I rather like Taylor Swift’s version of “Last Christmas,” though the rest of her Christmas album is less good, particularly “Christmas Must Be Something More,” which is very Christian in a way I find kind of unappealing. This isn’t just because of my general bias in favor of a secular Christmas; there’s something unpalatable about Swift’s attempt to advance a Christian theme in a modern idiom that lacks any kind of theological weight, and so is forced to rely on mere earnestness. This is actually an instance of a more general problem I have with Christianity, which is, as historically fascinating as I find it to be, on some level, I just don’t believe in it. I don’t mean that I don’t accept the religious tenets of Christianity (although I don’t); rather, I doubt Christianity’s empirical existence: I find it much easier to imagine that all those people who today say they are Christians are just somehow confused, than to imagine that they really believe what they say they do.

Of course, this limitation of my imagination has little bearing on the actual state of the world, but I was reminded of my emphasis on the historicity of Christianity by a post condemning Reverend Tim Jones’s recent sermon justifying shoplifting in cases of extreme necessity (via). What’s odd about this post is that it doesn’t just disagree with Jones, but presents his position as so obviously wrong it could only be a result of theological illiteracy or utter stupidity. But the compatibility of expropriation in the case of extreme necessity with Christian ethics is by no means obviously wrong; it was, indeed, the mainstream position among the scholastics and, indeed, looking at what Jones says (particularly, “the observation that shoplifting is the best option that some people are left with is a grim indictment of who we are”), it’s not clear to me that even Calvin (whose approach to private property was a historical innovation) would object. The author of that post is, apparently, a professor of Biblical Studies, but I’m mystified as to how you could study the bible without taking into account the historical specificity of the concepts it employs. In particular, the concept of private property due to which we today condemn all shoplifting alike as theft simply didn’t exist until the early modern period, and was, in fact, developed in large part in theological debates around poverty and natural law which would be a fruitful source of inspiration for an actual discussion of the ethics of expropriation.

Thinking about it, “people who aren’t historicists” would be another thing I have trouble imagining the existence of.

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All of which is to say, I hope you all have a good communist christmas.

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This, incidentally, is why William Lane Craig is a fucking idiot. A modern advocate of the cosmological argument, he doesn’t seem to be aware that the word “cause” in “first cause,” translation of the ancient Greek αἴτιον, doesn’t mean what the modern English “cause” means, but instead is bound up with Aristotelian metaphysics. But I digress (in more “fucking idiot” news, see A. C. Grayling vs. Steve Fuller, like some kind of chain-reaction of stupidness).

Anyway. Religion and science are both ways of using reason to make sense of the world; but it occoured to me the other day that, because I usually take theologians as the best representatives of religion (after all, they’re the ones who know most about it), I’d sort of missed a distinction. You can have a system of using reason to make sense of the world without expecting everyone involved to make use of reason themselves, where the weight of reasoning is taken on by particular people. This is clearly the case with Catholicism, and I think it’s somewhat true of Islam, too. On the other hand, modern science is supposed to be accessible to everyone’s reason (something it shares, I imagine not coincidentally, with Protestantism).

But the “supposed to” is kind of important here; obviously not everyone actually has equal access to scientific knowledge, and this emphasis on formal, rather than substantive, universality, makes science’s self-understanding a little like bourgeois rights. What would science look like if it were organized around making its methods and knowledge actually universally available? It seems to me this is what a Marxist science should be about, rather than proving Marx’s metaphysics. Well, that’s kind of obvious; Marxist science wouldn’t be about having the right ideas, but about changing the material conditions in which these ideas are produced.

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If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works.

In response to which the New Scientist compared him to Sarah Palin, and a couple of Nobel laureates are calling for him to be sacked from his position as education director of the Royal Society. And of course Dawkins got involved.

I initially posted this just because I thought it was amusingly stupid. But now I think there may be something a bit more pernicious going on. A number of people objecting to Reiss have said things like “teach creation in religious studies,” or “keep it in philosophy class” (see e.g. the comments on that New Scientist blog post). What’s wrong about this is the suggestion that philosophy of science, or the question of the nature and bounds of science, is irrelevant to science itself. This is a problem because it implies a belief that a scientific worldview is somehow obvious, rather than a particular way of thinking that took a long time and a lot of trouble to develop.

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The attitude of the General Council in regard to the “Religious Idea” is clearly shown by the following incident: — One of the Swiss branches of the Alliance, founded by Michael Bakunin, and calling itself Section des athées Socialistes, requested its admission to the International from the General Council, but got the reply: “Already in the case of the Young Men’s Christian Association the Council has declared that it recognizes no theological sections” (Mr. George Howell’s History of the International Working-Men’s Association).

Which is interesting a) because I never realized the YMCA tried to join the First International (presumably we can now claim the Village People song as a communist anthem) and b) because the First International rejected a group for being explicitly atheist, which sheds some interesting light on debates about whether Marx was a secularist. Also:

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable (“Suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung”).

Which is presumably the source of Negri’s celebrated line “No pity for our enemies.”

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A particularly good illustration of this point is the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. It’s housed in a building designed as a “Cathedral to Science,” which has much the same kind of neo-Gothic sense of the sacred as Victorian railway stations, with vaulted ceilings, saints of science (Newton, Darwin, erm, Prince Albert) on plinths along one wall, reconstructed dinosaurs looming over the visitors. And I don’t mean that facetiously; there really is something religious about 19th century industrial modernity, but, as I say, that’s not necessarily a criticism. Unless you sign up to the village atheist position that the entire history of religion is some kind of inexplicable mass stupidity, presumably you have to recognize that religious ways of thinking have had some utility; shouldn’t we actually expect post-religious ways of thinking to fulfill some of the same rôles as religion? The French revolutionaries, with their religion of reason, and the Victorians, with their more plainspeaking (and thus significantly more arrogant) devotion to truth, mocked by Nietzsche, were largely right.

The OU Museum of Natural History’s exemplary quality doesn’t stop there, however. Rather splendidly, the museum treats natural history itself historically. What was once natural history’s central activity, classification, is turned into a game for children, while the museum exhibits flagrently refuse to classify anything at all. I don’t have Moll‘s knowledge of the anthropology of museum representations of science, but I was fascinated by the way the exhibits recognized the contingency of what have been considered scientific facts at different times. Science becomes an eminently human activity.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the Museum of Natural History instantiates a Feuerbachian self-overcoming of religion; which is something much more interesting than broadsheet denunciations of religion or atheism.

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The problem is, Radical Orthodoxy appears to put forward an account of modernity as a decline—Pickstock I think says as much, describing modernity as a movement away from the immanence of God. What I don’t see, though, is an account of the internal necessity of this decline. Without such an account, it seems to me, we’re left with no way of understanding how the decline could be reversed, except by attempting to repeat a lost past; this is, surely, the very definition of reaction (and a claim that Milbank is reactionary should surely not be based on his avowed political commitments, but on the logic of theory with which he claims to ground them). I’m reminded of one of my favorite passages from Marx:

The still immature communism seeks an historical proof for itself – a proof in the realm of what already exists – among disconnected historical phenomena opposed to private property, tearing single phases from the historical process and focusing attention on them as proofs of its historical pedigree (a hobby-horse ridden hard especially by Cabet, Villegardelle, etc.) By so doing it simply makes clear that by far the greater part of this process contradicts its own claim, and that, if it has ever existed, precisely its being in the past refutes its pretension to reality (1844 Manuscripts).

The last sentence is the crucial one. Does Radical Orthodoxy invoke a properly Christian past that “precisely its being in the past refutes its pretension to reality”? As I say, this is all based on one hour of radio, so it may have little relationship to actually-existing Radical Orthodoxy, but the mistake Marx points out here seems pretty prevalent in would-be radical thought, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for.

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The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism could achieve were a few (and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity from the point of view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.

— Marx, The German Ideology

My alarm clock, set to play KPFA, woke me up the other day with the audio of Richard Dawkins’s The Root of All Evil. In the broad scope of things, this was probably good, as it encouraged me to get out of bed and get to school on time; but I do rather dislike having Dawkins’s crusade against phrases injected in my ears before I’m fully awake. Before I went off to make myself some coffee, I heard Dawkins’s report from Jerusalem, which got me thinking about what’s wrong, and kind of pernicious, about his approach.

It’s not just the inaccuracy, although it’s irritating to hear a conflict between secular nationalisms described as if it were a religious conflict. The problem is that by so describing the conflict, Dawkins effaces the political issues: the dispossession of the Palestinians, the colonialist history of Zionism, and the mobilization of fundamentalism as a response to neo-liberalism in Israel and corruption in Palestine. Any consideration of power drops out of the equation for Dawkins, for whom the question is simply one of incorrect beliefs. The same occurs with militant atheism’s positioning of itself as an alternative to Bush simply because of an intellectual disagreement with Bush’s fundamentalist Christian “base.” The criticism of religion substitutes elucidations for political struggle, and thereby serves as an apologia for the political and social conditions that underly religious belief (the whole first section of the German Ideology, which I only looked up due to half-remembering that bit about “phrases,” is really extraordinarily sharp as a criticism of contemporary liberal atheism).

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Christians feel particularly aggrieved because we believe that Jesus invented secularism. Jesus’s teachings desacralised the state.

He’s right, but I’m not sure this has quite the positive consequences Jones suggests, though. I’ve been reading St Augustine recently, and what strikes me as interesting is his hostility to the civic republican position in which politics is an arena for virtuous action. For Augustine, the world is fallen, and so any political organization of this world is necessarily immoral. To even think about politics in ethical terms is a category error. This is the desacralization of the state accomplished by mainstream Christianity; not, as Jones thinks, a justification for “dissent from state absolutism,” but quite the contrary, an immunization of the state from ethical critique. Augustine’s City of God is the secret core of liberal moralism: the problem with moralism is not the attempt to unite the ethical and the political, but the attempt to separate them, in order to elevate the moral and thereby abolish the political.

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