GKC, Christian Paradoxes, and the the Secular Right

In his chapter "The Paradoxes of Christianity" in Orthodoxy, Chesterton discusses the contradictory charges that are often leveled against Christianity:

As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind - the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons.  No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than nother demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness. 

Chesterton goes on to give several examples. The Secular Right provides another one in this post and this post. In the first, Heather MacDonald explains that her main problem with religion is that it falsely offers a "special friend" who will protect you from suffering:

That, to me, is the essence of religion: I have a special friend who will keep me safe from the usual disasters that rain down on my fellow human beings (see killer earthquakes and tsunamis, town-destroying tornadoes, fatal car crashes, children born with half a brain, and other Acts of God).

This understandable desire for a few strings to pull in the great random play of fate, for a special someone to get you out of tight fixes and to mop up messes, is an even more fundamental impetus behind religious faith than the hope for an exemption from death, in my observation.  The desire for a personalized leg-up lies behind the constant propitiation of the gods in the Aeneid and continues unbroken into the Christian cultivation of saints and the nonstop din of petitionary prayer...

In the second, Andrew Stuttaford explains that the problem with religion is that it teaches people that suffering is a blessing. He quotes a grieving father to that effect:

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling—that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. Isabel’s suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world.

With Chesterton, we might ask how Christianity can both sell people on the idea that God will protect them from suffering, and also sell them on the idea that suffering is a blessing and should be embraced. Chesterton did not immediately conclude that the attacks were baseless; but he did draw the deduction that if they were true, Christianity must be an extraordinary thing:

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, [masochistic yet hiding from suffering behind a divine skirt- DMT], if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. 

Chesterton eventually had the inspiration that the problem may not be with Christianity but its critics:

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while Negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the center. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane all its critics that are mad - in various ways.

And with respect to suffering, it may be that Christianity is the sane center. There seem to be two truths with respect to suffering: The first is that we would like to avoid it; the second is that no matter how much we try, some suffering in this life is unavoidable. A philosophy that answers suffering must speak to our desire to avoid it, but also provide meaning to the suffering that will inevitably come our way. Christianity speaks to our desire to avoid suffering by affirming it. It was not always thus; man was originally created in a world without suffering, but since has come to suffer as a result of his sin. Our repulsion from suffering is not merely an animal reaction against pain. It reflects a knowledge, deep in our being, that things are not supposed to be this way; our outrage at suffering is a dim memory of Eden. (Pascal: we are fallen Kings.)

But despite the legitimacy of our outrage at suffering, suffer we will in this life, one way or the other. The Christian answer to this is Hope. Even a small amount of suffering absent hope rapidly becomes unbearable; this is one reason our hopeless culture is a slave to convenience. Suffering becomes more bearable the more one possesses hope. This is one of the truths that is meant when Christians sometimes speak of the "blessings" of suffering. It is not that suffering in itself is ennobling; but in our distress we may turn to the source of Hope, and in that hope discover a power to persevere through suffering that we imagined would destroy us. Yes, Christians pray that God relieve us of suffering; that is part of hope. But they also understand that following Christ must involve suffering. The Christian's attitude to suffering is summed up in Christ's prayer at Gethsemane:

Father, if you are willing, remove this chalice from me; nevertheless not my will but yours, be done. (Luke 22:42)

 

Transcending human nature through science.

Here is Steven Pinker in the Preface to his book The Stuff of Thought (the emphasis is mine):

There is a theory of space and time embedded in the way we use words. There is a theory of matter and a theory of causality, too. Our language has a model of sex in it (actually, two models), and conceptions of intimacy and power and fairness. Divinity, degradation, and danger are also ingrained in our mother tongue, together with a conception of well-being and a philosophy of free will. These conceptions vary in their details from language to language, but their overall logic is the same. They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic.

I love that last sentence. It is a neat summary of the philosophical assumptions of the contemporary philosophy of mind. There is the distinction between "a distinctively human model of reality" - to be taken with a grain of salt, for it is only "a" model among many possible models - and "the objective understanding of reality" given by science and logic, which suffers from none of the unfortunate drawbacks of the human condition and its models, transcending human nature entirely as the objective understanding of reality. There is the easy confidence that never wonders who or what it is that understands this "objective understanding" when it is understood, or wonders how an "objective understanding" saves itself from being oxymoronic, since an understanding is only an understanding if it is understood by someone and therefore is subjective; or wonders how we mere men can understand an "objective understanding" without it becoming a human model. There is the hint of a further perspective beyond both the human model and the objective understanding, the perspective that allows us to compare the lesser two perspectives and determine in just what "major ways" the human model differs from the objective understanding. Finally, there is the strange innocence that fails to notice that whatever we understand and do must happen in and through our own nature, and so reference to "the objective understanding of reality" is itself an expression of human nature and so destroys the distinction of which it is a part.

Kierkegaard's "A" on the web

Via the secular right blog, I found the interesting blog Roissy in DC. What makes it interesting is that Roissy, from my admittedly casual inspection, seems to be an unselfconscious example of person "A" from Kierkegaard's Either/Or.  For those who don't know or need to be reminded, Either/Or is written in the form of short essays that were "found" by the pseudonymous Victor Eremita. Eremita does not know who wrote the essays, but he is able to deduce that they were written by two different people whom he labels "A" and "B". "A" may be classified as an intellectual hedonist, someone for whom pleasure is the highest good, and to the pursuit of which he turns his considerable intellectual ability. The theme running through A's essays is the nature and pursuit of the erotic, since it captures desire in its most potent form. The first part of Either/Or ends with the famous Diary of the Seducer, the account of a man's quest to capture and exploit the heart of a young woman.

Roissy is reminscent of A, but he doesn't seem to have A's refinement or deep sense of the erotic. Compare, for example the 16 Commandments of Poon with the Diary of the Seducer. Johannes the Seducer would scoff at the "alpha male" stuff, not because it isn't true, but because it aims so low. Getting a girl to go to bed with you isn't that hard, or even getting her to be your "girlfriend." Getting a girl to fall in love with you, real head-over-heels traditional romantic love, then using her and breaking her heart - now that is a challenge and a game worthy of a man. It is a challenge because you must first understand the truly erotic yourself, then educate your woman in it... only then do the highest pleasures of the erotic become available. And you will never understand the erotic if you are locked into a materialist, reductive mindset.

Like A's essays, despair seeps through the cracks of Roissy's blog. Check out rule VII in the Commandments of Poon. "A" was self-aware enough to know that despair is the great enemy of the aesthetic life, and that the true aesthete knows how to keep it at bay through techniques like the "rotation method." Whether such tactics actually hold despair at bay is, of course, another question.