The new age nut part comes from the fact that this person once asked to do my astrological chart. The following is a response to a new age nut that occasionally writes about my blog:
It’s hard for there to be any dialogue when you so misrepresent my positions. I’m either led to believe that 1) you didn’t not pay attention to what I said and made an honest oversight (an generous interpretation), or that 2) you’re fundamentally dishonest like Chic-fil-a and are representating my positions in a fashion analogous to the reasons that Chic-fil-a gave for withdrawing Muppet toys (i.e., that they were dangerous, rather than the truth, that Muppets withdrew their toys because of CFA’s donations to oppressive organizations, up to and including donations to Ugandan groups that support the murder of homosexuals. Just like CFA, you instead choose to thoroughly distort what was actually said, rather than present what was actually said. This has been going on for thousands of years; up to and including the description of Satan in a way that was indistiguishable from the great Pan. How are we to trust you when you practice these rhetorical gestures?
It is these sorts of practices that give religious thought a bad name, and after repeated dishonest gestures and mischaracterizations on your part– that have every appearance of being opportunistic –it’s hard to escape the impression that you’re not playing a game like CFA. First, I never made the claim that shifts in social conditions are merely shifts in material conditions. I have repeatedly argued that both are needed. I’m fully aware of the fact that there’s a plane of expression (beliefs, narratives, significations) and a plane of content (things and their affects). I merely argue that the former has tended to erase the latter and that we need to attend to the latter a bit more. If you’re honest, you will update your post to reflect this point so as to not mischaracterize my positions. Or maybe you have an axe to grind and would prefer not to acknowledge certain points? Second, I did not articulate an anti-religious position. I said that a) I fully agree that sometimes religion can be a powerful motivator for emancipation, but that b) when we look at the balance sheets of history, religion has i) tended to support oppressive forces, ii) tended to side with the powers that be against the will and emancipation of the people and try to treat horrifying social orders as natural and divinely decreed (look at the revolutions of the Enlightenment and who fought them, look at Indian attitudes towards women and the impoverished and how these are justified), and iii) has caused more suffering than emancipation. When we look at how religion functions as a set of institutions throughout the world and throughout history, I think that this is overwhelmingly obvious: genocide, persecution, terror, guilt, oppression and apologetics for the powerful. Again and again we see the same results from religion. We then get well meaning people such as yourself that focus on the narrative that these religions present, rather than the social facts of how they function in practice. We get John Caputo telling us that religion merely provides potent emancipatory narratives, despite the fact that women, homosexuals, queers are getting their teeth kicked in based on these narratives. We’re told that these things lead us to attend to the earth, despite the fact that apocalyptic narratives are being marshaled to deny climate change. We get told that these narratives will help us to fight capitalism, despite the fact that these narratives are used to support capitalism again and again. We’re supposed to take you seriously? It’s the materialists, naturalists, and atheists that are the enemy? We’re getting the shit kicked out of us, with little or no support from you, yet we’re supposed to bow to your so-called “superior wisdom” and the “superior wisdom” of that tradition? It’s hard to escape the impression that that tradition wants to destroy our world and demolish all our rights.
And in defending these things without a substantial critique of the majoritarian religious consensus, you become a part of the problem, thinking that the atheist and heretic is your enemy, rather than your own “bretherin” that level unspeakable cruelty on people in the world today and throughout history. When you stop attacking the atheist, heretic, and naturalist as the “enemy” and start taking the majority of your own who support oppression, oppressive powers, and who level unspeakable cruelty on the world, maybe then we’ll take you seriously. Yet until then, you’re an apologist for all this, even as you claim that it’s not “real” religion (a wonderful apologist’s argument), thereby providing cover for the shit that’s really taking place in the world. If you were a little bit more honest and carried out a genuine critique of how religion actually functions in the world you might be taken seriously, but given that you provide cover and support for these kinds of oppressions, suggesting that somehow it’s the materialists and naturalists that are the cause of this horror, it’s hard to take you seriously. You wish to personalize everything, rather than treating it as an objective institution that has real effects. I could care less about your damn beliefs. What I care about is how those beliefs function politically and institutionally. Yet you’ve read your Paul and Kierkegaard and ignore the reality of these things. You comport yourself as the knave, or the one that provides the ideological infrastructure for the master/oppressor. So step up to the plate: first, behave honestly and portray the positions you’re arguing against honestly. Don’t you understand that no one trusts priests, pastors, and so-called “holy men” because you behave in the ways you do in this post, all the while bending over for masters and oppressors? Second, recognize that your enemy is your intolerant and oppressive religious bretheran and suggest a way beyond that. Absent these gestures you’re just another dupe or knave, fellating the 1%, providing them with cover by muddying the issues, and caught in our own ridiculous and damaging/dangerous fantasies. Meanwhile the rest of us have to live with the consequences of your bullshit and creepy new age defenses of horror as we get our teeth kicked in environmentally, economically, and in terms of our liberty. Oh how we love your new age wisdom. You’re just tacky and an asshole to boot. Go watch Avatar.
Larval Subjects . 
August 14, 2012 at 5:44 am
I think any of us that claim the appellation of atheism have understood the meaning of Baron d’Holbach’s statement in his Letters to Eugenia:
“Such are the artifices which the ministers of religion every where employ to enslave the earth and to retain it under the yoke. The human race, in all countries, has become the prey of the priests. The priests have given the name of religion to systems invented by them to subjugate men, whose imagination they had seduced, whose understanding they had confounded, and whose reason they had endeavored to extinguish.”
“As a rule an Atheist is any or every man who does not believe in the God of the Priest.” – Voltaire
So many philosophers and thinkers seem to disparage atheism these days, yet I’m reminded of what Zizek recently stated, saying: “Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God’s will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do. Is this also not our most elementary experience of morality? When I do a good deed, I do so not with an eye toward gaining God’s favor; I do it because if I did not, I could not look at myself in the mirror.”
Maybe that’s the point: can you look at yourself honestly in the mirror and live with what you see? Most new agers need their easy solutions, their belief systems that absolve them of their own uniqueness, and instead enslave their minds within the dark systems of the priestly class. Instead of freedom and enlightenment we get ritual terror and violence. Is this not the age of reactionary forces gasping in their final death throws as the secret history of the Enlightenment slowly rises up in site after site around our planet revealing the truth of our modernity?
Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d’, 1723-1789; Fréret, Nicloas, 1688-1749. Letters to Eugenia; or, A preservative against religious prejudices (Kindle Locations 250-253). Boston : J.P. Mendum.
August 14, 2012 at 5:44 am
[…] 2012-phenomenon. Apparently he has been busy dealing with a New Ager as well. I feel that his responseto this individual can be applied to most 2012ers as well. However, they accuse me for […]
August 15, 2012 at 12:51 am
As far as ‘philosophy blogging’ goes, this is one of the more tactless things I’ve read.
August 15, 2012 at 1:34 am
Why be tactful to someone who willfully distorts your claims after lengthy discussion and who provides cover for ruthless oppression and cruelty?
August 15, 2012 at 4:34 pm
I think Foucault describes the risks of polemical engagement far better than I could, in the first part of this interview: http://foucault.info/foucault/interview.html
I didn’t see this person’s posts. It’s likely that they have been articulated in a way that no dialogue would be possible, because I don’t think your reaction would be this polemical if that were not the case. If that’s true, then I think refraining from replying is more prudent; a polemic like this is both more liable to increase exposure to what this person is saying, as well as place any of your readers who are more religious, spiritual, or even agnostic than you in a polemical relationship to you rather than a dialogic one.
To offer a friendly (and immanent) criticism, with all intent of being non-polemical:
I think that the concerns you have highlighted here, as well as in some of your other posts, offer strong reasons for trying to avoid polemics as much as possible. They tend to draw attention towards the beliefs of the interlocutors, rather than the material relationships of the ideas discussed.
From a rhetorical perspective, they are not likely to do much work or persuade. Your knowledge will either be received positively by those that agree with you in a moment of confirming their own beliefs, or it will be perceived as a personal attack by those that disagree with you, causing them to move to defend their position, rather than be reflective with respect to it, and perhaps change it a little. Someone on the fence who has a positive affective relationship to polemics may “switch sides,” but that victory also reinforces a polemical relationship. The size of your audience that could be persuaded would definitely increase. Conceiving these relationships in terms of sides tends to reinforce or construct operational closure where it was less present or weaker before, making knowledge introduced less likely to change existing beliefs.
It also can serve as an apologia, as you say, by placing the good on the “side” of science and the bad on the “side” of religion. I think that a lot of what you say about the institution of religion is true, but if you replace “religion” with “science” in your post, and tweak a few of the details, your criticism is still very intelligible. The violence and transcendentalism present in many scientific institutions is also a serious concern (which I know you share, from being a frequent reader), and I think that re-framing the post to focus on the problems with that rather than religion (which isn’t inherently problematic) would be more effective. It’s possible that religion is more responsible for these things than science, both in the past and now, but I believe that that analysis should proceed from a rhetorical frame which allows for expressions of nuance like that, rather than over-determining that historical contingency by treating it as (more) necessarily tied to institutions and transcendentalism. I think it would increase the size of your (friendly) audience, and allow for your opposition to religion to be more agonistic and less antagonistic.
Writing a post like this is difficult, because it’s hard not to engage in a polemic against polemics. It is not my intent to dictate to you how you should write your posts, but rather to raise concerns of effectiveness that I think are very relevant to what your aims and purposes are in the most persuasive manner possible. In that light, I hope this is perceived as generous, and if you have any ideas for how it could be more so I would appreciate the feedback.
August 15, 2012 at 5:06 pm
thegodman,
All good points. I am rather Badiouian about some things, ie, “the one becomes two”. I think there are certain things where it’s important to take clear and unequivocal positions. Look at what’s happened with attempts by American liberals amd democrats to be tactful with conservatives? All that’s occurred is a dominance of conservative frames on all issues and a general shift towards the right. Articulating opposing frames is not so much about persuading the opposition– that’s incredibly unlikely to happen –but of giving voice to that which has little or no voice in the world and of contributing to the production of alternative collectives.
August 15, 2012 at 8:09 pm
http://newbooksinpsychoanalysis.com/2011/12/16/jamieson-webster-the-life-and-death-of-psychoanalysis-on-unconscious-desire-and-its-sublimation-karnac-books-2011/
August 17, 2012 at 12:09 am
I agree that articulating alternative frames is valuable, but I do not think this requires being polemical in this instance, for a few reasons. The first is that the audience here, and on left-leaning academic blogs in general, is not the public audience. The second is that, given a country where about 50% of people vote republican, seeking a polemical engagement with someone who wants to do away with capitalism just feels a bit like a lost opportunity, to me. The way I prefer to articulate atlernative frames is by offering a different set of concepts and a different understanding of what mutually-used concepts mean to problematize shared concerns (like overcoming capitalism) in a way that I believe remediates problems with my interlocutors position.
Though I’m not as committed to this, I also think there are strong reasons for not taking up a polemical relationship even with regard to Republican frames. This is because I think internal critique is generally more effective than external critique. There are a lot of concepts used in the current Republican imaginary – like freedom and self-care – which provide opportunities for thinking about problems a little bit differently. This does not mean that the articulation of these alternative frames should be compromising; we should insist strongly on the value of these frames, and they should seriously question as many reprehensible elements of the status quo as possible. This also does not mean that we should only appeal to these values, but that we should seek to express them differently so they can serve as a bridge to our values. I also think it’s incredibly important to recognize our minority status both as political radicals and academics; there are certainly many Republicans with whom dialogue is not possible, but I think that’s a reason just to ignore them out-right, (unlike the media fetishization of people like Rush Limbaugh). However, there are many very intelligent Republicans that are worth conversing with, if for no other reason than the value of pluralism. I think that when engaging in discussion with these people, we should be as genealogical as possible: seeking to make the familiar seem unfamiliar in order to shift the way they relate to what is valuable and meaningful to them, rather than lambasting their cherished familiar with a (perceived) demonized familiar. I think that polemics make this very difficult to do because it does not disturb the operational closure of a frame about 50% of the country uses right now to understand incredibly important issues.
August 17, 2012 at 12:52 am
Thodgman,
I think we’ve seen what you’re proposing practiced over the last 30 years and we’ve seen quite clearly what it has resulted in.
August 17, 2012 at 1:00 pm
Do you separate faith from religion? It seems to me that you are, that you’re critiquing the institutional structure, not individual adaptations of religious thought. I think that is what people like Caputo sometimes get at, but it’s a tricky web to navigate. My point is just that the person you’re debating seems to read your comments as an attack on every person’s individual belief system, when what you seem to be focusing on are the structures built on beliefs. Those structures are entropic systems that work to maintain their structure, just like any other system, regulative or otherwise. And it seems to me that you’re simply trying to encourage a more critical thinking about how religion and belief function within such systems or how such systems function in regulating beliefs. I wonder what an object-oriented take on the faith part of religion might look like. The same critique you’ve level against other forms of ideology, I suppose. Just a lurker rambling!
August 17, 2012 at 5:03 pm
Hi Ferling,
I place faith in the context of belief as something that has been fetishized in these discussions. The modern concept of faith presents religion as a personal and individual belief. As such, it tends to erase the social and institutional nature of religion in much the same way that neoliberal economic theory erases the social nature of capitalism in its focus on individual
“rational agents” making solipsistic market choices. Religion, in my view, is first a social and institutional practice, not an individual matter.
Here, I guess I side with Althusser’s reading of Pascal: “kneel and you’ll believe.”. The belief does not *precede* the institutional practices– indeed the belief is not necessary at all and there can be a huge gap between what is believed and the practices as in the case of someone who believes on free market capitalism and still characterizes herself as a devout Christian –rather, it’s the institutional and collective practices that are the “essence” of religion. This is part of what I mean when I say we should focus on institutions rather than theology.
August 17, 2012 at 6:19 pm
Levi,
What about the possibility that faith constitutes a new kind of subjectivity no longer oriented primarily around self-interest, but directed toward the other so as to form communal bonds of love? Faith and belief should not be equated; in this sense, one can have faith without being a believer in this or that religious creed. Faith is the metanoic decision that constitutes a form of subjectivity capable of “loving thy neighbor.”
The question, as I see it, is how are we to form social bonds wherein individuals forego their own interests for the sake of the common good? If we can’t find a way to make this happen, I don’t see how capitalism’s hold on our social structure can be overturned. This is why I don’t think we should just toss faith out the window as a potential weapon in the revolutionary struggle.
August 17, 2012 at 6:33 pm
Matthew,
You’re talking like a theologian that says “faith is…”. I’m talking like a sociologist or ethnographer that says that “for people at this point in history, in the United States, this is how the discourse of faith *functions*”. My claim is premised on living religion as it’s materially practiced as a set of social institutions. Yours is articulated as that of a state thinker that disavows the social fact and sanitizes it, thereby providing support for those social institutions.
Now I don’t deny that *occasionally* faith *can* produce what you describe– we’re not talking about Newtonian laws, after all –but I am saying this is how faith predominantly *functions*. Let’s go back to Tim to see this. If you read Tim’s blog you’ll know that his comments here are based on a concept of faith. Let’s look not at how Tim understands his faith, but at how his faith functions. As we saw in prior discussion, Tim’s faith consists in a band aid response to human suffering (soup kitchens and shelters), and more importantly in a *hostility* towards addressing and responding to material *causes* of this suffering. His faith renders him actively hostile to these things. His faith thus *functions* to reinforce these structures of oppression, though that certainly isn’t his *intention*.
November 13, 2016 at 7:32 pm
Since I am indeed a new-age nut-job and occasionally cite you, I was for a moment scared you were referring to a response I made to an entirely different Levi. Good thing I never got around to offering do your horoscope.
This inflammatory tripe aside, your blog has been immensely valuable to me.
(btw, have read the stuff to which you refer, I think, and it does rather suck but I wouldn’t have thought it worth comment…)