Tag: Richard J Bernstein

Theatre

I finally watched the BBC’s video clip showing the moments when the Republicans heckled Democratic president Biden’s “State of the Union” speech. Looks like heckling has now become a normal part of the “State of the Union” speech.

What interests me is the hecklers shouting about lies and lying. The first such heckler, if you remember, was the fellow who shouted out that Obama lied. This tradition was upheld this year by the Christian nationalist shouting “Liar!” at Biden.

Knowing what is true is a major concern for U.S. society right now. And those who are within a traditional Christian worldview seem to suffer most from a sense that truth is under attack. Traditional Christians who believe that non-Christians will go to hell are often troubled by the multi-religious landscape of the United States today; those non-Christian people are going to hell, and yet our legal system protects them. This must be extremely disconcerting to certain traditional Christian worldviews.

So it is no surprise that one of the people shouting about lies during this year’s “State of the Union” speech was Christian nationalist Marjorie Greene. I suspect that Greene, who’s a bit of a drama queen, prepared herself in advance for her moment in the spotlight: she wore a dramatic white coat with a big furry ruff, which must have been dreadfully hot but was clearly meant to set off her blonde good looks. And she so obviously enjoyed the moment when she made the audience turn and look at her. She seems to have forgotten, however, that when you shout, it distorts your mouth and face and throat, and it brings out all the little lines in your face making you look older than you are. (This is why I hate seeing videos of myself preaching.) No matter: she made her truth claim in a very public manner, that she knows the truth, and unless the rest of us agree with her she will shout us down as liars.

Cartoon of Marjorie Greene shouting "Liar" during the State of the Union speech.

Back in 2005, philosopher Richard J. Bernstein argued that there were two prevailing mentalities in the United States. On the one hand there is a “mentality that neatly divides the world into the forces of good and the forces of evil.” On the other hand, there are those of us who “live without ‘metaphysical comfort,’ … live with a realistic sense of unpredictable contingencies” (The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion Since 9/11 [Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2005], pp. 12-13).

Greene and other Christian nationalists belong to the mentality that neatly divide the world into good and evil; they long for comfort and fear the unpredictability that pervades the world. Because of their fear, they cling to whatever certainties they can manufacture, and call those manufactures divine revelation.

But they should remember that when they shout, it distorts their faces….

Abuse of evil

Back in 2005, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we started talking more and more about evil — the evil of our terrorist opponents. Philosopher Richard J. Bernstein wrote:

“I want to examine this new fashionable popularity of the discourse of good and evil… it represents an abuse of evil — a dangerous abuse. It is an abuse because, instead of inviting us to question and to think, this talk of evil is being used to stifle thinking. This is extremely dangerous in a complex and precarious world. The new discourse of good and evil lacks nuance, subtlety, and judicious discrimination. In the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ nuance and subtlety are (mis)taken as signs of wavering, weakness, and indecision. But if we think that politics requires judgment, artful diplomacy, and judicious discrimination, then this talk about absolute evil is profoundly anti-political. As Hannah Arendt noted, ‘The absolute … spells doom to everyone when it is introduced into the political realm.'” [Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion Since 9/11 (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 10-11]

Here we are in 2022, and it seems that the discourse of good and evil has only become more firmly entrenched in the US, and in parts of the rest of the world. Here in the US, I see this happening across the political spectrum. There are political liberals who equate Donald Trump with evil. This is unwise, because it stops us thinking about what, exactly, Donald Trump and his supporters are doing. We brand them as “alt-right” or “fascists” — epithets which are just one step removed from calling them “evil” — and once branded as such, we stop thinking about them. On the other side of the political spectrum, there are political conservatives who use similar language to equate political liberals with evil.

It has become very easy to brand others as evil, or to brand others with some euphemism that implies evil. Richard J. Bernstein wrote, “‘Evil tends to be used in an excessively vague and permissive manner in order to condemn whatever one finds abhorrent.” [p. 97] Of course we should name evil when we see it. But we should stop and think first — are we naming this thing as evil because it is evil, or only because we happen to find it abhorrent? It should never be easy to brand others as evil.

Conservatism

“All academic thinking, whether right, left, or middle, is conservative in the extreme…. Nobody wants to hear what he [sic] hasn’t heard before.” — Hannah Arendt, in a letter to the philosopher Richard J. Bernstein, quoted in Jordi Graupera, “A Philosophy Professor’s Final Class,” New Yorker magazine, January 3, 2023.

What Hannah Arendt says applies in large part to religion as well. Religion tends to conservatism for the same reason academia tends to conservatism: people would prefer not to hear something they haven’t heard before.

However, organized religion is somewhat less conservative than individualized religion. In other words, someone who is “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) is likely to be more conservative than someone who is part of a religious community.

This is analogous to the tendency of an autodidact to be more conservative than an academic working in academia. When an autodidact has to listen to a challenge to their hard-won, often tenuous knowledge, it can feel like an assault on their very self-hood. When a tenured faculty member has to listen to a challenge to their hard-won knowledge, at least they’re getting paid for it.

So here’s the question. In a time when organized religion is in decline here in the US, should those of us in organized religion give in to the tendency to extreme conservatism? Or should we try to be a little more open?

Richard J. Bernstein had a strong opinion about this question. Jordi Graupera paraphrases Bernstein’s response: “We must all fight off this tendency to conformity, [Bernstein] said. Even intelligent people learn to go along with what is conventional, he explained, and they reject good philosophy.”

Process

“We are always in media res, there are no absolute beginnings or finalities. We are always in the process of being shaped and shaping our history and our traditions. We are eminently fallible. We never escape from the precariousness and contingency of existence. We become fools of history if we believe that we can achieve total control by expert knowledge, or if we think we can collectively impose our wills and completely determine our destinies.”

Richard J. Bernstein, “John Dewey on Democracy” (Philosophical Profiles, Univ. of Penna. Press, 1986, pp. 266-7).