Is it religion, or culture?
04/19/2010 22:09
So I found myself on page 150, beginning a new section that starts “The ‘argument from authority’ is the weakest of all arguments.” I assume he means rhetorically, because as Giordano Bruno found, it can be fairly powerful in real life. Hitchens goes on to say, “Behind the veil of Oz, there is nothing but bluff. Can this really be true?” he asks. “As one who has always been impressed by the weight of history and culture, I do keep asking myself this question,” Hitchens admits. It got me thinking: it must be a whole lot harder being an atheist, if you’re a conservative.
The passage continues in this ambivalent and revealing direction. “It does not matter to me,” Hitchens says, “whether Homer was one person or many, or whether Shakespeare was a secret Catholic or a closet agnostic. I should not feel my own world destroyed if the greatest writer about love and tragedy and comedy and morals was finally revealed to have been the Earl of Oxford all along,” he continues, showing just how easy it is to slip from the discussion of religion to a larger one about the rest of the foundation of western culture. And the "Edward DeVere was Shakespeare" argument: another apparently world-shaking controversy that shows how tenuous the “facts” that support our culture really are.
“The loss of faith,” Hitchens says, “can be compensated by the newer and finer [scientific] wonders that we have before us, as well as by immersion in the near-miraculous work of Homer and Shakespeare” and others (personally, I think his use of the word miraculous at this point is a misstep). Hitchens continues with a story about how his own secular faith “has been shaken and discarded, not without pain.” The faith he refers to is Marxism, which he insists “was not absolute and...did not have any supernatural element.” This may have been true for his own Leon Trotsky/Rosa Luxemburg flavor of Marxism, but I think it’s more accurate to say that “messianic...historical and dialectical materialism” is absolute and supernatural at its core. Hitchens finally admits, at the chapter’s end, that “Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic.” It will be interesting to read further, and see how he gets around the objection that if secularism leads to authoritarian dictator ship just as religion does, why switch? Not to mention the problem of insisting on the authority of tradition and culture, but just not religion.
Seriously, though, that’s what makes this book a success. Regardless what you think of Hitchens and his politics, it’s fun trying to figure out what he’s going to say next.
