Category — Modernity

The self-designated “Four Horseman” of the New Atheists are tilting at straw-men in regards to Biblical religion. They assume that faith is the central concern of the Christian. They do not identify the critical issue: pre-theoretical commitments, either their own or others’. 

In their assumptions, they elevate “reason” to the place of deity, while they attribute the elevation of faith to the Christian. This latter attribution is a mistake. They would admit that reason is ultimate in their assumption. But, they make the mistake of assuming that the Christian makes the same kind of commitment to an aspect of experience. In this case, faith. This aspect they designate as non-rational, and thus an enemy of any thinking person. It is true, faith is not reason, but difference does not imply antithesis. As an aspect of temporal experience faith exists in the heart of redeemed man in Shalom with all other aspects, including reason. Faith is not central to my existence, even as ethics, aesthetics or economics are not central. They are all equally ultimate in the temporal realm. Reason is one aspect of my experience, not the dictator of it. 

Within the hearts of the N/A, any aspect that is not reason exists in a religious dialectic with all others. They must, given their commitment to “analysis”, live in constant tension with all other aspects of temporal existence, faith being only one of them.

Daniel Dennet , one of the New Atheists, is religiously committed to the Analytical aspect of temporal experience. In issue 70 of Philosophy Now, — an issue devoted to the subject of Utopias— he writes: “Religious allegiance has ramifications too important to be out of bounds to rational inquiry” (24-5). Agreed. Of course, Dennet sees himself on the side of rational inquiry over and against any one with any sort of religious commitment. He assumes that he and his fellow “brights” are themselves above critique, having no religious commitment of their own. This is a deep self-deception on Dennet’s part. For Dennet the denial of any personal religious commitment is a kind of mantra. But, the authority he attributes to the rational process of inquiry is no different in kind than the worship offered by any other human being to an absolute. Religious neutrality is an impossibility. 

Dennet’s religion of Analysis provides a justification for the use of coercive power against any one that might take issue with its premise. Dennet is willing to leave off from rational inquiry and simply “establish a system of compulsory education about the world’s religions for all children of the United States”, because currently religious fanaticism is based on “enforced ignorance of the young”. This compulsory education would “Oblige their elders to inform them about the varieties of religion, and lack of religion, in the world, and [then] they will find it much more difficult to indoctrinate the children under their authority” (25). This would be accomplished through legislation and the sword (”bright senators, representatives and governors”). “Rational inquiry” would become a rare bird indeed. This is Dennet’s Utopian vision for the rest of us: a bare-boned fascism. 

Dennet takes issue with what he perceives as forced education, only to replace it with one that is enforced. His flat view of people and things creates a world in which he has no trouble with managing and controlling others, regardless of their own religious convictions. He is a “bright” and as such has the right to impose his religion on those who are not, using the power of the sword against those who might give him any trouble. The one kind of world that Mr. Dennet does not want is one in which we are free to ignore him and his new “openness”. 

Modernity suggest that the finite, or temporal reality, exists as a mirror of the self, as a means to create states of affectivity, or orders of feeling within the self. “Objective truth”, meaning empirical evidence, exists as a means of ordering and understanding the self. The self of Modernity is encaged by temporal reality. But, man always seeks unity, and as such seeks to simplify reality to a single idea, or substance. In so doing, the mirror becomes a flattened surface, and in turn so does the self. 

William F. Lynch, describing the Modernist perspective, writes: “The univocal mind often poses as the exclusive organizer and interpreter of a highly concrete, pluralistic and individuated world… Its whole temptation is to reduce everything, like and unlike, to a flat community of sameness— all in the name of an intelligibility and type of order that does not and cannot belong to the real world” (Christ and Apollo, p. 122). 

“The univocal man has no respect for reality. He is either contemptuous of it or destroys it, or flattens it— or he refuses to take up responsibility in the face of it. He is the true dogmatist— having a secular effigy of true dogma… The univocal man is not free. He is rigid, unbending, fixed” (ibid).

I can think of no better literary example of this than Javert, and his nemesis, Jean Valjean, as the converse of the univocal mind. 

Modernity is an assumption that men can understand, comprehend in toto, control and manipulate all of human experience. “Science” and its related projects are the means by which this task of “salvation” is to be accomplished.

Post-modernity recognizes the multiplicity and diversity of human experience and concludes that there is no central or higher meaning. The assumption that follows is that any attempt at a singular or certain meaning is futile.

Modernity recognizes “law” within a modal sphere, and absolutizes a single aspectual law as dominating all others. Post-modernity recognizes the diversity of aspects, but assumes a religious dialectic between all aspects, and thus the impossibility of any one “Master-Determiner”. All aspects cancel the others out. Badiou describes the post-modern world as “atonal”. Zizek, following Badiou, characterizes the postmodern mind as “a world of multiplicities lacking a determinate tonality” (In Defense of Lost Causes, 31).

What modernity seems to offer is a singular, certain “answer”, based in the analytical aspect of temporal experience. Modernity, as a project, assumes that empirical evidence provides objective truth. Truth is “out there”, it is possible.

What post-modernity seems to offer is the recognition that experience cannot be reduced to a single, dominating aspect. Post-modernity is a reaction against “the hegemony of scientific discourse” (Defense, 33). Post-modernity appears religiously committed to the sensate or psychical aspect of temporal experience. Foucault’s lifestyle and death are often used as an example of the post-modern life in demonstration. He is the philosopher of bio-politics.

Both assume the autonomy of the mind. Both assume that meaning is dictated by things. Both assume that Being precedes Meaning. The two exist in a religious dialectic, although the two aspects to which they cling are, in reality, relative.

One of the stories circulating through evangelical websites is the Carrie Prejean thing. I have no interest in the story directly, but rather I am interested in the way in which evangelicals are using her as a kind of “proof” of the rightness of their convictions.

This is just confirmation that the evangelical church is mired in modernity: a religious dependence upon “science” as the foundation of faith. As Zizek has written: “Religious fundamentalists are among the most passionate digital hackers, and always prone to combine their religion with the latest findings of science: for them, religious statements and scientific statements belong to the same modality of positive knowledge” (In Defense of Lost Causes, 31).

Prejean is a kind of “specimen” that proves the argument for heterosexual marriage. Forget the fact that Word of God says it plainly already. Here is empirical proof that we have it right. She is a kind of Penthouse Joan of Arc in the minds of evangelical men everywhere (albeit a surgically enhanced Joan). Men, wholly embedded in the image, having no real knowledge of her person, are singing her praises.

As John Gray has said: “Religious fundamentalists see themselves as having remedies for the maladies of the modern world. In reality they are symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure” (ibid, 43).