[Peace-discuss] Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Terry Eagleton is a Britsh academic and protege of my own ghostly father, the 
late Herbert McCabe OP.  The following is excerpted from "Reason, Faith, and 
Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate" by Terry Eagleton, to be published 
April 21, 2009, by Yale University Press. I'm skeptical of this essay in a 
number of ways, but I also think that Eagleton is, as some of my scientific 
friends say, "on to something." I find attractive, if that's quite the word, his 
vision of "tragic humanism" (in, I must say, its socialist, Christian and 
psychoanalytic varieties): "only by a process of self-dispossession and radical 
remaking can humanity come into its own; there are no guarantees that such a 
transfigured future will ever be born -- but it might arrive a little earlier if 
liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and Islamophobic 
intellectuals got out of its way." --CGE]


"...In a world in which theology is increasingly part of the problem, it is also 
fostering the kind of critical reflection which might contribute to some of the 
answers..."


	March 27, 2009  / Volume CXXXVI, Number 6
	Culture & Barbarism: Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism
	Terry Eagleton

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? 
Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic 
twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of 
Zoroastrianism? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section 
labeled “Atheism,” hosting anti-God manifestos by Christopher Hitchens, Richard 
Dawkins, and others, and might even now be contemplating another marked 
“Congenital Skeptic with Mild Baptist Leanings”? Why, just as we were 
confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical 
era, has the God question broken out anew?

Can one simply put it down to falling towers and fanatical Islamists? I don’t 
really think we can. Certainly the New Atheists’ disdain for religion did not 
sprout from the ruins of the World Trade Center. While some of the debate took 
its cue from there, 9/11 was not really about religion, any more than the 
thirty-year-long conflict in Northern Ireland was over papal infallibility. In 
fact, radical Islam generally understands exceedingly little about its own 
religious faith, and there is good evidence to suggest that its actions are, for 
the most part, politically driven.

That does not mean these actions have no religious impact or significance. 
Islamic fundamentalism confronts Western civilization with the contradiction 
between the West’s own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so. The 
West now stands eyeball-to-eyeball with a full-blooded “metaphysical” foe for 
whom absolute truths and foundations pose no problem at all -- and this at just 
the point when a Western civilization in the throes of late modernity, or 
postmodernity if you prefer, has to skate by on believing as little as it 
decently can. In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily 
undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of 
practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and 
philosophical skepticism. All this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence.

Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic. It looks particularly flaccid when 
its paucity of belief runs up against an excess of the stuff -- not only abroad, 
but domestically too, in the form of various homegrown fundamentalisms. Modern 
market societies tend to be secular, relativist, pragmatic, and materialistic, 
qualities that undermine the metaphysical values on which political authority in 
part depends. And yet capitalism cannot easily dispense with those metaphysical 
values, even though it has difficulty taking them seriously. (As President 
Dwight Eisenhower once announced, channeling Groucho Marx, “Our government makes 
no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief -- and I don’t 
care what it is.”) Religious faith in this view is both vital and vacuous. God 
is ritually invoked on American political platforms, but it would not do to 
raise him in a committee meeting of the World Bank. In the United States, 
ideologues of the religious Right, aware of the market’s tendency to oust 
metaphysics, sought to put those values back in place. Thus does postmodern 
relativism breed a redneck fundamentalism; those who believe very little rub 
shoulders with those ready to believe almost anything. With the advent of 
Islamist terrorism, these contradictions have been dramatically sharpened. It is 
now more than ever necessary that the people should believe, even as the Western 
way of life deprives them of much incentive for doing so.

Assured since the fall of the Soviet bloc that it could proceed with impunity to 
pursue its own global interests, the West overreached itself. Just when 
ideologies in general seemed to have packed up for good, the United States put 
them back on the agenda in the form of a peculiarly poisonous brand of 
neoconservatism. Like characters in some second-rate piece of science fiction, a 
small cabal of fanatical dogmatists occupied the White House and proceeded to 
execute their well-laid plans for world sovereignty. It was almost as bizarre as 
Scientologists taking over 10 Downing Street, or Da Vinci Code buffs patrolling 
the corridors of the Elysée Palace. The much-trumpeted Death of History, meaning 
that capitalism was now the only game in town, reflected the arrogance of the 
West’s project of global domination; and that aggressive project triggered a 
backlash in the form of radical Islam.

And so the very act of attempting to close history down has sprung it open 
again. Both at home and globally, economic liberalism rides roughshod over 
peoples and communities, and in the process triggers just the kind of violent 
social and cultural backlash that liberalism is least capable of handling. In 
this sense, too, terrorism highlights certain contradictions endemic to liberal 
capitalism. We have seen already that pluralistic liberal societies do not so 
much hold beliefs as believe that people should be allowed freely to hold 
beliefs. The summum bonum is to leave believers to get on with it unmolested. 
Such a purely formal or procedural approach to belief necessitates keeping 
entrenched faiths or identities at a certain ironic arm’s length.

Yet this value -- liberal society’s long, unruly, eternally inconclusive 
argument -- also brings vulnerability. A tight national consensus, desirable in 
the face of external attack, is hard to pull off in liberal democracies, and not 
least when they turn multicultural. Lukewarmness about belief is likely to prove 
a handicap when one is confronted with a full-bloodedly metaphysical enemy. The 
very pluralism you view as an index of your spiritual strength may have a 
debilitating effect on your political authority, especially against zealots who 
regard pluralism as a form of intellectual cowardice. The idea, touted in 
particular by some Americans, that Islamic radicals are envious of Western 
freedoms is about as convincing as the suggestion that they are secretly 
hankering to sit in cafés smoking dope and reading Gilles Deleuze.

In the face of the social devastation wreaked by economic liberalism, some 
besieged groups can feel secure only by clinging to an exclusivist identity or 
unbending doctrine. And in fact, advanced capitalism has little alternative to 
offer them. The kind of automated, built-in consent it seeks from its citizens 
does not depend all that much on what they believe. As long as they get out of 
bed, roll into work, consume, pay their taxes, and refrain from beating up 
police officers, what goes on in their heads and hearts is mostly secondary. 
Advanced capitalism is not the kind of regime that exacts much spiritual 
commitment from its subjects. Indeed, zeal is more to be feared than encouraged. 
That is an advantage in “normal” times, since demanding too much belief from men 
and women can easily backfire. But it is much less a benefit in times of 
political tumult.

Economic liberalism has generated great tides of global migration, which within 
the West has given birth to so-called multiculturalism. At its least impressive, 
multiculturalism blandly embraces difference as such, without looking too 
closely into what one is differing over. It imagines that there is something 
inherently positive about having a host of different views on the same subject. 
Such facile pluralism tends to numb the habit of vigorously contesting other 
people’s beliefs -- of calling them arrant nonsense or unmitigated garbage, for 
example. This is not the best training ground for taking on people whose beliefs 
can cave in skulls. One of the more agreeable aspects of Christopher Hitchens’s 
polemic against religion, "God Is Not Great," is its author’s ready willingness 
to declare that he thinks religion poisonous and disgusting. Perhaps he finds it 
mildly embarrassing in his new, post-Marxist persona that “Religion is poison” 
was the slogan under which Mao launched his assault on the people and culture of 
Tibet. But he is right to stick to his guns even so. Beliefs are not to be 
respected just because they are beliefs. Societies in which any kind of abrasive 
criticism constitutes “abuse” clearly have a problem.

That problem encompasses a contradictory fact: the more capitalism flourishes on 
a global scale, the more multiculturalism threatens to loosen the hold of the 
nation-state over its subjects. Culture, after all, is what helps power grow 
roots, interweaving it with our lived experience and thus tightening its grip on 
us. A power which has to sink roots in many diverse cultures simultaneously is 
at a signal disadvantage. A British defense think-tank recently published a 
report arguing that a “misplaced deference to multiculturalism” that fails “to 
lay down the line to immigrant communities” was weakening the fight against 
political extremists. The problem, the report warned, was one of social 
fragmentation in a multicultural nation increasingly divided over its history, 
identity, aims, and values. When it came to the fight against terrorism, the 
nation’s liberal values, in short, were undermining themselves.

Multiculturalism threatens the existing order not only because it can create a 
breeding ground for terrorists, but because the political state depends on a 
reasonably tight cultural consensus. British prime ministers believe in a common 
culture -- but what they mean is that everyone should share their own beliefs so 
that they won’t end up bombing London Underground stations. The truth, however, 
is that no cultural belief is ever extended to sizable groups of newcomers 
without being transformed in the process. This is what a simpleminded philosophy 
of “integration” fails to recognize. There is no assumption in the White House, 
Downing Street, or the Elysée Palace that one’s own beliefs might be challenged 
or changed in the act of being extended to others. A common culture in this view 
incorporates outsiders into an already established, unquestionable framework of 
values, leaving them free to practice whichever of their quaint customs pose no 
threat. Such a policy appropriates newcomers in one sense, while ignoring them 
in another. It is at once too possessive and too hands-off. A common culture in 
a more radical sense of the term is not one in which everyone believes the same 
thing, but one in which everyone has equal status in cooperatively determining a 
way of life in common.

If this is to include those from cultural traditions that are currently 
marginal, then the culture we are likely to end up with will be very different 
from the one we have now. For one thing, it will be more diverse. A culture that 
results from the active participation of all its members is likely to be more 
mixed and uneven than a uniform culture that admits new members only on its own 
terms. In this sense, equality generates difference. It is not a question of 
mustering a diversity of cultures under the common umbrella of Britishness, but 
of putting that whole received identity into the melting pot and seeing what 
might emerge. If the British or American way of life really were to take on 
board the critique of materialism, hedonism, and individualism made by many 
devout Muslims, Western civilization would most certainly be altered for the 
good. This is a rather different vision from the kind of multiculturalism that 
leaves Muslims and others alone to do their own charmingly esoteric stuff, 
commending them from a safe distance.

Part of what has happened in our time is that God has shifted over from the side 
of civilization to the side of barbarism. He is no longer the short-haired, 
blue-blazered God of the West -- well, perhaps he is in the United States, but 
not in Porto or Cardiff or Bologna. Instead, he is a wrathful, dark-skinned God 
who, if he did create John Locke and John Stuart Mill, has long since forgotten 
the fact. One can still speak of the clash between civilization and barbarism; 
but a more subtle form of the same dispute is to speak of a conflict between 
civilization and culture. Civilization in this dichotomy means the universal, 
autonomous, prosperous, individual, rationally speculative, self-doubting, and 
ironic; culture means the customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, 
unreflective, unironic, and a-rational. Culture signifies all those unreflective 
loyalties and allegiances for which men and women in extreme circumstances are 
prepared to kill. For the most part, the former colonizing nations are 
civilizations, while the former colonies are cultures.

Civilization is precious but fragile; culture is raw but potent. Civilizations 
kill to protect their material interests, whereas cultures kill to defend their 
identity. These are seeming opposites; yet the pressing reality of our age is 
that civilization can neither dispense with culture nor easily coexist with it. 
The more pragmatic and materialistic civilization becomes, the more culture is 
summoned to fulfill the emotional and psychological needs that it cannot 
handle-and the more, therefore, the two fall into mutual antagonism. What is 
meant to mediate universal values to particular times and places ends up turning 
aggressively against them. Culture is the repressed that returns with a 
vengeance. Because it is supposed to be more localized, immediate, spontaneous, 
and a-rational than civilization, it is the more aesthetic concept of the two. 
The kind of nationalism that seeks to affirm a native culture is always the most 
poetic kind of politics -- the “invention of literary men,” as someone once 
remarked. You would not have put the great Irish nationalist Padraic Pearse on 
the sanitation committee.

Religion falls on both sides of this fence simultaneously, which is part of its 
formidable power. As civilization, religion is doctrine, institution, authority, 
metaphysical speculation, transcendent truth, choirs, and cathedrals. As 
culture, it is myth, ritual, savage irrationalism, spontaneous feeling, and the 
dark gods. Religion in the United States is by and large a civilizational 
matter, whereas in England it is largely a traditional way of life -- more akin 
to high tea or clog dancing than to socialism or Darwinism -- which it would be 
bad form to take too seriously (the highly English Dawkins is in this respect 
egregiously un-English). One couldn’t imagine the Queen’s chaplain asking you if 
you have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. As the Englishman remarked, it’s 
when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it’s time to give 
it up. Polls reveal that most of the English believe that religion has done more 
harm than good, an eminently reasonable opinion unlikely to be endorsed in Dallas.

What the champions of civilization rightly hold against culture is its tendency 
to substitute for rational debate. Just as in some traditionalist societies you 
can justify what you do on the grounds that your ancestors did it, so for some 
culturalists you can justify what you do because your culture does it. This 
seems benign if one is thinking of Iceland, the Azande, or the maritime 
community, but less so for Hell’s Angels, neofascists, or Scientologists. In his 
article, “Islam, Islamisms, and the West,” Aijaz Ahmad points out that culture 
has come in some quarters to mean that one is how one is because of who one is 
-- a doctrine shared by racism. An appeal to culture becomes a way of absolving 
us to some extent from moral responsibility as well as from rational argument. 
Just as it is part of their way of life to dig traps for tigers, so it is part 
of our way of life to manufacture cruise missiles. Postmodern thought is hostile 
to the idea of foundations; yet in postmodernism, culture becomes the new 
absolute, conceptual end-stop, the transcendental signifier. Culture is the 
point at which one’s spade hits rock bottom, the skin out of which one cannot 
leap, the horizon over which one is unable to peer. This is a strange case to 
launch at a point in history when Nature, a somewhat passé idea until our 
attention was recently drawn to its looming devastation, may be on the point of 
trumping human culture as a whole.

Yet there is a certain sacred resonance to the idea of culture. For several 
centuries now, after all, it has been proposed as the secular alternative to a 
failing religious faith. This is not a wholly ridiculous notion. Like religion, 
culture is a matter of ultimate values, intuitive certainties, hallowed 
traditions, assured identities, shared beliefs, symbolic action, and a sense of 
transcendence. It is culture, not religion, that for many men and women today 
forms the heart of a heartless world. This is true whether one has in mind the 
idea of culture as literature and the arts, or as a cherished way of life. Most 
aesthetic concepts are pieces of displaced theology, and the work of art, seen 
as mysterious, self-dependent, and self-moving, is an image of God for an 
agnostic age. Yet culture fails as an ersatz religion. Works of art cannot save 
us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired. And 
celebrating culture as a way of life is too parochial a version of redemption.

Some seek to reconcile culture and civilization (or as some might translate 
these terms, the Germans and the French) by claiming that the values of 
civilization, though universal, need a local habitation and a name -- some 
sector of the globe that acts as the postal address of human civility itself. 
And this, of course, has been the West. In this view the West is a civilization, 
to be sure; but it also the very essence of the thing itself, rather as France 
is one nation among many, yet also the very essence of the intellect. For those 
to whom this argument seems supremacist, there exists what seems at first glance 
a rather less chauvinistic version of it. It is associated with the philosopher 
Richard Rorty (and, to a lesser extent, with the literary critic Stanley Fish).

Rorty’s kind of argument allows you to acknowledge that Western civilization is 
indeed a “culture” in the sense of being local and contingent -- even as you 
claim its values are the ones to promote. This means behaving as though your 
values have all the force of universal ones, while at the same time insulating 
them from any thoroughgoing critique. They are immune to such critique because 
you do not claim any rational foundation for them; yours, after all, is just one 
culture among others. In a bold move, you can abandon a rational defense of your 
way of life for a culturalist one, even though the price of doing so is leaving 
it perilously ungrounded. “Culture” and “civilization” here felicitously 
coincide. The West is most certainly civilized; but since its civility descends 
to it from its contingent cultural history, there is no need to provide rational 
grounds for it. One thus wins for oneself the best of both worlds.

Reason alone can face down a barbarous irrationalism, but to do so it must draw 
upon forces and sources of faith which run deeper than itself, and which can 
therefore bear an unsettling resemblance to the very irrationalism it is seeking 
to repel. Such a situation confronted Europe during the Second World War. Would 
liberal humanism really prove adequate to defeat fascism, a movement which drew 
from powerfully irrational sources -- or could fascism be vanquished only by an 
antagonist that cut as deep as it did, as socialism claimed to do? The question 
of reason and its opposite was a major theme of Thomas Mann’s great novel The 
Magic Mountain. In this work, life and death, affirmation and negation, Eros and 
Thanatos, the sacred and the obscene, are all interwoven in the conflict between 
Settembrini, the liberal humanist, and the sinister Naphta, Jesuit, communist, 
and rebel. Naphta is a full-blooded modernist in satanic revolt against 
Settembrini’s spirit of liberal bourgeois modernity. An exponent of sacrifice, 
spiritual absolutism, religious zeal, and the cult of death, he draws his life 
from the archaic and bloodstained springs of culture, whereas the civilized 
Settembrini is a sunny-minded champion of reason, progress, liberal values, and 
the European mind.

There can be no doubt which character in The Magic Mountain our civilized New 
Atheists such as Hitchens and Dawkins would find congenial, and which they would 
vilify. The novel itself, however, is a trifle more subtle in its judgments. The 
Settembrini who celebrates life is actually at death’s door, and the First World 
War during which the novel is set spells the ruin of his high nineteenth-century 
hopes. Naphta may be pathologically in love with death, but Settembrini’s 
buoyant humanism thrives on the repression of it. He cannot stomach the truth 
that to be human is, among other things, to be sick. Perversity and aberration 
are constitutive of the human condition, not just irrational deviations from it. 
It is significant in this respect that nobody in the clinic in which the novel’s 
action takes place ever seems to be cured.

What the novel’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, comes to recognize is a form of 
death-in-life which is the way of neither Naphta nor Settembrini. It involves 
affirming the human humbly, nonhubristically, in the knowledge of its frailty 
and mortality. This tragic humanism embraces the disruptiveness of death, as 
Settembrini does not; but, unlike Naphta, it refuses to turn death into a 
fetish. At the heart of Castorp’s moving utopian vision of love and comradeship 
in the novel’s great snow scene lurks the horrifying image of a child torn limb 
from limb, a token of the blood sacrifice that underpins civilization itself. 
Having been granted this epiphany, Hans will henceforth refuse to let death have 
mastery over his thoughts. It is love, not reason, he muses, which is stronger 
than death, and from that alone can flow the sweetness of civilization. Reason 
in itself is too abstract and impersonal a force to face down death. But such 
love, to be authentic, must live “always in silent recognition of the blood 
sacrifice.” One must honor beauty, idealism, and the hunger for progress, while 
confessing in Marxist or Nietzschean style how much blood and wretchedness lie 
at their root. Only by bowing to our mortality can we live fulfilled.

If culture can prove no adequate stand-in for religion, neither can it serve as 
a substitute for politics. The shift from modernity to postmodernity represents 
in part the belief that culture, not politics, holds center stage. Postmodernism 
is more perceptive about lifestyles than it is about material interests -- 
better on identity than oil. As such it has an ironic affinity with radical 
Islam, which also holds that what is ultimately at stake are beliefs and values. 
I have argued elsewhere that Western postmodernism has some of its roots in the 
failure of revolutionary politics. In a similar way, Islamic fundamentalism is 
among other things a virulent response to the defeat of the Muslim Left -- a 
defeat in which the West has actively conspired. In some quarters, the language 
of religion is replacing the discourse of politics.

If politics has failed to unite the wretched of the earth to transform their 
condition, we can be sure that culture will not accomplish the task in its 
stead. Culture, for one thing, is too much a matter of affirming what you are or 
have been, rather than what you might become. What, then, of religion? To be 
sure, Christendom once saw itself as a unity of culture and civilization; and if 
religion has proved far and away the most powerful, tenacious, universal 
symbolic form humanity has yet to come up with, it is partly on this account. 
What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most 
absolute and universal of truths and the everyday practices of countless 
millions of men and women? What other way of life has brought the most rarefied 
of ideas and the most palpable of human realities into such intimate 
relationship? Religious faith has established a hotline from personal 
interiority to transcendent authority -- an achievement upon which the advocates 
of culture can only gaze with envy. Yet religion is as powerless as culture to 
emancipate the dispossessed. For the most part, it has not the slightest 
interest in doing so.

With the advent of modernity, culture and civilization were progressively riven, 
and faith driven increasingly into the private domain, or into the realm of 
everyday culture, as political sovereignty passed into the hands of the secular 
state. Along with the other two symbolic domains of art and sexuality, religion 
was unhooked to some extent from secular power; and the upshot of this 
privatization for all three symbolic forms was notably double-edged. On the one 
hand, they could act as precious sources of alternative value, and thus of 
political critique; on the other hand, their isolation from the public world 
caused them to become increasingly pathologized.

The prevailing global system, then, today faces an unwelcome choice. Either it 
trusts its native pragmatism in the face of its enemy’s absolutism, or it falls 
back on metaphysical values of its own -- values that are looking increasingly 
tarnished and implausible. Does the West need to go full-bloodedly metaphysical 
to save itself? And if it does, can it do so without inflicting too much damage 
on its liberal, secular values, thus ensuring there is still something worth 
protecting from its illiberal opponents?

If Marxism once held out a promise of reconciling culture and civilization, it 
is partly because its founder was both a Romantic humanist and an heir of 
Enlightenment rationalism. Marxism is about culture and civilization together -- 
sensuous particularity and universality, worker and citizen of the world, local 
allegiances and international solidarity, the free self-realization of 
flesh-and-blood individuals and a global cooperative commonwealth of them. But 
Marxism has suffered in our time a staggering political rebuff; and one of the 
places to which those radical impulses have migrated is -- of all things -- 
theology. In theology nowadays, one can find some of the most informed and 
animated discussions of Deleuze and Badiou, Foucault and feminism, Marx and 
Heidegger. That is not entirely surprising, since theology, however implausible 
many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left 
in an increasingly specialized world -- one whose subject is nothing less than 
the nature and transcendental destiny of humanity itself. These are not issues 
easily raised in analytic philosophy or political science. Theology’s remoteness 
from pragmatic questions is an advantage in this respect.

We find ourselves, then, in a most curious situation. In a world in which 
theology is increasingly part of the problem, it is also fostering the kind of 
critical reflection which might contribute to some of the answers. There are 
lessons that the secular Left can learn from religion, for all its atrocities 
and absurdities; and the Left is not so flush with ideas that it can afford to 
look such a gift horse in the mouth. But will either side listen to the other at 
present? Will Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins read this and experience 
an epiphany that puts the road to Damascus in the shade? To use two theological 
terms by way of response: not a hope in hell. Positions are too entrenched to 
permit such a dialogue. Mutual understanding cannot happen just anywhere, as 
some liberals tend to suppose. It requires its material conditions. And it seems 
unlikely these will emerge as long as the so-called war on terror continues to 
run its course.

The distinction between Hitchens or Dawkins and those like myself comes down in 
the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those who 
hold that if we can only shake off a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, 
we can be free. Such a hope in my own view is itself a myth, though a 
generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the 
free flourishing of humanity, but holds that attaining it is possible only by 
confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity ultimately worth 
having is one that, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously 
wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place, and understands 
Swift’s king of Brobdingnag with his vision of the human species as an odious 
race of vermin. Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or 
psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and 
radical remaking can humanity come into its own. There are no guarantees that 
such a transfigured future will ever be born. But it might arrive a little 
earlier if liberal dogmatists, doctrinaire flag-wavers for Progress, and 
Islamophobic intellectuals got out of its way.

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2488