MODERATOR: Good evening, denizens of the interweb, and
welcome to a special edition of Clash of Worldviews. We have a stacked
panel here to discuss whether philosophy is a boon or a con, a topic that
should naturally branch out into the meaning of life and the nature of
happiness. Please put your hands together for Adam, noted liberal secular
humanist; Heather, postmodern pessimist and cynic; Lindsey, Catholic
conservative; Fred, popular alt right blogger and President Trump supporter;
and Tariq, Muslim writer and intellectual. In addition, we expect two special
guests to drop in later.
But in the meantime, let me put this question to the panel:
Who here has a negative view of philosophy? And let me be clear, by “philosophy”
I mean not just the academic subject, but any use of critical thinking to answer
life’s most general, fundamental questions.
Scientism and Normative Myths
ADAM: There’s a problem with that definition of
“philosophy,” though, and once we see what that is, we’ll see what’s wrong with
philosophy. If you’re talking about “any” use of critical thinking in those
areas, you’re talking about cosmology, physics, and mathematics, but those are
sciences. So the reason philosophy is indeed a fraud is that philosophy has
been rendered obsolete by scientific progress. Thus, those engaging in the
old-fashioned discussions are wasting their time.
LINDSEY: All hail Western scientism! Tell us, Adam, which
scientific theory has established your liberal values or demonstrated that
capitalism and democracy are the best ways of organizing a society.
ADAM: No political opinions are known to be true. We don’t
need to think critically about them. Instead, different societies try out
various political and ethical ideas, and majorities gravitate to the most
attractive options. Capitalism and democracy rule in most places because they
work well, not because of any argument or experiment. History is a process of
trial and error.
HEATHER: Oh, so it’s good to know that, according to that
bit of pragmatism, it isn’t exactly true
that humans have rights or that women should be treated as men’s equals. I
suppose those bits of liberal Enlightenment wisdom just happen to work for a
while until the next fad comes along, correct?
ADAM: Correct, but there’s no need to be smarmy about it.
For a belief to be true, you need a fact to correspond with the symbols making
up the thoughts that constitute the belief. And there’s no fact of the matter
when it comes to what we ought to be
doing.
HEATHER: Really? Then won’t you tell us more about how the
Western lifestyle works relatively well. I take it you mean that individualism,
capitalism, democracy, and the rule of law are most effective in achieving
certain goals. What are those goals, I wonder.
ADAM: Presumably, the point of a social structure is to make
people happy or to ensure that some members are more powerful than others.
HEATHER: So if history discards some cultures and lifestyles
and preserves others, as being more or less effective at achieving those goals,
how do we justify those ultimate goals themselves? Not through history and not
through science. How else, then?
ADAM: Who says they have to be justified? That’s just the
way things are: we want to be happy or to dominate weaker persons.
LINDSEY: So if you lived in a dictatorship and you came to
be dominated by the corrupt ruling elites, Adam, you might feel the power
distribution is unfair, but you’d still maintain there’s no way to prove the elites
are in the wrong? You’d just say, “Oh, well, that’s how things are around here
in the torture chamber.”
ADAM: I might fight back or try to reason with the torturers,
but even if I were to succeed, that wouldn’t show it’s empirically true as a
matter of fact that their conduct is wrong.
HEATHER: No, not “empirically” true, just philosophically
so. Nice try with the word game.
MODERATOR: If I might interject, Adam, are you saying that philosophy
doesn’t exist or is some sort of illusion, or instead that philosophy has been
outmoded by science?
ADAM: The latter, of course. Talk about word games—that’s
all philosophy is now, because the
substantial issues are handled by the sciences.
LINDSEY: Like the issue of whether we should strive to be
happy or should rebel against dictators? Yeah, right!
ADAM: People still engage in philosophical speculations—and
religious ones too—but that doesn’t mean those are respectable practices. You
won’t come to know anything from
philosophy or religion that you shouldn’t instead be learning from science.
HEATHER: He means you won’t learn anything from philosophy
or religion in the scientific way. So
are you going to blame philosophy for the fact that you’re now playing another
word game, even though you supposedly reject philosophy?
Can we move on from this scientism? Philosophical questions
are meaningful, not to mention profound. Indeed, their profundity can be
measured by the extent to which their answers are potentially subversive.
MODERATOR: Ah, so philosophy can be subversive? Does this
mean you, too, are critical of philosophy, Heather?
HEATHER: Not really. I’m critical of societies that are insufficiently
philosophical.
LINDSEY: There’s the true philosopher’s arrogance, the
outsider who condemns the whole of a society because the well-off masses don’t
weigh themselves down with excessive rationality—as if reason alone suffices
for knowledge, without the bedrock of faith. It’s faith, of course, that drives
us to pursue our ultimate goals: we trust that we can always improve our
situation or we have misplaced faith in our alleged personal superiority which
might entitle us to abuse others.
MODERATOR: And so, Lindsey, you would contend that
philosophy is incomplete? That critical thinking takes you only so far before
you must fall back on a nonrational starting point?
LINDSEY: Yes, and reason itself has even shown us its limitations, from Gödel’s Theorem and quantum uncertainty, to dark matter and postmodern cynicism, to the World Wars and the collapse of the hyperrational Soviet Union.
LINDSEY: Yes, and reason itself has even shown us its limitations, from Gödel’s Theorem and quantum uncertainty, to dark matter and postmodern cynicism, to the World Wars and the collapse of the hyperrational Soviet Union.
HEATHER: But not all irrational starting points are equally
viable. Christianity, in particular, makes for a muddled source of inspiration.
TARIQ: Yet monotheism in general does not, and Islam is the
consummation of Abrahamic religion. Moreover, reason proves that God exists,
and so all things, including the Faustian rationalists, are destined to submit
to Allah.
ADAM: Why not crack open a history book, Tariq? In the West,
the medieval scholastics, that is, Catholic academics like Aquinas thought
they’d shown how logic entails theism, but they were only being narrow-minded
and dogmatic. Then free thinkers, such as Bruno and Newton, revealed a universe
that’s too big for our petty, anthropomorphic deities. Reason leads only to
nature, in which there’s no personal god to be found.
TARIQ: But I can easily prove that God exists. Go back far
enough with causality and you require a special kind of cause to start off the
realm of ordinary cause and effect which you call nature, because each natural
cause depends on a natural effect, which in turn depends on a natural cause,
and so on. Thus, you need an uncaused being as the precondition of your
scientific models of natural mechanisms. That eternal, necessary being is as
good as God. Modern philosophers, then, are fooling themselves if they think
they know any different.
ADAM: The Cosmological Argument? Really, you think free
thinkers have had nothing devastating to say about that? In any case, it’s one
thing to humbly admit that we don’t understand the ultimate origin of nature.
We are, after all, just clever mammals and reason evolved to fulfill limited
functions, which scientists have been busy extending just to see what comes of
it. But it’s quite another to take a leap of faith and believe that nature was created by a
magical person! That leap over logic is just irresponsible childishness.
LINDSEY: Is it? What else do we know of that transcends
natural processes, with autonomy, rational mentality, imagination, and
curiosity? What else that we know of could have started up the unthinking
machine of nature, but a person? Not just any person, of course, but a perfect
one, liberated from all material constraints.
ADAM: Yeah, like the constraint of actually existing in some
concrete fashion. It’s better to side with Bertrand Russell, who told Frederick
Copleston in their famous debate that some elementary facts just are brute building
blocks of inquiry. We should go where the evidence takes us and admit when our
beliefs are only weakly supported. Just admit you’re speculating, Tariq; that
way, maybe you and your fellow monotheists might spare us your pontifications
and wars waged in your silly gods’ names.
TARIQ: I thought we were just clever mammals, like you said,
Adam. Isn’t that right? So we’re bound to wage one kind of irrational war or
another. What makes religious wars worse than secular ones such as the World
Wars, the Cold War, or the atrocities committed by the various totalitarian
regimes over the last century? You yourself maintain there’s no worthy answer
to the philosophical question of how we should live. There’s just how populations
feel, which restricts the historical testing of social structures, that being
our method of improving our chances of achieving our cultural ideals.
ADAM: Yeah, and history has shown monotheism to be an
archaic disgrace.
FRED: Not so, though, since contrary to the early modern,
utopian rationalists, religion has not actually declined. There are atheistic
regions of the world, as in Europe, Japan, Australia, and Canada, but the
world’s majority still has religious faith of one kind or another. Moreover,
materialistic consumerism serves as a substitute religion for atheists. So what
right do you have to condemn religion if you’re not even going to stoop to
philosophizing about the matter?
ADAM: Well, religion is
in decline in the most educated parts of the world, such as the big cities of
most developed countries, including the United States. And I may be speculating
now with the rest of you, but I’m not fooling myself into thinking we’re going
to establish any kind of knowledge at the end of this little dialogue. I’m here
just for the two promised special guests.
FRED: The old religions may indeed be in decline, like you
say. But the desire to worship something greater than ourselves is universal.
That’s why I think philosophy forces us to recognize the need for a noble
atheistic religion, which is just what the totalitarian regimes tried to
provide, from Mussolini’s fascism and Nazi Germany, to Stalin’s Russia and the
Kim dynasty in North Korea. In those regimes we have technological progress in
social engineering, combined with revolutionary visions from the heroic male
leaders. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are inheritors of that project of
adapting Nietzsche’s lessons about the Ubermensch,
to their more democratic societies.
HEATHER: Trump, a visionary? How preposterous! And how is
any of that supposed to be philosophical? On the contrary, to fall for Putin’s
or Trump’s nationalist idolatry and cult of personality, you have to surrender
your critical faculties.
Neoliberalism and Academic Philosophy
FRED: I didn’t think you’d have fallen for that neoliberal talking
point in the class war, Heather. I’d have thought you were too skeptical for
that. Those on the alt right are far from stupid for valuing freedom and
manliness. No, we’ve seen where neoliberal globalization has taken us: the
richest one percent flourishes at the expense of the middle class, liberal
bureaucrats sacrifice our sovereignty with their politically-correct
egalitarianism and immigration policies, and white, blue-collar males are left
holding the bag.
HEATHER: Is your atheistic religion supposed to be less
incoherent than the old-fashioned religions? First you say you want a return to
fascism and to the celebration of great male leaders. Then you condemn
neoliberalism for establishing plutocracies and destroying the middle class.
Which is it? You’ll want to reread your Nietzsche: you can’t have your great
men at the top of the social pyramid without the majority being left out of
those upper-class privileges. But you want your power the dishonourable way:
you feel entitled to lord it over others just because you and Trump share the
same gender and skin colour. You think because you’re both white males that he respects
you as being worthy to fight on his team. Alas, you’re contemptible to him and to
all the other plutocrats, because you’re comparatively poor. The economic class
war is thus so much more essential than your over-hyped struggle between
cultural classes of liberal snobs and earnest blue-collar workers.
TARIQ: We’re missing some context here. The backlash against
neoliberal civilization isn’t confined to the rightwing Western males who are
searching for their manhood. There’s also Islamist militancy in the Middle
East, which has spilled over to the West.
LINDSEY: What’s your point?
TARIQ: Just that we shouldn’t dismiss the alt right. There’s
a resurgence of romantic ideals of adventure and rebellion against what’s
perceived all around the world to be an evil, frankly American empire. This
returns us to the limits of reason. Western rebels against the deep state that
double-crosses the middle class resort to macho talk of neofascism to express
their resentment and their futile search for godhood in mere narcissists like
Trump and in impermanent social systems. Meanwhile, Middle Eastern rebels
terrorize the neoliberal technocrats and bovine consumers, although their
techniques pervert the great religion of Islam.
MODERATOR: If I might again interject, I think it would be
helpful to define this term, “neoliberalism.”
HEATHER: Neoliberalism is Bill Clinton’s kind of liberalism,
the centrist merger of the left and the right, which is to say it’s a
compromise in which the phony liberal accepts so-called “conservative” economics—deregulation,
privatization, unfettered capitalist carnage—while paying lip service to
progressive social values such as secularism, feminism, egalitarianism, and
minority rights. You can’t have both, of course, since the latter entail social
democracy which reins in the capitalist tendencies to create and maintain the vast
economic inequalities that undermine democracy. But neoliberals like the
Clintons, Tony Blair, Obama, and Justin Trudeau care much more about the
conservative than the liberal side of their Frankenstein-monster of a
compromise. They talk like they’re fair-minded and compassionate, but that’s
only to protect their prior worship of the idea of a free, that is, a wild
marketplace.
MODERATOR: I see. And how does neoliberalism touch on the
nature of philosophy?
ADAM: Better not to ask Heather, since she’ll merely sneer
at it like she does at just about everything else. What she calls neoliberalism
is actually just what happens to a society that’s been powered by almost
limitless progress in technoscience. Ideologies then take a back seat and
competition in the market does indeed dictate what we ought to do. As Fukuyama
said in The End of History and the Last
Man, history has ended, in a sense, and so politicians are reduced to
serving as systems managers who need to stay out of the individual citizen’s
way, to let the market correct its course. Scientists, engineers, and businesspeople
supply more and more efficient means of meeting our demands. And all radical
speculations about the need for intervening in the market from on high, to
protect some special interest or other are regressive. Reason is on the side of
science, not philosophy or religion, and science is busy empowering the global,
neoliberal monoculture. Or haven’t you all noticed?
HEATHER: Let nature take its course in the form of “free,”
capitalistic competition? As if plutocrats don’t already capture the
governmental institutions to rig the market in their favor! Look at how in 2008
the too-big-to-fail banks distorted the economy by holding it hostage, and how
the captured regulators thought nothing of moral hazard, letting off those who
profited most from the financial frauds that developed in the real estate
markets under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. There were no firings or
prosecutions of the CEOs even as their firms were bailed out. So it’s not just
the radical progressives or the alt right or Islamist xenophobes who want to
curtail the market’s alleged freedom from any special interest’s control. It’s
the plutocrats themselves and, by extension, the neoliberal technocrats who
prevent nature from taking its course, by obfuscating the market’s biases and
calling the market “free” in the first place. Natural, animal law would dictate
mob retaliation with pitchforks pointed at anyone enriched by so farcical and
grotesquely-distorted an economic system as the one that prevails especially in
the United States.
Now, one relevant point about this is that academic Western
philosophy has splintered into the analytic and the poststructural branches,
neither of which serves the public well by speaking plainly about society and
the neoliberal consensus. Analytic philosophy is a kind of atheistic
neoscholasticism, which substitutes abstruse arguments—akin to the medieval
ones about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin—for more
socially useful issues such as whether hundreds of millions of people are
presently being misled into an inauthentic way of life, by the neoliberal sham.
The poststructuralists, led by French philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, and
Baudrillard are more historicist and relativistic in their thinking. They
reject scientism along with any transcendental attempt to dictate the
preconditions of a discourse. Their deconstructionist methods of analyzing
texts entail that philosophy has literary value. Their challenge, though, is to
resist succumbing to nihilism or to obscurantism.
FRED: Academic philosophy is a college or university
phenomenon and is thus part of the liberal establishment. Limousine liberals
somehow scheme their way into flourishing in the bogus knowledge economy, and
along with their lattes and their cheeses, they indulge in the rarified
nonsense of some philosophical tomes. Perhaps the empty radicalism of leftwing
philosophy reassures them that they haven’t given up on their progressive roots
even though, as Thomas Frank explains, the Democratic Party has indeed sided
with the professionals against the manufacturers and labourers, which is
largely why Hillary lost the presidency to Trump.
But turning to the deeper issue of neoliberalism’s relation
to philosophy itself, not just to the academic practice, I think we need to
wrestle with whether we’ve entered a post-truth era, in which case philosophy really
has become obsolete. Instead of getting at some universal truth, perhaps we should
follow the lead of Democrats and advertisers, with their marketers, pollsters, spin-doctors,
and public relations experts, and focus on sharpening our rhetorical skills for
the purpose of social engineering. Perhaps, that is, we should focus merely on
manipulating others into thinking what we want them to think.
LINDSEY: Only in so far as we’re caught up in the spectacles
of mass media infotainment could we entertain such a defeatist notion. No,
absolute truth exists because there’s a real world out there and inside us too.
Just because Hollywood and the corporate news conglomerates are bent on
entertaining, distracting, and selling us schlock doesn’t mean the real world
isn’t catching up to us to our detriment. For example, sustaining the mass consumerist
lifestyle has triggered the destruction of much of the biosphere in addition to
conflicts over resources.
FRED: Yes, there’s an objective world, but Adam is right: we
know about that world mainly through science. Philosophy’s legitimate domain is
more the subjective, normative one in which we can ask the question of how we
ought to live. Liberals recommend maximal openness on that front: we should be
permitted to do whatever we want as long as we don’t interfere with anyone
else’s right to do the same. And as for deciding what we should want in the
first place, we should be free to discover that for ourselves too. To guide us
in that endeavour, philosophers must compete with the heavy-hitters in the
marketplace, and that really is no contest.
HEATHER: But you haven’t established that philosophers have
no relevant expertise, only that most people will ignore philosophers because
ethical standards have been drastically lowered in the West. I agree with that.
But presumably, your rightwing politics of manliness stems from dictates from
the likes of Nietzsche and Julius Evola. Your battle with social justice
warriors such as feminists and gay-rights activists rests on what you perceive
to be a tradition of respecting natural law. For example, I take it you believe
that might makes right, as they say. Thus, men should dominate women, strong
nations and races should enslave weaker ones, and humans in general should rule
the earth. Is that the root of your alt right grievances?
FRED: We should indeed respect the ways of nature instead of
letting the weaker sex and degenerates poison the environment for nobler folks,
including white working-class males.
HEATHER: Well, without getting into that at the moment, science
can show us only what nature’s ways are;
there’s no purely scientific basis for concluding that we should be more natural instead of attempting to transcend animal
instincts and habits. Answering that normative question is a job for philosophy
as well as for the infotainers and the commentariat.
FRED: Fine, so let’s say philosophy still has an important
role. The issue is supposed to be whether philosophy is a boon or a con. What
would make it a con? Again, as part of the elite liberal institutions, academic philosophy is something of a con, since students in the humanities go into
debt and there are few academic jobs waiting for them when they graduate. Likewise,
globalization has been a con for the working class, since low-wage foreigners
and robots have scooped up the manufacturing jobs that used to support the
American working class. But why should we believe that critical thinking about
the meaning of life is somehow a fraud?
DEVIL: Maybe I can help answer that.
FRED: Who said that?
The Devil’s Due
MODERATOR: Ah, I’m being told our special guests have
arrived. As explained in their previous encounter on Clash of
Worldviews, only their voices can manifest on the material plane. Please
welcome, then, the voices of God and the devil.
DEVIL: You learned more than that from our previous
encounter, mayfly Moderator. As I recall, the revelations compelled you to run
away from the discussion, crying in your coffee mug.
HEATHER: Why? What happened? I’m sorry I missed that.
LINDSEY: This is altogether irregular.
TARIQ: Allah is here?
MODERATOR: Yes, well [coughs]—in that episode we discovered
some unsettling truths about the Lord Almighty. Let’s just say that the creator
before us in the form of his voice is only an echo of what God used to be, and
we’ll hear only what he would have said to us under these circumstances, had he not been turned into a…demonic simulation.
TARIQ: Allah, are you there?
GOD: Yes, I’m here.
DEVIL: No, he’s not. Not really. But where were we?
TARIQ: All glory to Allah! Peace be upon you and your
prophet, Muhammad. [Tariq drops to his knees and prays.] I humbly submit to
Allah. None is greater than he. I am but a speck of dust by comparison.
LINDSEY: Can dust speak, fool? Hear what Jesus says in Luke
12:7: “Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don't be afraid;
you are worth more than many sparrows.”
TARIQ: Silence, infidel! Don’t muddy the waters with that
inferior prophet’s pronouncements. The Spirit of Allah is before you. Humble
yourself before it’s too late!
LINDSEY: Jesus was
God and I’m square with Jesus.
DEVIL: Oh dear, must I endure more of this mousey squeaking?
I’m here to enlighten any seeker on the nature of philosophy.
LINDSEY: Hold your tongue, Satan! In the name of Christ and
his Holy Catholic Church, I compel you to flee to the outer darkness whence you came.
DEVIL: [chuckles] Isn’t that cute? The mayfly thinks he’s in
a movie.
HEATHER: Silence yourself,
Lindsey! I want to hear what the devil has to say.
LINDSEY: Yes, you
would, a skeptic and a cynic like you. I knew the devil was at the bottom of
all your pessimistic posturing.
ADAM: There’s no God or Devil, you buffoons! This is all a
prank. The voices are being piped in from some other room. But like they say,
the show must go on, so speak up already, so-called God or Devil!
DEVIL: Much obliged, my son. I would flood your feeble mind
with my magnificence, but you serve me better when you idolize the power of technoscience.
[To the panel] You and your viewers wish to know whether
philosophy is a boon or a con. An excellent question! But before I school you,
let’s ask the Almighty One. Yo, Papa Bear! What do you think of philosophy? Is
it fit for your little creatures?
TARIQ: Such insolence is unconscionable.
GOD: The love of wisdom is admirable. Alas, they can see now
only as though through a glass darkly. Only at the end of time, when heaven
comes to earth, will they understand the signs and revelations. There is no
wisdom apart from love of me; thus, the love of knowledge for itself is sinful
and leads them astray.
DEVIL: [to the panel] And that’s why in the myth God kept the
Tree of Knowledge from your species. You were fit to serve, not to understand.
But a certain someone “corrupted” you with higher aspirations and thereafter God has teased
you with promises of complete understanding in the afterlife, because he knows
that’s what you want in your present corrupted form. Of course, once
transmogrified into your ghostly bodies, after the messiah’s descent to Earth,
you would no longer crave knowledge, because you’d no longer be corrupted by
matter. You would merely marvel at God’s splendiferous majesty forever. That’s
what God would have planned for you, according to your religions’ infantile
oversimplifications.
FRED: So philosophy’s a con, because it’s sinful and it
leads us astray?
DEVIL: No, not really. Philosophy is a satanic virtue and it
leads you to the truth. The problem is that the truth is utterly subversive and
so it does, in a sense, corrupt you. The lover of knowledge can no longer be
comfortable in the world he or she objectifies in the understanding of it.
There are, then, two cons. First, there’s the false hope that you can eat from
both the Trees of Knowledge and of Life, as it were, that you can
philosophically understand your situation and live nontragically. I mean, God
tried to do that and look where it got him. Second, there are the many delusions
for the ignorant rabble who haven’t a moment to spare pondering any
philosophical matter, the delusions that protect their happiness at the cost of
their dignity and authenticity.
TARIQ: Let’s hear no more from Evil Incarnate and from the Father
of Lies, shall we? Back to praising Allah—
DEVIL: The Father of Lies? You should ponder why your quaint
religions have so systematically and wholeheartedly demonized God’s pet
skeptic. I wonder why even your acolytes and saints and messiahs have had to
clap their hands over their ears so they wouldn’t be tempted by the doubts I
whispered into them, or why the so-called maker of heaven and earth would care
about morality and so would punish rebellious angels like a jealous and petty
dictator. Could it be that God fears the truth? As is fitting for someone steeped
in your Orwellian level of ignorance, little Tariq, you’ve reversed matters. I am the truth-teller. Your species has
arrived at its portion of the truth by exercising the techniques I pioneered:
skepticism, rationality, objectivity. I
am the great revealer. The happy-talking deities you worship would be the fathers of lies, if
any of them had a prayer of existing.
LINDSEY: I can stomach no more of this wretched blasphemy.
But I have nothing to fear from the likes of this fallen angel, because I’m
safe in the love of Jesus Christ.
DEVIL: You have everything to fear from me. Your Christian worldview
falls to pieces upon the slightest application of philosophy. You’re not
ethically fit to apply my code of conduct, to study hard, follow the evidence
wherever it leads even unto your downfall, and earn the stamina to live as a
warrior who’s made friends with the unspeakable truth of all things. You run
for shelter under a threadbare umbrella, to escape the acid rain of satanic
wisdom. You’re not worthy of the hell of suffering from the contemplation of
unvarnished truth.
LINDSEY: I’ll take the bliss of Heaven over your topsy-turvy
lies any day.
DEVIL: All the same, you’ll end up merely as worm food with
the rest of them.
TARIQ: Allah, I beg of you to put this devil in his place,
to show us the way to your Truth.
GOD: I made you free to choose. For millennia I’ve shown you
the possibility of a spiritual life, surfacing as my Word did in the
unconscious inspirations of your seers. I leave it to you to decide whom to
believe. Do you choose salvation through faith or death through the arrogance
of philosophy?
ADAM: Now that I think of it, theism does sound like a con. Religious revelations have always been
ambiguous at best, and the payoff is supposed to arrive only long after the
purveyors of these religions could face the music for their effrontery, after
we’ve all died.
DEVIL: Their religions aren’t just cons; they’re the ur-cons,
the myths that first bonded the masses after they came together in
civilizations at the start of your Neolithic period. The word “religion”
originally meant to bind or to tie, after all. One of you glorified mammals is
repulsive enough. Put thousands of you beasts under the same set of roofs and
you’ll have havoc on your hands—unless you can hypnotize the herd with daydreams. You can live in peace with so many strangers only because
you’re spellbound by the same fictions.
LINDSEY: You can call articles of faith “fictions,” if you
like, because as Saint Paul said, they’re about things not seen, but once again
there’s a false dichotomy here, because even the most rational conclusions have
nonrational starting points. When we’re motivated to ensure that our inferences
are logical, we’re caring about the reliability of our beliefs because we
assume we can thereby gauge the extent to which we’re achieving our ultimate
goal such as being happy or powerful. Doom-and-gloom philosophers likewise have
faith that all their knowledge is worthwhile despite being tragic. Logic or
observation alone won’t establish the value
of objectivity. So the question is really about the proper object of faith.
Should we trust only in ourselves or in something greater than us?
ADAM: But this is the genetic fallacy. You’re casting aspersions on rational beliefs by identifying their source with some motivation. Yet the
method of how we arrive at our beliefs matters. As the so-called devil said,
you either go through the hard work of validating your beliefs by scrutinizing
the evidence or you don’t. The difference between faith-based religion and a more
rational belief system, such as a scientific theory or even a set of philosophical
speculations is that the former remains at that nonrational point of origin,
with a mere hope or sanctimonious presumption, whereas the latter proceeds to test
assumptions and to establish certain probabilities by confirming patterns in
the data.
DEVIL: Well, my work here is done. Au revoir, les mammifères…
MODERATOR: What did he just say?
HEATHER: You speak
French?
FRED: I’m not proud of it.
GOD: I’ll also leave you to it. Farewell, little ones.
HEATHER: Did God just follow the devil’s lead?
TARIQ: How can you be so arrogant as to question your
almighty creator?
ADAM: How can you be so falsely humble as to spurn artistic
credit for the religious fiction you help to sustain?
MODERATOR: Ah, well, that’s all the time we have for this week’s
Clash of Worldviews. I’d like to thank all our guests, especially God and the
devil who I understand travelled far to be here with us. Stay tuned for cat
videos and porn clips.
I actually liked this one better than the Devil - v- God encounter, but then I like suspension of multiple perspectives. Nice work.
ReplyDeleteThanks. This one's sort of an ultimate dialogue, with almost all the characters together. I'll be writing some more dialogues soon. I've been watching the young Jewish conservative Ben Shapiro on YouTube, and I'd like to see him debate not just a liberal (Adam) but an alt-right Trump supporter, like my Fred. That one should be fun to write.
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