The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality. And the human societies that hew closest to the natural order aren’t the shining Edens of James Cameron’s fond imaginings. They’re places where existence tends to be nasty, brutish and short.There's really nothing wrong with a little pocket philosophy. It would be easy to complain that despite, or because of, his Harvard education, young master Douthat doesn't really understand what Hobbes meant by "state of nature," but that would be cheap and a bit dishonest. After all, Hobbes himself didn't know what he meant. Cribbed and bowdlerized philosophy is only very offensive if you hold the authentic item in high regard. I do not. Hobbes was a crank, and Leviathan was bunk. Casting back to its notions about the natural world is like appealing to Aristotelian mechanics in discussing rocket launches.
-Dorm Rap Douthat
Anyway, what are these "human societies that hew closest to the natural order"? Life expectancy in modern Russia is twelve years and three and months, after which every single adult man dies from a mixture of bathtub vodka, automatic gunfire, and despair, but you would hardly call Russia neolithic. We consider the Afghans primitive, and yet your basic illiterate tribesman seems to have a far firmer grasp on such cornerstones of modernity as the internal combustion engine that your average chin-bearded Ivy Leaguer. Among actual neolithic peoples, both extant and within the archeological record, all that can be said is that there is and was wide variety--peaceable types and warlike, long-lived and sickly, idyllic and hardscrabble. Plus ça change, motherfuckers, as I am wont to say.
The flip side of this rusty coin is the myth of the noble savage, the crass primitivism that Douthat et al. associate with Hollywood and New Age America but that has in fact been with us since the gods of the stargate or whoever gave us civilization. And that's the rub, isn't it? They are the same fallacy. Cultural conservatives imagine some kind of attack on the "theistic" cosmogony, even as it is their own confused fairy tale that posits a pre-civilizational Eden as the natural and primordial state of man. Meanwhile, the merely narrative appeal of making every ancient tribe and alien civilization into nature-worshipers is simply this: despite what every dork with a World of Warcraft avatar and a pile of Frank Herbert books believes, creating a unified, coherent, Tolkienian, fictional universe is very, very hard. It may have taken James Cameron a half a billion dollars to make the blue titties of his forest babes jiggle just so, but it took old J.R.R. a whole lifetime to invent his elves. Mere primitivism is a problem in storytelling not so much because it fetishizes false notions of indigenousness, nor because it attacks the received moral order of the Christian universe, but because it is bad storytelling. And isn't that likewise the problem with the Times editorial page and all its compeers? Not that they're so fucking wrong, but that they're so goddamned lazy.
54 comments:
BLAWG!
Reading Douthat makes life nasty, brutish and short.
bad storytelling? 10,000 BC doesn't have a 9% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes for nothing, you know.
No man who has read Emerson or understood the jokes in Forster would write such nonsense.
What is it about 'intellectual' converts to Catholicism that makes them write such constipated prose? How can they pick up nothing at all from Waugh and Greene and O'Connor?
My money's on "because of" and not "in spite of".
Say what you will about the movie or storyline, but i'm guessing doubthat and his ilk hate the movie because of it's anti imperial message. That message is too simplified and obvious, I grant you. And the navi don't much resemble the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents. But for many, it still hits close enough to home to annoy.
And it's waaaaaayyyy better than 300
douchehat, don't recycle your enema water!
douchehat must have missed that Schiller survey at harvard, particularly "Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen." also some of that hegel stuff, something about contradiction (nature v. culture) or other.
@Lysander: I think you're giving them too much credit. There's not enough there there, in Avatar, to hate. The "exploitation BAD, nature GOOD" storyline was tired in Ferngully: The Last Rainforest. In 2009, it's a laughable throwback.
No, Douthat, the neocons et al distrust Avatar because they feel they ought to. They picked up on the "exploitation BAD, nature GOOD" message and trotted out the same tired responses they made to "Captain Planet and the Planeteers" in 1994.
So we're replaying the same kulturkampf that we saw in the Clinton administration. Ho hum. Everything old is new; someone pour me another Caucasian.
what is Douthat concluding?
Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms.
religion exists, in part, because man made it up to chill everybody out. and that even so, believing in the sky fairy is better than believing in the premise of James Cameron's Avatar?
dude, are you fucking this up?
"whoever gave us civilization." Sid Meiers.
"They picked up on the "exploitation BAD, nature GOOD" message and trotted out the same tired responses they made to "Captain Planet and the Planeteers" in 1994." WAit, did that really happen? Damn, I wish I weren't 12 at the time and genuinely enjoying CP instead of enjoying him ironically AND enjoying rightwing flip out
I havent even seen the movie yet but I guarantee its about a pervert defending his imaginary blue whores from the Spanish Armada.
At the end, they tell him to quit jerking off so much and get a life. He refuses, so they burn him at the stake.
Life expectancy in modern Russia is twelve years and three and months
I know you're into comedic hyperbole, but as a strictly factual matter hunter gatherers and primitive agriculturalists have shorter lifespans and much higher rates of death by homicide (even when we include the world wars in modern homicide stats). According to Google, Russian life expectancy is 67.6 years.
we've really fetish-ized this whole "being alive" thing, haven't we? after a certain point, is longer life expectancy necessarily a positive?
The myth of the Noble Savage fails because of "noble", not because of "savage". Ever since Rousseau, proggies have reposed their escapist projections in some sort of Back to Nature, loincloth 'n spear motif. Tycoon Cameron's six-dollar-popcorn foray into anti-capitalism recalls rich Pharisees dispensing alms in the Temple square and tearing pre-torn seams in prayer garments.
As a devout admirer of progressive doctrine, my only beef with "Avatar" is that for some reason the invading human army does not feature the rich ethnic diversity we've all come to expect from Big Hollywood, especially in high leadership positions. Okay, the copter pilot who sympathizes with the Blue People is a Latina, the traitress....
I was tempted to go with a "the dude was a lazy man" quote here, but... no, the bigger problem is that they are so sucking wrong, their laziness is secondary.
@NutellaOnToast: what, you didn't read National Review when you were 12? I thought I was normal ...
Fuck the reviews of the reviews, I wanna see some straight-up Avatar hatin'. "Dances With Smurfs" indeed.
The savages are always noble until the white man wants something from them.
And Scientology, not pantheism, is the Hollywood religion of choice.
Enron: We divorce production studios, not religions.
IOZ, you are making stuff up; Douthat isnt. You have brought a sharp irony on yourself.
Name ten, out of the thousands of hunter peoples, that were definitely peaceful over centuries. You can start with those allegedly pacifist Moriori who, whatever the case, were certainly slaughtered by Maori arriving with guns. Only nine to go.
Youve never looked at any data, you are just interpolating between Rousseau and Pinker, figuring that should come out about right. Thats the only sloth I see here.
Try looking at some numbers, youll see that a rather small fraction of hunters reached 50, though the few that did might sometimes live to 75 or 85.
All levels of technology have their advantages, certainly including hunter-gathering, agriculture having made a mess of life in several ways. But theres no doubt that Afghans are behind us on technology. Have they invented any useful drugs lately? Can they help me with my multivariable calc homework? Have they made the machines that make us wealthy enough to support full-time mechanics, so we dont need to know how to fix combustion engines? Without help from Western inventions, 80% of Afghans would be dying of infection prior to sexual maturity, today. Thats how it was in Europe and probably Afghanistan in 1500 or 1600; it had probably been that way for thousands of years.
Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.
Does it matter that a large number, perhaps a majority, of religions have had a pantheistic component?
Is Rod just explaining how benighted the poor savage red man was until the guiding light of Christ came to take him out of the darkness? In the New York Times? In fucking 2009?
Eric, ladies and gentlemen. What he lacks in apostrophes, he makes up for with sheer delight.
I like how be really bit into the fallacy of the primitive and ran a half marathon with it. I hope he has a dental plan.
Toe-pick! H to the b.
For video of Ross Douthat helping Eric with his multivariable calc homework click here (not safe for work, I don't expect, not that I've ever gone there, mind you).
Could an Afghan do that?
I can think of a lot of "Western inventions" that are "killing Afghans before sexual maturity" today. Does the West win?
Enron---
One discovers that "primitive" and "savage" are not nearly so frightening and racialist if one permits recorded history to extend past the last half-millenium or so. There are all these variegated tides and cycles, you see, within which not the only the white dog's had his day. Still, if one's wedded to Coldplay as the greatest band of all time....
Well dude, I was referring to the concept of savagery that has dominated Western ontology since at least Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Ross Douthat's middle name is Eric, isn't it?
They all scream "live free or die" until it's time to hoist the strawman of savagery and blame him for inadequate healthcare or policing. Christ, here's what you lack: the brutish, short, bloody, depraved, maniac, insane, superstitious, wild, lawless... can be appreciated immediately and seen for what is wrong about it and what is right about it.
Civilization is a mixed bag and it can scarcely be praised without remembering the costs it entails, costs we don't agree to but pay anyway. Civilization is defended by barbarians who, like heathens acting in gods' names, are so desperate to forget what they've lost that they howl at the thought of anything else.
We're not civilized. We're domesticated. We have neither instincts nor higher faculties. And that's why we watch fantasies and write editorials; to pretend we're in touch with a single god-damned thing.
Also, according to Gene Callahan, Rousseau didn't believe in the "noble savage" either.
Enron---
If by "Western ontology", you mean, "Enron's deontology", I think we have a meeting of the minds.
Inky, just for you:
"The ability to project transhistorical relevance while hiding the particularities of their marks and origins makes North Atlantic universals as hard to conceptualize as they are seductive to use. Part of their seduction resides in that capacity to project clarity while remaining ambiguous. We have a stronger sense of what modernity may mean when we point to the naysayers—the Taliban of Afghanistan, a native tribe in the Amazon, or whichever figure temporarily plays the good or evil face of the nonmodern—than when we investigate those who praise it. In other words, the nonmodern is glaring but the modern is much less obvious. Still, this opaqueness notwithstanding, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that the word modernity evokes sensibilities, perceptions, choices, and indeed states of affairs that are not easily captured by other words. The modern may be vague; yet it seems necessary. That is in part why it is a seductive word. But if the seduction of North Atlantic universals also has to do with their power to silence their own history, then we need to unearth those silences, the conceptual and theoretical missing links that make them so attractive. In its most common deployments as a North Atlantic universal, modernity disguises and misconstrues the many Others that it creates. A critical assessment of modernity must start with the revelation of its hidden faces."
-Rolph-Trouillot, North Atlantic Universals
Re: Human Life Span
Per Psalm 90, the life expectancy was 70, and up to 80, for better builds.
The Christians
i suppose i should retract what i said in an earlier steeler's thread abt roethlisberger being counterfeit ...
As they used to say in Southie, D's ass is grass and you wuz the lawnmower.
I would kiss your hand but you'd have to wipe it first ... it smells of mortality.
Re: Gene Callahan
I followed the link, read the webpage, and was confronted by some choicy Rousseau quotes...
"the horror, the horror"
Enron---
Well and good. What you're missing is that some version of the same observations would have been just as applicable to Middle Kingdom Egypt, Tang dynasty China, Rome under the Antonines, or Aztec Central America. For the reasons I've described, you and yours insist on casting "North Atlantic universals" as different in kind, not degree, from the hierarchizing, depredation-justifying universals of a hundred other dominant cultures with an era at the top. Not only is it tiresomely ahistorical, but it leads to whining, anomie, and anti-social behavior among the heirs of the era's unfortunate losers.
I mean like, racism et al is a "modern" conception, hence the dilemma.
Yes, Afghans and others have certainly suffered titanically from western inventions, just as agriculture, which you cant pin on the West, caused terrific suffering. I dont have the interest to tot up the whole ledger.
I've never read Douthat at all, except for short quotes on other blogs. Let alone engaged with him in any of the strange ecstatic practices suggested above by Moloch, which I assume must come from some strand or another of inscrutable oriental mysticism. So I'm not acting as a partisan hack or Douthat fanboi, here. I am not a party GOPer, movement conservative, etc.
I admit I know nothing about Rousseau, but in any case I was only using him as a symbol or a position; I didnt actually "do" anything with him.
There are "peaceniks" like Brian Ferguson of Rutgers, who claim that prehistoric warfare was not terrible or frequent. And there are "hawks" like Lawrence Keely and Pinker who think it was more or less universal, and killed 20-50% of all males basically worldwide. But there isnt agreement based on data that peace was widespread in any degree. I have read some of this stuff but I do not have a strong data-based opinion myself.
There have also been plenty of accusations that anthro/archeo can be quite utopian and put the good as they see it above the true, particularly but not only when it comes to prehistoric warfare. Some have also suggested that the interpretation of changes in the distribution of artifacts. These used to be ascribed mostly to population movements. After the war (the big one) such changes were ascribed to trade and cultural influence, with the actual peoples staying still. Surprise surprise, the notion of a mighty people extirpating a neighbor in quest of /Lebensraum/ was not so appealing anymore.
Of course, these anthropologists believe in far more cultural tractability than I do. They think we will tend, somewhat, towards imitating the original prehistoric man we read about. Being somewhat more of an inherent nature man, I think we tend to BE the prehistoric man that we read about or DONT read about, either way. I dont claim the nature of man is evil... but lets just say its "a problem". Obscuring this fact makes things worse, not better; it needs to be recognized explicitly, which was one of the virtues of say our dear departed christianity (RIP), among plenty of vices. And what I say in this paragraph is an huge part of what it means to me to be on the right. It is at least as important as Burkean conservatism, or libertarian impulses (which I admit are only partly rightish).
Eric Johnson
As to Enron and Inkberrow's thread, I agree with both of them. We should let Afghans do whatever they want in their own god blessed country. Modernity has plenty of bad aspects. I'm a demo-skeptic and rather an anti-modern. This is compatible with pro-westernism, even though such a combination is rather in eclipse today.
We'll cut off your Eric Johnson!
Not that they're so fucking wrong, but that they're so goddamned lazy.
Although, truth be told, that they're so fucking wrong is pretty fucking annoying too.
Enron---
"Racism" is as old as the hills. The Aztecs almost self-evidently believed in the inherent inferiority (except as foodstuffs) of the untold thousands of members of defeated vassal peoples who were lined up for stone altar soup-stock organ removal. The Greeks, Romans, and Chinese had this thing with calling certain other less-sophisticated peoples "barbarians"---I think they intended to convey what would today be considered "racist" attitudes.
It's the pious anti-West anti-Racists who are the modern development. No National Association For The Advancement of Cooked People during the Aztec heyday. But it's still, "Ah, Aztlan!".....
Inkberrow, do you have a point or did you mistake this for your sixth grade history class?
The modernity and the pre-modern are, according to Inkberrow, at best equal in terms of crimes. And the modern is kinder than the past, but doesn't know it.
Ah, conservatives. They're presentists until they're not.
I have to wonder how Doothat feels about the expression "down to Earth."
Anon 1030307---
Are those the only options? Neither seems to really fit, even as well as you being a malevolent half-wit.....
Cuneyt---
As we've discussed before, it's all in the framing, in the initial point of reference. Based on this and related threads it's progressives too who are "presentists, until they're not". I posit all as equally bad, which history supports: you and yours ahistorically posit the West as especially bad, or perhaps more precisely, the only bad worth mentioning.
Yea, I don't think Inky is calling out anything out of the ordinary. Hate it all you want, but on we go. Again, why do you guys hate America? Inky is all like: "Why wouldn't you want to surf the height of this empire's wave to its ultimate crescendo? Let's see what kind of air we can catch. Quit whining you silly bitches." Which is like trying to give a pep talk to the gay misfit glee/drama club. Easily as pointless as hating on America. And on the Internet, tooboot! BLAWG.
I suppose Inky either has a strong stomach, or works under a vent hood. Maybe he could recommend a model for you, Cuneyt. :-)
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