David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, is one of the less noxious conservatives on their staff (think of Ross Douthat, for instance). Although he was in favor of our invasion of Iraq, and supported John McCain, he’s also not nearly as anti-Obama as are other right-wing columnists. I still think, however, that the Times could produce a better stable of conservative columnists—unless good ones simply aren’t out there.
Brooks’s column on Thursday,”The body and the spirit,” looks as if were phoned it; an idea he had—a bad one—that he expanded into the Procrustean bed of his column. His topic is why Americans are so revolted at the beheading of others, including the two journalists recently beheaded on video by ISIS. His answer is because the human body is imbued with spirituality—he calls it “sacred”—and beheading degrades that sacredness. But what he’s doing is simply trying to inject religion (in the guise of “spirituality”) into a phenomenon that has other explanations. It’s not irrevelvant, I think, that Brooks is a believer: a Jew.
A few excerpts:
But the revulsion aroused by beheading is mostly a moral revulsion. A beheading feels like a defilement. It’s not just an injury or a crime. It is an indignity. A beheading is more like rape, castration or cannibalism. It is a defacement of something sacred that should be inviolable.
But what is this sacred thing that is being violated?
Well, the human body is sacred. Most of us understand, even if we don’t think about it, or have a vocabulary to talk about it these days, that the human body is not just a piece of meat or a bunch of neurons and cells. The human body has a different moral status than a cow’s body or a piece of broccoli.
We’re repulsed by a beheading because the body has a spiritual essence. The human head and body don’t just live and pass along genes. They paint, make ethical judgments, savor the beauty of a sunset and experience the transcendent. The body is material but surpasses the material. It’s spiritualized matter.
It’s not clear what Brooks means by “spiritual”, but clearly the word “sacred” has religious connotations, as if we had a soul. In fact, he directly appeals to humans’ metaphysical dualism as a reason for this beheading.
Most of us, religious or secular, have some instinctive sense that there is a ghost infused in the machine. And because the human body is a transcendent temple it is worthy of respect. It is offensive to treat it the way you would treat an inanimate object. Even after a person is dead, the body still carries the residue of this presence and deserves dignified handling.
Where does he get the idea that nonbelievrs think there is a ghost infused in the machine? Has he done a survey? Does he not realize that we secular folks are just as revolted as religious people at seeing this, even though we have no truck with souls or God or sacredness. Perhaps that should tell Brooks that there is an explanation for our revulsion that is more general—one that doesn’t involve the numinous.
My alternative explanation is that beheading is a particularly gruesome and brutal way of killing someone, it is not instantaneous, and there’s a lot of suffering and blood. We have an instinctive revulsion for that kind of killing, perhaps from our evolutionary history. (I do note, though, that in medieval times people loved gruesome public torture and execution, so perhaps some of that revulsion is, as Steven Pinker maintains, a cultural change in morality.) If the state murders someone, we now prefer it to be quick, clean and bloodless. And Americans are much more willing to accept killing if it involves remote drones rather than a bullet in the head by a sniper. We want to remove ourselves from the gruesomeness of death, but beheading puts us right there with the sawing knives, spurting blood, and gurgling as the victim tries to scream. Further, the severing of the head—the body’s command module and repository of personality and memory—is particularly upsetting because we know that only a few moments before that head was thinking and feeling.
But perhaps Brooks sees the “ghost” only as the memory of humans who once were alive, whose loss we mourn. We secularists treat the dead with respect not, I think, because we see them as having been sacred, but because there were humans: fellow species with which we could once communicate, or whom we liked or love. And now they are gone and all we can do to show our affection or affirm our common humanity is treat their remains with respect.
Brooks goes on to accuse the zealots of having no respect for the sacredness of the body because “physical reality is not important”:
Our revulsion makes us different from the religious zealots who are prone to commit or celebrate acts like beheadings. The zealots often hew to a fringe of their faith that holds that the spirit and the body are at war with each other. They have a tendency to extreme asceticism, to seek to deny themselves pleasures of the living world, to celebrate the next world at the expense of this world, to oscillate between masochistic self-flagellation, when they think they have been sensual, and bouts of arrogant spiritual pride, when they convince themselves they have risen above the senses. It doesn’t matter to them what they do to their enemy’s body, because this physical reality is not important.
Well, maybe he’s partly right here; I think that Islamic martyrs or jihadis might value their earthly existence less than other people, simply because they are so sure that they’ll get Virgins in Paradise. But I’m dubious about Brooks’s take beyond that. There are many Christian sects that do indeed see the body at war with the spirit (Catholicism is one, for instance, as it repeatedly tells people that their corporeal desires are sinful, and so is fundamentalist Protestantism that decries all the pleasures of the flesh). Further, Christian Scientists see the physical world as an illusion. But none of these sects come close to the kind of brutality of fundamentalists Islam instantiated in ISIS. My view is that they degrade the body of their enemies not because his physical reality is not important, but because they know it will have a particularly horrible effect on their enemies, perhaps terrorizing them into submission and, in the case of the beheaded journalists, forcing America to make concessions. (That doesn’t work.)
In the end—and I’m spending too much time on a column I consider trivial—Brooks goes off the rails completely, taking it upon himself to tell us what “true” religions really are. And, in passing, he admits, without sensing the irony, that ISIS is “spiritual”:
If ISIS is to be stopped, there will probably have to be some sort of political and military coalition. But, ultimately, the Islamists are a spiritual movement that will have to be surmounted by a superior version of Islam.
The truest version of each Abrahamic faith revels in the genuine goodness of creation. These are faiths that love the material world, especially the body. They’re faiths that understand that the high and the low yearn for each other, and that every human body has some piece of the eternal, even if you’re fighting against him.
I love these people who think that they know what the “truest version” of faith is. In reality, I’d say the truest version of, say, Judaism would be the most brutal and misogynistic version, one adhering strictly to the strictures of the Old Testament. Indeed, Christians also take the Old Testament as scripture, too. Have you read Deuteronomy lately? And why is liberal Christianity, which embraces the material world, “truer” than fundamentalist forms of Christianity that abjure dancing, drink, premarital sex, and even coffee? Those “lows” don’t yearn for the highs. As for “every human body having some piece of the eternal,” I have no idea what Brooks means here, unless he thinks we have souls or afterlives. Perhaps he’s speaking metaphorically, but if so is he’s also speaking obscurely.
No, there are no “truer” versions of faith than others. There are versions that are “truer” to their scripture than others, but that’s not how Brooks is construing “truth.” If adherence to scripture were the criterion, the truest versions of Islam and Christianity would be the most brutal. What he means by the “truest” faith is “the faith that I, David Brooks, find most congenial.”
In the end, faith is faith, all of it is based on revelation and wish-thinking, and it’s all a delusion. Are some delusions truer than others? I doubt it.
