The language of addiction

First Things har en intressant artikel (The Language of Addiction Takes Over) om hur missbruksterminologin sprungen ur AA och tolvstegsprogram vinner mark i amerikansk populärkultur.

In some ways, this widespread fascination with recovery is encouraging. If the young hip kids of today are willing to embrace David Foster Wallace’s famous Betty Crocker cake mix analogy for AA (“It didn’t matter one f—ckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether he understood the like f—ing baking-chemistry of how a cake would result: if he just followed the m—f—ing directions . . . a cake would result”), then they’re only a small step away from grasping Credo ut intelligam, I believe so that I might understand. If they feel the need to smuggle the language of religion into their moral universes under the cover of the twelve steps, then the absence of religion from their lives must, at some level, be bothering them acutely. It’s annoying that so many people are unable to talk about obedience, mortification, or the quiet heroism of everyday life except in the context of recovery from addiction, but at least these concepts still make sense to them.

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Milbank on Catholic vs. bourgeois piety

But surely, in the case of Christianity, the more authentically "Catholic" reality is the blend of the very sophisticated with the very popular - omitting the half-baked "bourgeois" mode of positivistic piety, prayer meetings, organizational obsession, and ill-informed, unimaginative Bible studies that waste the time one might spend having fun.

John Milbank “A Closer Walk on the Wild Side” in Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig J. Calhoun, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2010), 68.

Läsvärt angående Thomas Nagels kritik av materialismen

Mycket läsvärd artikel i The Weekly Standard om kritikstormen kring Thomas Nagels bok Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False:

Materialism, then, is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go as far as materialists want it to. It is a premise of science, not a finding. Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result. 

But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion. 

Here materialism bumps up against itself. Nagel insists that we know some things to exist even if materialism omits or ignores or is oblivious to them. Reductive materialism doesn’t account for the “brute facts” of existence—it doesn’t explain, for example, why the world exists at all, or how life arose from nonlife. Closer to home, it doesn’t plausibly explain the fundamental beliefs we rely on as we go about our everyday business: the truth of our subjective experience, our ability to reason, our capacity to recognize that some acts are virtuous and others aren’t. These failures, Nagel says, aren’t just temporary gaps in our knowledge, waiting to be filled in by new discoveries in science. On its own terms, materialism cannot account for brute facts. Brute facts are irreducible, and materialism, which operates by breaking things down to their physical components, stands useless before them. “There is little or no possibility,” he writes, “that these facts depend on nothing but the laws of physics.” 

Omoderna föreställningar om "moderniteten"

Signum skriver intressant om Påven, journalisterna och ”moderniteten”:

Det tycks bland journalister finnas ett fast och tämligen enhetligt begrepp om ”modernitet”. När företrädare för katolska kyrkan, och särskilt unga sådana, tillfrågas om vad de önskar av den nye påven leds de ständigt mot att säga att de önskar ”modernisering” eller en ”modern påve”. [...] 

”Modernitet” som ett enhetligt begrepp, som rör framsteg och revolution mot allt gammalt och förlegat, finns knappast kvar hos några seriösa tänkare idag. Sedan ungefär trettio år tittar man istället på komplexitet, strömningar och motströmningar, olika kontexter och tolkningsramar, och ser att det i alla fall inte är så enkelt som att det finns något slags enhetlig modernitet som alla människor och alla samhällen med något slags förutbestämd determinism rör sig mot. 

Det finns dock vissa yrkesgrupper där denna ”myt om framsteget” tycks leva kvar. En sådan yrkesgrupp är arkitekter, där det fortfarande anses progressivt att bygga som man gjorde på 30-talet för att bereda vägen för ”den moderna människan”. En annan grupp tycks vara journalister, och främst äldre sådana. Bo-Inge Andersson tycks exempelvis, trots sitt stora kunnande och sin gedigna journalistiska bakgrund, inte kunna slita sig från en föreställning om en ”modern värld” som ”den katolska kyrkan” måste uppdateras till för att kunna överleva, för att vara relevant.

"Religion" and unicorns

Bruce Lincoln: “Religion . . . is that discourse whose defining characteristic is its desire to speak of things eternal and transcendent.” ...  “History, in the sharpest possible contrast, is that discourse which speaks of things temporal and terrestrial.”

Timothy Fitzgerald: This is a God-like generalization that transcends historical inquiry. Religion in itself is nothing. It is a highly contested construct and requires contextualized, historical unpacking. This is not a critical practice; it is a statement, or a pair of statements, of the kind “Unicorns have one horn” and “Bligs have three tongues.”

Timothy Fitzgerald, “Bruce Lincoln’s‘ Theses on Method’: Antitheses,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 18, no. 4 (2006): 402–403.

Religion as meaning and truth

/.../ the simplest definition of God and of religion lies in the idea that truth and meaning are one and the same thing. The death of God is the end of the idea that posits truth and meaning as the same thing. And I would add that the death of Communism also implies the separation between meaning and truth as far as history is concerned. "The meaning of history" has two meanings: on the one hand "orientation," history goes somewhere; and then history has a meaning, which is the history of human emancipation by way of the proletariat, etc. In fact, the entire age of Communism was a period where the conviction that it was possible to take rightful political decisions existed; we were, at that moment, driven by the meaning of history. /.../ Then the death of Communism becomes the second death of God but in the territory of history. /.../ Today we may call ‘obscurantism’ the intention of keeping them harnessed together – meaning and truth.

Alain Badiou quoted in Slavoj Žižek. "Religion between Knowledge and Jouissance." in: Lacan.com. 2007.

Bentley Hart on natural law

Without “specific religious or metaphysical traditions, there really is very little that natural law theory can meaningfully say about the relative worthiness of the employments of the will.” but we can talk about natural law only if there is general agreement about nature, such that there is a bond between “what is and what should be.”

Peter Leithard summarizes Bentley Harts latest article in First Things