I used to like Marilynne Robinson, and much enjoyed the two books of hers I’ve read: Housekeeping and Gilead. The latter book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and Robinson’s also been awarded the National Humanities Medal. But she’s a theist, and her drinking the Kool-Aid of faith has not only produced a substantial degeneration of her prose, but has eroded my admiration of her books, something that really isn’t warranted. (Someone can be a religious jerk and still write good books!). According to Wikipedia, she’s pretty religious:
Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian and later became a Congregationalist, worshipping and sometimes preaching at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City. Her Congregationalism, and her interest in the ideas of John Calvin, have been important in her works, including Gilead, which centers on the life and theological concerns of a fictional Congregationalist minister. In an interview with the Church Times in 2012, Robinson said: “I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker.”
But her religiosity has led her into a crusade against “scientism”: the perjorative term for the view that science either neglects The Big Questions That Can Be Answered in Other Ways, or dehumanizes us through materialism and reductionism (Robinson apparently subscribes to both of these notions). I’ve mentioned her first anti-atheist book, Absence of Mind, in an earlier post; I’ve since read much of it and found it appallingly biased and ignorant.
Now she’s back again with another anti-science and anti-atheist rant, a book called The Givenness of Things, a series of 17 essays that comes out in three days. The Amazon summary is thin, but Kirkus Reviews, which likes the book (curiously, it also liked Faith versus Fact) gives a summary that I reproduce in part:
A sober, passionate defense of Christian faith.
In these 17 essays, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Robinson (Iowa Writers’ Workshop; Lila, 2014, etc.) returns to themes she considered most recently in her memoir, When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012): ethics, morality, reverence, and her own convictions as a Christian. “My Christology is high,” she writes, “in that I take Christ to be with God, and to be God. And I take it to be true that without him nothing was made that was made.” Much scientific thinking, she believes, draws conclusions from only a “radically partial model of reality” that excludes the marvelous and the improbable. She criticizes, for example, “the reductionist tendencies among neuroscientists” to propose a material model for the human mind; instead, she finds the soul “a valuable concept, a statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience.”
I haven’t read this book, and doubt I will, but if you are feeling composed and ready to wade through a thicket of dreadful prose and misguided argument, you can see a long summary of Robinson’s views in a extract just published at The Nation, “Humanism, science, and the radical expansion of the possible.” It’s a truly awful piece, and the writing is of extremely poor quality: wordy, tedious, and unworthy of someone who won a Pulitzer Prize. Frankly, given how execrable the piece is, I’m surprised that The Nation published it. It goes to show what you can get away with if you have a Pulitzer.
What’s worse is Robinson’s arguments that reductionism, science, neurobiology, and Darwinism are sucking the life out of humanity, and we need to grasp and hold onto the concept of the soul, which she really seems to see as some kind of non-materialist ghost in our machine. She also gets into some quantum woo à la Chopra, considering quantum entanglement and string theory as aspects of a scientistic “ideological reductionism.”
I needn’t rebut Robinson’s views, as readers can do that for themselves—if they have the stomach to read her piece—but I present two excerpts as an example of her antiscientific views. The first goes after neuroscience with an implicit attack on its reductionism:
The old humanists took the works of the human mind—literature, music, philosophy, art, and languages—as proof of what the mind is and might be. Out of this has come the great aura of brilliance and exceptionalism around our species that neuroscience would dispel. If Shakespeare had undergone an MRI, there is no reason to believe there would be any more evidence of extraordinary brilliance in him than there would be of a self or a soul. He left a formidable body of evidence that he was both brilliant and singular, but it has fallen under the rubric of Renaissance drama and is somehow not germane, perhaps because this places the mind so squarely at the center of the humanities. From the neuroscientific point of view, this only obscures the question. After all, where did our high sense of ourselves come from? From what we have done and what we do. And where is this awareness preserved and enhanced? In the arts and the humane disciplines. I am sure there are any number of neuroscientists who know and love Mozart better than I do, and who find his music uplifting. The inconsistency is for them to explain.
I’m not sure what “inconsistency” Robinson’s talking about. It may well be that science will never understand why someone can write like Shakespeare (while others can’t) or compose like Mozart, but surely the answer must involve neurons, evolution, and environment. After all, all of these things are known to be involved in performance and personality, while we have no evidence at all for any kid of “soul” that isn’t at bottom based on physical phenomena. As for why we find some music uplifting and some not, or some landscapes beautiful and some not, the answer surely must reside in part in our evolved brains. Songs in minor keys, for instance, make many people feel melancholy. We like ice cream for an evolutionary reason, and there’s no reason why that can’t hold in part for art.
Finally, it’s simply not true that neuroscience dispels human brilliance and exceptionalism. I know something about neuroscience, and I still love literature, music, and art. I suspect that Sam Harris, who knows far more than I do about neuroscience, also appreciates the humanities.
What Robinson raises here is the old canard that science devalues creativity. It does not; it enhances our appreciation of not only creativity, but of the universe as a whole. One might as well say that the humanities suck the life out of science because they don’t tell us anything about black holes or quantum entanglement. To each their own. But that is not to say that science can’t contribute something to understanding why great art moves us.
Finally, get a load of this indigestible and petulant word salad about evolution, another Robinsonian culprit supposedly eroding the humanities:
A type of Darwinism has a hand in this. If evolution means that the species have a common ancestry and have all variously adapted and changed, that is one thing. Ovid would not object. If it means that whatever development is judged to be in excess of the ability to establish and maintain homeostasis in given environments, to live and propagate, is less definitive of the creature than traits that are assumed to reflect unambiguous operations of natural selection, then this is an obvious solecism. It is as if there are tiers to existence or degrees of it, as if some things, though manifest, are less real than others and must be excluded from the narrative of origins in favor of traits that suit the teller’s preferences. So generosity is apparent and greed is real, the great poets and philosophers toiled in the hope of making themselves attractive to potential mates—as did pretty well every man who distinguished himself by any means or tried to, from Tamburlaine to Keats to anyone’s uncle. (Women have little place in these narratives—they are the drab hens who appraise the male plumage.) This positing of an essential and startlingly simple mechanism behind the world’s variety implies to some that these pretenses, these very indirect means to the few stark ends that underlie all human behaviors, ought to be put aside, if only for honesty’s sake. So, humanities, farewell. You do not survive Darwinian cost-benefit analysis.
First note how wordy and opaque this passage is. Second, try to figure out what it means. (It would be easier if she were a clearer writer.) What it seems to say is that we’re all victims of natural selection—sexual selection in particular—and that creativity is always an attempt to enhance reproduction. Well, that may be true sometimes, but I strongly doubt that it’s true always. Think, for instance, of all the gay artists and writers, or solitary creatures like Proust who write because they must. There is far more to the creative impulse than pure evolution, for once our brains got up to a certain size, they were capable of doing things, like playing chess or doing math, that could not have been of any selective advantage. Why do we do them? Do we play chess to gain mates? (Well, maybe checkmates. . . ). The world’s variety far transcends the ability of evolutionary biologists to explain it.
But I’m tiring of this, for Robinson’s piece is far longer than my patience. Have a look at it, and be amazed that someone who can write great novels can become a hectoring pettifog when it comes to science—probably largely because of her religion.
My last suggestion is this: if Robinson is going to whale on science because of its supposed inimical effects on the humanities, she might want to have a scientist look at her piece. I would recommend a neuroscientist, an evolutionary biologist, and (given her New Agey remarks on quantum entanglement) a physicist.
Groan
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Richard Feynman answered the first point years ago: “Science only adds.”
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At last: The beauty of a flower: “… which science, knowledge, only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”
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That’s outstanding. Thank you, AntAllan. I don’t know nearly enough about Mr. Feynman. In fact, I hadn’t heard of him at all until I started reading the posts on this site. I look forward to learning more about his life and accomplishments.
Well, I think that’s basically what we are looking at here. There is a fear among many such writers about the rapidity of change in their world. Science. It comes up with new and interesting evidence and analysis explaining many mysteries that have plagued man for centuries. There is a certain mentality that balks and starts at these changes. They long for a certain stable environment where the notions that were current during their formative years were still current. It’s basically nostalgia which swings ultimately into paranoia. Robinson seems to be ignoring alternative interpretations of the flow of culture as it appends a rapid influx of scientific discovery. She’s uncomfortable with the extra dimensions. She longs for the past.
I think it is likely her hankering for stability comes from her attempt to cling to faith. She’s reading Calvin(16th century) in the 21st century for Christ’s sake. What does she expect?
I watched a programme last night about the music of Beethoven, for me the greatest composer who ever lived. His compositions were analysed, and juxtaposed with his growing deafness. Unlike Mozart he was always changing the detail of his compositions, never satisfied until they were perfect, which many very nearly were.
To the listener they are exquisite and can take the mind to ‘the limits of spirituality’. If Ms Robinson were right then you’d expect that the music came to Beethoven in one easy, inspired, session. Yet, while he clearly was immensely inspired (especially by nature) he was also a meticulous worker. His music was very much man made.
I suppose that was the Leif Ove Andsnes programme I just watched, terrific stuff. And Beethoven, one of the most brilliantly creative people that ever lived is a very poor example of creativity as sexual selection
That was me, bric. Must pay attention
Yes indeed that was the programme.
I hope I don’t come up as anonymous again!
I have a nice American word for this dross: poppycock. On the contrary, our lives are vastly improved by the glory of existence, untrammelled by religion. the world would be richer without religion, not poorer. It’s sad for her that she cannot see that all the new knowledge coming to light almost daily is exciting and inspiring, and makes the world and our times the absolute best from an intellectual point of view.
And I have a nicer English word for it: bullshit.
Flapdoodle.
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I was going to offer: Bollocks
A load of all codswallop – it runs much nicer off the tongue.
A load of old codswallop – it slides much more easily off the tongue or out of your pen.
Her essays amount to a bolus of squills.
I’m curious if Ms. Robinson is familiar with Sam Harris’ “Waking Up” and what she would make of it.
Re: (Someone can be a religious jerk and still write good books!).
a much bigger religious jerk was a favorite novelist of Richard Dawkins, Evelyn Waugh, and I confess to having enjoyed Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”, but if I am going to read a novel by a religious author I prefer relative non jerks like Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, or C.S. Lewis.
For a really good atheistic ‘religious’ novel, try T. F. Powys’s ‘Mr Weston’s Good Wine’.
My favorite novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, was in his non-fiction a deeply narrow-minded and unpleasant individual. In fact, possibly a Russian Orthodox “Old Believer”, the equivalent of a new earth creationist neocon, in modern terms. Yet in his novels, described as “polyphonic” in the equality that they give to all the voices and ideas they convey through his characters (Ivan Karamazov’s arguments for atheism are as persuasive as anything by PCC, RD or any modern NA), he seems to set aside every one of the prejudices he propagates in his non-fiction writing. I have enjoyed Robinson’s novels. Perhaps, as Henry James said, we should ignore the public persona and trust the novelist.
“Crime and Punishment” seems quite biased towards faith, however.
It’s one interpretation, but more biased perhaps towards the power of “conscience”, similarly to Macbeth. In other words, rationalistic arguments about the objective value of other human beings, and how one might use their resources for better purposes, are overridden by our evolved (and/or inculcated/internalized) social objections to instrumentalizing other human beings. C&P does not, as far as I recall, explicitly use religious explanations for Raskolnikov’s inability to live with his crime, but – like Macbeth – implies that guilt will out.
It’s been probably 20 years since I read it, but I seem to recall that he’s reading the Bible at the end, or at least something that conveys involvement with religion. Perhaps I am mistaken.
Pretty certain from your review and samples that I would not be interested in slogging through the book. It is obvious that she is no different from most other religious heavy minds. The ability to properly understand or even comprehend such things as science, evolution or many other important things about the universe is so disrupted by religious belief that she can hardly speak. Religion can be quite the disability.
When fiction becomes one’s reality.
Yes. To me this is all a sort of neo-romanticism. A belief in fairies because gardens are so much less pretty without them.
Not fairies alone. If one uses a tripartite perception model — fact, fiction, fantasy — where empirical evidence is strong for the first and non-existent for the latter, there is very little we know with certainty.
We all have personal fairies. One of mine is that Dad loved me because he didn’t kill me when I was fifteen. 😉
Which is called “evidence”.
Indeed, much of which, most in my case, demands synthesis to form a point of view.
I’ve read some parts 2 to 3 times and I still don’t understand what Marilynne Robinson tries to say, even though I do see a vague association of ideas. I think you hit the nail on the head with your analysis, professor.
It seems to me that those like Ms Robinson attack science because their claim that there are other ways to knowledge is so weak.Xtianity is just one very good example. Two thousand years and what has Xtianity to show but a few bits of architecture and some music . It has not added to the sum of human knowledge but has often tried to stymy the search. Science has removed humans from the centre of the Universe and for many that is the unkindest cut of all
“If Shakespeare had undergone an MRI, there is no reason to believe there would be any more evidence of extraordinary brilliance ”
That’s because brilliance, in this context, is subjective and has the meaning “I like Shakespeare very much.” Personally, I find Shakespeare rather tedious.
If science were to attempt to measure Shakespeare’s brilliance, the only way this subject could be approached is by taking a poll, measuring how much the average person likes Shakespeare on a scale of 1-10.
Sounds to me like a rather elaborate version of the o so trite “You can’t see love under a microscope — checkmate, athiests!”
Ah – that useful word ‘subjective’ again. It allows one not to think.
And, the following is not directed at you, Scott, as I’m afraid the above was, but I think that some people at least are not noticing that in the last passage quoted Robinson is being, or thinks she’s being, ironical (unsurprisingly, since she writes so badly).
“Ah – that useful word ‘subjective’ again. It allows one not to think.”
No, it doesn’t, but it does allow one to reject a claim to knowledge.
It actually requires more thought to construct objectively true statements about literary works than it does sloppy subjective ones.
In that case, I think you should practice what you preach and not make sloppy remarks about judgement in the arts. Also, if you seriously suppose that simply taking a poll of average people is going to establish some sort of proper knowledge as to who is better than who in the arts, you are being extraordinarily naive.
In that case, you should practice what you preach and not make sloppy remarks about judgement in the arts, of the making of which I suspect you have no experience. Yes, it does require more thought to construct statements about the arts that are as true as they may be (see reason shark’s excellent comment below) than sloppily subjective ones, and you might try reading a few good critics to see how it is done. Your suggestion that polling average people is going to lead to objectively true aesthetic judgements in the arts is pitifully naive – although in that connexion you might look at the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist, who has used statistical methods to make some very interesting points about the arts.
Let’s not throw a hissy fit, OK? The nice thing about the arts is that pretty much everyone is qualified to make artistic judgments, since none are objectively true.
My remark about polling is not naive; if most people hate Shakespeare, then Shakespeare sucks. He was, after all, an entertainer. This can lead to objective statements such as “65% of people polled wish they had spent the evening watching Seinfeld reruns rather than attending ‘Macbeth'”. You might not find this conclusion interesting, but at least it’s objective.
And now the ‘hissy fit’ method of evading issues!
‘everyone is qualified to make artistic judgments’ – it is not snobbishness to say that this is a profoundly ignorant remark. Perhaps, instead of lazily relying on your own unconsidered feelings, you might like to provide us with an argument as to why Shakespeare is an uninteresting writer.
Shakespeare was an ‘entertainer’ – I suspect from this remark that you are American, since largely because of the influence of Hollywood, I suspect, it seems that the meme that the arts are nothing but ‘entertainment’ is entrenched in the minds of many Americans, and the idea that the arts might go beyond being entertainment seems very difficult for some people to understand. Yes, Shakespeare was an entertainer, but he was a great deal more than a mere entertainer, as were Milton, Bach, Beethoven, Calderon, Dante, Goethe… all of them, doubtless, artists who induce in you copious fits of yawning. Just as there are people who are incapable of following mathematical theorems, so there are people who are insensitive to the arts – which is fine, but if they are insensitive to the arts, they might refrain from issuing ignorant pronouncements.
‘This can lead to objective statements such as “65% of people polled wish they had spent the evening watching Seinfeld reruns rather than attending ‘Macbeth’”.’
Yes, you have the objective statement that 65% of the people polled(who were they?) preferred watching Seinfeld reruns to watching ‘Macbeth’. That is an objective statement about the people you happen to have polled and tells us nothing about the relative value as works of art of ‘Macbeth’ and Seinfeld reruns.
And I really recommend that you – and everybody – should read reasonshark’s second comment at 29, because it is extraordinarily illuminating and addresses in a profound way (better than I, alas, could do) the nature of the questions that arise when we think about the arts.
Since you’re into the arts, let me lecture you on the use of paragraphs. It makes your prose more readable, and their lack makes your thoughts look disorganized.
Also, your comments reek of hurt feelings. This again undermines the perceived thoughtfulness of your prose. Sometimes emotion can be used to good effect in writing, but other times it detracts from it, as it does in this case.
These are artistic considerations, of course, but they could in theory be verified empirically.
Your emotional response does, however, successfully convey to me that useful communication is at an end, so I will disengage.
It takes more than using paras correctly to avoid being boorish.
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Let’s try again, since the last one I sent hours ago hasn’t got through, it seems.
Ah, the ‘hissy fit’ ploy .
‘The nice thing about the arts is that pretty much everyone is qualified to make artistic judgements, since none are objectively true.’ Everyone is certainly entitled to express their preferences and prejudices, but everyone is certainly not qualified to make artistic judgements. ‘Subjective’ is not a synonym for ‘arbitrary’.
What follows from the ‘objective fact’ that 65% of people polled prefer watching Seinfeld reruns to watching ‘Macbeth’ is simply the fact that 65% of a group of people polled (whoever they were) said that they prefer watching Seinfeld reruns to watching ‘Macbeth’. It says nothing about the relative artistic merits of a Shakespeare play and a Seinfeld rerun. If you want to infer from that fact that Seinfeld reruns are great art and Shakespeare sucks, then you need to justify the inference and not assume it. You might as well say that because of the objective fact that a percentage above fifty percent of American people now think that torture is a splendid idea that, yes, it is an objective fact that torturing people is a splendid idea. What an extraordinarily simple place you seem to suppose the world to be.
The meme that all art is ‘entertainment’ seems, perhaps because of the influence of Hollywood, to be principally American. Yes, Shakespeare was an entertainer, but he was very much more than that, as were, for example, Sophocles, Dante, Milton, Bach, Beethoven, Verdi and many others, all of whom doubtless induce in you prodigious fits of yawning. Among other things, such artists make you think. Yes, I can enjoy, as much as the next person, some innocuous bit of TV entertainment, but I do not make the mistake of supposing that an innocuous but of TV entertainment constitutes good or great art. Stephen Pinker remarked somewhere that many scientists were philistines (though I suspect from your logical abilities that you are probably not a scientist), and it is surely a fair question to ask why one should pay attention to the opinions concerning the arts of people who clearly have no real feeling for the arts, whether they are scientists are not. Fortunately there are good scientists like Aniruddh Patel and Pierre Bourdieu who respect the arts and through their scientific work endeavour to extend our understanding of them, and who do not indulge in the kind of thoughtless complacency that characterises your comments.
And I really recommend that you – and everybody – should read reasonshark’s second comment at 29, because it is extraordinarily illuminating and addresses in a profound way (better than I, alas, could do) the nature of the questions that arise when we think about the arts.
In A Sense of Style, Steven Pinker does a remarkable job explaining why certain passages of various texts (some fiction, some non fiction) are well written.
I think this provides an example of how one goes about proving something is “good” in the Humainities.
Ok I swear I filled it in that time, but I said that. 😉
And made a typo. That wasn’t me, it was Satan.
Santa?
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I haven’t read ‘A Sense of Style’, but if Steven Pinker does do that, I am sure you are right. But there have been very many great critics over the centuries who have discussed works of literature and presented arguments as to why they think the works are good, and we didn’t have to wait for Pinker to bring good writing into the light. As to whether they have ‘proved’ that the works are good, or whether Pinker has ‘proved’ that the works are good, I refer you to reasonshark’s excellent second comment at 29. I think that all one can do is show why they may be considered as good. As the proverb has it, you can bring a horse, or Scott Draper, to water, but you can’t make it, or him, drink.
Well yes, but evidence is important. The point I’m making is you don’t just get to make stuff up. You need to prove through evidence why you think something is so.
Many believe anything goes in The Humanities. I’m not sure how they think languages are taught or rhetoric.
I selected Pinker because I find he presents evidence very well and he is a known author on this site.
Yes, of course evidence is important, and good critics have been adducing evidence in their arguments for many centuries. I certainly do not believe that anything goes in the humanities, and am not suggesting for a moment that it does. Nevertheless, it is foolish to suppose that you are going to get the kinds of certainty that you get in the natural sciences, for reasons that reasonshark makes very clear. As for the prejudice that anything goes in the humsnities, it is found generally among those who know nothing or very little about the humanities.
I think we are violently agreeing. I think though that it is important to be explicit in the points that I made as I have found the “anything goes” argument about The Humanities crops up regularly when a person like Marilynne Robinson writes what she writes. I have also found that a vast amount of people have no experience with The Humanities and my own experience, throughout my lifetime, is one being told just how stupid I am for having studied what I studied since anyone with “half a brain” could do so.
Crap, I forgot to fill in again. The anonymous comment that will pop up is from me.
Sorry, ‘foolish’ is too strong a word and is not directed as you. I think I should say that one needs to think more carefully about the supposition that you are (or one is!) going to get the kinds of certainty you get (one gets!) in the natural sciences….
Fortunately, I think I have a disability in that I rarely take things personally or get angry at word choice so no offence taken. 🙂
I did reply but as “anonymous” somewhere and I think we are violently agreeing. I am just explicit in pointing out what you mention because, in my experience, very few people do have experience in The Humanities and make a lot of inaccurate assumptions.
This is in response to Diane MacPherson. Yes, we are violently agreeing! And, yes, it has certainly been a great source of frustration to me that a vast amount of people have no experience of the humanities, or of practicing an art, and trot out time and again the most ridiculous cliches and thoughtless prejudices about the humanities and the arts.
Amen, brother!
Amen, sister!
“because they doesn’t [sic] tell”
Deletion of this proofreading comment is fine with me.
“If it means that whatever development is judged to be in excess of the ability to establish and maintain homeostasis in given environments, to live and propagate, is less definitive of the creature than traits that are assumed to reflect unambiguous operations of natural selection, then this is an obvious solecism.”
what the heck is this? Does this woman know what solecism means?
I think that’s an example of her misunderstanding of a specific scientific concept, and then trying trying to extrapolate her misunderstanding more broadly. I have no idea how she is trying to use the word solecism, though.
KIWI DAVE
I think she’s saying:
Characteristics of a species which are not nececessary for survival in a particular environment define the species’ nature as much as those characteristics which are necessary for survival.
And no, she doesn’t know what a solecism is.
I wander what her explanation of the itinerary of the recurrent laryngeal nerve would be.
In other words, “if someone misunderstands evolution and thinks it says what I think it says, then they’ve blundered. Therefore an evolutionary perspective is wrong.”
Confused on several levels.
I guess life isn’t worth living if you don’t have a screen between you and reality.
Take the sentence “Love is chemicals.” In between the word “is” and “chemicals” you can insert the word “just” as those who speak of “scientism” do. Or you can insert the words “wonderful” “Joyous” and “superfantastic” as most atheist/scientists do.
I’ve never understood how “reductionism” became a pejorative. If you ever go out to a fine restaurant and there’s something on your plate called a “reduction” it’s usually friggin delicious. I’ve had some reductions that give me a sense of awe. Long live reductions.
Do “oxidations” ever take place in restaurants? 😉 Would they be similar to “infusions”?
Robinson’s November 2006 review of Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” was another example of fine writing but deluded content. It’s behind a Harper’s paywall but (apparently) is reproduced verbatim here:
http://megdoesblogs.blogspot.com/2011/11/marilynne-robinsons-review-of-richard.html
For a detailed critique of her Dawkins review, visit here: http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/AORComment17.htm
I’ll offer this here, because it seems relevant:
Engineers, enablers and implementers of the built environment, including communications, transportation, civil structures, even war machines, (but not medicine as such, although they can cooperate), use the science-produced models to get things done, constrained by the social community (economics, politics). It is a type of creative art in that it proceeds from an inner vision (based on models based on a history of observations) to produce manifest physical representations of that for the benefit of humanity (again constrained by the social community).
In that specialized sense, engineering (and similarly, medicine) is a bridge from the abstract idealized science models of reality based on observation of the real world to the social community.
Engineering, at some level, should be included in the humanities, especially policy.
The author Robinson might disagree.
“He left a formidable body of evidence that he was both brilliant and singular”
Ah, yes, the “great men of history” perspective, only with a spiritual elitism instead of a racial one. Some souls are just inherently better than others. It’s not a happy chance confluence of genetic endowment, culture, luck and hard work.
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And she noticed that neuroscience threw out the concept of the soul, but sees this as rampant blind materialism, instead of being due to the fact that try as they might no one ever found the spot in the brain where the soul connects.
And she didn’t notice that as well as the soul, an huge load of other — entirely materialistic — concepts got thrown out as well…. because they didn’t work either.
To be fair, if one substitutes ‘human persons’ for ‘soul,’ the claim is true: some of us are better than others in all forms of doing, and a few are greatly better.
Yes, I didn’t mean to deny that, but if one attributes greatness to “the soul” aka “the divine”, then it sets up a really odd form of spiritual hierarchy that is very similar to the old traditional views about the great men of history and the great kings, etc.
Alas, only paid subscribers could comment on Robinson’s Nation piece. Here’s what I would have posted had it been open to all (any any who are subscribers there, feel free to copy the post if so inclined):
This piece falls into the same poetic but uninformative mysterian sideswipes at “Darwinism” (or “neo-Darwinism” this time) as the many iterations of this theme by David Berlinski or Denyse O’Leary in the nether crannies of the Intelligent Design movement. I imagine those who deemed planets to be gods and comets their omens not so many centuries ago (when religious mythologies had more clout to eradicate any trace of scientific reductionist thinking) were equally frustrated at those persistently exploring what turned out to be physical nature.
Ah, there but no farther, comes the cry. Quantum entanglement (even though as mechanistic and predictably reductionist as anything Laplace ever envisaged) is copacetic, but there must remain that “ghost in the machine”. Still, if there is some incorporeal soul responsible for our consciousness, how can we ever be unconscious? When our sensory brain shunts into sleep mode (that little death we go through multiple times every night), what exactly is this alleged spirit doing, twiddling its Platonic thumbs in the Cartesian Theater, waiting for the sensory stream to kick back on?
No, “we” aren’t on at all during sleep, a situation explicable if there is no magic spirit hiding like Tinkerbell off by the cornice.
The neuroscientists and other biologists who use their latest tools to investigate what is actually going on in our amazing evolved meat computer discover how our sense that a parent is our parent (and not a homunculus replacement) turns on feedback signals from our reptile-shard amygdala. Does dangling the prospect of a soul illuminate that realization in the slightest, or allow someone whose circuits there have glitched (as in stroke or other physical injury, dubbed Capgras’ syndrome) to be cured by that claim? Meanwhile, those reductionist scientists whose insights are to be spurned as afflicted by too much “neo-Darwinism” blunder on ahead anyway, curing the malady by taking advantage of functioning paths to the amygdala to prompt the rewiring of the mental circuits by natural means.
As someone whose area of research in college was the Antebellum/Civil War/Reconstruction era of American history, I also couldn’t help but cringe reading, “Where slavery and other forms of extreme exploitation of human labor have been general, moral convenience would account for much of it, no doubt.” The bearers of the lash in those days were just as convinced of incorporeal souls and Christian Biblical Truth, and untainted by any trace of “neo-Darwinian” reductionist convenience. Meanwhile, Darwin and Huxley and Wallace were among those (joined by many a liberal Christian who today would not be welcome theologically in the Kulturkampf halls of Tony Perkins) in opposing slavery.
So keep at it, you neuroscientists, and “neo-Darwinian” explorers of the latest Forbidden Zone. Those who value light more than shadow will keep the candles burning in the dark.
The Nation would have definitely benefited from your sardonic comment, which makes far more sense than anything in Robinson’s rant.
Carl Sandburg decried obscurantists. In this piece, Ms. Robinson is one. A favorite instructor of mine insisted that the best arguments are those written as clearly and as simply as possible. She would do well to follow that advice.
I do not understand how any novelist of ability cannot read the Bible and tell where the fixups have been inserted. It’s beyond me.
BTW, for the first time in a long while, the posting system has asked for my name and e-mail; usually it’s automatically inserted. Hmmm.
At least you’re being asked!
Perhaps I should have said, “those fields in the posting form are blank and needed to be filled in.”
In any case, I’ve since read PCC(R)’s post on weird things happening with commenting, so I imagine this will all clear up in a few days.
Ugh. More evidence that when it first appears that a person is speaking on behalf of the Humanities, they are really speaking on behalf of theologians.
She should team up with Orson Scott Card. I love his books but the guy is a complete and total douche. He too is highly religious and he has completely backward ideas about women.
Whatever, “Anonymous.” (If that is your real name) You sound like a Canadian squirrel-lover. Why should we take you seriously?
This “anonymous” sounds like the smartest and most attractive person in all of Canada.
heh heh heh
That was me again.
Ugh. More evidence that when it first appears that a person is speaking on behalf of the Humanities, they are really speaking on behalf of theologians.
She should team up with Orson Scott Card. I love his books but the guy is a complete and total douche. He too is highly religious and he has completely backward ideas about women.
I live in Iowa City and I’ve run into Marilynne Robinson a couple of times.
The first was at the Congregational Church, where she is a member according to the Wikipedia entry Jerry quoted, and where I was recording the “special music” at a service (a rather nice cantata by Buxtehude). What’s interesting about that is that this is a very liberal church – in Iowa City, it’s one of the congregations, along with the Unitarians and the Synagogue, where an atheist who still wants something to do on the weekend can sit in a pew and not roll her eyes too much. Our Congregationalists’ christology is definitely not “high” – if they even have one at all!
The other time I saw Robinson was at a lecture by a visiting professor of religious studies, whose thesis was that the Gospel of Mark was actually written as a comedic novel. He had some very persuasive arguments. Robinson asked some pointy questions in the Q&A, and did not look pleased. Heh.
You don’t remember the professor’s name do you?
I don’t, and I’d also like to know, because lately I’ve gotten very interested in the Christ-myth theory, and I wonder if this guy has written anything. So I’m going to contact the University’s Religious Studies department and find out if anybody remembers this lecture. Get in touch with me privately (through my website — my ‘nym is a link) and I’ll let you know what I find out!
If one reads Mark without the appended (and later) resurrection ending, it fits nicely into the form of an Aristotelian tragedy: Jesus has his greatness, his flaw (delusion of kingship and holy connection with god the father), his peripeteia, and the catharsis–that is, the audience’s emotional release that ‘there but for the grace of god go I,’ knowing as we do that Jesus did not have that grace.. . .
Ms. Robinson: please (x7), more compassion. Speaking of compassion, Buddhists have been doing fine with “no self” for as long as there has been Buddhism — not a new invention!
Another thing with these people (not necessarily Robinson, but I just wanted to say this anyway) is that they blab on about how the universe could be conscious, and matter must be conscious if it can construct a brain… and then start ridiculing Richard Dawkins for supposedly saying genes can be selfish. Well according to them, they could well be!
(Watching a talk between RD & P Gillette.)
Incidentally, in case someone hasn’t listened to the the interview with Jerry by John Shuck, it’s the best interview with Jerry that I’ve heard, I think. Shuck was very familiar with Jerry’s ideas, asked sensible questions and simply let him talk.
http://religionforlife.podomatic.com/entry/2015-10-11T11_00_00-07_00
I had made the same comment soon after this podomatic.com was available…but it’s a good reminder.
Except that Dawkins went further than saying that genes were selfish and asserted ‘we are born selfish’, a statement that I think he removed from later editions of ‘The Selfish Gene’ in consequence of Mary Midgley’s criticisms.
Well, obviously we are born selfish, so I suspect the reason he dropped that sentence was more likely to be the confusion about the two different uses of the word – one metaphorical, one literal.
I think we are born wanting to survive, which is rather different from being born innately and therefore nearly, had we not Reason, irrevocably selfish. In the context of ‘The Selfish Gene’, the statement that ‘we are born selfish’ came across as deriving from the suggestion that genes were selfish – i.e. that we are all of us innately selfish because our genes are selfish. Dawkins removed the sentence in which that phrase occurred, as I recall, to ‘avoid misunderstanding’ and in consequence of the much maligned Midgeley’s criticism.
I think we are using the language differently. Babies are selfish because they are incapable of being anything else and have enormous survival needs. I never saw the quote you say Dawkins removed, so I can only assume that he meant it like that.
What was the original quote exactly?
As I recall (I no longer have the book), it was something along these lines: because of our genes we are born selfish, but because of our reasoning abilities and because of scientific knowledge we can transcend our genetic inheritance and behave unselfishly.
That last ‘anonymous’ was me – Tim Harris.
The quote, as I recall, was rather Rousseauesque (‘Man was born free, but is everywhere in chains’), though in an opposite direction.
This is late, but I honestly think it is nonsense to say that babies are selfish. The qualities of selfishness and unselfishness are things we learn over time, and each depends on the other: if there were not such a thing as unselfish behaviour than we should not be able to distinguish selfish behaviour from it.
This is late, but I think it is nonsense to say that babies are selfish. The qualities of selfishness and unselfishness or generosity are qualities that we come to to recognise as we grow, and each depends on the other – we know what selfish behaviour is because we know what unselfish behaviour is, and vice versa.
Yes, I meant it in the same kind of way that Dawkins meant genes are selfish. Namely, in the kind of mathematical sense where, if you ascribe selfishness to one you will be able to accurately predict their behavior. I don’t mean the baby is sitting there thinking to heck with everyone wanting to sleep, I feel like yelling a bit.
To come back to your original argument that Dawkins said we are born selfish and removed it because of Midgley’s criticism,, I would still strongly contest that.
Midgley’s criticism was completely wrong. It looks to me like any subsequent alterations he may have made would have been to avoid using “selfish” in a non-metaphorical way.
Ans anyway, as you probably know, he was considering calling the book The Immortal Gene or The Cooperative Gene, but went with “Selfish” to distinguish his views from group selection. (And by “his” I mean the perspective on evolution he was advocating, and which has since been accepted as the standard model.)
A surprising number of academics think the book claimed that genes are inherently selfish and therefore so are we. They didn’t read as far as page one, where he explains the book is about how genes that “behave” “selfishly” (two metaphors) could produce a creature (us) that can act altruistically.
Page one. But was that the new preface, in which he talks in undisguised fury about a ‘person’ named Mary Midgeley who, he asserts, misunderstood him, or the original preface or chapter one?
But, anyway, here is Midgley herself once again:
‘It is rather striking that Richard Dawkins, when he treats of human motives in The Selfish Gene, bypasses these (Darwin’s) suggestions entirely and reverts to full-scale Hobbism. In this discussion – which is quite distinct from his account of “gene-selfishness” – he writes flatly that “we are born selfish” – we ourselves, not the genes. The word selfish clearly has its normal, negative sense here because he has just written that, if we wish
to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly… you can expect little help from biological nature. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then have a chance to upset their design, something which no other species has ever aspired to.”
It is surely rather surprising that we – creatures who are, as he has explained, merely lumbering robots, survival-machines entirely controlled by these super-beings – are, at this stage of our evolution, suddenly free to rise up with one bound and overpower them. Dawkins’s first explanation for this is still that of Hobbes – our extra intelligence, producing enlightened self-interest.
“We have at least the equipment to foster our long-term self-interest rather than our short-term self-interest. We can see the long-term benefits of participating in a ‘conspiracy of doves’.”
This seems to imply, rather strangely, that nobody has tried to enlighten self-interest up till now. Moreover, it suggests that intelligence is independent of genetic causes. But still more remarkable is Dawkins’s next proposal – one that would have shocked Hobbes profoundly. Dawkins writes,
“We can even discuss ways of cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism, something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world.… We have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
Hobbes would have pointed out pretty sharply that this is a metaphysical claim to a very strong form of free-will – a mental ability to resist physical causes. Moreover, he would have asked what could possibly be the motivation for trying to transform one’s own basic wishes so completely?
This manifesto, prominently placed at the beginning and end of Dawkins’s book, serves to reassure readers who are shaken by the extreme egoism, fatalism and determinism of the remainder. But it might perhaps have been better to avoid those extremes in the first place. The central weakness of Hobbism is its arbitrary, simplistic, sweeping psychology. And that is surely better dealt with by giving a more realistic, more biological account of human social motivation, as Darwin did in The Descent of Man.’
Page one. But was that the new preface, in which he talks in undisguised fury about a ‘person’ named Mary Midgeley who, he asserts, misunderstood him, or the original preface or chapter one?
But, anyway, here is Midgley herself once again:
‘It is rather striking that Richard Dawkins, when he treats of human motives in The Selfish Gene, bypasses these (Darwin’s) suggestions entirely and reverts to full-scale Hobbism. In this discussion – which is quite distinct from his account of “gene-selfishness” – he writes flatly that “we are born selfish” – we ourselves, not the genes. The word selfish clearly has its normal, negative sense here because he has just written that, if we wish
to build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly… you can expect little help from biological nature. “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then have a chance to upset their design, something which no other species has ever aspired to.”
It is surely rather surprising that we – creatures who are, as he has explained, merely lumbering robots, survival-machines entirely controlled by these super-beings – are, at this stage of our evolution, suddenly free to rise up with one bound and overpower them. Dawkins’s first explanation for this is still that of Hobbes – our extra intelligence, producing enlightened self-interest.
“We have at least the equipment to foster our long-term self-interest rather than our short-term self-interest. We can see the long-term benefits of participating in a ‘conspiracy of doves’.”
This seems to imply, rather strangely, that nobody has tried to enlighten self-interest up till now. Moreover, it suggests that intelligence is independent of genetic causes. But still more remarkable is Dawkins’s next proposal – one that would have shocked Hobbes profoundly. Dawkins writes,
“We can even discuss ways of cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism, something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world.… We have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”
Hobbes would have pointed out pretty sharply that this is a metaphysical claim to a very strong form of free-will – a mental ability to resist physical causes. Moreover, he would have asked what could possibly be the motivation for trying to transform one’s own basic wishes so completely?
This manifesto, prominently placed at the beginning and end of Dawkins’s book, serves to reassure readers who are shaken by the extreme egoism, fatalism and determinism of the remainder. But it might perhaps have been better to avoid those extremes in the first place. The central weakness of Hobbism is its arbitrary, simplistic, sweeping psychology. And that is surely better dealt with by giving a more realistic, more biological account of human social motivation, as Darwin did in The Descent of Man.’
I’m not really sure what your point is. Midgely misunderstood the book and misrepresents him:
“It is surely rather surprising that we – creatures who are, as he has explained, merely lumbering robots, survival-machines entirely controlled by these super-beings”
The book doesn’t say that at all. She didn’t understand the analogies, nor the nature of the argument Dawkins put forward, nor why his model so swiftly became the text book standard view of evolution.
I couldn’t finish the piece. Marilynne needs to read The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski.
Better yet, download and watch the TV series narrated by Dr. Bronowski. It can be downloaded from via BitTorrent.
I found this very poignant segment (with the rather crass title “Why Science PWNS God”).
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Thanks for sharing that wonderful Bronowski clip, Ant! I watched the whole series when it first came out (80s?) and have recently been watching an episode or two at a time on DVD from the library. His books are very good, too.
Oh, how I loved that series when it was first broadcast on public television. And in several revisits over the years I’ve always found ‘Ascent’ to be refreshing. I have heard that he did the series at least partly because of Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation,’ which B. found far too light on science. Taken together, the two are complements of an education that young folks would be lucky to get (they won’t, I’m afraid).
Most of the humanities make the social sciences look hard as diamonds. Of course spiritual types gravitate towards it. It’s easier to hide in mist and darkness.
If Shakespeare had undergone an MRI, there is no reason to believe there would be any more evidence of extraordinary brilliance in him than there would be of a self or a soul.
Translation: “We can’t practically see the events go on in real-time, so it’s acceptable to dismiss our scientific understanding of the brain and think what happened was nothing to do with science and was therefore spiritual or otherwise ‘more’.”
The old argument from ignorance. And here’s the motivation:
Out of this has come the great aura of brilliance and exceptionalism around our species that neuroscience would dispel.
Ha! Define “brilliance”. Define “exceptional”. Do it without assuming the conclusion you’re trying to prove with them. The words are so sloppy that you can smuggle any supernatural-sounding ideas under them. I can say that Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage” speech is an apt metaphor, the language slots into a rhythm, and that I find it brilliant and enjoyable, without once needing to invoke ghosts in my machine or anyone else’s.
Robinson hasn’t given a second’s thought to what to do about providing evidence for anything non-physical or spooky going on. She’s content to assume that it is the case, and therefore to assume that literature and other humanities subjects demonstrate the point automatically. If she wants to understand minds, she’s wasting her time.
Compare that with the mass of work done just to establish the atoms involved in the brain’s function and content, and it’s just embarrassing.
Not “most of the humanities”, theology departments and religious professors. Try not paint all the humanities as messed up because of dolts like this just as we don’t paint all the sciences as foolish because of the odd loud mouth creationist that happens to also be a scientist.
Not “most of the humanities”, theology departments and religious professors. Try not paint all the humanities as messed up because of dolts like this just as we don’t paint all the sciences as foolish because of the odd loud mouth creationist that happens to also be a scientist.
Try not paint all the humanities as messed up
It’s got nothing to do with being messed up, and everything to do with the extremely difficult nature of what’s being studied. There’s a huge amount of uncertainty involved in interpreting literature, art, music, etc., as evidenced by the simple fact that we have to interpret in the first place. These subjects are involved in studying the human mind, the most complicated object known to scientific inquiry, and one of the most changeable, chaotic, unpredictable, and imprecise. If we take Ben Goren’s and Jerry’s “science broadly construed”, this is the “broadly” they’re talking about.
The subjects are ridden with much uncertainty and many difficulties, not to mention they describe and discuss – directly or not – the most familiar human subjects and the most difficult scientific ones, subjects which also have the greatest ideological stakes. That combined the maximum of intellectual challenge with the maximum of “Oh I know that it’s like this” familiarity and confidence.
Of course they’re going to have an uncomfortable ratio of good ideas to bad ideas, at least relative to more robust scientific fields. You can use vagaries there that would be exposed instantly in an environment as rigorous as physics or biochemistry, simply because a human writing poetry is more complicated than an RNA molecule writing genetic code.
That’s why you get types like Robinson who revel in the combination of familiarity and ignorance.
Religious reasoning in particular seems to specialise in conflating ideas. Arguing for the existence of a god is conflated with arguing for the existence of a late-model version of the Judeo-Christian god; stating that Professor Dawkins is not a nice man is conflated with somehow dissing evolution. And so on…
Thank you for that, reasonshark. What you say is surely right on the mark.
I’m not sure you can use “vagaries”. Sure you can say what you want, but someone else is going to call you on it. I certainly didn’t get away with writing what ever I wanted without evidence and when I studied foreign language, It was immediately obvious if I was making stuff up.
This is a lovely essay in itself, Reasonshark. Thank you.
I would offer only two remarks. First, the humanities are indeed ‘messed up,’ stuck in the congealing mud of a half-century of relativism and ideological super-impositions on the study of literature and the other arts. Whether Marxist, social-constructionist, anti-colonialist, etc., such approaches have one thing in common: their objects of study have no identity without context (which is to say that that aren’t really objects at all). The effect of this is to ignore or even to deny aesthetics: Shakespeare and the phone book are equally under purview.
My second point is that even we humanists who take art objects as seriously having their own ontology have not been able to formulate a theory of aesthetics that reasonably accounts for differences in taste or, more fundamentally, how to distinguish among tastes on a hierarchical scale of aesthetic value.
“…the great aura of brilliance and exceptionalism around our species that neuroscience would dispel.”
It’s apparently not enough for her that humans find “literature, music, philosophy, art, and languages” useful and uplifting. The rest of the real and imaginary universe had better stand in awe as well.
I once picked up Gilead because President Obama liked it. I quickly put it down. Too goddy.
It would appear to be the bane of writers that attempting Sophisticated Theology is to relinquish any form of clarity.
Two things struck me as woefully erroneous.
Firstly, “The physicality enshrined by neuroscientists as the measure of all things is not objectivity, but instead a pure artefact of the scale at which, and the means by which, we and our devices perceive.”
Since we can now perceive things from the Planck scale to the span of the visible universe, I can’t see what the practical limitation of that is. The most recent images of the cosmic microwave background are the best possible; the resolution is limited only by the laws of physics, not by any limitations in the quality of our devices!
Secondly, “Science of the kind I criticise tends to assert that everything is explicable, that whatever has not been explained will be explained—and, furthermore, by its methods.”
That’s a total straw man. I think even the most scientistic would assert no more than that everything can be investigated; no-one seriously proposes that science can explain everything, even in principle. (Of course, this is quite different from the claim that there are no limits to what science might be able to explain.)
Feynman, again, implied that a hallmark of science is not being afraid of not knowing the answers. But wanting to know the answers is what drives science forward.
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That bit about measurement reminds me of that odious poem about the “learned astronomer”. She zealously thinks all scientific exploration is poisoned somehow.
Yes, that put me in mind of Whitman’s poem as well. Could you please fill in your name and email in future comments so your posts aren’t by “Anonymous”? There’s a WordPress glitch that has eliminated many readers’ ability to have those blanks filled in automatically.
Yes, it doesn’t remember my particulars like it usually does so I’ve been forgetting. I have been trying to identify the anonymous remarks that are actually me.
Stupid technology.
That was me.
The particularly frustrating thing about this terrible fear of reductionism is that it’s not only hyper-reductionistic and thus guilty of the very thing it complains about, but it’s also incredibly mundane. It demonstrates not hope and nobility, but a poverty of spirit and imagination.
“I think human beings have worth and dignity and are ultimately reducible to matter in motion.”
“NO– you’re wrong!”
“We have no souls and are capable of beautiful and soaring thoughts and ideals.”
“NO — that’s not possible!”
“The mind is what the brain does and our thoughts and feelings matter to us and can make a difference in our lives.”
“NO — stop that!”
“I find that understanding the material basis of reality allows me to appreciate the humanities even more.”
“NO — that’s because you’re stupid! Stop caring! You have no reason to!”
And so forth. Do those who insist on a magical supernatural foundation …. or else … not realize how poor and bankrupt they look to us?
+1
Yes, +1.
Let’s hope that the physicist who reads it isn’t John Polkinghorne as he would probably back her up. A Christian friend suggested that I read one of his books in order to ‘advance my thinking’. Nothing like a challenge so I did. It was rather sad – an intelligent mind defending silly ideas. But fact v fiction takes this apart better than I.
Recently I read 1984 to my nine-year-old, at her request, and came across a phrase I hadn’t noticed when reading it to myself; ‘crime stop’. This refers to the barely-conscious stopping of one’s own thoughts when they stray towards a potentially heretical line of thought. In most religious people, it seems to be a very strong reflex.
Marilynne Robinson has all but announced that she deserves no benefit form science.
If she gets pneumonia, let her thrive on the works of Austen and Shakespeare and see where that takes her.
Poetry, good wishes and bubblegum.
It reminds me of Robot Chicken when they did a Star Wars parody and “Doctor Ball” (the torture device reimagined as a physician) complains “what are you going to do, cure her with poetry” as a response to “she lost her will to live”.
The Platonic tripartite notion of the soul (psyche, consisting of appetite, spiritedness,reason) – or the maybe somewhat improved Aristotelian version – is based on an insightful analysis of human nature, and does not require any spooky, immaterial entity that survives death. Of course some Greeks, Romans, and especially Christians have concocted ways to add an immaterial soul to the Platonic or Aristotelian versions, but that is superfluous.
My appreciation of science doesn’t damage the pleasure I take in the humanities. I’m a strong atheist, even an anti-theist, but one of my favorite novels is John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Robinson is just whining.
This is just the usual failure to appreciate the breadth of reality and that a bunch of primates can actually understand how the Universe really works.
One can easily read and appreciate Robinson’s fiction while ignoring the goddiness of her characters.
“I think, if people actually read Calvin, rather than read Max Weber, he would be rebranded. He is a very respectable thinker.”
As illustrated by this text:
“I have had much conversation with many Jews: I have never seen either a drop of piety or a grain of truth or ingenuousness – nay, I have never found common sense in any Jew.”
Lets say Calvin did have his bad moments.
There was an interesting interview of Marilynne Robinson in the NYRB recently. The interviewer was President Obama who is an admirer of her books and he outright calls her a theologian.
http://www2.nybooks.com/articles/s3/2015/nov/05/president-obama-marilynne-robinson-conversation.html
I wonder what scientists, philosophers and critical thinkers he admires.
‘Hectoring Pettifog” is my new favorite adjective!
“Prevaricator” is also a good word.