Remember, as you hear and read it, there are a lot of people who identify DBH as a "conservative" largely because a lot of his essays get published at the right-wing magazine First Thoughts, but I don't think you're likely to find anything more radical in the most radically basic meaning of the term at any of the current Marxist blogs or any anarchist blogs, those arguably Christian anarchist websites such as Catholic Worker, perhaps, excepted. Remember, any mistakes in the transcript are mine
Questioner: Do you think capitalism is hostile to prayer and is consumerism hostile to really well reasoned thought?
David Bentley Hart: Um, are you a member of the Rand Society? (laughs) I just want to make sure, I want to know how hostile the audience can get, here.
Seriously, I think that late a capitalist culture, any capitalist culture but one that in Adorno's terms is really consumerist, is a culture whose primary cultural task, the great adventure of the culture is the fabrication of desires and ever more desires for an ever greater diversity of things. Desires for things that were not even desirable before they became “necessities” and then make room for other desires. within that sort of order of social cultural relations in which acquisition and disposal become the primary business of life. I mean Look, we're surrounded by advertising all the time, we don't think about it, it's a white noise but that's what our culture does, it's teaching us to fabricate desires. There are problems . . . Such a culture is inherently atheist, it has to be, that doesn't mean that you can't live a perfectly decent life within, you know, building a small business, building a business, employing people, that's not what I mean.
I'm talking about the consumerist culture is one in which prohibitions on desire progressively have to be erased, right, new desires have to be fabricated constantly for things that ultimate values that could possibly subtract from or distract from or act as rivals to the momentary finite desires by which the economy is sustained and the culture “advances” have to be abolished. And there is no value more problematic than God. Because you know he might actually send you out into the desert rather than into the world of business.
This isn't an opprobrium cast to people who make their lives making things and employing people but you can do that without having embraced the culture and the inherent nihilism of consumerist capitalism.
And so, yeah, I think there is a necessary . . . and what I see in the New Atheists is a kind of predictably vulgar expression of this need to do away with . . . there are a lot of things I see the new atheists . . . I also see contemptible western supremacist, you know, the late modern notion of those who have not embraced the late modern western mechanist vision of reality have cultures that are “worthless,” I mean literally worthless. You get sort of the Quineian notion or the Rawlsian notion that “the only light that comes from the East is is the sun,” you know – Aboriginal culture in Australia with this very rich language of dreaming, that's meaningless because, of course, it's not mechanism, it's just “folk mythology” it's not even “folk psychology.” So there's that and there are any number of things I see in the new atheists, I just see it as a popular expression of this imperative of a capitalist culture, to do away with this monstrous rival to the market, GOD.
And prayer I think is an essentially subversive activity in a culture like that. Prayer is the one thing you should not be allowed to do, in a truly good consumerist culture. It gets in the way of advertising, it gets in the way of your openness to advertising, you should be opening your pores and your mind and your souls to constant advertising and prayer is something else that should be discouraged. So, yeah, I do see a link there.
Came across a blog post I wrote some years back, commenting on Wittgenstein's comments on religion and language games. He was primarily disassembling logical positivism, though it's an oversimplification to limit his work to that effort (he, along with Godel, pushed it off the cliff, but that wasn't their primary effort at all). Still, LP lingers because, ironically, it's a stupid person's report of what a clever person said. Which is to say, DBH is right in the portion you quoted, because, to put it simply, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The Australian aboriginal dreamworld, for one. Interesting how much of our thinking about other cultures was formed by anthropology, and then when anthropology cleaned its own house of talk of "primitive cultures" and "magic" (a technical term, not the Harry Potter version), popular culture flew off the train as it rounded that sharp curve. Same thing happened with the demise of LP which pop culture didn't notice.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, the French were hardest hit by that. They built a lot of philosophy on anthropology, and then deconstructed it when its gross errors became apparent. We could still learn a thing or two from them. ;-)
The same class in 20th century French lit I took in which my second paper was on Cocteau's Oedipe, the first one was on Charles Peguy's Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d'Arc which, while a bit much in form was the real anti-establishment piece.
DeleteCocteau was the last straw with me, I didn't take another French lit class after that. It's so banal and depressing.
"I just see it as a popular expression of this imperative of a capitalist culture, to do away with this monstrous rival to the market, GOD. "
ReplyDeleteAs Richard E. Grant says in Bruce Robinson's insanely brilliant WITHNAIL AND I:
What absolute twaddle.
A very elaborate way of saying you don't understand it.
DeleteGee, I had to look it up, having been unimpressed enough to have forgotten the reference. It's only to be expected that you wouldn't know the difference between what Hart was talking about and something genuinely counter cultural. That's something I think I realized by 1968, that the "counter-culture" was just a different flavor of market capitalist branding. Or, as your favorite mophead said when one of his friends teased him about the blatant hypocrisy of his "imagine no possessions," "It's only a bloody song."
ReplyDeleteYou, you're only a messy putz.