The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (40 page)

The celebrity atheist Sam Harris says that “the moment you shift the conversation to God, and the moral structure of the universe as decreed by religion, then all of a sudden all bets are off. You pretend to know things you absolutely and obviously cannot know.”
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But there are things that you can believe without knowing: that good is greater than evil; that lives have value; that rights exist; that the faith that God is watching you is a better check on evil than some utilitarian credo. Beliefs such as these have pulled us from the bloody muck. The forces that have known everything—or everything they needed to know—with scientific certainty have in the course of a century racked up a greater death count than all of the bishops of Rome combined.

As a fairly secular Jew I cannot and will not speak to the theological questions, in part because I do not want to, but mostly because I do not have to. The core problem with those who glibly invoke one cliché after another about the evils of organized religion and Catholicism is that they betray the progressive tendency to look back on the last two thousand years and see the Catholic Church—and Christianity generally—as holding back humanity from progress, reason, and enlightenment. They fault the Church for not knowing what could not have been known yet and for being too slow to accept new discoveries that only seem obvious to us with the benefit of hindsight. It’s an odd attack from people who boast of their skepticism and yet condemn the Church for being rationally skeptical about scientific breakthroughs.

In short, they look at the tide of secularism and modernity as proof that the Church was an anchor. I put it to you that it was more of sail. Nearly everything we revere about modernity and progress—education, the rule of law, charity, decency, the notion of the universal rights of man, and reason were advanced by the Church for most of the last two thousand years.

Yes, compared to the ideal imagined by atheists and secularists this sounds like madness.

But isn’t the greater madness to make a real force for good the enemy because
the self-anointed forces of perfection claim to have some glorious blueprint for a flawless world sitting on a desk somewhere? It is a Whiggish and childish luxury to compare the past—or even the present—to a utopian standard. Of course there was corruption, cruelty, and hypocrisy within the Church—because the Church is a human institution. Its dark hypocrisies are the backdrop that allow us to see the luminance of the standard they have, on occasion, fallen short of. The Catholic Church was a spiritual beacon lighting the way forward compared to the world lit only by fire outside her doors.

Recall that the fall of Rome loomed large in everyone’s imaginations, remaining fresh in the collective memory even centuries after. It was a powerful reminder that things didn’t always get better with the passage of time. The conviction that Augustine’s wheel of history only moved in a forward direction had been shattered by the collective battle-axes of barbarian hordes (Roman roads were the only reliable ones in Europe a thousand years after the sacking of Rome).

Where the Church was strong, civilization was strengthened. Where the Church was weak or absent—at least prior to the Reformation—mankind was more likely to operate according to its more barbaric default settings. Europe wasn’t some land of enlightened, white-robed philosophers as depicted in Raphael’s
School of Athens
. It was filthy, dark, and cruel—just like the rest of the world. The Church survived not because it was conniving and mercenary but because good men who
believed
more than they
knew
did their best to light the darkness. Many failed. Many shined that light in the wrong direction or in the right direction too late. But for all of the Church’s failings—including, in all likelihood, transgressions against my own ancestors—the Church believed that it is better to light the candle than curse the darkness. And that is why it has a long tradition of existence, and so much more, to be proud of.

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SPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS

Y
OUR KARMA RAN OVER MY DOGMA
. You’ve no doubt seen the bumper sticker. The pun is easy to get, but the underlying point is more elusive. Most of the time, like so many bumper stickers, it’s little more than a smug declaration of superiority whose appeal derives more from the appearance of cleverness rather than the reality of insight.

I have asked any number of people what it’s supposed to mean. Beyond “I dunno, it’s funny,” the consensus goes something like this: In “Eastern” philosophy (which should mean Hinduism or Zen Buddhism but may well mean yogaism, or perhaps the state of enlightenment one attains after seeing
Kung Fu Panda
a half-dozen times while stoned) we believe in karma, while in Western theology you believe in something called “dogma.” Under karma we are rewarded for our good deeds and punished for our bad ones, in this life and our next lives as humans or grasshoppers or carpet mold. But the meat-eating adherents to imperialist Western theologies of Christianity and Judaism unthinkingly take orders from ancient texts or their invisible sky god. Eastern religion is flexible, open-minded, kind, and “spiritual.” It offers no dogmatic opposition to a three-way with your wife’s Pilates instructor. Western theology is cramped, constipated, and mean.

It’s a triumph of Hollywood marketing that this perception is so widely held. After all, it is hardly as if Christianity and Judaism are silent on the questions of how to live a good life that pleases God and perhaps turns on your karmic cruise control. According to actual experts, karma can for the most part be boiled down to “you reap what you sow,” or as Paul
tells the Galatians “whatsoever a man soweth, that he shall also reap” (Galatians 6:7). And Jesus says: “‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’: This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22: 37-40).

As for the Hebrews, it’s a similar tale. When Rabbi Hillel was famously asked to summarize the Torah (while standing on one leg, no less) he replied, “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary—[and now] go study.”

Meanwhile, one often gets the sense from listening to Western liberal Buddhists—particularly of the Hollywood variety—that no such investigation is required. The idea of karma is all you need to know. Be nice, and everything good will follow. The problem, as the Jesuits and rabbis will tell you, is that one’s conscience (i.e., the part of the mind that determines what is right and wrong) must be informed by reason. A child raised by Saddam Hussein will have a conscience, a sense of right and wrong, but we know it won’t track too well with the teachings of the Dalai Lama or the pope, that is, unless I missed their respective pronouncements on the desirability of human rape and animal mutilation and vice versa (if you doubt this, Google “Uday and Qusay Hussein”).

Karma is certainly a more benign philosophy than some others I can think of. One wouldn’t expect riots in response to a saucy cartoon of Buddha in a Danish newspaper. If a storefront preacher vowed to burn a copy of the
Buddhavacana
, it’s unlikely the State Department would have to issue warnings to Americans around the world about the potential for violent blowback (just as if you burned a copy of the
Watchtower
, the worst thing the Jehovah’s Witnesses might do is come to your house and bore you to death). I certainly wouldn’t fear wearing a yarmulke in the Buddhist sections of Paris.

But it’s worth noting that the very concept of karma is in fact a form of dogma. Sincere Buddhists believe it is true, doctrinally, literally, dogmatically true. And there is nothing wrong with that, because there is nothing wrong with dogma. The notion that karma liberates the individual from Western, closed-minded dogmatism is true insofar as its adherents have simply changed dogmas. If I converted from Judaism to Christianity,
I would be switching one dogma for another. If I then switched to Buddhism, I would be switching dogmas again. The fact that Buddhism, at least the Western fashionable variety, is more lenient and liberating is not evidence that it is not dogmatic; it is merely evidence that it demands a whole lot less work from its adherents.

Hillel’s answer has a nice echo to Buddhism in that it sounds awfully subjective. If you find something hateful, don’t do it to anybody else. The difference is that for the Jew that doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels. You must study
why
it is hateful and, just as important, you must investigate what is truly hateful and what is not. The phrase “the rest is commentary” sounds dismissive in English, but it was not meant that way. Hillel believed it was vital for you to study the Talmudic commentary, which takes a lot of time and effort, and is why so many “spiritual” people have taken to studying the “Kaballah” instead. I put Kaballah in quotes because the real Kaballah is a branch of Jewish mysticism that even the most learned rabbis aren’t supposed to even attempt to grapple with until they are at least forty years old. For Madonna it’s a fun waste of an afternoon. Or as the Jenna Maroney character on NBC’s
30 Rock
says, “It mixes the fun part of Judaism with magic.”

The same goes for much of what passes for Buddhism in the West. Obviously there are many sincere and informed Buddhists in America. And even many of the champions of the watered-down lifestyle Buddhism we associate with Hollywood and yoga fetishists with silly bumper stickers have made useful contributions on issues such as the oppression of Tibet.

But at a very basic level, the fascination with Buddhism and “Eastern philosophy” is really no more than an age-old desire to appeal to the authority of what we don’t understand to support what we already believe. It’s a lot like the folks who complain about how we do things in “this country,” as if they know how things are done in other countries. As the Dalai Lama himself has admitted more than once, he has become a global brand of mystical niceness. Or, as no less a theologian than Sharon Stone says, he’s “the hardest-working man in spirituality.” When he signed on to Apple’s “Think Differently” campaign the Dalai Lama explained, “I am what you want me to be. I am a screen saver for computers? People can use me as they want.”
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Indeed they will.

According to dogmatic Buddhism, abortion and homosexuality are bad (
abortion, he says, is “an act of killing”). But he doesn’t talk about that in the West, because it would hurt his brand. When he released his book in Great Britain, his editors successfully got him to water down his prolife beliefs and cut his references to homosexuality entirely. No less than
Salon
magazine described him as “Gandhi meets P.T. Barnum, minus the elephants.”
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Let’s leave the Dalai Lama alone for a minute, since he is basically a decent chap. Consider instead
Avatar
, the highest grossing film of all time. The film was a CGI exoskeleton of trite Hollywood tropes—
Dances with Wolves
,
Pocahontas
, et al.—covered in a digital 3D epidermis. Heroic noble savages are tied together by a spiritual Gaia-like life force and must fend off the evil, white, land rapists, with the aid of a white man who has been reborn as one of the natives. This was an old idea when I first saw
A Man Called Horse
thirty years ago. Indeed, the “genius” of the film wasn’t to offer a controversial narrative about environmental spiritualism. The genius was in finding a way to peddle precisely the sort of New Age propaganda Hollywood (and, for that matter, the public schools) have been peddling for nearly half a century now. What would have been truly controversial and subversive to the prevailing Hollywood ethos would have been to make the heroes born-again Christians or, even better, Hasidic Jews.

When conservatives panned the unoriginality of James Cameron’s script—tellingly, a script he had written twenty years earlier—defenders of the film went ballistic about the inability of conservatives to appreciate spirituality. This is a hard charge to take seriously from the same quarter that routinely mocks religious believers for being, well, believers.

I love having conversations with people who deride organized religion as so much superstition and magic, but who don’t have any problem with superstition and magic when it is
disorganized
.

There are vast numbers of people on the left who hold two positions simultaneously: 1) Organized religion is a sham and a source of evil in everyday life; and 2) There are rich mystical, spiritual, and supernatural forces at work in the universe working apart from traditional religions. A great many feminist theorists endorse a hodgepodge of faiths, from Wicca to Gaia theory. New Agers snort and guffaw at traditional religion while at the same time worshipping crystals and blathering on about how they were scullery maids in the fourteenth century.

This worldview infects popular culture in myriad ways. Consider one admittedly minor example. When Disney came out with
The Princess and the Frog
it was hailed as a progressive triumph because the protagonist was a black princess. I have no objection to that. But the actual plot of the film rests on the prevalence of voodoo in New Orleans. Dr. Facilier, the villain of the tale is, in the words of Rod Dreher, “a big, bad French Quarter voodoo daddy who tries to manipulate evil spirits to do his bidding.” As Dreher notes, New Orleans is saturated with Catholic mysticism, but rather than draw on that tradition, Disney felt it had to go another way: “a kooky Atchafalaya Oprah” of a white magic priestess. “My complaint is not religious,” Dreher writes, “but artistic. Disney’s politically correct aversion to Christianity hollows out the potential for spiritual grandeur that ought to have infused this lovely film,” opting instead to go the safer route of clichéd dreck. “It’s not so much anti-Christian prejudice as it is fear of real faith, and a failure of imagination. And when it comes to creating film fantasy, that’s an unforgivable sin.”
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