Morris Zapp has gone downhill
Stanley Fish is moved to let us know that he is just as woolly and assertive and bad-mannered and rhetorical as Terry Eagleton and Mark Vernon and Madeleine Bunting and the rest of the ‘new atheists are bad‘ crowd.
[T]he British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed.
Eh? ‘Other candidates’ than what? Other than Eagleton? Those are our choices – Eagleton on the one hand and science, reason, liberalism, capitalism on the other? Why? How? Who says?
Perhaps Fish means ‘other candidates’ than literary criticism, and we’re supposed to be able to figure that out via the word ‘critic’ in front of ‘Terry Eagleton’ – but ‘critic’ could mean restaurant critic, movie critic, dance critic – it could mean a lot of things, and in any case, it’s far from obvious that we’re supposed to understand Terry Eagleton as standing for the entire genre of literary critics. In short, that’s a bit of remarkably slovenly careless lazy writing, and it’s the opener for an attack on – you’ll never guess – the ‘new’ atheists. An opener as sloppy as that doesn’t bode well for the care and intelligence of the rest – and the rest is indeed surprisingly crappy stuff.
Fish goes on to say that Eagleton admits religion is flawed but ‘at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself…”
The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised.”
Again, already, the sloppiness makes it hard to tell exactly what is being claimed, but it seems to be that religion alone is trying for something more than local satisfactions and that religion alone takes the nature of humanity for its subject, and all other projects are finally superficial and are merely about consumerism. That suggestion is so obviously stupid I can’t be bothered to say why it’s stupid – I don’t think anyone who reads this needs to be told.
By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?” The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.
So that is what he’s claiming – on the one hand there are theological questions, which are alone able to ask ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ and related questions, and then there are ‘science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation’ which are all much of a muchness and which can’t ask ‘ ‘why is there something rather than nothing.’ Further, the interpolated ‘never mind answer’ implies that ‘theological questions’ can answer – without of course offering any actual examples of such ‘answers.’
This is lamentable stuff.
On and on it goes – sneers at progress, liberalism and enlightenment, sneers at cures for diseases, sneers at technology, much use of the word ‘Ditchkins,’ and finishing up with a triumphant blast at ‘the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins.’
It is so hard not to wish both of them suddenly transported to a place bereft of progress, liberalism and enlightenment – the Swat valley would be just the ticket – and see how they like it.
That’s not a nice thing to say, it’s even a bit schoolyardy, but I am so sick of smug prosperous safe comfortable pale men urinating all over progress, liberalism and enlightenment while desperate threatened terrified women would weep scalding tears of joy and deliverance to get just a taste of some. I am so sick of safe prosperous men who are never, ever going to be grabbed on the street and whipped, or shot in the back, or locked up in their houses, or married off to some abusive bully, going on and on and on and on about how much they hate progress, liberalism and enlightenment.
Bravo! So am I! I read this fishy ‘review’ this morning as I had my breakfast. It made me want to vomit.
It may be true, as Grayling says, in connexion with freedom of speech, that it takes a lot of compost to grow a flower. But it really is too much that these scabrous people should use tenured and salaried freedom to subvert the very freedom that their freedom denies to others. To have read this on the same day that we read about Delara Darabi saying “Hello” to the world is truly heartbreaking.
It may be ‘schoolyardy’ to wish them in Swat, but it would be a proper and fitting penalty for their perfidy.
I’ll say this much for the so-and-so: at least he acknowledges the role of art, albeit in a not very serious way. If, for the sake of argument, religion is like ballet and Chekhov, then it seems to me that he has another problem; we have ballet and Chekhov, so why would we need religion?
And really, it’s not as if scientific materialists are grim and joyless clods who never go to the theater. I saw “Jekyll & Hyde” down at ACT this last weekend, and if that didn’t take as its subject the nature of humanity, I don’t know what does.
I find it hard to believe that someone as “distinguished” as Stanley fish can be as historically and philosophically naive as the article suggests. Laying racism, sexism, colonialism, poverty and famine (nice list) at the feet of “liberalism” (itself an evasion) is the sort of tactic I would expect from a fundamentalist ministera or shock jocks who professionly are expected to deal in fact free rhetoric. Distinguished professors, on the other hand . . . But for Fish, like Eagleton but moreso, this is all a game. (At least, Eagleton has some commitment to a concept of justice warped as it is.) Please, Professor Fish, stick to interpreting Milton, that actually doesn’t matter.
I know, that’s why I say downhill – I don’t think Fish has always been this idiotic.
‘we have ballet and Chekhov, so why would we need religion?’
Because religion offers more opportunities for lit-critty contortionism? For, in other words, talking nonsense?
Just a guess.
Of course it is utterly disgraceful and it is impossible to get over the spectacle of these men pissing on the freedoms they have and others don’t. It would be bad enough if they flaunted their freedom to taunt those without it, but they’re doing worse: they’re claiming it’s worthless. They have so much of it, they can afford to trample all over it. It makes me think of a billionaire displeased with some gourmet meal, who, solely in order to prevent the starving woman outside retrieving it from the garbage, goes and personally flushes it down the toilet. Utterly sick-making.
And yet…
I was actually able to draw a little comfort from Fish’s last paragraph:
“The other source of his anger is implied but never quite made explicit. He is angry, I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins. I know just how he feels.”
Why does he “have to” expend all that mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists? Is it because they are finally making more than just a dent with their arguments? Is it because precisely those he loathes are starting to influence people in unprecedented numbers and turn them against what Eagleton thinks needs defending? Have they become impossible to ignore? And what does “shallow arguments of school-yard atheists” really mean? Does it mean that they’re prepared to say “to hell with it all, it’s rubbish”? Funny how the schoolyard atheists can get to the core of the issue in a way that can elude more sophisticated philosophers.
Small percentage of spleen vented.
I would use no paper on which Stanley Fish’s writing has ever been printed to wrap fish. I wouldn’t want to make my dead haddock stupider.
What baffles me is why anyone has ever paid any attention to anything this twit has ever said. I have yet to read anything by him that had any merit or substance whatsoever.
One is given by Eagleton, and it is personal. Christianity may or may not be the faith he holds to (he doesn’t tell us), but he speaks, he says, “partly in defense of my own forbearers, against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void.”
The passage quoted above is the key to the whole issue. Fish and Eagleton bullshit (in the sense of the term used by Harry Frankfurt) about religion, without really believing in it themselves. However, lots of people (not me) get defensive when the faith or way of life of their parents and grandparents is criticized, whether they believe in it or practice it themselves.
I suspect that what is also really getting up their noses is that the atheist best-seller authors are telling their readers (many of them young) that they don’t need to have mastered theology or philosophy in order to dismiss religion. The attack is not subtle; people are being empowered to label as bullshit things that were held sacred by almost all previous generations. Eagleton, Fish et al are furious because they’re redundant. It is no longer necessary to engage in arguments with their ilk in order to justify non-belief. Nobody actually cares whether they think there has to be something to be said for faith. We can get angry at their abuse of their own freedom while others are suffering, dying and being repressed, but we also dismiss them as being irrelevant to what is important in the world.
If Eagleton’s ancestors had been Nazis or Satanists, would he also be defending them “against the charge that the creed to which they dedicated their lives is worthless and void”? The argument is no better for Christianity than it would be for any other belief or set of beliefs. It isn’t even an argument, it’s a rationalisation, and a bad one, at that.
But neither Fish nor Eagleton is a philosopher. They both somehow convince people that they are, but they aren’t. They are both literary critics, and that is all. Dawkins and Hitchens don’t actually make either of them redundant, because D and H aren’t trespassing on their territory.
Well – to be sure, Hitchens does a much better job of writing about literature than Eagleton does – but that’s not related to his atheism book.
“It isn’t even an argument, it’s a rationalisation, and a bad one, at that.”
Yeah and also a truculently self-pitying one in a way that is truly repellent. It’s like some drunken boor saying ‘Are you saying my mother is a whore?!’ when nobody was. In short it’s yet more vulgar bullying.
In the world of lit crit gibberish reason = liberalism = capitalism = colonialism = racism so we need Other Ways of Knowing like superstition.
To people like Fish any argument that’s logically valid and based on true premises is “shallow.” Anyone can understand those kind of arguments!
The deep kind take an entire book’s worth of hand waving, vague analogies, and obscurantist language to derive a conclusion that no one really understands.
Is it any surprise literary critics admire theology?
Terry Eagleton went to a school run by the De La Salle Brothers and even once thought about becoming a priest. He is fond of saying ‘ what you are in the end is what you cannot walk away from’. He also lives in Dublin some of the time. I guess he must find some time there to embrace his Catholicism.
Interesting point. Whose territory is it then to attack or defend religion?
What I meant was more that people are starting to realise that they have carte blanche to say it’s all nonsense and doesn’t even require a deep intellectual discussion. A commenter on the discussion of Fish’s piece over at the Dawkins site put it: “The arguments against the truth of religious claims are necessarily shallow ones – because religious claims are just about the most shallow claims it is possible to make. They are piddling little puddles of nonsense that you could see right to the bottom of in an instant were they not so turgidly opaque. It does not take a deep argument to refute a shallow claim.”
I would amend that: it’s not the claims themselves that are shallow, but the evidence backing them up. Anyway, I meant redundant in the sense that they think their voices need to be heard and a lot less people than they would like agree with them on that point.
Well our Terry’s not having any of that ‘no need for a deep intellectual discussion’ nonsense. That’s all right for believers, but unbelievers had better have three PhDs before they open their mouths on the subject.
Wham!!! Biff! Sock! POW!
You are superheroes of the well-deserved smackdown. My compliments.
Fish asserts that science cannot ask “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?” Yes, it can. This is the sort of question that evolutionary psychologists like Steven Pinker ask. Evolutionary psychology may have its weaknesses and limitations, but I would rather to listen to an evolutionary psychologist on these questions than a priest.
“ unbelievers had better have three PhDs before they open their mouths on the subject.”
PZ Myers has a wonderful term for this – he calls it the “courtier’s reply”. He lampoons it at
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php
This is deeply irritating. I actually have some sympathy for the more sophisticated theological thinkers and their frustration with the tendency for critics of religion to focus on the cruder forms thereof; but Feagletosh (a portmanteau I like better than ‘Eaglefish’) make this complaint while (a) not actually being particularly theologically sophisticated themselves and (b) doing exactly the same thing to their ‘opponents’.
Apart from anything else, it’s rubbish that science and rationalism cannot be applied to answering the questions “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?”, and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?”… even if the answers provided may not be satisfying to the teleologically minded.
The third of Fish’s cited questions fort religion to answer really bewilders me. Teleological explanations themselves – including those provided by religion – comprise part of ‘our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility’. Can Fish really not see that trying to use religion to answer this question is obviously question-begging? (Don’t answer that.)
Religious and theological thought may well have something left to offer, but Feagletosh are totally off-track on what that something may be.
What Eagleton calls “theological” questions, normal people call either reasonable questions in need of some philosophical refinement or outmoded questions used by religious evangelists as part of their holy hustling for souls.
And it’s much easier for Eagleton to come up with theological questions than take the time to actually read some of the scientific and philosophical answers.
Now, here’s a theological question of my own: is Eagleton an honest seeker of the truth or just a hack who changes his opinions with the flowing tide in order to get attention like plenty of other newspaper columnists and other assorted buffoons?
He is illustrating what the world would be like without Enlightment reason: fully-grown men throwing rhetorical peanuts at each other in place of a decent counter-argument.
Nah, I disagree. Fully-grown men throwing rhetorical peanuts at each other is something that Enlightenment reason actually empowers – without Enlightenment reason, people tossing rhetorical peanuts tend to get themselves dry-roasted.
Feagletosh!
HAhahahahahahahahahahahaha
“Feagletosh” should surely be coined as an appropriate response for examples of this particular kind of sneering, obfuscatory irrationalism…
eg. “I read this great piece in the Grauniad where Bunting attacks rationalism..”
“Feagletosh!”
:-)
Slightly more seriously, it was heart-warming to see the treatment Fish got in the comments under his article.
Yes. Well done O stout-hearted readers of the NY Times.
Ok, for those that haven’t seen it yet, PZ was just stuck on a plane for 8 hours with Eagleton (the book, not the creep himself) for company, read it twice and has a take on it which is not identical to Fish’s: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/the_eagleton_delusion.php#more
“Feagletosh” sounds like it belongs in the Spike Jones version of the William Tell Overture. That’s the intonation in which my mind’s ear keeps hearing it.
Heh heh. PZ’s take –
“a kind of tweedy Andy Rooney with longer sentences and more complex vocabulary, and a lot more ego.”
I CANNOT STAND Stanley Fish. What a waste of newspaper space! Full of hot air.
FYI–have you seen this Yasmin Alibhai-Brown column? I found it poignant and pertinent to these posts of yours. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/yasmin-alibhai-brown/yasmin-alibhaibrown-whod-be-female-under-islamic-law-1678549.html
Yep, I posted it in News on Monday.