Surrender
Damon Linker makes a great observation, in discussing Hitchens and death and god. He compares Hitchens on the difference between his lucid self and the thing he could be turned into by drugs or pain, to Primo Levi on entering Auschwitz as a non-believer and exiting it the same way, and cites a too-devout Christian former colleague of his who had only contempt for Levi’s stoicism, calling it sinful pride.
Levi and Hitchens imply that a person’s capacity to determine the truth depends on his or her ability to think calmly, coolly, dispassionately. It depends on the capacity to bracket aspects of one’s subjectivity (like intense emotions, including fear of imminent death) that might distort one’s judgment or obstruct the effort to achieve an unbiased, objective view of the world in itself. This is the outlook of the scientist (Levi was a chemist), the philosopher, the champion of rational enlightenment, the secular intellectual and social critic. From this standpoint, the terrified, irrational effusions of a man facing his own extinction are no more to be trusted than a blind man’s account of a crime scene: each witness lacks the capacity to perceive, make sense of, and accurately judge the essential facts. Far more reliable are the sober, critical reflections of a man in good health, protected from danger, insulated from threats to his well being. That, for Levi and Hitchens, is a man at his best and most capable of determining the truth of things.
Religious believers—including my devoutly religious colleague at First Things—make very different assumptions about the proper path to truth and what constitutes a man at his best. As Rod Dreher noted in a post about Hitchens’ recent statements, a Christian believes that the experience of suffering discloses essential truths that cannot be discovered or known in any other way. What are these truths? That we are fundamentally weak and needy creatures. That we are anxious animals, longing for someone or something to soothe us, to protect us from and relieve us of our worries…
For the religious person, human beings are at their best when they accept these truths and live humbly in their light, offering up their existential anguish as prayers, opening themselves up to the possible existence of a providential divinity who will answer those prayers and grant salvation from the horror of obliteration…
Levi and Hitchens reside in the first camp, believing that they are most themselves when they are healthy and free—at the height of their human powers; whatever they may feel or say (or be tempted to say) in moments of weakness or degradation deserves to be dismissed as inauthentic. But the devout reside in the second camp, insisting that human beings are truest to themselves—most authentic—when they are most vulnerable.
That’s a beautiful point, and it clarifies what’s at stake. The devout think that humans are at their best when they are damaged: weak, suffering, miserable. The undevout think we are at our best when we are at our best – strong, healthy, functioning well, not afraid or depressed or flattened by grief.
Well which would it be? Is a sick, deaf, lame, tired dog a dog at its best or is it a dog that is not even itself anymore – that is no more than a tube to ingest and exrete food?
It’s the same for humans. I’ll come over all Aristotelian here and say that humans are at their best when they are best at doing what humans do – talking, thinking, laughing, making, designing, inventing, cooking, dancing, singing, and a thousand things more. That is humans at their best – when they’re living up to their potential. A human that is too lazy and apathetic to do anything but slump on a couch and watch tv 18 hours a day is not a human at her best, and neither is one who is physically damaged to the point of surrender.
If a gang kidnapped you and tortured you until you agreed to betray a friend to them – would that be you at your best? Hardly. If “god” takes advantage of your illness and pain to get you to surrender – would that be you at your best? I see absolutely no reason to think so.
Andrew Sullivan did the same fetishizing today.
I wonder if it has to do with associating faith with doubt, another of Sullivan’s themes. Where submission is regarded as a high virtue, a sick, deaf, lame, tired dog must seem an aspiration.
What’s grating is the implication that those who disagree must know little of suffering, like that coddled dilettante Primo Levi.
Ugh I hate that kind of lofty windbaggery and excusing of torture. I hate that pseudo-priestly talk from people who aren’t priests (I also hate it from people who are priests). It makes me want to hit things. “It is much deeper than that.” No it isn’t! It’s just licking the boots that kick you.
It doesn’t matter how you come to accept god, as long as you do. The end justifies the means.
Strange position for people who reject consequentialist reasoning.
Is there the implication here that if Levi had not encountered human beings acting in the most vile way possible he might have embraced belief in a celestial nanny ?
Nothing prevents me from “conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice” but so far no evidence has been presented to back up such claims.
Human behaviour, encompassing a continuum from genocidal and xenophobic through benevolent and tolerant does not constitute any sort of proof for a supernatural entity.
These same behaviours have reasonable evolutionary explanations, for example kin selection and altruism.
Why does either have to be true? Humans, as I see it, can become inspired through pain or pleasure: Gandhi, fasting in his cell; Solzhenitsyn in the camps; Bonhoeffer defying persecution in the Reich.
Is one’s “best” at one’s most “sober, critical” and “objective“?
I’m on board with the rejection of Sully’s theology. It’s a perverse, sado-masochistic outlook.
On this subject, we deserve a lecture from the late Bill Hicks: “A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. Do you think when Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a fucking cross? It’s like going up to Jackie Onassis wearing a rifle pendant.”
Of course, though, it’s perfectly right and good to believe that humans live up to their fullest potential by acting out of sympathy for those in pain. And in all likelihood this is the intuition that Sully and his fellow travellers have. But this intuition has been distorted in Sullivan’s passages above.
This explains much. In my all encounters with First Things, I have often noted that they not only sell Catholicism as the cure for despair, they sell despair as well. I have always considered drug companies who sell diseases (for which, they, of course, have the cure) as the lowest of bottom feeders. What does that say about First Things.
I think Damon Linker misunderstood — intentionally or otherwise — the point Christopher Hitchens was trying to make. While I don’t want to presume to express Hitchens’ thoughts on the subject of death in light of his cancer diagnosis, I nevertheless watched the recent interview in which Hitchens explained that he would not toss aside his atheistic views and embrace god or adopt prayer. Hitchens then offered the caveat that he would not do this of his own volition, and that he could not predict or vouch for what he might do when his mind has been degraded by disease or drugs. But he noted for purposes of clarity, that if reports later surface of a death-bed conversion, that any such reports should be dismissed because he would not, consciously and of his own free-will, choose faith over reason. [I’m paraphrasing, of course, but this is what I understood Hitchens to say.]
I understood Hitchens to mean simply what he said: that he could not envision adopting faith, unless (and even this he discounted as unlikely), his intellectual faculties had been so degraded by disease or drugs that this “person” who might be adopting faith could not be fairly thought of as Hitchens any longer, but rather another being manifested by way of psychosis.
Linker distorts both the content and meaning of the point Hitchens communicated. Linker characterizes Hitchens’ statement as saying that “IF” Hitchens were to have a deathbed conversion, it would be the product of an irrational terror or fear of a man facing his own death. I did not understand Hitchens to state or imply that terror or fear would have anything to do with such a conversion — but rather it would result, if at all, from the wholesale degradation of his ability to think and reason, and would thus be the product of a hallucinatory brain — and that at this stage of degradation, Hitchens’ mind (such as it were) could no longer be thought of as reflecting the thoughts or beliefs of the person known as Hitchens. Stated more simply, Hitchens would never consciously and intentionally choose faith over the alternative, which is rationality. [The point being that in order for some future theist to claim that Hitchens had chosen faith in his dying moments, as a prerequisite to such claim being true, Hitchens would need to be sane and in control of his mental faculties when making said choice — and Hitchens unambiguously stated that he could envision no circumstances at all that would cause him to willfully choose faith.]
But Linker goes beyond misstating Hitchens’ caveat (above), by concluding that in Hitchens’ view, Hitchens’ hypothetical mental degradation would be comparable to, and “no more to be trusted than,” the senses of a blind man, offering an account of a crime scene. Linker offers the implication that from Hitchens’ standpoint, the deathbed conversion of a man caused by mental degradation is equivalent to the diminished reliability of a blind man as a witness because the latter lacks one of the senses with which humans perceive surroundings. This is a flawed analogy for the obvious reason that all things being equal, a blind man is presumably sane and capable of logical thought — in contrast to Hitchens’ hypothetical, in which the deathbed convert can no longer be considered sane or in possession of his faculties. To the extent a blind man is less useful as a crime-scene witness, it is not because of the man’s insanity, but rather because he cannot see (and thus lacks the ability to testify to some relevant matters, such as the visual features of the criminal, and other matters requiring vision to perceive, e.g., physical movements, placement of relevant objects relative to one another, etc.). The logical flaws in Linker’s assertion are simply too glaring to miss, and ought to be apparent to any clear-thinking mind.
Linker’s words:
“From this standpoint, the terrified, irrational effusions of a man facing his own extinction are no more to be trusted than a blind man’s account of a crime scene: each witness lacks the capacity to perceive, make sense of, and accurately judge the essential facts.”
The sad thing is, as one way of viewing science fiction glurge like Starman puts it, there is a way in which humans are at their best when things are at their worst. But that way has nothing to do with submission to some who-knows-what, etc. It has to do with refusing to surrender to those who would take your humanity away, and I think Levi’s reaction to the Nazi horror at first hand is exactly that. The people who died there were human beings. They should come first, not something else “out there”, even if there were such a thing.
Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is definitely called to mind here.