In the Sullivan/Harris debate, Sullivan has time and again--at least to the careful reader--exposed the utter vacuity of his specifically theistic belief. Having transferred his superstitious magical thinking to conservatism, Sullivan has left to "God" specific ideology, no actual content at all, just feel-good platitudes. Sullivan can have his private "truth" about God, and allow others their private "truths" about God, because none of these truths actually matter.
But most readers have neither the time nor the inclination to read so carefully, and Sullivan is almost unmatched for his talent in making the vacuous sound good, very good. Even when he's right, as on gay marriage and torture, he's right about the blatantly obvious, where sincerity and rhetoric count for so much and analysis for so little. At the end of the day, I don't think Harris is a good enough writer to overcome Sullivan.
Someone in the atheist camp needs to match Sullivan's sincerity and rhetorical force. More importantly, we need to perform some emotional and psychological judo. We need to warmly accept all the lovey-dovey feel-good emotionalism, and show how it's not only compatible with atheism, atheism makes it better.
I'm doing my best, but my talent and training are less oriented to singing rhetoric and more to computer manuals, and I need years more practice.
We need a poet. Sam Harris is a lot of things, many of them good, but he's not a poet.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
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R. Scott Bakker at Vanderbilt is pretty eloquent. His fantasy series, "The Prince of Nothing," was written to finance his Ph.D. in philosophy, and is chock full of interesting thoughts on tradition vs. progress, theism/faith vs. atheism, etc.
ReplyDeleteI have my moments, but my thinking tends to be haphazard and slipshod. Part of what makes Sullivan so eloquent is that he has nearly two millenniums' worth of neo-Platonism to crib from.
I think that the key lies in encouraging the very human traits of empathy and projection. I need to ponder it a bit further.
I'll have to add the book to my Amazon queue.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is perhaps not just Sullivan's eloquence, but also Harris's tin ear and somewhat... ah... confused philosophy, mentioned in the same breath as Dawkins and Dennett by virtue only of the miniscule pool of atheist writers. In my darkest moods, I suspect Harris might be to atheism what Alan Colmes is to liberalism.