Nov 4, 2014 02:10 AM
http://www.spiked-online.com/review_of_b...6MWk0DN6wY
[...] It is to these great questions of culture and religion that Terry Eagleton returns in his latest collection of lectures, as he has done so often in his work for nearly half a century. Surveying the decline of religious faith, and the diverse attempts to forge ‘surrogate forms of transcendence, plugging the gap where God had once been’, he observes that ‘the Almighty has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of’.
Though as an economic system capitalism is ‘intrinsically faithless’, relying on the dull compulsion of the market, it is a ‘true believer’ in the value of traditional religion in the sphere of morality and social conduct. The problem here is not only that the advance of market forces, science, technology and education have had a corrosive effect on popular faith.
It is also the case that the distinctive ideologies of capitalism – pragmatism, materialism and utilitarianism – lack an affirmative, affective quality that might inspire the masses. Eagleton quotes the judgement of the (recently beatified) Victorian Anglo-Catholic John Henry Newman, that liberalism was ‘too cold a principle to prevail with the multitude’.
The quest for a ‘viceroy for God’ has been long and arduous. Eagleton, who likes a list, provides a long one: ‘Reason, Nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, the life force and personal relations: all of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity.’ The very survival of religion confirms the difficulty of replacing the complex role it plays in the life of human societies.
[...] He wades through an hilarious assortment of leftists, philosophers, materialists, positivists, atheists, reluctant atheists, agnostics, deists who just can’t leave religion alone: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Régis Debray, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, George Steiner, Roger Scruton, John Gray, Simon Critchley, August Comte, Edward Gibbon, Denis Diderot, JM Synge, Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, Matthew Arnold, Montesquieu, Hans Vaihinger, Leo Strauss, Emile Durkheim, Voltaire, John Toland. They don’t believe a word of it, of course, but, well, it might come in handy.
The philosophers turn to theology in search of more productive questioning. The social scientists can’t stop pressing religion into socially useful service – to provide the ceremonial, the ritual, the cohesion, the unity, the discipline, the order, the sweetness and light, all of which appear to have gone out of the church window. And then there’s Alain de Botton who says he finds religion ‘sporadically interesting, useful and consoling’. As Eagleton remarks, it sounds ‘rather like rustling up a soufflé when you are feeling low’....
[...] It is to these great questions of culture and religion that Terry Eagleton returns in his latest collection of lectures, as he has done so often in his work for nearly half a century. Surveying the decline of religious faith, and the diverse attempts to forge ‘surrogate forms of transcendence, plugging the gap where God had once been’, he observes that ‘the Almighty has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of’.
Though as an economic system capitalism is ‘intrinsically faithless’, relying on the dull compulsion of the market, it is a ‘true believer’ in the value of traditional religion in the sphere of morality and social conduct. The problem here is not only that the advance of market forces, science, technology and education have had a corrosive effect on popular faith.
It is also the case that the distinctive ideologies of capitalism – pragmatism, materialism and utilitarianism – lack an affirmative, affective quality that might inspire the masses. Eagleton quotes the judgement of the (recently beatified) Victorian Anglo-Catholic John Henry Newman, that liberalism was ‘too cold a principle to prevail with the multitude’.
The quest for a ‘viceroy for God’ has been long and arduous. Eagleton, who likes a list, provides a long one: ‘Reason, Nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, the life force and personal relations: all of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity.’ The very survival of religion confirms the difficulty of replacing the complex role it plays in the life of human societies.
[...] He wades through an hilarious assortment of leftists, philosophers, materialists, positivists, atheists, reluctant atheists, agnostics, deists who just can’t leave religion alone: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Régis Debray, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, George Steiner, Roger Scruton, John Gray, Simon Critchley, August Comte, Edward Gibbon, Denis Diderot, JM Synge, Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, Matthew Arnold, Montesquieu, Hans Vaihinger, Leo Strauss, Emile Durkheim, Voltaire, John Toland. They don’t believe a word of it, of course, but, well, it might come in handy.
The philosophers turn to theology in search of more productive questioning. The social scientists can’t stop pressing religion into socially useful service – to provide the ceremonial, the ritual, the cohesion, the unity, the discipline, the order, the sweetness and light, all of which appear to have gone out of the church window. And then there’s Alain de Botton who says he finds religion ‘sporadically interesting, useful and consoling’. As Eagleton remarks, it sounds ‘rather like rustling up a soufflé when you are feeling low’....
