Eagleton redux
Terry Eagleton is getting to be embarrassing. He reviewed a collection of essays on secularism last week, with his familiar combination of malice, inaccuracy and laziness. That’s not a good combination for a reviewer.
Most recent defences of secularism, not least those produced by “Ditchkins”
(Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens), have been irate, polemical affairs, powered by a crude species of off-the-peg, reach-me-down Enlightenment.
There’s the laziness and the malice – recycling his own stupid joke, which was never funny in the first place, not least because Dawkins and Hitchens are really not interchangeable. And there’s the inaccuracy too, in the meaningless sneer at the end.
It is scarcely a caricature of Dawkins’s work to suggest we are all getting nicer and nicer and that if it wasn’t for religious illusion, we would collectively outdo Kenneth Clark in sheer civility.
Scarcely a caricature! Scarcely a caricature!! This from a literary critic, for christ’s sake. A caricature is exactly what it is, and a broad, stupid, vulgar one at that.
Adam Phillips, a superb writer whose outlook on the world is that of Islington Man…
What, exactly, is it that Terry Eagleton thinks separates his outlook from that of “Islington Man”? What exactly is it that makes Eagleton’s outlook superior in its humility and authenticity and austerity? He’s a prosperous academic; he has been and perhaps still is trendy; he has acolytes; he has international gigs; he writes for the New Statesman and the Guardian. How is he not “Islington Man” himself? Whence comes the great height from which he looks down on other prosperous academics?
Christianity is certainly other-worldly, and so is any reasonably sensitive soul who has been reading the newspapers. The Christian gospel looks to a future transformation of the appalling mess we see around us into a community of justice and friendship, a change so deep-seated and indescribable as to make Lenin look like a Lib Dem.
Big woop. “The Christian gospel” can afford to do that, can’t it, because it’s just making it up. “Looking forward” to things is dead easy; making things happen is another kind of activity altogether, so naturally the latter is much tamer than the former. People who make things happen have to work within real limits; people who just make things up don’t. You’d think a lit crit would know that.
There are some predictable misunderstandings in these essays. No theologian worth his or her salt would see God as an “entity” as Philip Kitcher does.
Why’s that then? (If it’s even true, which I doubt.) See above – because making things up is a lot easier than working within the limits of the real world.
A message for quasi-Islington Man.
“Islington Man”?
I googled that, and got a whole bunch of headlines about crimes. Islington man arrested for this, or accused of that, or implicated in some other thing.
Quite a nasty chap, it seems, and prodigiously evil.
Just what does Eagleton mean by this comparison? I seem to have missed something.
@Paul
I got that also until I appended “definition” to it. Then I got:
Islington person a term used to denote a middle-class, socially aware person with left-wing views, characteristics supposedly typical of Islington residents, and harking back to the parlour pink of a previous generation. Islington person is seen as a typical supporter of New Labour who, while rejecting the brash self-interest of Essex man, is nevertheless similarly insulated by material wealth from the harshest pressures of modern society.
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O214-Islingtonperson.html
I’m not entirely sure that his caricature is entirely wrong, though. Not that I’m saying Dawkins has said that, but I don’t think it is entirely false. It definitely seems to be the case that as time progresses, on average, we learn to live with each other better. And it is also definitely the case that religion is one force (among many) that is slowing us down and threatens to claw back older traditions of nastiness. So even if it is a caricature, I’d be happy to support that statement, with qualifications. I couldn’t say whether or not Dawkins would myself.
As I understand it, Islington Man is upper-middle class. Hard to tell, really, as it’s usually used sneeringly, so exact meanings depend on the sneerer.
“No theologian worth his or her salt” might not “see God as an “entity” “, but the average believer most surely does. I’d suggest it’s not Dawkins et al who are out of touch with common belief, but the theologians. (At least as far as representing what common belief is. They can argue about whether the teapot’s Delft or Wedgewood all they like, but shouldn’t pretend that their ruminations are representative of that common belief that it’s Dresden.)
That is not a rational understanding of historical Christianity. How would you have to think to even say it?
Oh…like that.
Eagleton has a peculiar attachment to Christianity as some kind of authentic Leninism that simply must be defended. I see no evidence that he’s taken the time to study the religion beyond what is needed to support his opinions.
Gosh! What a contemptible little man Eagleton is. It never ceases to amaze me how much recycled venom and bile he can spew forth while claiming that others are shallow, repetitive, uninformed, stick-like figures compared to the breadth of his own imagination, and the richness of his own scope and cultivation. But to claim, as he does, that the future to which Christianity points would make Lenin look like a Lib-Dem is to forget that Christianity has been looking forward to this wondrous future for nearly two thousand years, or that Islam claims to look forward to a future at least as rich in peace and prosperity. The madness of the religious vision, where, as you say, people just make things up, is clear in this, that, despite generations and generations in which Christians and Muslims and other religious have anticipated the coming kingdom of peace under the rule of God they have all managed to carry out pogroms and crusades, enslavements, and oppressions, cruelties and massacres, all in the name of the same peace they claim and the (same or different) God they adore. What has happened to Eagleton that he is now an out and out apologist for Christianity? I guess his unbelief was only skin deep. Criticise his religion, though, and he is suddenly all bristles, like the faith he pretends at other times to scorn.
Did Eagleton actually read any of the essays? There’s no evidence of it from his “review.”
I’m confused, where in any of Dawkins’ writings does he indicate that “we are all getting nicer and nicer”?
Brief points: why is it that “no theologian worth his salt” believes anything like what most monotheists throughout history have? Christianity is multiple religions nowadays, most of which either explictly involve God as an entity or imply it strongly enough to hook in all the laypeople. Who has time for this tiny spinoff religion, “theologian’s Christianity”, especially when the William Lane Craigs of the world are perfectly willing to offer their views as experts in the relevant theology, while actually promoting ideas that other people actually believe?
On a second, more adolescent note, I read that first quote as accusing “Ditchkins” of “on-a-peg, reacharound Enlightenment”, which I thought a hilarious and baffling metaphor.
Right (what Mike said); it’s another version (but sexist) of “the chattering classes.” It’s obviously just ludicrous for Eagleton to use it to sneer at other people. He’s more Islington than prosperous lefties who actually live in Islington. He’s Homo islingtoni islingtoni, the only one of his kind.
I was also confused by the “Islington man” reference, but now I’m kind of disappointed he wasn’t referring to this:
Yeah, if it’s wrong theology, then he needs to stop focusing on atheists who have the wrong idea bout Christianity and start focusing on Christian leaders who are giving people the wrong idea.
Improbable Joe. Since the book contains essays by Charles Taylor (winner of the Templeton prize, and a devout Catholic who argues at length for the reenchantment of the world), it would seem that Eagleton did not read the essays. And if he read Kitcher, he should have noticed that Kitcher, in a series of articles, while an atheist, does support at least a liberal form of Christianity. And the idea that no one believes in god as an entity is so absurd as not to bear close examination. Aquinas may have thought of god in an Aristotelian way, but he ended up with a mystic vision, and all his philosophy was, he said, as straw. So, really, if Eagleton read, he certainly did not read attentively. Just another opportunity to play spite and malice.
I assume he’s referring to the section of The God Delusion headed The Moral Zeitgeist.
Which reminds me that Eagleton’s review of TGD is a classic of purposeful misapprehension.
And the usual Eagleton trade mark – a ridiculous and pointless analogy:-
“For postmodern theory, there never was any truth or meaning in the first place, and so mourning its disappearance would be like lamenting that a rabbit can’t recite Paradise Lost.”
WTF is that about? Is it supposed to be funny? Is it supposed to be enlightening?
God is a nonentity of course, like Eagletosh (though in a different way, theologically speaking).
Given that the coming of the Kingdom of God as described by GospelJesus is accompanied by uprooting the “weeds” and tossing them into the “fiery furnace,” perhaps a better comparison would be Stalin.
Eric MacDonald wrote:
To be fair, Eagleton is merely saying that the idea that god is an entity is “mistaken”. Only Eagleton knows why only theologians’ beliefs should be addressed. Just because Paul Tillich thinks that saying “god exists” is blasphemy doesn’t mean most believers don’t think god exists, nor is there any way to say which is the “correct” belief.
Eagleton will invest in any crackpot belief system, from Althusseran marxism to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Now its the New Theism.
I guess this time he thinks he’s finally found something that won’t become a laughing stock in his lifetime.
Well, to be exact, Eagleton is saying that no good-enough theologian “would see God as an ‘entity’.” It still sounds like complete bullshit – literally no ok theologians see God as an entity? If that’s true, what is “theology”? What is the “theos” there?
Historically, “God” certainly always has been seen as an entity. The Tillichian “God” is a minority plaything, and shouldn’t be called “God” anyway.
And even with that – is it even true that Tillichian theologians are the only good theologians there are? I find that very hard to believe. (And I’m certainly not going to take Eagleton’s word for it, since he just says anything he feels like saying, with no regard at all for whether it’s true or he can back it up.)
This seems written by someone who is drunk, or just typing random ideas and just doesn’t care.
Christians look forward to justice all right – after they are dead. That’s the only thing they look forward to – unless you count forcing others to believe like they do – or at least act as if they do, as well as fording others to try to follow their twisted morality.As for “other-worldly” that’s another world for Fantasy, right?
Islington Man = Tony Blair or anyone who thinks like him (he lived in Islington for a while). So it’s clever-sounding crap. He’s just spouting hot air. And his talk of God as not really an “entity” reminds me of Stephen Law’s useful book on Bullshit (and thanks, Ophelia, for putting me on to that): “Oh, you seem to think I am saying something meaningful. Hard cheese! I am not expressing any opinions at all, and everything I say has no meaning that you can possibly comprehend, because, well, it has no meaning at all. It’s just a promise, or a pointer, or, well, just words I like saying, basically. See how superior my understanding is. So sucks to you”.
Eagleton’s theology is to mainstream Christianity what his Marxism was to the Labour movement.
You might think that socialism is something to do with social justice but that’s a humanist/empiricist/historicist/economicist delusion and REAL socialism is about decentering the subject.
Why ask the Christians/workers what they think when you can construct Christians/workers of your own according to Theory?
Why worry about improving conditions in the here and now when there’s a deferred Utopia to place your faith in?
Eagleton called Anthony Grayling Islington Man. Anthony doesn’t live in Islington! Nyah! I think Nick Cohen does, but he’s more like Scourge of Islington Person.
Clever-sounding crap, then. We’re supposed to “understand”. But it’s just words, like the rest of his pseudo-critique.
Yes – what the heck is the problem with Rumsfeld if you’re not going to appeal to the problem of evil? Is it that Rumsfeld is icky, like cobras and garbage cans?
More from Eagleton:
What the fark is he trying to say? A book on secularism should instead discuss the implications of Christianity being true? And speaking of that: how does a non-entity get born in human form?
He’s trying to say that Christian morality is so far beyond the reach of secularists that it represents an ultimately unattainable aspiration (without the grace of God, presumably), and by contrast we mere secularists are trivial with our pathetically “worldly” goals. I am inclined to think that evil starts here. I’m not exaggerating. Just think about it. The human cost of other-worldly goals, vis-s-vis the essential needs of common humanity.
Religion “sacralises” the essential needs of common humanity. And in doing so it takes them out of our power to address them. We have to insist on taking them back. They are our needs, in the real world that we have to live in, not some fairy-tale rubbish of gods and demons and eternal sacrifices for suffering humanity blah blah. We suffer, and we want to do something about it. And all the religion of all the generations of all the world has never, and will never, permit us to find our own answers.
Shatterface wrote:
The more apologetics – both professional and amateur – I read, the farther away it appears that theologians and lay-apologists are getting from what the vast majority of religious actually believe in.
Abstract concepts of God such as ‘the ground of being’ are so far removed from what the people in churches on a Sunday morning are there to sing songs of praise to – and feel they are being judged by – that it’s essentially an entirely separate religion.
However, neither side is will to admit that, since it would deprive the hand-waving wafflers of the numbers to support them, and the old-fashioned Yahweh of the bible worshippers from having to admit they can’t answer the uncomfortable truths raised by us nasty atheists.
That’s what I figured as well, but I’m not sure what else he expected from a book titled “The Joy of Secularism” – since he criticizes it for “misunderstanding what it means to be secular”. A post-modern international business manual for nihilistic CEOs?
I wondered about that, too, but I came to the conclusion that he’s just trying to know better than everyone else. Looks good, you see.
What I mean is that throughout his “critique” he apes authority. What is better, when you have nothing to say and are still being paid for your column-inches? He talks in a superior tone throughout, as though he “really knows, you know”. It’s a con. The man’s a liar.
Exactly. Everybody misunderstands everything, except for polymathic unIslington Terry Eagleton.
Yes, that’s essential. You know, that’s really disgusting. I suppose he’s not really a wicked bugger, just a vain fool.
A book worth reading if one wants to understand the lack of any ground on which such as the Ineffable Eagleton like to set their feet is ‘Metaphor & Religious Language’ by Janet Martin Soskice, professor of philosophical theology and fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. The book – a careful analysis of the nature of metaphor – is in many ways a very good one, but it ends, in a chapter entitled ‘Metaphor and Theological Realism’, in what surely amounts to evasiveness that is designed to protect not so much religion (as the title of her book suggests) as Christianity. She speaks of ‘a literalism which equates religious truth with historical facts, whatever these may be’, and goes on to say that ‘Christianity is indeed a religion of the book, but not of a book of this sort of fact. Its sacred texts are chronicles of experience, armouries of metaphor, and purveyors of an interpretive tradition. The sacred literature thus records the experiences of the past and provides the descriptive language by which any new experience may be interpreted.’ These ‘experiences’ are of ‘that which cannot be adequately described’, that is to say, ‘God’. Elsewhere in her book she asserts that her argument has no bearing on whether there is or is not a God, or, rather, that the existence (if you can use that term) or otherwise of God is irrelevant to her argument. But, as you see, she has to posit something real somewhere in order to make her argument work: and that ‘reality’ is religious experience, but we cannot readily say what such experience is experience of. It might be of nothing, really: our own fantasies or delusions; but she seeks to avoid that pitfall (for the Christian and the theologian) by positing, while denying that she is really doing so, the existence of ‘that which cannot be adequately described’, of ‘He Who Is’. You might call it a matter of not having your cake and not eating it. It is this kind of practice that underlies Eagleton’s evasiveness and his sheer silliness.
Ah well, they all get mystical in the end. It’s not this, it’s not that, it’s something else — sorry, “other” — can’t explain, you know, ineffable and transcendent and all that. They forget that their sacred scriptures were put together to meet local needs at a particular time, and have since been pondered over and reassessed by various Jewish and Christian committees. And have been handed down as “holy” by mere tradition for ever and ever, not because they say anything, but because it’s what we do, hand things on for no reason except that we have been taught. Frankly, we might just as well advocate the I Ching. Why not? Toss a few coins (or yarrow stalks) and read an oracle. You might get the same oracle again on another occasion but what the hell, it’s all about “change”, so read it the way you want. And then get mystical about it. What’s the difference? I like your “not having your cake and not eating it”!
No, GordonWillis, The scary thing is he probably isn’t a liar. Eagletosh may not know what he believes, but he knows he believes it.
So he’s lying to himself, then? He believes he believes, he doesn’t know what he believes, but he makes out he believes it anyway, just so that everyone else knows he believes whatever it is that no one knows he believes (though he allows us to have some idea). He’s kidding himself, and everyone else. He wants to believe, and he wants the authority of appearing to know what he believes and why and convincing the rest of us that he really really isn’t talking total rubbish. How is he not a liar, then?
A liar knows they are telling lies.
In fact, much of what Eagletosh believes isn’t untrue any more than it’s true. It’s a reflection of theology or some forms of marxist ideology- a verbal structure put up alongside reality but never or very seldom actually impinging on it. What Eagletosh says has no more “entity” than the god he refers to. Eagletosh himself is fairly harmless, if dishonest and irritating. It’s the people who actually believe these forms of rhetoric say things about reality and try to apply them that are dangerous/
It goes back to what I said earlier about evil. He disparages a way of life which seeks to address human wrongs here and now (because that’s where the wrongs are). He does this on the basis that some other-worldly morality is somehow better, because (without God’s grace) unattainable. In doing this he aligns himself with the people who really do believe in the other-worldly nature of our lives, and gives them encouragement to quash our efforts to better ourselves in favour of a merely mythical “spiritual” salvation. That makes him one with them, and at least equally dangerous.
Also, a liar doesn’t necessarily know they are telling lies. Self-deception is perfectly normal.
Ophelia S. Benson wrote:
My mistake. Although I put “mistaken” in quotes, after reading this comment I copied the article into a word document and searched for “mistake” and found nothing. Apparently I confabulated from the part where Eagleton says Kitcher’s use of “transcendental entity” was inaccurate. I could have sworn the word was in the article.
Moar insufferable Eagleton:
Eagleton writes, without noticing that the signifier of God for the New Testament is the resurrected body of a repentance preacher (see also: OT prophets), who bears wounds without pain or debilitation. Also apparently without noticing the Acts of the Apostles, which feature disciples repeatedly surviving grievous injury via miracle.
A Christian might reply thus, but how many Christians actually notice that Jesus tells people to sell everything they own and give the proceeds to the poor in order to be his disciples, or that a tax collector who gives up half of his money is told by Jesus that he has earned a place in heaven? Eagleton’s hypothetical Christian seems to be in the clear minority of actual believers, and his reading of Christian beliefs seems pretty clearly influenced by his own Marxism.
GordonWillis wrote:
I didn’t read that part this way. I figured Eagleton was saying the essayists could criticize Christian morality as unattainable, but instead “chatter away” with less powerful critiques.
Does he disparage a way of life which seeks to address human wrongs here and now? His burblings about Rumsfeld would be even more stupid if he did. Eagletosh isn’t actually a religious believer any more, remember. He’s a marxist, supposedly with very real beliefs about improving this world, though in his case, as I said, I think the marxism has litttle or no connexion with this world, just as his literature courses nolonger seem to have any connexion to any actual works of literature.
It isn’t the believers who build detailed logical structures at an angle to reality who are dangerous but theonsts who do try to better this world. It’s Osama bin Laden and Stalin we need to worry about, not the rhetorical theoreticians. The latter are responsible though- and I was mistaken in saying people like Eagletosh are harmless for that reason- for giving the former apparent justifications for their actions which outweigh their immediate apparent consequences.
“You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.” That’s the policy Eagletosh justifies
Self-deception is completely normal.
I think someone who doesn’t know they are telling lies- or saying things with no connexion with reality- isn’t a liar. I think if we are going to call someone a liar then their conscious purpose is animportant aspect of the definition.
I think your other point applies here, Moewicus:
Eagletosh disregards the criticism of actual morality as practised by christians by demanding criticism of an ideal christianit morality which exists only as an inspiration for and justification of actual existing christianity.
Wait… holy Thor, there is more stupid and wrong here than my wee small brain can comprehend!
“God” is not an “entity”? That’s… good? Entities are things that are defined as having some form of existence. If “God” is not an entity, then “God” is something that lacks any form of existence. Therefore, Eagleton’s theologians are all atheists. Works for me!
Granted, I’m just some idiot without a fancy degree in anything. I’m also a smart and common-sense sort of guy with a tested IQ over 150… but has Eagleton talked to an actual Christian lately? In America, which seems to be one of the few holdout countries filled with this superstitious stupidity? Christians in America claim that their god is not only an “entity” but he is also a person… and also a HE! Maybe you have to be a professional “literary theorist” to be so stupid as to claim that a gendered being with whom people claim to have a personal relationship is not an “entity” in any sense.
I’d have just thought Eagleton was a professional philosopher… I expect that sort to be sufficiently idiotic to make that sort of claim. [mostly just kidding] :)
But what is a person but a culturally-imposed story of self-hood? It’s only within the context of Christian fellowship that the secularist can understand the relationship between the idea of gender and the Marxist soul, a bridge too far for the pen of Hitchens. The dumb post-Enlightenment rants of the men of Oxford are merely a flatulent rumble drowned out by the Psalms, the endless signifier, a redemption that was always here, in the Kingdom, not in the crassulent tyranny of some science age.
There, I hope that explains things.
In fact, what really becomes clear from Sospice’s book is that the sort of theology that various theologians and Eagleton espouse is a closed hermeneutical circle without any genuine purchase on reality, a sort of prayer-wheel idly and endlessly spinning.
For those still wondering at the “Islington Man” jibe, Bremner Bird and Fortune’s Middle Class Dinner Party;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22gCw4iDdu4
I-max levels of projection involved in Eagleton using that term.
Oh, good. Theologians do agree with us about the mumbo-jumbo (according to the Eagle-man), they’re just being contrarian.
Uh huh. Well, let’s hear what yer ac’shul theologians say…
What’s vexing about Eagleton isn’t just his snideness towards non-believers; it’s his condescension towards the religious. He seems intent on arguing that they don’t really believe the things they claim to.
Does someone who can say that thinkabout what he sats?
[…] Eagleton keeps popping up and I do my best to ignore him, but some quotes in Butterflies and Wheels from a review he wrote on some secular essays have allowed me to comment without reading the entire […]
Eagleton is a Catholic Marxist. What he dislikes most about what in this piece he calls “liberal secularism” (as distinct from “radical secularism”) is that it attacks religion without challenging capitalism. He draws from Christianity a revolutionary image of Jesus as political prisoner, which he finds inspiring.
This has been a theme of his since forever (see http://newhumanist.org.uk/2085/tragic-hero-laurie-taylor-interviews-terry-eagleton).
In this “review” Eagleton is not as clear as he should be. His theology is mistaken where it isn’t barely coherent. His criticisms of Dawkins et al are mainly daft and snippy. But there is an interesting point in there somewhere about liberalism versus radicalism, and tragic humanism versus optimistic humanism.
Dan
[…] tone throughout, as though he “really knows, you know”. It’s a con. The man’s a liar. (Said about Terry Eagleton.) Also conspicuously missing is Nick Matzke’s ability to apply his criticisms to himself. Nick […]