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dwrs 's review for:
Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious
by Ross Douthat
What's strange and spooky in him is this sense of the supernatural, of the weird lurking. He is serious when he asks us not to practice Satanism; there is something literary—in the sense of narrative—Gothic, in the idea that the world is strange, full of symbols and meaning that matter to us: that the appearance of meaningfulness of things in human categories (morality, portent, resonance &c.) are not superseded by scientific categories. Yes, the mental supervenes on the physical: but that's just a physical fact. The ultimate reason for the physical being that way—is us, or some being or mind that cares about us. (Which isn't so implausible: we do seem special compared to other things. Earth is flatly more interesting than Mars.) A reversion to putting primary emphasis on the manifest reality (as opposed to the world of laws and particles), of things in the terms they appear to us: it was made for us, it means something, it's drenched in intention.
I mean the spookiness literally: I read it alone at night and the way he hinted and intimated at (e.g) demons (about which this very smart man is very serious), it somehow got me to buy in to something that in sober daylight I once again find silly (actually this book occasioned one of the weirdest sober nights of my life, but besides this comment I will pass over it in silence). In that way, I enjoyed it almost like someone might enjoy a horror movie: it got me temporarily to really believe--not in the sense of making the a life-commitment to religious practice, but in a primitive, supernatural sense. (I remember when I was 16 thinking that although my views move around a lot, the one thing I could be confident that I would never become was socially conservative. Then, after I became socially conservative, I laughed at myself. To believe in the supernatural or paranormal would be that on steroids. "I may become religious, but I'll never believe in demons....")
The idea behind this: there is a superstitious form of life that trusts how things appear to it: a streak of light slanting from a cracked door into a dark room: a symbol of a secret world behind our world. But in the scientific mindset, there is no such meaning, or it's in the mind and real only in that way, but nonetheless emerging from particles that don't know or care about how it manifestly appears to us. And the spooky or freaky things can build on themselves because our brains see order, narrative, progression in things—even archetypical personalities. That kind of self-trust involves the restoration of the "projected" qualities that things have to us: morality, symbolism, narrative coherence, beauty. Those manifest features feel primitive to focus on because don't we know that they are just emergent from the real laws undearneath? They're the gravestones, not the corpses, and you can do whatever you like to the gravestone without affecting the corpse at all.
I want to say: In the hands of most people, regardless of if it's true, this kind of credulity could be disastrous; the social practice of cool reflection, of the expectation of justification, is important in living a good life and maintaing an effective community. I almost want to say it's a kind of elite religiosity that can indulge the supernatural (just in the same form as other conservative arguments against e.g. sexual liberation, where social norms against free love that protect everyone are probably unnecessary for people with a lot of agency and resources (to practice safe sex, to get abortions &c., who will inevitably form stable marriages: but when the culture is liberated, those less well off suffer). Isn't this kind of indulgence a disaster for ordinary crazy people? I've seen in my life people get taken in by ordinary scams; an intellectually weighty one that has all of the primitive cognitive faculties behind it seems even more sinister. (Even if it's not a scam, but true!?) The kind of no-nonsense English stiffness and rationalism I think can be quite functional and healthy for a lot of people, and society overall. The incredulous attitude might just be a functional adaptation which serves the purpose of being able to cancel what would otherwise be intense emotional reactions.
That aside, the book does make also makes me think, though, of how much my own atheistic naturalism is just the result of my experiences. He makes much of the things he observed as a child at Pentecostal services, among Yale New Haven secular types too: if I had seen that, what would I think? It's that I haven't had those experiences that make me an atheist (although one with fits and grasps towards religion). But this isn't at all for want of trying—I have longed for weirdness and it just doesn't fit. My most religious experience was perhaps anti-religious, humanistic, literary, and psychological: a kind of mysticism which insisted upon itself—as nothing more than a marvelous neurochemical accident.
He is very good at making things seem reasonable, and although he mentions it in passing, very good on the particular contingency and class-conformity that are the real grounds for many modern people's religiosity. The book is aimed at a general reader; it's short; it reminds me of Mere Christianity. What's interesting in both the pitch and the execution is that there is no reliance on technical philosophical argument (as I may have expected, and which I guess correctly diagnoses as a kind of anxious retreat), and also that he really just does believe what he is saying. (I almost wonder if the book is too reasonable, too accommodating....) He comes off well in promotional interviews; there is something in him which can metabolize the challenges posed....
Especially in regards to some of the arguments from design and religious experience, I want to say: Well clearly there is something odd, even if it's so radically inhuman and other that it has no point of connection with religious practice on this planet. (Oddly he mentioned in passing that some conservatism Islam sects that say that God is so alien and incomprehensible that he can't even be depicted, and which insists on rulebound, submissive piety: and I thought, yes, here is a religious order which appeals to my sensibilities, or one cluster of them.)
But even the freaky things that have happened to me in my life: I want to say that they're happening in my own mind: isn't it obvious? There was a recent book, Why An Afterlife Obviously Exists (or some such), that trades on the fact that everyone who has an NDE becomes convinced of its, if not reality, then hyperreality: its more-real-than-real quality. And aren't you well-represented by "everyone," statistically speaking? I think so. Douthat mentions this line of argument too, the countless people who've had these experiences and come away convinced, lost to the ordinary world. Perhaps it's special pleading to say: Well, I would too—just in the same way I would be crazy if I dropped too much acid or had a pipe blast through my brain. But that's the "outside view": from the inside, the changed me would find my stubbornness maddening. These perspectives, I think, though, are incommensurable: Either/Or. But then again, no: I feel quite comfortable with the fact that there is widespread, systematic epistemic failure in the world. The Nazis overran the most cultured country in the world; COVID hysteria overtook the world; the academy especially reliably miseducates students and services a class of corrupt priest-ideologues. And isn't the religious delusion the archetypical, most basic one? The reification of primitive, schizophrenic instincts that see agency, intention, and meaning everywhere—when it's provably not so?
Maybe it's offensive or consdescending that I can like this book without actually seriously having it move the needle at all. What is the real reason I refelxively don't take this seriously? (A part of me wants to say: That there is no God—at least not one that cares about the things humans care about, or intervenes with comprehensible intentions—is manifest from learning about the nature of the scientific world: It tracks how things seem, and this impression is shared by an enormous number of smart people. (But then, is credulous openness just psychologically disastrous and dysfunctional? Just like how the truth in other areas is anti-social?)) Not sure. And he recommends other, non-supernaturalist religious alternatives, but those don't really interest me and they aren't his primary concern, either.
There is a whole kind of relating that we're capable of: to an agent with wills and intentions, which are nonetheless inscrutable and more powerful than us. Animals are alien, but weaker than us or stronger in a way that we understand (brute strength). But they don't look at us simultaneously with curiosity (of our individual personality) and with knowing; only people know us. There is something freaky about beings that look at us, smile and play, or torment, but which we don't understand. We still have wonder and awe at vastness, and there are things unknown to us still, but the world isn't mysterious, hidden, secret, strange. How I wish it were still, how intoxciating, electrifying, also terrifying, it is to be temporarily thrown back into that way of thinking. (But don't I appreciate it as a kind of sociological permission? Because I can otherwise handle it, and like new ideas—play with them at no risk? I can't focus, so I can't get fully swept up in emotions or feelings: I am always safe, and so ideas can't hurt me.)
His defense of Jesus and the Gospels in particular just seemed wrong to me; I wish it were true, but I can't escape the image of Jesus as just an idiot apocalyptic preacher who was also a kind of moral genius. I can't escape the idea of the early Christians as anticipating apocalypse and only later realizing it wasn't imminent and beginning to write their accounts; of the human-all-too-human political agendas of the different texts. I guess one of the great disappointments of my intellectual life has been in the overhyped character of Jesus.
I feel like his prose was worse than earlier books, maybe because it was more constrained by making an argument, or by concessionary rhetoic? But those didn't feel like why....
I mean the spookiness literally: I read it alone at night and the way he hinted and intimated at (e.g) demons (about which this very smart man is very serious), it somehow got me to buy in to something that in sober daylight I once again find silly (actually this book occasioned one of the weirdest sober nights of my life, but besides this comment I will pass over it in silence). In that way, I enjoyed it almost like someone might enjoy a horror movie: it got me temporarily to really believe--not in the sense of making the a life-commitment to religious practice, but in a primitive, supernatural sense. (I remember when I was 16 thinking that although my views move around a lot, the one thing I could be confident that I would never become was socially conservative. Then, after I became socially conservative, I laughed at myself. To believe in the supernatural or paranormal would be that on steroids. "I may become religious, but I'll never believe in demons....")
The idea behind this: there is a superstitious form of life that trusts how things appear to it: a streak of light slanting from a cracked door into a dark room: a symbol of a secret world behind our world. But in the scientific mindset, there is no such meaning, or it's in the mind and real only in that way, but nonetheless emerging from particles that don't know or care about how it manifestly appears to us. And the spooky or freaky things can build on themselves because our brains see order, narrative, progression in things—even archetypical personalities. That kind of self-trust involves the restoration of the "projected" qualities that things have to us: morality, symbolism, narrative coherence, beauty. Those manifest features feel primitive to focus on because don't we know that they are just emergent from the real laws undearneath? They're the gravestones, not the corpses, and you can do whatever you like to the gravestone without affecting the corpse at all.
I want to say: In the hands of most people, regardless of if it's true, this kind of credulity could be disastrous; the social practice of cool reflection, of the expectation of justification, is important in living a good life and maintaing an effective community. I almost want to say it's a kind of elite religiosity that can indulge the supernatural (just in the same form as other conservative arguments against e.g. sexual liberation, where social norms against free love that protect everyone are probably unnecessary for people with a lot of agency and resources (to practice safe sex, to get abortions &c., who will inevitably form stable marriages: but when the culture is liberated, those less well off suffer). Isn't this kind of indulgence a disaster for ordinary crazy people? I've seen in my life people get taken in by ordinary scams; an intellectually weighty one that has all of the primitive cognitive faculties behind it seems even more sinister. (Even if it's not a scam, but true!?) The kind of no-nonsense English stiffness and rationalism I think can be quite functional and healthy for a lot of people, and society overall. The incredulous attitude might just be a functional adaptation which serves the purpose of being able to cancel what would otherwise be intense emotional reactions.
That aside, the book does make also makes me think, though, of how much my own atheistic naturalism is just the result of my experiences. He makes much of the things he observed as a child at Pentecostal services, among Yale New Haven secular types too: if I had seen that, what would I think? It's that I haven't had those experiences that make me an atheist (although one with fits and grasps towards religion). But this isn't at all for want of trying—I have longed for weirdness and it just doesn't fit. My most religious experience was perhaps anti-religious, humanistic, literary, and psychological: a kind of mysticism which insisted upon itself—as nothing more than a marvelous neurochemical accident.
He is very good at making things seem reasonable, and although he mentions it in passing, very good on the particular contingency and class-conformity that are the real grounds for many modern people's religiosity. The book is aimed at a general reader; it's short; it reminds me of Mere Christianity. What's interesting in both the pitch and the execution is that there is no reliance on technical philosophical argument (as I may have expected, and which I guess correctly diagnoses as a kind of anxious retreat), and also that he really just does believe what he is saying. (I almost wonder if the book is too reasonable, too accommodating....) He comes off well in promotional interviews; there is something in him which can metabolize the challenges posed....
Especially in regards to some of the arguments from design and religious experience, I want to say: Well clearly there is something odd, even if it's so radically inhuman and other that it has no point of connection with religious practice on this planet. (Oddly he mentioned in passing that some conservatism Islam sects that say that God is so alien and incomprehensible that he can't even be depicted, and which insists on rulebound, submissive piety: and I thought, yes, here is a religious order which appeals to my sensibilities, or one cluster of them.)
But even the freaky things that have happened to me in my life: I want to say that they're happening in my own mind: isn't it obvious? There was a recent book, Why An Afterlife Obviously Exists (or some such), that trades on the fact that everyone who has an NDE becomes convinced of its, if not reality, then hyperreality: its more-real-than-real quality. And aren't you well-represented by "everyone," statistically speaking? I think so. Douthat mentions this line of argument too, the countless people who've had these experiences and come away convinced, lost to the ordinary world. Perhaps it's special pleading to say: Well, I would too—just in the same way I would be crazy if I dropped too much acid or had a pipe blast through my brain. But that's the "outside view": from the inside, the changed me would find my stubbornness maddening. These perspectives, I think, though, are incommensurable: Either/Or. But then again, no: I feel quite comfortable with the fact that there is widespread, systematic epistemic failure in the world. The Nazis overran the most cultured country in the world; COVID hysteria overtook the world; the academy especially reliably miseducates students and services a class of corrupt priest-ideologues. And isn't the religious delusion the archetypical, most basic one? The reification of primitive, schizophrenic instincts that see agency, intention, and meaning everywhere—when it's provably not so?
Maybe it's offensive or consdescending that I can like this book without actually seriously having it move the needle at all. What is the real reason I refelxively don't take this seriously? (A part of me wants to say: That there is no God—at least not one that cares about the things humans care about, or intervenes with comprehensible intentions—is manifest from learning about the nature of the scientific world: It tracks how things seem, and this impression is shared by an enormous number of smart people. (But then, is credulous openness just psychologically disastrous and dysfunctional? Just like how the truth in other areas is anti-social?)) Not sure. And he recommends other, non-supernaturalist religious alternatives, but those don't really interest me and they aren't his primary concern, either.
There is a whole kind of relating that we're capable of: to an agent with wills and intentions, which are nonetheless inscrutable and more powerful than us. Animals are alien, but weaker than us or stronger in a way that we understand (brute strength). But they don't look at us simultaneously with curiosity (of our individual personality) and with knowing; only people know us. There is something freaky about beings that look at us, smile and play, or torment, but which we don't understand. We still have wonder and awe at vastness, and there are things unknown to us still, but the world isn't mysterious, hidden, secret, strange. How I wish it were still, how intoxciating, electrifying, also terrifying, it is to be temporarily thrown back into that way of thinking. (But don't I appreciate it as a kind of sociological permission? Because I can otherwise handle it, and like new ideas—play with them at no risk? I can't focus, so I can't get fully swept up in emotions or feelings: I am always safe, and so ideas can't hurt me.)
His defense of Jesus and the Gospels in particular just seemed wrong to me; I wish it were true, but I can't escape the image of Jesus as just an idiot apocalyptic preacher who was also a kind of moral genius. I can't escape the idea of the early Christians as anticipating apocalypse and only later realizing it wasn't imminent and beginning to write their accounts; of the human-all-too-human political agendas of the different texts. I guess one of the great disappointments of my intellectual life has been in the overhyped character of Jesus.
I feel like his prose was worse than earlier books, maybe because it was more constrained by making an argument, or by concessionary rhetoic? But those didn't feel like why....