Avatar, "the Glenn Beck Problem", and Ted Kaczynski: Part I
Avatar is a deeply religious movie and is nothing so much as a visual statement of Pantheism and Gaiaism. In the movie, the biosphere is all connected, communicating through the trees. Spirits/souls live on independent of the flesh and as a result there appears to be no gratuitous violence, warfare, or all the other ills fallible humans have been prone to. In a paean to the idealized American Indian of contemporary myth, hunters apologize to their prey and thank them for their contribution to the people. It is a lovely vision of a Godless religion, one that can be imagined to have evolved without benefit of a Deity. It is scientific and decidedly amoral, in that morality requires choice and when one is always part of the greater collective, there is no necessity for moral choice. One is defined by the collective mind, follows those who are closer to the biosphere's "mind" (apparently made up, in part, of the spirits of those who came before) and an individual ethic is unnecessary. At least, within the confines of the movie, the only people forced to make moral choices are the humans from planet Earth. That their moral choices are so obvious and overt is a tribute to the limitations of the filmmaker's imagination as opposed to any potential reality of the situation, but that is immaterial here.
Returning to the Ted Kaczynski saga in the Atlantic, what is striking is the implicit splitting in the stance of the Harvard professors, those paragons of complexity, in their approach to the Gen Ed curriculum's attempts to inculcate an appreciation for the Judeo-Christian ethic. From Part I of The Roots of the Unabomber
The committee's report, General Education in a Free Society (1945), was known, for the color of its cover, as the Redbook. The solution that the Redbook committee offered was a program of instruction that, in the words of the education historian Frederick Rudolph, called for "a submersion in tradition and heritage and some sense of common bond strong enough to bring unbridled ego and ambition under control." The Redbook's program of reform caught the imagination of educators across the country. By the mid-1950s more than half the colleges in America were offering programs of general education modeled along the same lines.
Although at Harvard the name caught on, the philosophy behind it did not. Gen Ed was doomed from the start.
By 1950 the Harvard faculty was divided between those who, chastened by their experience in World War II and especially by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saw science and technology as a threat to Western values and even human survival and those -- a majority -- who saw science as a liberator from superstition and an avenue to progress. Both these views found their way into the Gen Ed curriculum. The dominant faction had little sympathy for the Redbook's resolve to inculcate Judeo-Christian ethics. Because of the majority's resistance, many Redbook-committee recommendations were never fully implemented. And those recommendations that were incorporated into the curriculum were quickly subverted by many of the people expected to teach it. These professors in fact emphasized the opposite of the lesson Conant intended. Rather than inculcate traditional values, they sought to undermine them. Soon "Thou shalt not utter a value judgment" became the mantra for Harvard freshmen, in dorm bull sessions as well as in term papers. Positivism triumphed. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Superficially, the positivist message appeared to be an optimistic one, concerning the perfectibility of science and the inevitability of progress. It taught that reason was a liberating force and faith mere superstition; the advance of science would eventually produce a complete understanding of nature. But positivism also taught that all the accumulated nonscientific knowledge of the past, including the great religions and philosophies, had been at best merely an expression of "cultural mores" and at worst nonsense; life had no purpose and morality no justification.
Even as positivism preached progress, therefore, it subliminally carried -- quite in contradiction to the intent of Gen Ed's framers -- a more disturbing implication: that absolute reason leads to absolute despair. G. K. Chesterton wrote, "Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad ... mathematicians go mad." Hence Gen Ed delivered to those of us who were undergraduates during this time a double whammy of pessimism. From the humanists we learned that science threatens civilization. From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied that there was no hope. Gen Ed had created at Harvard a culture of despair. This culture of despair was not, of course, confined to Harvard -- it was part of a more generalized phenomenon among intellectuals all over the Western world. But it existed at Harvard in a particularly concentrated form, and Harvard was the place where Kaczynski and I found ourselves.
To very briefly review and summarize: among the cognoscenti, religion and religious belief became synonymous with primitivism. G-d was not only unnecessary but in fact his influence was invidious. Our predecessors, because of their belief in such primitive nonsense, had little to offer sophisticated modern, post Nietzschean ("God is dead") man. The modern philosophical edifice threw out several thousand years worth of human struggle with the questions that reside at the core of morality and ethics. For the modern sophisticate, moral judgements are unnecessary and delusional. Modern man is far too sophisticated to accept such morally loaded terms as "right" or "wrong". As well as throwing out the foundations of morality and ethics, the modern existentialist atheism managed to toss out meaning as well, leaving a vast hole in the soul (for want of a more appropriate, less archaic term) that people remain eager to fill:
I recently met a young woman who was just back from a monthlong Costa Rican vacation. She said that she had gone in part to connect with her spiritual self, to shed the moral strictures of her youth and to find her place of peace as an adult. In her mind at least, it had been a successful trip. She was a new woman, spiritually awakened.
She told me that she had gone from religious to nonbeliever, and then to spiritual. Putting aside the fact that most young people probably couldn’t afford to take a monthlong vacation in a foreign country, and the fact that her spiritual awakening was admittedly spiked with copious amounts of Costa Rican rum, her story struck me as increasingly normative rather than anomalous. Many young adults seem to be moving away from organized religion while simultaneously trying desperately to connect with their spirituality.
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A report entitled “Religion Among the Millennials” produced by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life and released this week found that one in four people 18 to 29 years old are unaffiliated with a religion. But that by no means makes them all atheists or agnostics. While there are always religious people among the unaffiliated, the numbers are significantly higher among the younger unaffiliated crowd. While they are less likely than those unaffiliated and older than them to believe in God, they are more likely to believe in life after death, heaven and hell, and miracles.
Glenn Reynolds had the best comment on the new spirituality:
YOUNG VOTERS WANT SPIRITUALITY, BUT NOT NECESSARILY RELIGION. Well, that’s because religion often tells you to do things you don’t want to do, or to refrain from doing things you want to do, while spirituality is usually more . . . flexible.
Religious belief has been systematically devalued by the liberal elites since the early days of the last century. Pure reason has been insufficient to temper our inherent desires to control others and destroy opponents. Rationality led to the worst excesses of the 20th century. national Socialism imagined itself to be based on rationality; Communism offered a "scientific" approach to social problems. Both led to unfathomable destruction.
The newest iteration of a purely rational, scientific approach to understanding can be found in the eco-religion of AGW. If the Warmists had their way, billions of people would be consigned to extreme poverty, technological progress would be aborted, and millions would die, all to satisfy their unacknowledged religious devotion to Mother Earth.
[Ed Morrissey documents the religious devotion of our liberal MSM in relation to AGW; they literally cannot talk about heretical data: Another American media failure.]
We desperately need some humility. Homo sapiens is not yet ready to replace G-d. For those who reject belief in G-d, I would suggest a new version of Pascal's wager. The most rational, non-religious view is that G-d is an idealized projection of our collective Superegos. In this case, it has survival value for the human race to believe in a Deity; no other source of moral authority would ever be sufficient to control our basest desires and our extraordinary ability to rationalize those desires. Perhaps, 100 years after his death, one could argue we need G-d more than ever.
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