‘I like to imagine Joel’s spirit, in triumphant benevolence on the arc of history, looking with the mercy of a good Christian upon the wretched and irredeemable soul of the New York Times, when it too gives up its ghost in the oncoming apocalypse which he prophesied and it prepares.’
‘I imagine Joel speaking to the Times in the words of William Blake, whose ‘Proverbs of Hell’ are placed throughout this text as guideposts to navigate the liberal inferno: “He who has suffer’d you to impose on him knows you.”
Quincy Saul's phrase 'the liberal inferno' is one that caught my eye.
I come to liberalism below. For the moment, I wish to focus on the religious message.
Another article on Joel Kovel that is well worth reading is:
Joel Kovel knew the impossibilities of the destinationless voyage, and showed what is required for the healing of spirit and community.
Many on the left are secularists and atheists and are somewhat dumbfounded by Joel Kovel's conversion to Christianity. They don't understand it, seek all manner of explanations for it.
I shall quote at length, because what is written here makes sense of my own direction:
Another major point of departure from Joel is with respect to my views on religion, which is shared likely by most leftists, Marxist and otherwise. The matter, however, has never been terribly simple or resolvable by alluding to mind-altering substances. As Marxist activist and psychoanalyst Ian Parker has pointed out, under the keyword ‘Spirituality’.
“The journey [to Christianity, such as Joel’s] does not necessarily lead away from revolutionary struggle., but can deepen it, can deepen it even where there are some dramatic conversion from one ‘religion’ to another, conversion that enable the spiritual suffering to turn into protest.” (Parker 2017)
Though I do not share (or even really grasp) Joel’s spiritual affinity with Christ and much less comprehend his conversion to Episcopalian Christianity in 2012, I do, thanks to him, appreciate the role spirituality has in a transition to ecosocialism. More than this, Joel taught me to fear not my own spirituality and, rather than repress it, to embrace it as a feeling of being beyond the self, as a positive way of relating to others (humans or not) and thereby help build ecosocialist sensibility. After all, the majority of people worldwide show explicit spiritual inclinations often articulated by way of religion and specifically monotheism. This is emphatically not to my liking, but the enormous weight of such a fact must be confronted and addressed constructively, not dismissively.
But this implies a kind of instrumentalism on my part. Joel felt his conversion deeply and I could only respect his courageous decision. A major factor was his resolve to emancipate himself from Judaism, with its tribalism and its foundational and self-congratulatory notion of chosen people. In this, Jesus inspired Joel not only as a historical revolutionary, but also as a Jew who was able to overcome his Jewishness. The conversion must be situated in Joel’s social context, one that was highly damaging to his spirit. It also cannot be underlined enough that he identified as a Marxist to the end (Kovel 2017, 173). Christianity for him was scarcely oppositional to Marxism. It meant selfless love, a state of being foundationally inimical to any religious hierarchies and apologetics for social inequalities. In the example of Jesus lay, for Joel, the possibility of dissolving the egoic self into universal humanity, and thereby the universe, with human nature becoming intimately felt as part of nature. This is the overcoming of the multiple dimensions of capitalist alienation Marx wrote about, and, Joel would say, the notion of alienation and its relationship to spirituality is an important and downplayed part of Marx’s thought. Joel therefore thought such principles should be the basis for redirecting Marxism (Kovel 2017, 194), especially as alienation is directly linked to the destruction of spirit (Kovel 1991, 3).
That is a religion that moves away from exclusive claims. But it is a religion all the same, not an instrumental means to an end. Bear these words in mind when I come to Rabbi Sacks' words below. Sacks makes it clear in his work that religion is a philosophy of protest as against acceptance.
Nietzsche is scathing of the complacency of those who think it possible to give up the belief in God and leave nothing unchanged. He would be contemptuous of those who think that doing so would necessarily make life more worthy of living, if, by that, they mean for all beings. He has no time for the comfortable mediocrity of the ‘last man’ or the ‘last race.’ If we want to talk about the chosen few, then let's talk about Nietzsche's Superman or Overman. Only some, argues Nietzsche, are capable of living the best lives. And the standards are not moral, they are subjective, egoistic, assertive – they are about power. Because, as Sacks argues, ‘if we give up belief in the God of justice, we relinquish belief in the objective reality and categorical imperative of justice also.’ Sacks spells out the consequences:
In such a world there is no comfort for the sufferer, no rebuke for the oppressor, no hope, just the stoic endurance of hopelessness. 'The mass of men', said Thoreau, ‘lead lives of quiet desperation.’ That is what the third response offers us: resignation to a world we have no reason to suppose could be other than unjust.
Sacks 2011: 240
Sacks describes all such philosophies as ‘philosophies of acceptance,’ going on to make it clear why all philosophies of protest must ultimately have their grounds in God and religion. ‘Abrahamic monotheism is not a religion of acceptance. It is a religion of protest. It does not try to vindicate the suffering of the world. That is the way of Job's comforters, not Job.’ (Sacks 2011: 240).
Marx retains a little glimpse sense of this protest in his criticism of religion, but thinks religion a form of acceptance and apologetics. I think he was wrong. It can be, but in its core, religion is a cry against injustice, pain and suffering, for a better world::
Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
Marx EW CHPR:I 1975
The suffering is ‘real,’ notes Marx, and religion is a ‘protest against real suffering.’ It is also a protest for the realization and doing of good over evil, affirming against sophistry that such a distinction actually exists and that we live in a moral world. It can be a lonely struggle against power.
In the first article above, Quincy Saul writes:
‘I remember one of the first things I learned from Joel Kovel, in a series of study groups at St. Mary’s Church in Harlem: that you can measure the power of ideas by the energy spent suppressing them.’
Talking of which …
My latest books ... which embrace Marx and religion in ways like to annoy adherents on both sides.
These books offer a systematic and sustained critique of liberalism. For reasons given and developed at length in these texts, liberalism is an acid that dissolves the emancipatory claims of the left. I target the fallacies and antinomies built into and reproduced by the liberal ontology. The failures of liberalism to generate a common purpose and meaning, cutting human beings off from the genuine public life they need to individuate themselves as social beings, serve to block the creation of an authentic left, and justify continuous swings to the right.
John Grey spots the more obvious manifestations of liberalism's failures in this article:
It would be easy to say that liberalism has now been abandoned. Practices of toleration that used to be seen as essential to freedom are being deconstructed and dismissed as structures of repression, and any ideas or beliefs that stand in the way of this process banned from public discourse. Judged by old-fashioned standards, this is the opposite of what liberals have stood for. But what has happened in higher education is not that liberalism has been supplanted by some other ruling philosophy. Instead, a hyper-liberal ideology has developed that aims to purge society of any trace of other views of the world. If a regime of censorship prevails in universities, it is because they have become vehicles for this project. When students from China study in Western countries one of the lessons they learn is that the enforcement of intellectual orthodoxy does not require an authoritarian government. In institutions that proclaim their commitment to critical inquiry, censorship is most effective when it is self-imposed. A defining feature of tyranny, the policing of opinion is now established practice in societies that believe themselves to be freer than they have ever been.
I write at length on liberalism's hypocritical and ideological claims to neutrality, claiming to be agnostic on the good whilst advancing political and social arrangements that correlate precisely with liberal values and institutions. That sounds good, to progressive ears, when the target is the right and traditional conservativism and old authorities. But the same criticisms are made against socialism, Marx, any form of radicalism that seeks to constitute a common cause and purpose. Protests against power are fine, attempts to embed and institutionalize power become infringements on individual liberty.
John Grey targets Corbyn's Labour in this regard, but in truth the point applies to mainstream liberal/progressive politics:
there is not much in the ideology animating Corbynite Labour that is recognizably Marxist. In Marx, the historical agent of progress in capitalist societies is the industrial working class. But for many who have joined the mass party that Corbyn has constructed, the surviving remnants of this class can only be obstacles to progress. With their attachment to national identity and anxieties about immigration, these residues of the past stand in the way of a world without communal boundaries and inherited group identities – a vision that, more than socialism or concern for the worst-off, animates this new party. It is a prospect that attracts sections of the middle classes – not least graduate millennials, who through Corbyn’s promise to abolish student fees could be major beneficiaries of his policies – that regard themselves as the most progressive elements in society.
There are, however, some significant differences between these hyper-liberals and the progressives of the past. Grey goes on to mention ideological indifference to facts born of a commitment to overriding truths:
indifference to facts .. is pervasive among liberals who came of age at the end of the Cold War. Francis Fukuyama’s claim that with the fall of communism the world was witnessing “the universalization of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” is nowadays widely mocked. Yet when he made this pronouncement in 1989, in the summer issue of the National Interest, it expressed what most liberals believed, and, for all that has since transpired, most continue to insist that the arc of history curves in their direction. They believe this even though the Middle East is a patchwork of theocracy, secular authoritarianism and states fractured by Western intervention; much of post-communist Europe is ruled by illiberal democracies (regimes that mobilize popular consent while dismantling protections for individuals and minorities); Russia is governed through a type of elective autocracy; and the US under Trump appears to be on the way to becoming an illiberal regime not unlike those that have emerged in Hungary and Poland. They pass over the fact that parties of the far Right attract growing support from voters in several of the countries of the European Union. In Germany – the centre of the stupendous liberal project of a transnational European state – a recent poll showed larger numbers of the electorate intending to vote for the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) than for the centre-left Social Democrats. In Italy, Centre Left and Centre Right have been rejected in favour of extreme parties, some of them with links to Fascism. One reason liberal democracy is not going to be universalized is that in some cases it is morphing into a different form of government entirely.
For a philosophy supposedly rooted in empiricism, such a commitment to an overriding belief is anomalous. Here is a political movement incapable of seeing realities that contradict its most cherished principles. And is incapable of actually treating individuals as citizens and respecting their voice. Instead, there are lengthy and loud lectures as to why the people are wrong, ignorant, racist, sexist, homophobic and 'populist,' when not being overtly fascist. I live and work in the community, have close connections with one and all. People tell me things and express themselves in ways that utterly contradict what the mainstream culture disseminates on a daily basis. Someone is not reading the writing on the wall, or is doing so only to issue warnings as to what is to come if we don't defend enlightenment/liberalism etc. Like Leonard Cohen, I've seen the Future - and things are sliding in all directions.
The problem is more than economic, although the economics of inequality are certainly a big part of it:
In this view, the populist upheavals that have shaken Western countries are clearly a backlash from those who have been excluded from the benefits of an expanding global market. Certainly this was one of the reasons for the revolt against established ruling elites that erupted in 2016. Brexit and the Trump presidency are different in many ways, but neither would have happened had it not been for large numbers of voters having a well-founded sense of being left out. Revulsion against Washington-centric oligarchical capitalism was part of the mood that Trump exploited.
But it's much more than that:
But it was not only their marginalization in the economy that the voters resented. They were also responding to the denigration of their values and identities by parties and leaders who claimed to be fighting for social justice. Hillary Clinton’s contemptuous reference to a “basket of deplorables” was emblematic. In recent years, no social group has been more freely disparaged than the proles who find themselves trapped in the abandoned communities of America’s post-industrial wastelands. With their economic grievances dismissed as “whitelash”, their lives and identities derided, and their view of the world attributed to poor education and sheer stupidity, many of these despised plebs may have voted for Trump more out of anger than conviction. If this mood persists and penetrates sections of the middle classes it has not yet deeply affected, he could yet win a second term. It may not be the economy but a need for respect that decides the outcome.
I've given up warning 'progressives' on this. They are right and people are wrong and 'truth' - their version, of course, trumps everything else. Cue the crying and whining when people say otherwise. The issue is not that there are right wing leaders and 'populists' out there who are leading people by the nose. There is nothing new in that phenomenon. The truly significant point is that such a condition is always indicative of decay and decadence in politics. The real question is why 'progressives' have lost the people. Gray identifies the problem in this combination of individualism and abstraction when it comes to identity, the dissolution of the common lives, values and identifies that people shared in community, the organic product of traditions, communities and relations, in favour of abstract commitments. That entails a vociferous overriding commitment to an abstract people and an insistence that real people meet those external standards. The commitment is to a world without communal boundaries, ignoring the extent to which identity, value and purpose is created and lived in place.
It is at this point that the rise of an illiberal liberalism becomes politically significant. Grey comes to the liberal intelligentsia:
Anxiously clinging to the fringes of middle-class life, many faculty members have only a passing acquaintance with the larger society in which they live. Few have friends who are not also graduates, fewer still any who are industrial workers. Swathes of their fellow citizens are, to them, embodiments of the Other – brutish aliens whom they seldom or never meet. Hyper-liberalism serves this section of the academy as a legitimating ideology, giving them an illusory sense of having a leading role in society. The result is a richly entertaining mixture of bourgeois careerism with virtue-signalling self-righteousness – the stuff of a comic novel, though few so far have been up to the task of chronicling it.
I'd have a go at chronicling the phenomenon were it not for the fact I don't find it remotely funny. I live and work in a working class community in the old industrial town of St Helens. The town suffers from mass unemployment in the context of deindustrialisation. The job I do is poorly paid and insecure. And in making these points over the years, arguing for reconstituting the forms of the common life, I have been accused by the people Gray identifies above of suppressing otherness and difference. Such people wouldn't know real otherness and difference if it bit them on the backside - they are mainstream and core and making a lucrative career out of margins and minorities. I live on the margins, it's not sexy and subversive, it is profoundly alienating, and we most certainly do require the constitution of the form and forms of the common life. As for getting that message through to liberals .. there's more chance of platting fog. You've lost the people, if you ever had them. If socialism doesn't remove liberalism from the hold it has on the left of centre, then a reconstituted conservativism is the only hope for surviving this chaos and restoring law and order. As for liberals, they will end their days warning about the fascism to come, little realizing that it is their mindset and practices breeding the terrain for what is to come. I'm writing on Lewis Mumford. Read him in the 1920s and 1930s and the flabby moral and political terrain of liberalism. He showed precisely why and how fascism would ride a coach and horses through liberalism. If progressives restrict themselves to defending the indefensible, it will happen again, and the rise of illiberal regimes the world over ought to have told certain folk that. But it's hard to see reality as it is when you have an overriding commitment to 'truth.'
Gray nails it here:
Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal (TLS, February 9) has been widely attacked for claiming that a Rooseveltian project of building a common identity that spans ethnicities can produce a more enduring liberal politics: any such view, faculty inquisitors hiss, can only be a disguised defence of white supremacy. Lilla’s book cannot be faulted on the ground that it harks back to Roosevelt. By attacking a liberal conception of American national identity as a repressive construction, hyper-liberals confirmed the perception of large sections of the American population – not least blue-collar workers who voted Democrat in the past – that they were being excluded from politics.
If Lilla's analysis has a fault, it is that it does not go back further in time and explore the moment when liberalism became a secular religion. Grey locates this in John Stuart Mill's premiss in his argument for free expression to the effect that truth should be valued as an end in itself – an assumption hard to square with his Utilitarian moral philosophy, according to which the only thing valuable in itself is the satisfaction of wants.
What if many people want what Mill (citing an unnamed author) described as the “deep slumber of decided opinion”? In a later work, Utilitarianism, Mill suggested that anyone who had known the intellectual pleasure of free inquiry would prefer it over mere contentment: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied,” he declared, “than a pig satisfied”. If the pig thinks otherwise, it is because the pig is not familiar with the delights of the mind. Mill’s certainty on this point is droll. A high-minded Victorian, he was insufficiently familiar with the lower pleasures to make a considered judgement. His assertion that human beings would prefer intellectual freedom over contented conformity was at odds with his empiricist philosophy. Essentially unfalsifiable, it was a matter of faith.
And here is where we get the bogus religion, worse and more righteous and more wrong by far than the real thing:
While he never faced up to the contradictions in his thinking, Mill was fully aware that he was fashioning a new religion. Much influenced by Auguste Comte, he was an exponent of what he and the French Positivist philosopher described as “the Religion of Humanity”. Instead of worshipping a transcendent divinity, Comte instructed followers of the new religion to venerate the human species as “the new Supreme Being”. Replacing the rituals of Christianity, they would perform daily ceremonies based in science, touching their skulls at the point that phrenology had identified as the location of altruism (a word Comte invented). In an essay written not long before the appearance of On Liberty but published posthumously (he died in 1873), Mill described this creed as “a better religion than any of those that are ordinarily called by that title”.
Natural rights are based on natural law. Secularists think they can help themselves to rights whilst dispensing with their grounds in God. Rights are conventional creations which we give ourselves through our politics. That sounds liberatory, until you run into regimes which deny those rights. What standard will you use to back your claims to rights in those conditions. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are equal ... that's not a truth of biological nature nor of politics. Politics can, and in the main in history has, denied those truths.
Mill’s transmutation of liberalism into a religion marked a fundamental shift. 'Modern liberal societies,' Grey rightly notes, 'emerged as offshoots from Jewish and Christian monotheism.' And it was Jesus Christ - 'render under Caesar' - who made the first argument for the separation of the secular and the spiritual. It's not a modern liberal argument at all. It's there in Dante, too.
In seventeenth-century England, Milton defended freedom of conscience and expression as a condition of true faith, while John Locke saw toleration as a duty to God. When they claimed universality for these values they did so in the belief that they were divinely ordained. Mill and the secular liberals who followed him did not give up the claim to universality. They made it all the more strongly, and in a more radical form. What this meant for Mill becomes clear in the third chapter of On Liberty, “Of Individuality as one of the Elements of Well-Being”. Here, freedom no longer refers only, or even mainly, to protection from coercion by the law or other people – a system of toleration – but to a radical type of personal autonomy – the ability to create an identity and a style of life for oneself without regard for public opinion or any external authority. In future, only a single type of life would be tolerated – one based on individual choice.
Morality dissolves into irreducible subjective opinion - individual choices, desires, likes, preferences, mere value judgements involving no substantive truth claims. Welcome to the liberal inferno, a flatland where there is no longer good and evil, individuals choose their gods as they see fit, or devils, since there is no objective standard enabling us to evaluate choices and distinguish between them. A moral marketplace.
It is a problematic vision, some of whose difficulties Mill glimpsed. A society that promotes individuality of this kind will iron out differences based in tradition and history; but since much of the diversity of human life comes from these sources, the result may be mass conformity. Again, in a society of the sort Mill envisioned, other religions and philosophies would be gradually eliminated. But if only one view of the world is acceptable, what becomes of intellectual diversity?
Note: 'other religions and philosophies would be gradually eliminated.' Mill came to believe that Comte's view led to “liberticide” – the destruction of intellectual freedom that comes when everyone is required to hold the same view. 'A hostile critic of liberalism who valued free inquiry only insofar as it was useful in weeding out irrational beliefs, Comte welcomed the rise of an intellectual orthodoxy with the power to impose itself on society. Mill was horrified by the prospect. He could scarcely have imagined that such an orthodoxy would be developed and enforced by liberals not unlike himself.'
Moreover, it is not at all clear that people in the main yearn for the sort of life that Mill and liberals promote. 'If history is any guide, large numbers want a sense of security as much as, or more than, personal autonomy.'
Liberals who rail at populist movements are adamant that voters who support them are deluded or deceived. The possibility that these movements are exploiting needs that highly individualist societies cannot satisfy is not seriously considered. In the liberalism that has prevailed over the past generation such needs have been dismissed as atavistic prejudices, which must be swept away wherever they stand in the way of schemes for transnational government or an expanding global market. This stance is one reason why anti-liberal movements continue to advance. Liberalism and empiricism have parted company, and nothing has been learnt. Some of the strongest evidence against the liberal belief that we learn from our errors and follies comes from the behaviour of liberals themselves.
There'll be a lot more on Infernos when I get the Dante out, nice hard-backed book, because Dante deserves nothing less. But it is taking what remains a socialist argument on my part into some deeper, and some would say highly contentious, areas. I can only repeat what I have said many times before, those who believe in justice, equality, fairness, the unity of each and all, need God to support their claims, to inspire and obligate over the long term, the transcendent source and hope that creates and sustains the confidence that is essential to achieving any long-term project forged in the teeth of existing power.
By volume 3 of my new studies on Marx, I come to true religion as against the totalitarian dangers of the fake. That modern politics has been shaped by secular religions is abundantly clear in the cases of totalitarian regimes. Gray goes further and points to the fake religion of humanity advanced by liberal regimes - equally damaging and destructive:
While liberals have been ready to acknowledge that totalitarian movements have functioned as corrupt religions, they resist any claim that the same has been true in their own case. Yet an evangelical faith was manifestly part of the wars launched by the West in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. No doubt these wars served geopolitical strategies, however poorly thought out and badly executed, but underpinning them was an article of faith: that slowly, fitfully and with many relapses, humankind was evolving towards a worldwide society based on liberal values. Existing humans might vary greatly in their devotion to these values; some might be bitterly hostile to them. But this was only a result of having been repressed for so long. Sweep away the tyrants and their regimes, and a new humanity would emerge from the ruins.
The idea that the world is gradually moving towards a universal civilization based on old-fashioned liberal values is as fanciful as Comte’s notion that altruism emanates from a bump on the head.
Hyper-liberals will reject any idea that what they are promoting is an exorbitant version of the liberalism they incessantly attack. Yet the belief persists that a new society will appear once we have been stripped of our historic identities, and switched to a system in which all are deemed different and yet somehow the same. In this view, all identities are equal in being cultural constructions. In practice some identities are more equal than others. Those of practitioners of historic nationalities and religions, for example, are marked out for deconstruction, while those of ethnic and sexual minorities that have been or are being oppressed are valorized. How this distinction can be maintained is unclear. If human values are no more than social constructions, how can a society that is oppressive be distinguished from one that is not? Or do all societies repress an untrammelled human subject that has yet to see the light of day?
Praise be! I've been hammering away at this for years, causing bewilderment and consternation among my old friends and alliances on the left. If they were to get over their initial revulsion and actually see the point, they would see that I am actually strengthening the emancipatory commitment, because as presently stated, the progressive cause is merely politically contingent and has no firmer basis than transitory political fashion. What can be valorized in such manner can just as easily be devalorized. What decides the case? Not right and value, but power. That's a sophist world, where justice is the interest of the strongest. The good is more than conventional and values are more than social and political constructions.
The politics of identity is a postmodern twist on the liberal religion of humanity. The Supreme Being has become an unknown God – a species of human being nowhere encountered in history, which does not need to define itself through family or community, nationality or any religion. Parallels with the new humanity envisioned by the Bolsheviks are obvious. But it is the affinities with recent liberalism that are more pertinent. In the past, liberals have struggled to reconcile their commitment to liberty with a recognition that people need a sense of collective belonging as well. In other writings Mill balanced the individualism of On Liberty with an understanding that a common culture is necessary if freedom is to be secure, while Isaiah Berlin acknowledged that for most people being part of a community in which they can recognize themselves is an integral part of a worthwhile life. These insights were lost, or suppressed, in the liberalism that prevailed after the end of the Cold War.
I put the common life of human beings as social beings firmly back in place.
Liberals who are dismayed at the rise of the new intolerance have not noticed how much they have in common with those who are imposing it. Hyper-liberal “snowflakes”, who demand safe spaces where they cannot be troubled by disturbing facts and ideas, are what their elders have made them. Possessed by faith in an imaginary humanity, both seek to weaken or destroy the national and religious traditions that have supported freedom and toleration in the past. Insignificant in itself and often comically absurd, the current spate of campus frenzies may come to be remembered for the part it played in the undoing of what is still described as the liberal West.
You want it darker, asked Leonard Cohen. We kill the flame. Vilified, crucified, in the human frame. 'It's written in the scriptures, and it's not some idle claim.' There are some deeply troubling elements in the human condition. This was Leonard Cohen's final message to us: God I love you, but I don't love the world you created - I don't like the human beings you have made in your image. If you are the dealer, then I'm out of the game. If you're the healer, I'm broken and lame. And yet for all of that, Leonard Cohen continued to affirm life and God and light and hope. And that is extraordinary. Everywhere, there are broken vessels, but within those vessels is the divine light - that is the power of God's love to reach everywhere:
"I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair with a love so vast and so shattered it will reach you everywhere." Leonard Cohen - Heart with No Companion
And that, of course, is the Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes and sustains us, each and all. It is a Love beyond the human. It is unfailing and ceaseless. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks was the man who convinced me to see the limitations of philosophy and find my way back to religion and the profoundly humane truth of religious experience:
"You can solve a contradiction by sitting quietly in a room, thinking, using conceptual ingenuity, reframing. Philosophy, said Wittgenstein, leaves the world unchanged. But faith does not leave the world unchanged. You cannot solve a cry by thinking. Moses, weeping for his people, is not consoled by Leibniz's admittedly brilliant proof that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."
Sacks 2011: 241
That's the psychic core and truth of religion that rationalists miss. A cold reason detached from the emotions leaves people unmoved and the world unchanged. The God of Einstein and Spinoza, which unfolds in complete indifference to human beings, is half a God, a God of the easy and the uncontentious - you can only say 'yes' to physical things and their nature and causality. Human beings are the yes/no species. They are moral beings. The full God is the God of personal relationships, dialogue and interchange, the God of Love, the God you can say 'no' to, and the God that you have to make the moral effort to say 'yes' to. With such a God, natural facts become existentially meaningful. It's a messy world, full of error and bias and contention. Some yearn for cleanness and purity. It would be impossible to live in such a world, the air would be too refined to breath, the surface too icy to walk upon, the relations to others too cold, too indifferent. It's the grit under the feet that makes it possible to walk.
You want to talk about being co-creators in the ceaseless creative universe (Stuart Kauffman, Owen Flanagan et al)? Rabbi Sacks writes of 'The Great Partnership.' That was always the deal. Ditch omnipotence and omniscience and the false arguments and debates they involve us in. Leonard Cohen was a deep student of Zen. Here, Rabbi Sacks speaks beautifully of his Jewishness.
