change to the exegetical process, if by that you mean that it did not trend towards authoritative interpretations, though the authorities multiplied. But the Calvinist idea of each man his own priest did have some effect on the way that exegetical authority was understood. New presbyter might be old priest writ large, but it is hard for even the Vatican to retain control of interpretation, and there is a lot of smorgasbord religion about now. But my only point was the Byrnes simply doesn’t know what he is talking about if he thinks that it wasn’t until the modern period that religion thought in terms of fixed texts and literal interpretations. Analogy and metaphor have always been exegetical options, but to think that Karen Armstrong’s warm and fuzzy idea of belief is and has been normative for religion is a futile attempt to whistle in a force 10 gale.
What surprises me is that Armstrong’s glorification of pre-literate religious practice is a reactionary idea and yet gets good press in the so-called progressive media. Progressive historians used to see the introduction of mass literacy, which led to people reading the Bible and seeing religion as a system of ideas, as a step towards democracy, a political system in which the common person could have ideas about what is a good government. Yet Armstrong glorifies the good old days of religious practice before the masses were able to read religious texts and hence to develop a system of beliefs.
Perhaps the line which divides those whose theism is “pierced” by the arguments of the so-called New Atheists, and those whose God is quite safe, lies in how one answers a rather fundamental question:
‘If God doesn’t exist after all — and you came to recognize this — would it make any real difference to how you see, understand, value, and practice religion?’
I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that Armstrong and other “murkies” (Dennett’s term) would wax very eloquent and elegant in how they phrased their reply of “no.” In which case, the teflon armor isn’t all that surprising.
By the way, physicist Vic Stenger, whose book God: The Failed Hypothesis (How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist) puts him firmly in the camp of the so-called new atheists, is coming out with a new book titled The New Atheism, in which “I review and expand upon the principles of New Atheism and answer many of its critics.”
So here is one example of a so-called “new atheist” accepting and embracing the term.
Getting back on track…. First, let me say how much I enjoyed your interview, Ophelia, over at the New Statesman. Well done.
Second, as I’ve said, Sholto Byrnes doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, but that he finds your book ‘bad’ means that he’s bound to find Armstrong’s book ‘good’. I’m not going to bother to find out about the latter, and I’m still waiting for yours. I had enough trouble with Armstrong’s “History of God”, and “The Battle for God” was unreadable. I haven’t tried anything since, and I’m not about to start. Despite the claims made about her scholarship, she is perhaps one of the more careless writers around on the subject of religion.
However, I am puzzled as to the response of the The Independent and its lawyer. As you say, bad reviews are one thing, dishonesty is another. To give a positive review of a book by someone who so lacks perspective and integrity, and to trash your book dishonestly on the basis of what is, essentially, a religious prejudice (whatever Byrnes says about his beliefs), is unacceptable, and raises questions about the Independent’s independence.
What’s Left? Cohen’s question remains unanswered, I’m afraid. The Left seems to have been left anchorless and rudderless after the fall of the Berliner Mauer. Has the Left made the mistake of thinking that it was religion that brought it down?
Thanks Eric!
Yes, we’re puzzled by the Independent’s response too. Puzzled isn’t the only thing we are by it.
Misrepresentation as a means of critiquing certainly seems rampant right now. Is this a new phenomenon or have I just been blissfully ignorant?
I don’t know! It’s not completely new…but I assumed (without really examining it) that there were limits. I assumed that editors would say ‘Wait…is this really accurate? If not, re-word it.’ I’ve subbed a lot of book reviews and I’ve never seen one like that. If I had I would have been nervous, and I would have asked questions.
To beat the same drum again, I think there’s a certain two-facedness about this certain subject, has been as long as I’ve happened to be looking, at least. Religion itself is an agreement to tolerate certain forms of obvious bullshit–indeed, even to promote them–and *not* to mention that they’re obviously bullshit (at least in public). And in defense of the bullshit, rhetorical stunts that wouldn’t be tolerated in any other area of life are permitted. So, call someone out on the very risibility of their religion, and they’re allowed to say whatever they might please in response, however absurd, however dishonest. No one in the flock (and, for that matter, no one defending an equally risible belief with the same sort of agreement) is going to call them on it, again by mutual understanding. So everyone on that side is just happily going to go along with whatever they can muster to imply that the current criticisms of their nonsense aren’t valid–flagrant dishonesty is perfectly acceptable, in this context.
… which, by the way, I’d argue, is one of the (really very many) reasons it’d probably be healthier for everyone if religions collectively could just be put out to pasture. That kinda implicit deal, if you keep it safely walled off, is toxic enough on its own, but I think the basic dishonesty it teaches bleeds readily out into other areas too… Not that this is so much today’s subject, mind you.
Try as I might I just cant fathom how this guy come up with “torrents of invective” when describing D.G.H.W. I found the book factual well reasoned and measured in its critique of islam. As for Ms Armsrong,my favorite part of the book was the point by point demolition of her position.
My conclusion is the guy is an idiot and had made up his mind before he even read the book.
Hey Richard – How’s things!? (If you’re not the Richard I know, sorry!)
Thanks for reading the book.
Yes, we couldn’t figure out how he came up with the torrents of invective thing.
Glad you liked the Armstrong demolition!
And yes, I’m pretty sure he had made up his mind before he read it.
Take care.
Jerry
Yup its me, it just seems so off base to me because the way I read the book you detailed the facts of what was happening to women and drew reasonable conclusions from that,reasonable people can disagree about those conclusions but torrents of invective is ludicrous. take care mate.