On “Losing my religion”….

I am a mandolin player. Or perhaps more accurately I should say that I play the mandolin. On this side of the Anglo-Saxon Atlantic, mandolin playing is mainly limited to folk music, although across the Chanel it has long been known as a classical instrument (Vivaldi wrote at least two mandolin concertos). In the US the mandolin has a long and treasured place in country and bluegrass music. But as far as I know there is only one rock/pop mandolin riff that is widely known. Back in the ‘90’s R.E.M. had a hit with the song “Losing My Religion” which starts with it. The song and the accompanying video went on to win multiple awards. You might think that the song had something to do with religion. Perhaps a celebratory atheistic anthem of its newly recognised irrelevance or a wistful retrospective of a now forgotten childhood heritage. But apparently not. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe who wrote the lyric has said that it was actually about unrequited love: “..what I was pulling from was being the shy wallflower who hangs back at the party or at the dance and doesn’t go up to the person that you’re madly in love with and say ‘I’ve kind of got a crush on you, how do you feel about me?’”. Doesn’t take away from the brilliant mandolin riff of course. In any case it turns out religion isn't quite what you might think.

That’s interesting because it often isn’t. The meanings given to the word have changed over time, as often happens. And even if there really is a thing being labelled (in the sense that we also give names to non-things like purple spotted unicorns) this is also likely to change through time and and over space (i.e. being different in different places and spaces). So it is sometimes genuinely difficult to know what is meant when we talk (or even sing) about religion, lost or otherwise. There is nothing new or unique in this; try looking up the etymological history of “nice” – you’ll be surprised. Even broad categories used to identify obvious and necessary boundaries turn out in some important cases to be recent innovations that are neither obvious nor necessary. The rhetorical drawing of contrasts is therefore also tricky. The idea that the categories of “natural” and “supernatural” have always been with us, and we’ve always been clear about what these categories are, crops up in many debates. Indeed it is the supernatural, as distinct from religion or God, that was Dawkins’ main target in “The God Delusion”. He clearly thought he knew what he meant, and that his readers did too.

But the categories of natural and supernatural are relatively recent. And around them there has been more than a little myth-making particularly once they transformed into “-isms” claimed to competing with each other. This particular framing (although not the words themselves) appeared late on in the 19^th century promoted by, among others, T.H. Huxley. Huxley and his ilk then read these categories back into history. Promising (in their terms) pre-Socratic philosophers were identified as being early stalwarts taking their plucky stance against surrounding supernatural beliefs and religious practices. A line of heroes was then traced through that most influential of ancient philosophers, Aristotle. And so down to contemporary debates where science, rationality and naturalism were pitted against religion, faith and supernaturalism, with the implication that we all know which side of the line we (and the intellectual greats of the past) must stand. Except it was never thus and is not so now.

The Greek philosophers, of all schools and stages, were clear that the divine was involved with all aspects of human life and thought, whether for good or ill. For them, “natural” inevitably implied, among other things, divine activity. And Greek science (a much wider activity than what is meant in English by the word today) showed little sign of progress or development away from such notions. Arguably it was actually the rise of Christianity which in some of its forms began to remove the divine from many of the areas of life it was formerly thought to inhabit. Many of the innovators who began to give science the form it has today, from Bacon on, made no great distinction between their thinking as scientists (not a word they would have understood in our sense) and theological thinking. Investigating the world with the tools available was an investigation of the works of God. The success of science  was, to many, not the success of naturalism in the face of supernatural resistance, but actually progress in illuminating and understanding the works of the Creator. No contest here. But something does thereafter seem to have been lost.

A broadly Biblical understanding of everything there was and is was what led to (or at least was the context of) the development of science as we know it today. But a catastrophic narrowing of science seems to have taken place, particularly as it became professionalised and institutionalised. The historian Peter Harrison recently put it like this “Whereas the sciences are sometimes said to be based in curiosity, from the mid-twentieth century that curiously rarely extended to fundamental questions about the metaphysical foundations of science or the intelligibility of the natural world” (Some New World, p328). As a matter of history those “metaphysical” foundations were thought to be Biblical by the majority of the practitioners from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It was Huxley and others, relatively recently, who set up various false antitheses. And they were then highly successful in evangelising for this particular view of our intellectual and scientific history. Once constructed in their terms, loosing the supernatural, indeed losing religion, was not the loss of anything of value. Indeed, it was seen as a necessary and progressive step.

The problem is that we are now living with the consequences of this loss of “who knows what”. And it actually turns out that the most serious consequences are not for religion (in the modern sense) as much for science, politics and culture. Religion appears to be going from strength to strength all over the world. But particularly in Western Europe and the US, wistful noises are now being made in the oddest of corners for what has been lost. And science itself seems particularly to be suffering. 

So if you thought REM was celebrating the loss of religion in the sense of losing the religious, think again. And even if you had been right, it would probably not be something worth celebrating.

Words, texts and their mattering….

I like words. Sometimes it’s just the sound of individual words that I’m drawn to (like ‘flibbertigibbet’). You may well have your own favourites. But more often it’s words strung into sentences, usually with the aim of communicating something. Hence I’m sitting here typing. And, presumably, that’s why you’re sitting where you are, reading. You like words too. Mind you, spoken words and written words are not identical (I don’t know what ‘flibbertigibbet’ sounds like inside your head). But they do serve the same sort of purposes, the main one being to communicate meaning. But meaning is a word, and slippery one too. Linguists, philosophers, theologians and scientists have all tacked the issue of what meaning “is”, and have not always arrived at compatible definitions. Some have therefore concluded that there is no such thing as meaning. But that would seem to subvert the whole business of communicating with one another, something humans have actually been doing for a very long time, and with a fairly high degree of success (an observation I’ve commented on before). And it is a view that is, basically, self-refuting.

But what this does highlight is that in using words, whether as a sender or receiver, thought and care are often required. When precision is needed, we can usually achieve it. It does complicate matters and tends to slow communication down. And sometimes we can all get a bit impatient with this. But there is something here that is familiar from many areas of life and behaviour - a speed accuracy trade-off. So when I’m speaking quickly, without much thought, the precision I am communicating with is reduced. A similar thing happens when I sit down at a keyboard and with little thought I just begin to type. Stringing words together isn’t particularly difficult. But stringing them together coherently is a different matter. And of course prior to the words are the concepts that the words are supposed to convey. If I haven’t given these much thought, then prior to the lack of clarity in the words, will be a lack of clarity in the thoughts. The net effect will be ambiguity and uncertainty. This is sometimes a thoughtful intention, but that is probably the exception rather than the rule, and carries its own meaning.

On the other side of the communication process, the same sort of considerations must apply. A whole series of processes are going on in your head right now. Some of them are fairly low-level and not under your control (at least to any great extent) – things like resolving the words on the screen you’re looking at so they are clear enough to read, or extracting meaning from individual words. But at a higher level, implicitly or explicitly, you will have to decide how much work you’re going to put into understanding what I’ve written. If you’re not particularly interested, you will probably merely skim the text, perhaps alighting on the odd word here or there, following the narrative or the argument (such as it is) at a superficial level. If I were to write something obviously crazy at this point (like “raspberry”) you might notice. But then again you might not (in which case the entire point of what I’ve just written will be lost on you!). But if I’ve succeeded in catching your attention, and you’re interested in the meaning of meaning, or the meaning of words, or the business of communication, you’ll be working to understand both what is written and what is meant. That will take time on your part, time that you could have spent doing something else. That implies a price that you either will, or will not be prepared to pay.

To be sure, there are lots of reasons why you might not want to pay a particularly high price to extract the meaning from this particular text. It is after all, merely a blog post, one of many on this blog (this is #152), and there are of course many blogs (plus books, magazines etc). But we all have an innate idea that some texts are much more important than others. And with these we have a sense that it will pay to do the work. And there are those texts which claim (or are claimed) to be potentially life changing (not something I’d claim for my blog I hasten to add). If you are persuaded that this is the case, the words (and the sentences and paragraphs they make up) will matter a lot and you’ll want to do the work to get at the meaning. While such claims may be spurious, Benjamin Franklin (among others), he of “Give me 26 lead soldiers and I will conquer the world” certainly thought that words could matter.

Part of the human condition is that our time and resources are finite, so choices have to made. Given the slipperiness of words, the question arises as to how best to spend our finite resources. Because we know that some words matter more than others we direct variable degrees of attention towards the text of adverts, comic strips, headlines in tabloid newspapers and captions on TikTok compared to those in a textbook we need to study to pass an exam or a philosophy book making an argument that we really want to get to the bottom of. Experience, our own and that of others, can also be a guide. Where we know that others have claimed to find particular words truly transformative (sometimes transformations we ourselves may have witnessed), these will be the ones we really want to pay attention to and work at to understand.

There is a particular text in mind (of course). It is one of the most critically scrutinised in history. It has been pilloried and banned in some jurisdictions. It has been lauded and literally worshipped in others. This wide range of responses and attitudes itself is evidence (of a sort) that here is something worth exposing oneself to, reading, reflecting on and responding to. Given the range of reactions to it, and conflicting claims about it, it is clearly likely to have its complexities. This can’t all be down to the vagaries of the readers and hearers of it. So it is likely that work will indeed be required. But at least there is a prima facie case that here indeed are words that should be encountered first hand, as opposed to depending on second-hand, necessarily filtered accounts of it. And there does appear to be a coherent core meaning that both historically and now millions have extracted from it (as well as some crazy conclusions and consequently crazy behaviour).

If the Bible is what it and many of its previous readers have claimed, then here are words that matter. And perhaps they matter more than anything else.