Ehrenreich Redux

Several weeks ago I wrote a post about the reaction to Barbara Ehrenreich's new book and her coming out as an atheist who, nevertheless, has had what many people, including, apparently, her, would call a mystical experience.

I read this blog post this morning

Online, radio, and print news is abuzz about Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Living with a Wild God, with the paradoxical subtitle, A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything. And, yes, this is the “fourth-generation atheist,” Barbara Ehrenreich, of leftist-labor and feminist-activism fame, whose award-winning journalistic investigations into social, economic, and political issues span decades.

Now in her early seventies, Ms. Ehrenreich discloses a narrative running parallel to her life and career since a young age, most significantly a personal experience at 17. On a predawn walk in Lone Pine, California, Ms. Ehrenreich recalls, she encountered “something alive” which she describes as nothing short of a “cataclysmic experience” when “the world flamed into life.”

No visual hallucination, no prophetic voices; rather, the world opened up and was “rushing out to” her. Ms. Ehrenreich writes:

“Something poured into me and I poured out into it…. a furious encounter with a living substance.”

Looking back on this moment, as recorded by her younger self, Ms. Ehrenreich reflects on the want of adequate language to describe what happened, personally, experientially, and as an atheist who continues to describe herself a rational empiricist (though, recently, also as a “mystical rationalist”).

Grasping for words outside of “ineffable,” “transcendence,” “spiritual,” or “religious,” Ms. Ehrenreich leans on the word “mystical” to carry her burden of meaning. The lack a vocabulary to express the varieties of the inexpressible leads Ms. Ehrenreich to her larger challenge to science: go forth boldly in the study of uncanny experiences...


Here is my reaction to the post.

In reading Barbara Ehrenreich over the last few decades, one of the thing that has struck me is how much of her hostility to religion governs how she thinks. Over the past decade of the new atheist fashion, I've come to see how much that hostility, not empirical rationalism has governed all aspects of modernity for all of the 20th century.   

That has led to such things as the rote denial of the fact that, in the West, religion was the major force in reforming society and laws in most areas, racial equality, womens suffrage, rights of workers, relief to the destitute and poor.  I have also, largely through reading what atheists of the "rational empirical", materialist type have said, have come to see atheism as an inherently anti-liberal ideology, denying the absolute reality of equal, inherent rights and the equally held moral obligation to respect those rights.  Without those metaphysical foundations, liberalism (in the American sense of the word) is impossible and, in fact, wrong.  

Through reading history I have also come to the conclusion that those things are obviously not wrong, that the history of the 20th century, largely through the activity of anti-religious governments and governments that denied the reality of those metaphysical foundations produced a factual record proving that liberalism got that part of it right.  Those lessons, unlike the ones demonstrating evolution and geological history of the planet and life, are an articulation of human intentions and a more direct route to understanding than science has available to it.   People produced that record to articulate their intentions and document their acts, to communicate them in a way that is intentionally unambiguous - accounting for and rejecting intentional falsification.  The record of that history is directly factual in a way that much of science can't be.  The fact supporting the reality of equality, inherent rights and moral obligation is unambiguous whereas much of neuro-science, cognitive-science, evolutionary psychology and the speculations of cosmology are far more indirect and require a far greater degree of interpretation, much of it as or more open to ideological twisting and wishful thinking as any other area of academic study.  The past decade of encountering atheism and atheists has shown to me that they are as prone to being governed by wishful thinking as any other group of people.   Without an authoritative declaration that it is a sin to bear false witness and lie, even that imperfect governor on self-deception and intentional deception are replaced by the mere gamble that they might not be able to get away with it.   In the area of academic discourse and journalism, they often do.  

I might have added that a declaration of their disbelief, their atheism is also a requirement, so often it seems nervously appended to something quite unrelated to it.   Thornton Wilder's note on Our Town, dispelling any suspicion that he's unreliable, believing in such woo as an afterlife and the mind of God, purifying that by invoking the shade of Dante.*

And I have to confess that another comment at the blog got there a lot faster than I did.

Submitted by Reza Mahani on Tue, 2014-05-27 08:37
From your descriptions, I get the feeling that she does not have enough "humility" to be taken seriously on these issues. But this is just a first impression.

Reza Mahani got one of the major things wrong with our intellectual life better in that observation than I did in paragraphs.

* I had a project a few years back of reading everything by Wilder I could get to and came to the conclusion that his fear of dealing with that topic might have something to do with why his best works seem to fall apart at the end.  The concluding chapter to The Eighth Day is especially disappointing, leading more logically to the conclusion of life's futility than in the value of any particular second of life's experience.   Perhaps that has something to do with the bleak cynicism of so much of what is called modern.