Thirty Three Things (v. 19)

"What's Opera, Doc?", the Bugs Bunny cartoon that was voted by animators in the 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals to be the greatest cartoon of all time, turns 50 years old this year.

One of the few things about which I can agree based on the rest of your blog.

But you should note: this is the only Bugs Bunny cartoon known to have a tad bit of off-color language, albeit in Yiddish in it; Wagner's Gotterdamerung!

27:

It's amazing how quickly the cat reverts from "surrogate child" back to small furry animal after the birth a real juvenile Homo sapiens. And when he meows loudly for breakfast at 5:00 am on the morning after a toddler has had a difficult night, the former "surrogate child" skirts dangerously close to the classification of "vermin."

I was a bit puzzled to see the article ostensibly linking Stanley Fish's "deconstruction" of atheism referring to Fish in the third person. Discovering it was actually a summary of Fish by the notoriously fact-averse Dinesh D'Souza did much to explain things. Discovering further that Fish's article was in fact as witless as D'Souza made it appear, however - that is, that Fish really wrote badly enough to be taken for D'Souza - re-rocked my sense of the fitness of things. Whatever the reasons may be, however, the original article is shockingly bad.

First, Fish devotes more than a third of his wordcount to simply describing the three writers he attacks, and briefly naming some of their arguments (roughly, that religion is arbitrary, false, and harmful). He concludes this section by saying, in just these words: "It’s time for an example of the kind of thinking Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens find so contemptible."

Immediately following that sentence, he spends about 15% of his total text on an incident from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, concluding "At this point, Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens would exclaim, See what these nuts do at the behest of religion . . . . (This is the only substantive part of the article that D'Souza quotes, by the way.) There's one small problem here: the writers he quotes do not discuss Bunyan in the first place! (At least, Harris - the only one of the three I have read on this topic - does not, and Bunyan is not in the index to Hitchens's book. I'm making an assumption about Dawkins, but his argument is scientific, not literary, and I can't imagine he would care about what is found in such dreck as that anyway; also, there are no references to Dawkins citing Bunyan anywhere on the Web.)

It is true that Fish only imagines what they would say about Bunyan, he does not claim they actually said it, but he then goes on to criticize it at length, explaining how shallow these thinkers are for imagining that their objections have not been thought of by religious thinkers, including Bunyan himself. He triumphantly observes that "What this shows is that the objections Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens make to religious thinking are themselves part of religious thinking . . . ."

Well . . . not exactly. Possibly it shows that the objections Fish fantasizes they might make to one particular piece of old and creaky religious writing were discussed in that same piece of writing, but, since they didn't actually make those objections, it hardly matters, and since they didn't actually cite that book at all, they can hardly be accused of overlooking its counterarguments to the objections they didn't make.

This is truly astounding. Fully half the text of Fish's supposedly devastating article is either purely descriptive or attempts to refute - with explicit textual citations! - a literary criticism that none of his targets ever made! Fish fobs this weak delusion off as representing the kind of thing they might have said - but he has, collectively, thousands of pages of their writings to choose from in which to find what they actually did say! Why can he not make his argument without, not merely inventing a staw opponent, not merely putting forward false or distorted arguments on the part of that opponent, but actually inventing explicit textual analysis of specific works that is wholly fictional?! Whatever the reason he cannot do so, it is telling that he apparently believes he cannot do so.

Fish pretends he knows how Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris think, so he can create fictional arguments on their part and then cite ways in which those arguments overlook passages in their own source text. The idiocy of this undertaking is too apparent. (It reads very much like those creationist urban legends in which atheist college professors are forever being put in their place by earnest Christian undergraduates, and then suffer a nervous breakdown or flee the classroom in shame.) But the type of argument Fish conjures up is also telling: Fish, a pre-eminent literary textual analyst, imagines an anti-religious argument from Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, Hitchens, a political essayist, and Harris, whose approach to religion is by way of terrorism, that centers entirely on close textual analysis of a 350-year-old fictional morality tale. Not only is this nothing these three authors did say, it is - Fish's bizarre inventions notwithstanding - nothing like any them would say. But . . . who, in this tale, would take that kind of approach to the subject? . . . Yes, that's right. Fish is talking to himself while pretending to debate Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris - while carefully avoiding using their own words to represent their side of the debate.

Note, by the way, that D'Souza never seems to realize this. He describes in detail Fish's Bunyan fantasy, as well as Fish's remarkably successful counterargument to himself, and then smugly concludes "We can expect our unbelieving trio to react with their trademark scorn, but Fish has scored a telling point."

Well, Dinesh, Fish may be worthy of scorn - at the very least - for such a weak and dishonest argument, but he is at least careful to word it in such a way that he does not come right out and say the "unbelieving trio" wrote any such nonsense as he discusses. You quote him while leaving out the crucial term "would say". ("Fish takes as an example of the Harris-Hitchens-Dawkins critique the behavior of Christian in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress." [emphasis supplied]) You're another victim of Conservative Reading Comprehension Disorder. And you're a dumbshit.

[Part II follows]

Fish vs. Fish, with Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris Looking On [Part II]

The second half of Fish's article - the half D'Souza completely overlooks, with the exception of a single sentence - is better than the first half, if only because it refers to things his opponents actually wrote. But it's hardly stronger than the first. In fact, in an interesting way, it's just as much a self-revelation as that earlier embarrassment. Fish accuses the three atheists of ignorance of well-known pro-religion arguments, citing such arguments in response to their concerns. But he never stops to consider exactly what role those concerns play, or whether his citations are actually responsive to the arguments being made. He treats his opponents in just the way he accuses them of treating religion: by trotting out superficial slogans in response to his uncomprehending first-glance reading of their text, and then concluding there is nothing there to grapple with. He not merely vacates the principle of charity - the standard analytical principle of interpreting your opponent's argument as logically valid and resting on a solid founation - but contents himself with exactly the kind of incurious ignorance he claims to be refuting. More and more, this article seems to be nothing more than Fish getting a lot of things off his chest - but why Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris should have to pay the freight for his therapy, I don't know. He should be paying them.

Fish recounts a number of questions he finds the three writers raising - familiar ones that question the rationality or purpose of religion, such as why Adam and Eve should be harshly punished for something so trivial as eating a piece of fruit, or why God does not prevent evil events before they occur. Fish answers each one by citing the little Sunday-school parable that each evokes: Adam and Eve's sin was not wrong because it is bad to eat an apple, but because it was disobedience to God; evil is the result of sin, so God is not responsible, etc. In each case he accuses his opponents of not understanding why the question is important, or what others have already written on it.

I think it is Fish who does not understand what he reads. I think the import of the questions Dawkins, Hitchens, and (to a lesser extent) Harris raise is not that they regard them as unanswerable ojections to religious belief, but as demonstrations that the answers given are either empty or harmful. The religious interpretation of the Garden of Eden story is simply psychotic: God is so demanding of absolute obedience that he dooms the entire human race for all of history for a refusal to obey that has no importance in itself whatsoever. The acquiescence in suffering is similarly amoral: God could prevent suffering but refuses to do so to reinforce the punishment for disobedience. [Fish does not cite the "evil is good misunderstood" argument, which is just as well because it's obviously false.] To non-believers, a major problem with religious beliefs - aside from the overwhelming fact that they're false - is not that various concerns cannot be reconciled on religious grounds, it's that the explanations given make religion, and God, out to be a terrible thing. A God who calls himself "jealous", exacts terrible punishments for utterly trivial reasons, at one point horribly destroys the entire human species and every other living thing worldwide except for 8 people on a boat, practices genocide, and all the rest, and then demands unconditional love and obedience on pain of eternal torture . . . it doesn't matter what the explanation is. There's no way to make that a reasonable way to treat people, and no reasonable reaction to it other than thoroughgoing disgust and horror. But the fact that it's so transparently fictional means it doesn't have to be taken seriously. That so many people do take it seriously - live their lives not merely in the understandable, abject fear of this viciously psychotic, prejudiced, mass-murdering asshole they believe secretly controls their lives from the sky, but profess overwhelming love for him, hope desperately to be allowd to live in his magic kingdom and see his final destruction of all who do not, and in so many cases go out of their way to curry favor by finding yet more enemies to persecute in his name - is overwhelming reason to reject religious thinking in all its forms.

Fish's attack is based on his perception that DH&H aren't aware of the hair-splitting arguments and "mysteries" religious believers invoke to make sense of this insanity. I suspect they're all too aware. But I think also that their arguments are simply not aimed where Fish perceives them to be. It's not that there is no explanation for the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in their eyes - which Fish responds to by helpfully supplying one. It's that no such explanation can do away with the basic fact that God condemned the entire human race to misery because they wanted to make their own decisions and he insisted on making them for them - and that that sets up the entire struggle whereby they have to carefully nurture his good feeling in order to avoid even more punishment later to which he again will condemn them. There is no explanation of this that makes it not psychotic, not grossly immoral, not disgusting. And the evasions give - that God's obviously psychotic behavior is not so because "God's ways are not our ways", or that it is not immoral because "God is always good" - some of which Fish himself cites, are equally inadequate, and intellectually empty. The objections to religion Fish combats are not rational arguments against religious teachings (the only, and best, such argument is also the simplest: it's false), they are simply observational: they are reasons why it would be good not to let that kind of crazed and fearful thinking into your life.

Fish, in supplying the counterarguments that justify that nonsense DH&H encourage us to avoid, at best trundles off on his Scholastic byway to nowhere (he cites Paul on evil, in response to a quote from Hitchens about unthinking obedience). At worst, he makes their argument for them. And he never seems to suspect - certainly never offers the admission, charitably or otherwise - that they have read his logic-chopping prevarications and are simply not impressed, let alone that they may be making another kind of argument entirely.

It's surprising to see this glaring disconnection from Fish, but, as I have suggested, he seems to have a personal agenda related to religious belief, and found it convenient to flog it while taking a few whacks at some prominent atheists at the same time. (D'Souza, the Sancho Panza of the right wing, opens his article by stating that "If literary critic Stanley Fish deconstructed anything, one might expect him to deconstruct Christianity." Since Fish is the author of two books on Medieval literature and two others on Milton, I don't know what D'Souza is getting at by this. Whatever D'Souza thinks it means, it's a safe bet it doesn't.) D'Souza, of course, has utterly no clue. His article is a cut-and-paste hack job that apparently went no further than speed-reading the Fish piece for some seemingly-juicy quotes. That the line of argument one he excerpts at length happens to be both (a) the first one in the piece, and (b) wholly imaginary (which D'Souza both does not notice and does not report), speaks volumes of his level of understanding of the issue. They would both have embarrassed themselves less if they had stood in bed.

[Final note: In his very last paragraph, Fish does appear to recognize the consequentialist nature of DH&H's rejection of religion: "I have not yet considered their prime objection to religious faith: that it leaves argument, reason and evidence in the dust, and proceeds directly to the commission of wholly unjustified (and often horrific) acts . . . ." He promises to address it in a future column. This raises two questions: (1) What was the point of the first column, then? (2) How can he say that and still treat their questions about evil, God's punishments, etc., as some sort of theological arguments? Given the quality of the first article, one fears for the second, but, as the first one was noticeably closer to the mark in its second half, perhaps the second one will be closer than the first one in its entirety. For everyone but Dinesh D'Souza, that will be a welcome discovery.]

Michael Glatze's article was spot-on. He's calling "sexual orientation" the farce that it truly is.