The binding of moral clarity

Simple-minded for the posh, Douglas Murray is yet another sign of our ludicrous times. He pontificates about cults of freedom and death, moral sanity and evil with the unencumbered ease of a Hamas militant. He challenges imaginary adversaries to produce better IDF fighting plans while conveniently forgetting to ask for better Palestinian strategies in the face of nuclear power. Not all asymmetries are created equal, apparently.

He speaks of consensus around Churchill's historical prestige without ever specifying the parameters of that consensus - Allied consensus? British consensus? Oxbridge consensus? He dismisses the death-defying promises of the Aqidah while ignoring the felicitous cruelty of the Aqedah. Don't Christians celebrate the infinite love of the ultimate sacrifice? Aren't all flags ominous anchors of death cults? Doesn't morality itself ground its propaganda in subordinating life to death-worthy horizons? 

Isn't Douglas Murray telling us what he's dying for?

CosmicPeterson

I am bored. Over six years later and people still wonder at the postmodernism of Jordan Peterson. We've all been postmodern ever since Pentheus' head ended up on his mom's stick. We are blind to the points of our stories. Every Apollo hides a (t)horny Dionysos. Someone has to let the serpent in. Or out - fuck knows.

We need to move on to the stupid bits. Like Peterson's love for Eliade, the fascist. Like his delusion that anyone can somehow stand outside ideology. Isn't he eager to admit that hell is all too real in human history? Maybe it's because hell is adaptive. Maybe all hierarchies are Dantean. Maybe God requires the Devil. Nay, maybe God and the Devil are one. The One.

Like the fact that the Tree of Life, with all its arbitrary levels of resolution, is hierarchical. Jesus dying on the Tree is no better than the saprophyte feasting on the holy rood. And the storyteller cannibalising the Tree of Life is the worst parasite of all. Someone needs to speak for the saprophyte. And Peterson needs some wood to die on. A little death at least.

The geek's Deepak

The recent popular fascination with the meagre thinking of Jordan B. Peterson is both amusing and sad (a very Trumpian ‘sad’, that). Amusing, because it’s always fun to see strange bedfellows (evolutionists and creationists, psychologists and racists, or the very Marxist combo of academics and rednecks) mate over pet peeves (political correctness and the plight of the white male). And sad, because it’s largely built on ignorance, on the part of both Peterson and his fans.  

Take the delusion that a biological basis for ‘dominance hierarchy’ would somehow threaten Marxism. Or the associated confusion over the pretence that Christianity, in which “the last shall be first”, would somehow provide a corrective for ‘cultural Marxism’. Not to mention the complete ignorance of the long history of Christian Marxism. 

Or consider the inability to see that religions provide ideologies too. That God only survives in an environment where language is policed (with ‘correct pronouns’ as well). That Christianity is also, historically, the advocation of slavery - not only the pseudoscientific babble of Jungianism.

Inveighing against the ‘French professors’ who have infected liberty-loving minds with their postmodern ideas is only the posh version of the Bush-era ‘freedom fries’. It ignores the basic fact that postmodernism is nothing if not the culmination of the Judeo-Christian tradition (a form of Greek thought, let’s not forget). And it belies the mysteriously less-than-obvious reality of Peterson’s own postmodernism, as showcased in his insistence on the utility of Christianity as fiction directrice, or in his concept of “truth”.

That anyone had to wait for the gospel of Petersonism to learn about “silencing your inner critic”, or that parents are supposed to be more than friends to their children, or that one should listen and pursue understanding before trying to argue against an opponent, boggles the mind. That one would prefer Peterson over the masters of self-help, like Marcus Aurelius or Montaigne, is just stupid. But that the evangelist of Petersonism stands to make a fortune over his traffic in ignorance and banality surely fulfils the great free-market prophecy of 2 Timothy 4:3-4.

The joys and perils of live classical

Two and a half years of living in the UK have afforded me and my wife quite a few opportunities to applaud some of our favourite artists. I've mentioned Arcadi Volodos, Valentina Lisitsa and Eric Whitacre before. Boris Berezovsky was a slightly hurried delight; Marc-André Hamelin showcased his complete mastery and superb musicianship; András Schiff, talking about and performing the Diabelli Variations, brought to mind the luminous memory of Daniel Barenboim's Chicago Beethoven masterclasses of almost a decade ago; Mitsuko Uchida was equally at home in Mozart and Messiaen; Stephen Hough (whose beautiful Schumann album is playing right now in my EarPods) offered a lacklustre Liszt (1st concerto) and an offensive encore (a badly played Chopin, in a Hungarian themed program); Cédric Tiberghien was the perfect companion to the effusive Pieter Wispelwey. And Midori was imperial in DoReMi.

Fabio Biondi's Europa Galante was almost beyond reproach; Lionel Meunier's outstanding Vox Luminis made us go back for their second London appearance; nobody does a fresher, more exciting Messiah than the Academy of Ancient Music; the Belmont Ensemble of London deserved better brass players on the night; The King's Singers in Salisbury Cathedral were electrifying; The Thallis Scholars in their anniversary concert at St Paul's were ravishing; Jeffrey Skidmore's Ex Cathedra is a worthy institution; so are The Cardinall's Musick, or the Temple Church Choir. The Choir of Westminster Abbey is definitely dwarfed by the cavernous abode of the famous dead. And yes, we also enjoyed non-classical performances by Straight No Chaser and The Real Group.

Excepting most of the events hosted at Wigmore, where one can still encounter the impudent wrapper crackle, and the occasional well behaved audience, I still curse the time and money so often wasted by idiot concert goers. The constant fidgeting and pen clicking right behind me at Cadogan Hall; the sonorous bracelets right across the isle; the unruly bunch of kids, whose chaperon couldn't be bothered, at the unforgiving Symphony Hall in Birmingham; the distinguished elderly lady next to me with an infernal tick-tock on her wrist; and, most shameless and annoying, the use of loud, sometimes culminating, passages to “mask" all sorts of coughing. Shall I mention the slender pensioner who threatened to step on my phone, only because, at intermission, I was sharing with my wife some of the best pics from our earlier visit at the Manchester Art Gallery? Classical concerts can be downright dangerous in this gentlemanly country.

Flirting with eternal damnation

If last January's event at the crossroads of atheism and religion was the emergence of The Sunday Assembly (possibly the fastest growing “church" in the world), this January former Adventist pastor and minor celebrity Ryan Bell is making news with his plan to chronicle a Year Without God. For this “believing atheist" it comes as no surprise that both (many) believers and (some) atheists find it hard to wrap their heads around such a venture. While no two intellectual biographies are the same, I'll throw in my two cents.

It's not that one should dare opt for eternal damnation that irks the faithful - the world is, after all, replete with the numerous sorts of the doomed. It's the flirting which they find simply appalling! They haven't yet learned Tim Minchin's “anthem to ambivalence". A “true believer" loves an unbeliever, nay, he/she needs the unbeliever - it's the latter who gives the “true believer" his/her gravitas. “The Cross", for instance, is supposed to divide history and the world in clear, opposing parties. One can either embrace or reject its claims. Sitting on the fence suggests the possibility that “the Cross" is not all that important to either history or the world. It ridicules and offends the devout way more than outright rejection.

As for reading atheist literature, one need not look further than the Bible itself. When the stultifying straightjackets of a “spiritual" hermeneutics are put aside, this ancient collection of texts reveals itself for what it actually is - the best argument for atheism conceivable. God is only a mirror for humanity. There is no such thing as prophecy, let alone “Messianic prophecy". The apocalyptic imperialism of the “Kingdom of Christ" is no better than the delusional dreams of Jerusalemite world dominance. And I'd replace the likes of Spinoza and Locke with George Carlin, Tim Minchin and the rest of the best preachers of disbelief. If one is to go to hell, why not go laughing?

Times and means of rapprochement (V)

In Cult and Character, the red cow ritual (Numbers 19) is interpreted in an inescapably contradictory manner (see pp.183-184). On the one hand, Gane states that “the red cow ritual avoids bringing corpse contamination into any contact with the sanctuary". But he had just written that “in other purification offerings... the blood, carrying the moral or physical impurity, affects the sanctuary", meaning specifically that “sacrificial purification of the offerer necessarily involves transfer of his/her evil to YHWH". Why would anyone avoid “bringing corpse contamination into any contact with the sanctuary" when the whole point of expiation is, according to Gane, to bring sin and contamination into expiatory contact with the sanctuary? On the other hand, Gane is among those who see the red cow ritual as a sacrifice. The sevenfold sprinkling toward the sanctuary is a remote application of חטאת blood to the sancta. How can Gane concede then that “the red cow ritual is the only חטאת sacrifice in connection with which automatic defilement is mentioned, and this defilement only occurs when the impure person does not receive the benefit of the sacrifice" (his emphasis)? It would seem that Gane cannot help defiling the temple. Rebellion and sacrifices alike dump man's iniquity upon the holiest. Sacrifices only dampen (“downgraded toxicity", as on page 179) an otherwise boomeranging blow to the fickle flame of Yahweh's gory glory (I admit I got carried away).

Returning to Leviticus 16 and “the goat unto Azazel", one cannot escape the similarity the Yom Kippurim ritual bears to the apotropaic gestures of Leviticus 14:7.53. In neither of these instances is there any intimation of transfer (of disease or impurity) or of blood functioning as a “ritual sponge". The cleansing human is a healed human, while the house to be cleansed has never been declared unclean (we have already noted the post-quarantine rite of passage in Leviticus 13). Similarly, whenever the temple is to be rededicated, any agent of impurity (idols mostly) is removed before the performance of inaugural sacrifices. The כפר sacrifices are nothing but gestures of approach - “rituals that confirm and routinize the recognized borders of the sacred place" (Ron E. Hassner's definition from a decade old article on interreligious conflict). Yom Kippurim was not the antidote to, but the culmination of a whole year of ritual activity. There was no reversal in ritual semantics, but a deepening of the כפר purpose - coming as close as possible to the flammable presence of God. Sacrifices were not meant to decontaminate the temple (Milgrom's theory) or contaminate it throughout most of the year (Gane's). They only mended fences. In this context, the suggestion that the horns of the altar (or human body extremities, for that matter) functioned as boundary markers (Gn.31:52) and therefore as (covenant) memorials (Ex.24:4) seems quite plausible.

Kicking the Lord out of the church

At a friend's prompting, I attended yesterday's Sunday Assembly (The Guardian chronicled the event). It's fashionable nowadays for atheists to attempt to salvage whatever's deemed good in religion. Alain de Botton even wants to go back to building atheist temples. As if humans have ever built anything but atheist temples, or held anything but atheist worship services! To the eye unforgetful of the simple fact that all gods are of our own making, any temple, shrine, synagogue, church or mosque is an atheist monument. There is barely a need to invent an atheist alternative. The cityscape is, as ever, saturated with atheist sanctuaries.

While it's true that I enjoyed the “sermon" on Dirac's equation, it's no less true that I found the address delivered in last December's Christmas Carol Service at St Paul's Cathedral equally atheistic, humorous and enjoyable. Whether it's Freddie Mercury (“Don't Stop Me Now") and Stevie Wonder (“Superstition"), or Herbert Howells (“A Spotless Rose") and John Tavener (“God Is with Us"), music is music. Whether one attends a spiritual retreat, a party conference, or the Super Bowl, words are words, ritual is ritual, emotional manipulation is emotional manipulation, the money collected is money collected. One cannot escape being religious and atheistic. And, by the way, tautology is the atheistic font of all religion (“I am who I am").

An atheist church can be no better and no worse than any other religious congregation. More reasonable, maybe. More meaningful, not at all. Will I go back?