May 2007 reading review: Esperanto, atheism, Baldwin, Vonnegut
Mid-April through the first week of May proved to be a fertile Esperanto period. I translated Blake’s "The Birds" into Esperanto and put several other author’s pieces on my web site. I revisited one of my favorite Esperanto short-story volumes, Vitralo, by John I. Francis, and put "La Klera Despoto" [The Cultured Despot] online. I put La Biblioteko de Babelo by Borges, translated by Gulio Cappa online. [See blog entry Borges en Esperanto (3).] I rediscovered the anti-racist poetry of Poul Thorsen. In the process of putting Roberto Passos Nogueira’s Blake-inspired poem "A World in a Grain of Sand" online, I re-read the original poems in his one volume, Vojo kaj Vorto, along with his essay on modern poetry. I have to review his translations again, but the original poems by and large did not work for me.
The Borges translation led to me to read the entire volume of science fiction translated into Esperanto, Sferoj—2: Sciencfikcio kaj Fantasto, comp. Miguel Gutiérrez Adúriz (Santander, Hispanio: Grupo Nifo, 1983). Nothing terribly thrilling, but something I should review in a blog entry.
I should also mention a blog entry I wrote at the beginning of April, based on an Esperanto blog I read in March: Filozofio en Esperantujo - ĉu blogo blagas? [Philosophy in Esperanto-Land: is a blog pulling my leg?]. This is a hostile critique of French philosophy and Antonio Negri. This Esperantist blogger provoked me to dig out Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx in April.
May proved to be another month for atheism.
On 9 May I attended a talk by Christopher Hitchens on his new book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Warner Twelve, 2007).
I saw Hitchens on Charlie Rose on 4 May was convinced he had lost his mind. I wanted to write a full scale analysis of this performance, but never got around to it. I took a look at his book, but I only gave a quick read to two chapters—one on New Age philosophy based on the thought of the East, and one on the evils of secular dictators like Stalin. Both were written in a scattershot fashion, not up to what once would have been Hitchens’ standard. He was an erudite, historically and intellectually sophisticated man—unlike Sam Harris—up until 9-11-01; then he became politically schizoid, and now he’s lost his sanity as a propagandist for Bush’s wars. My initial thought was: maybe he’s cashing in on the popularity of Dawkins and Harris by tossing off a second-rate book to add to their second-rate books? But this is a hasty judgment, which must be suspended pending further scrutiny.
In person Hitchens was actually terrific, and hilarious. The British are so much better educated and articulate than Americans. He also explained some of his ideas, particularly his take on Stalinism, better than he did in the book. Q & A: the majority of questioners were religious idiots, including a Mormon whose religion Hitchens subjected to ridicule, and a fundie lunatic who used to attend a local philosophy group.. Hitchens was actually reasonably gracious while demolishing the shoddy propositions of the religious nuts, but he did have the majority of the audience on his side, so he could afford to be.
The question as to whether the public will learn what atheism really is depends on how much air time atheists get to clearly explain their position, free of slander, spin, and calumny by others, so that at least the marginally intelligent fraction of the population can get the story straight. The religious fanatics, however, are never going to learn, even to characterize their opposition correctly. This includes a fair percentage of the American population which is hopelessly ignorant and has never had the experience of rationally considering any question and doesn’t want to start now. It is nevertheless likely that a high percentage of the U.S. population don’t know what atheism is, or even that it exists. I don’t expect that even someone as eloquent as Hitchens (on all subjects other than America’s wars on Muslim nations) is going to convince these religious airheads of anything, but perhaps the more reasonable among the uninformed or undecided population will learn to understand the anti-religionists’ anti-theists’ issues better.
There were of course several reviews in the press with the usual quotient of stupidity.
My next book was Rousseau’s Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (New York: Ecco, 2006). (Contents) This is basically historical gossip: a biographical account of the relation between the philosophers Hume and Rousseau. It has less intellectual content than their previous work Wittgenstein’s Poker, and even the title doesn’t fit. Is this about Rouseeau’s essential loneliness, apart from his beloved dog, or is the dog a greater thinker than David Hume? The authors are apparently infatuated with the contest between strong intellectual personalities Oddly, the popularity of these writers in their time does not seem to have been accompanied by profound engagement with their ideas. Only in chapter 11 is there actually an intellectual comparison between the two figures. Of greatest interest is the antipathy of Hume towards the French Enlightenment’s atheism and materialism, which resonates down through British intellectual history (see T. H. Huxley).
Then I went in an unexpected direction, revisiting novelists of my youth I hadn’t touched in decades. While I had this in mind to do for a few years, on a whim I pulled James Baldwin’s first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain off the shelf to read (finished on 13 May, a sad day). You can read my reaction to the experience in two pieces:
This initiated a chain reaction I shall describe later. In the process of reviewing other critics, in addition to reading the novel, I had to consider how the novel’s religiosity tends to obscure Baldwin’s rejection of Christianity.
In mid-May I got involved in a panel discussion/debate on the existence of God. In preparation, I prepared this statement and bibliography:
And here is a summary of the panel discussion:
The same week I began preparing for this I began reading this weighty, demanding 400-page tome (17 May - 3 June):
Cohen, Edmund D. The Mind of the Bible-Believer. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986.
It will take some effort to fully digest it. There are several comments on the web, and a couple of mini-reviews from the Christian opposition as well as from liberal Christian semi-sympathizers, but there is only one real full review from the atheist camp (accompanied by the lyrics of a Zappa song), summarizing the Christian technniques of mind control:
"The Mind of "the Bible-Believer": a critique of the book by Edmund D. Cohen (Positive Atheism)
From other people’s criticisms, it seems that these are the main areas in which to evaluate the book:
(1) the schema of mind control techniques
(2) the psychological theories adopted by Cohen
(3) Cohen’s account of the history of Christianity, in general and in the USA
(4) Cohen’s thesis that the founders of Christianity fully intended to engage in mind control.
Cohen’s sympathizers are most sympathetic to (1), and most critical of Cohen’s take on (3) and (4).
My position going into this: I myself am not in a position to judge (3). But I am on the lookout for the incorporation of sociological factors. Pyschology in isolation from sociology cannot do the job. Perhaps Cohen’s account of the conditions of the Roman Empire in which Christianity was generated will prove insightful. Perhaps Cohen will have a good explanation, as he purports to, as to why Christianity was so successful in penetrating all different types of cultures.
I still have not evaluated the book after reading it. There’s a heavy-duty Freudian and Jungian preparation, before an immersion into a couple hundred pages on the New Testament’s mind-control techniques. I will return with a more detailed critique.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died in April. The last week of May I re-read Cat’s Cradle after 35 years, a longer long time ago than the last Baldwin novel I read before this month. Read my review: Revisiting Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
