there's no way i can catch up now. so i'll probably be waiting for the next go-round. which is sure to happen sooner or later. :) Jeffrey Fisher
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You didn't miss much. The best thing to come out was the essay by Terry Eagleton that Chris Maisano posted:
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/culture-barbarism-0. I
It's worth reading completely independent of the thread and goes far beyond the silliness. My only critique of Eagleton is the use of the word culture. I prefer the word identity. The current noxious disease called Christianity is essentially an identity movement. in its US manifestation.
>From my perspective what has happened in the US with Christianity via
some fundamentalist urge is something similar to what happened between
Judaism and Zionism during Weimar and the concept of a Jewish identity.
This became the central theme in Leo Strauss's early work. In Strauss's
view in this early work, the rationalism, or Neo-Kantian project of
Herman Cohen and Julius Guttmann destroyed the essential Jewish spirit
of Judaism. He didn't keep with that position, but modified it to trace
back a more authentic rationalism he found that was more compatible with
what I think of as a old world patriarchy and hierarchical or
authoritarian political system of power. I am no sure he saw it quite
that way, but that is what it amounted to. The neoconservative view of,
liberal democracy, is the practical result.
Eagleton writes about Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain and its themes of western civilization and the culture, or cult of German identity in the novel's characters Settembrini and Naphta. Hans Castorp is caught in this struggle between what Eagleton calls civilization and culture, which is also a struggle between what Mann saw as a Latin based Enlightenment and a Germanic authenticity of spirit.
It's a very good essay. But it doesn't go far enough. The US right has managed to convince plenty of people that they can not be Americans unless they are also Christians...and maybe Jews, depending...on how long the right rules Israel. So this Christian business is tied up with some imagined construct of an American identity. The litmus test of this authenticity is the belief in God, but it is also accompanied by a long list of right wing talking points, or a political agenda.
The linkage to Weimar, Mann, and Strauss is the psychological and sociological chaos brought on by various socio-economic crisis of capitalism. The retreat to a fabricated mass identity whether German in the 1920s, or `American' in our current era, I think is motivated by the perception of a complete loss of a cultural identity of any sort. The irony is that capitalism's production of a neoliberal mass consumer society was the primary means of this cultural destruction. And so the fabricated antidote has become some mass concept of Christianity under an authoritarian or neoconservative political state. The security of identity is bought by fevered belief in blood and soil.
CG