https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/why-we-still-need-atheism
Robinson makes a useful distinction I think is worth repeating, that there is a dispositional and philosophical distinction to be made between atheist and anti-theist stances, a distinction John Gray articulated pretty clearly in Seven Types of Atheism a few years back. Gray's contention was that the New Atheists had views that were parasitically dependent on the liberal Protestant ideals formulated by Schleiermacher and that in philosophy they brought nothing new to the table and in geopolitical terms all they contributed was support for two of the more hotly contested United States imperial gambits of the last twenty years.
Robinson makes a useful distinction I think is worth repeating, that there is a dispositional and philosophical distinction to be made between atheist and anti-theist stances, a distinction John Gray articulated pretty clearly in Seven Types of Atheism a few years back. Gray's contention was that the New Atheists had views that were parasitically dependent on the liberal Protestant ideals formulated by Schleiermacher and that in philosophy they brought nothing new to the table and in geopolitical terms all they contributed was support for two of the more hotly contested United States imperial gambits of the last twenty years.
It is probably hard to overstate the extent to which New Atheists shot themselves in the foot backing Gulf War 2 and the War on Terror, regardless of any stipulations or caveats. I read Hitchens' columns at Slate pretty regularly during my Mars Hill years and it's strange to think of it now but men like Hitchens and Driscoll seem to have in common an eagerness, maybe even a need, to provoke and get people to react ... which, if you've read Wenatchee The Hatchet at all since 2006 ... you might have worked out that I am obliged to point out that getting people to react is not getting them to think. Robinson revisited the question of whether Christopher Hitchens is still worth reading earlier this year. He has made a point of saying that, in the wake of deBoer's comments, that being an atheist or a rationalist doesn't preclude being a racist or a bully.
There's more I could write about what for me was a kind of era of Driscoll/Hitchens but I'll try to keep this post brief. It's oppressively warm in Seattle these days. Years ago, in my Mars Hill days, I heard there was some debate between Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens. I couldn't be bothered to watch it then and I can't be bothered to watch it now. To put the point as harshly as possible, guys like Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens are the problem for both religious and skeptic communities. Meme-worthy zingers are not the same thing as carefully thinking through issues that will impact the lives of countless people. These are the kinds of men for whom working the crowd is more important than getting them to slow down and think.
I was a teenager when the Berlin Wall came down. As a child I remember hearing and seeing news stories about nuclear annihilation being possible at any moment. Before I graduated from high school the Soviet Union had been dissolved. Growing up in a pretty conservative Pentecostal family I thought there might be some trap or feint in the dissolution of the USSR. Well, obviously, and thankfully, I was a callow teenager who was wrong! That being wrong got me thinking about how, if the Cold War was over then there wasn't any reason not to explore the cultural legacies of nations that were in the Soviet bloc. I had come around to loving the string quartets of Shostakovich and Bartok and in college befriended people from Croatia and Kenya and Japan and Mongolia and began to discover I loved a lot of music and literature from central and eastern Europe. I had already become a fan of Kafka and Dostoevsky in high school and liked some of Levertov's poetry. I guess what I'm trying to say is I came of age at a time when I realized I could consciously chart out a path of comparing musical developments in the former Soviet and the still-existent NATO blocs. Over the last thirty years I've realized that attempts to develop a fusion of the vocabulary of jazz with the syntactic scripts of "classical music" have been going on for generations.
Unfortunately most of the intellectual energy spent in musicology and music theory has been attacking or defending the viability or the musical vocabulary of African diaspora musics in relationship to the syntactic scripts and procedures of "classical music" rather than working to demonstrate in theory and practice that the boundaries erected by partisans are all thoroughly permeable. The covid-19 years have not been too kind to me but I am still hoping to eventually put together Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space as a kind of big prelude-sequel to Ragtime and Sonata Forms. After years of reading guys like Scruton and Borstlap say there's no "argument" in pop music or Borstlap claiming Ravel "transformed" jazz material I find that familiarity with religious concepts related to sacraments and christology are useful antidotes to Western art-religion. Christians who affirm the Incarnation of Jesus as the Logos and consider His hypostatic union and the perichoresis of christological and trinitarian dogmas shouldn't have any problem stepping back and regarding the Western highbrow art-religious stance as a dubious assertion that the pseudo-logos of classical musical formal "argument" and the pseudo-sarx of "African American musical vocabularies" (though no one dares to be so blunt as to say that in 2022 compared to 1922 polemic!).
What does that have to do with a reinvigorated skeptic movement? As Nathan Robinson put it, he could not believe Hitchens was right that no religious thinkers anywhere in the history of the world ever made positive contributions to society in light of what Martin Luther King Jr. labored for. In other words, if religious people labor to solve social and cultural problems secular leftists think need solving then the likes of Hitchens are not the only option for appraising the influences of religions.
In my case, and in my blogging interests, I have tried to be pragmatic about what thinkers and writers may help me play with a synthesis of American popular and vernacular styles with "classical" forms and processes. Adorno has been indispensible and the more I have read Adorno and Scruton the more i have realized Scruton had basically nothing compelling he didn't get from Adorno or the Schenkerian Victor Zuckerkandl but I'm not blogging today to go through the laundry list of why I think conservative Christians should dispense with Roger Scruton as someone whose ideas are hand-me-down Adorno, Zuckerkandl or ... I read The Soul of the World and there's nothing in there you couldn't get more clearly from Emil Brunner.
Ahem, anyway ... I've been reading up on the reception history of jazz in the Soviet bloc and the role jazz played in American propaganda I guess I could say that a thorough-going skepticism would be skeptical about the notion that black music in the Americas actually represents "freedom" despite what Wesley Morris had to say about it. I finished William T Dargan's Lining Out the Word recently and it's an interesting thesis about how the low liturgical customs and concessions of the Westminster councils paved the way for African American Christians to preserve African musical traditions in the form of church customs ranging from the lining hymn to the ring shout, things that were not preserved and actively discouraged in higher liturgical traditions such as Episcopal, Lutheran, and Catholic and high liturgical Methodist settings.
I've been tip-toeing around this issue at Wenatchee The Hatchet for years but I think that the best arguments against the highbrow Western art-religion of the elites is not necessarily to declare it all white colonial/imperial but ... not because that case can't be made. No, because my background is a Pentecostal who became a Calvinist and ended up in the Presbyterian/Anglican wing but never actually jettisoned my affection for low liturgical traditions of music, my alternative proposal is that if we want to make arguments against highbrow elitist white European art-religion we need to dig into the history of the low liturgical traditions associated with Calvin and Zwingli and Bullinger and the Puritans. Why? Weren't all those people anti-arts? Not if you read the sources themselves rather than what Lutherans and high church Anglicans tell you. ;) As the musicologist John Butt has put it, one of the mistakes music historians frequently make about the Calvin/Zwingli/Puritan scenes is they wrongly assume that because church music was stripped down to the barest of bones that music was denigrated. Butt has pointed out that in religious cultures that stripped down liturgical music to the bare essentials of the human voice secular music could frequently flourish or even explode with activity.
None of which is stuff you'd ever know about if all you do is stick to the worldview vindication scripts of guys like Christopher Hitchens and Doug Wilson. The older I get the more I wonder whether these were men so steeped in Cold War polemics about which metaphysic and which ideology would encourage or suppress human potential that they never bothered to get to anything else. The discourse, if there is any, stays at the level of what in Christian apologetics writing has been the "ideas have consequences" canard. It's easy for a contemporary exvangelical to claim that Christianity won't last if it doesn't jettison the idea of eternal conscious torment but the history of the arts doesn't even bolster the case. Do we think, a la some Soviet polemicists scrambling to rehabilitate Bach so as to fit into Soviet music education, that J. S. Bach was some nominalist who only wrote church music because he had to because that's necessary to keep Bach around? Or do we try to claim that Bach couldn't have written good music if he subscribed to eternal conscious torment?
Spending my whole adult life steeping myself in music and film and writing from both sides of the Iron Curtain showed me what people told me in those Cold War era polemics didn't hold up. I didn't have to be a Marxist or a pantheist to admire Hayao Miyazaki's films and his manga. I didn't have to join a communist party to like the string quartets of Shostakovich and I didn't have to keep believing he was some secret dissident because with the end of the Cold War I could step back and realize that I could enjoy those string quartets without having to endorse a claim that the composer was a secret dissident. Maybe he was an ambivalent communist, maybe he was a sincere communist, maybe his being a composer could be informed by whatever his convictions were without being good because of those convictions.
That gets at the distinctions deBoer and Robinson make that I appreciate, which is to point out that the metaphysical views asserted don't make people good for those assertions. Christians have a biblical text that warns "watch your life and doctrine closely". Just because you believe correct things doesn't mean much by itself. James warned us that even the demons believe and shudder but who among Christians would claim demons are good because they believe things that are true?
I've put my cards on the table over the years. I exist because a Native American Calvinist Christian man married a white Arminian woman and I'm the child of that marriage. I don't contest that it's probably weird. The very idea that there's some kind of Native American Christian Calvinist tradition in the Pacific Northwest of any size might seem incredible given the regions reputation but such is the world we live in, bigger and weirder than our bromides about it might allow for.
Which roundaboutly gets me back to the New Atheists. deBoer and Robinson merely touch on this in some ways but for leftists and progressives the problem with the New Atheists is that they simply hitched their wagon to Anglo-American imperialism, full stop. They were committed to a notion that the Enlightened West was the light of the world. It's not surprising if after twenty years of over-extension and a crumbling of the prestige of the United States and the destabilization of its vassal states in the form of the United Kingdom and the N.A.T.O association that New Atheists peddled a set of ideals that were ultimately only about as relevant as the gospel of hipster megachurch preachers that emerged in roughly the same period. I might never become a Marxist but I appreciated The Cult of Smart (even if Nathan Robinson openly damned it). deBoer's point that restoring an unskilled labor market for high school graduates who never go on to college is an idea I've been sympathetic to for more than a decade. I'm also sympathetic to the idea that American musicology can and should take on Germanophile highbrow art-religion, which was what I appreciated about the late Richard Taruskin.
Whether it's the New Atheists or the New Calvinists I think humanity is basically better off that these groups were apparently busier laboring to get to higher rungs on the ladder of the media prestige racket than doing anything significant to address problems outside the realm of worldview vindication. In that sense, no, I don't think we need a reinvigorated skeptic movement if by skeptic movement we mean New Atheists but deBoer and Robinson basically granted that point up front. :) No disagreement from me there.
Under other circumstances I'd switch to blogging about Lining Out the Word, which I'm excited to have finished but it's oppressively hot in Seattle! Maybe I'll save blogging about Dargan's book for next weekend but I am happy to at least say I've finished the book and even if it is by Dargan's account the first and only book-length essay in lining hymn traditions it's a compelling first-step (2006) toward future work. There are problems that can probably only get solutions if the solutions sought are worked toward by drawing upon ideas from a variety of people across potentially contrasting confessional/metaphysical camps. This seems more and more probable to me as I've looked at how the West and the Soviet blocs handled or dismissed jazz and American popular musical styles more generally.
But it's starting to get too muggy for me to feel like blogging this weekend. I hope you enjoy your weekend where ever you are.
4 comments:
"Christians who affirm the Incarnation of Jesus as the Logos and consider His hypostatic union and the perichoresis of christological and trinitarian dogmas shouldn't have any problem stepping back and regarding the Western highbrow art-religious stance as a dubious assertion that the pseudo-logos of classical musical formal "argument" and the pseudo-sarx of "African American musical vocabularies""
I think I know what you are saying here, but there may well be a word or two missing.
Yeah, between the heat wave and bouncing back from a bug IRL and having a weird set of C19 years my writing isn't as clear as it should be lately.
I've been incubating a prequel/sequel series to Ragtime and Sonata Forms that I hope can deal with the art-religious impulse post-Richard Wagner more directly. In my interactions with John Borstlap he keeps falling back on the canard that Ravel had a blues movement in his violin sonata, for instance, but he "changed" and "elevated" the material. It's a pretty rote highbrow art-religion canard and sometimes I wonder if Borstlap isn't conversant enough in actual religious writings to know that a whole bunch of biblical scholars and theologians have taken issue with Schleiermacher-style numinous feeling.
But I'm not sure any of that blog to blog back and forth comes across when I write a post and don't remember to even mention it. ;)
This has been a weird year in the offline world and I'm still bouncing back from a bug of some kind.
Ethan Hein's recent blog post on the divine status conferred to Bach might be a handy springboard/catalyst for me to get some of my ideas clearer later in the week but I'm not at my most nimble writing this year.
"I've been reading up on the reception history of jazz in the Soviet bloc and the role jazz played in American propaganda I guess I could say that a thorough-going skepticism would be skeptical about the notion that black music in the Americas actually represents "freedom" despite what Wesley Morris had to say about it"
I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'black music' and 'in the Americas' and in what sense 'represents' is meant. There's a reasonably airly decent case supporting some of his arguments on the level of "artistic freedom" which I believe was the locus of his argument. Even if music history itself ends up being a constant dance between musical invention and subsequent co-option by various forms of capitalism (with musicians themselves playing a range of roles) either commercially or as ideology (in your example).
The case actually becomes stronger if you expand it outwards towards an expansive reading of 'Americas' to mean both North and South as well as the island nations, or via an alternate reading of the adoption of technology in music (from the Hammond Organ to the early sequencer).
the case does become stronger by including a global context but in a sense it becomes more tenuous. I'm slowly getting into some books on the history of jazz in totalitarian states and it's interesting learning that the earliest attempts to set up jazz concerts in Estonia were between 1918 and 1922; almost as soon as Stalin was in the ground Polish intellectuals called for formal toleration of jazz; jazz was flourishing in Iran during the 20th century ... but since the Cold War music historians have pointed out that these are all cases in which jazz became popular within and even at times endorsed by intellectuals and political leaders in totalitarian regimes. The question as to how "total" totalitarian regimes actually were has been a question that muddies things up.
I think the other side of Wesley Morris' case that doesn't seem so clear to me is what, as you've touched on, he means by 'black music'. It was clear throughout his contribution to the 1619 Project African diasporic music meant North American popular music. So the late George Walker or Samuel Coleridge-Taylor weren't up for consideration or Vicente Lusitano (there's reportedly a full CD of his music getting prepped for release later this year, which is exciting).
The question of what 'freedom' means in US and Soviet contexts is something else I've been reading about (Pauline Fairclough and I'm going through a book on the history of socialist realism in Poland and East Germany). The short-for-now version is scholars have been looking at how Soviet composers understood "freedom" as prescribed by party doctrine on the one hand and at how `black music' was entangled in pro-Western propaganda on the other.
But I'll have to do some blog posts on that reading when I'm farther into it.
I could do a post "just" on Adorno's visceral loathing of the electric organ. :)
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