5th Grade Modernists
I just read an article that may well have been written by a very intelligent and well-read fifth grader enamored with Descartes and his ilk.
The author (David J.A. Clines) seems to have misunderstood postmodern reminders that readings are situated, and has taken that to mean that all situated readings are wrong. Instead of saying that we should consider the situatedness of readings and evaluate them in light of their situation (e.g. my reading of a text will always be a reading by a white American male, who is a confessing Christian, who grew up in the midatlantic, etc), Clines seems to say that if we read anything in a situated way, then, as a 5th grader would tell us, well, we would say that. He doesn't outright condemn situated (read: all) readings, writing the article with the self-stated purpose of pointing out what biblical commentators are doing (in this case, commentators on the book of Amos). But his rhetoric is laden with snide asides and discrediting adjectives.
If you boil down what he's saying, and take out the value judgment from it, his point is: "People who have been commentating the book of Amos tend to be people who end up agreeing with the social and theological thrusts of the book. They also don't state this to the reader. It's possible to disagree with Amos on both points." Well, ok. Sure. People can and will disagree. But I'd like to point out, contrary to his rhetoric (and the explicit statements of others) that there's nothing at all wrong with reading a piece of scripture from the point of view of the believers themselves; if you restrict this, officially or implicitly, you wind up with an artificial gap between faith and reason, created by an attempt not to 'contaminate' reason with faith, which leaves the faithful incapacitated in the scholarly realm and arms the pundits of religion with a way to say that, in the (paraphrased) words of Mark Lilla, 'for religious people, at some point, thinking stops.' Well, that point may exist in some scholarly circles, but it seems to exist because of its being created by those who attack religion in the first place! It would be very helpful for scholars not to use postmodernism as a way of pointing out the situatedness of readings in order to discredit them and thus return to a rigid modernism which attempts to construct a rigid 'objectivity' (more on this in a sec), but instead to recognize the situatedness of every reading, and point us in the direction of accepting, and working within, our situations.
So, let me reuse Lilla's quotation: at some point, thinking stops for all situated people. At some point, people appeal to what they were raised with, or they appeal to what they believe is ethically right, etc. Nobody has fully thought out everything they think in light of all possible contradictions. This doesn't make them wrong. It's worth pointing out that those who espouse an 'objective' scholarship of the bible and such tend to not so much work within a system where the bible might or might not be accurate on its description of miraculous events (their scholarship instead focusing on what can be objectively gleaned), as that they work within a subjective and atheist frame, thus defeating their own aim at objectivity.
Anyway. I need to get back to work.
(N.B. The comment about Clines acting like a 5th grader is really only in response to his actual retort, on a small point, "The commentators think that the phrase 'like David' is an inauthentic addition to the text; but they would say that, wouldn't they, because otherwise it would be altogether too hard to say what was wrong with it." The problems with the return to a modernist view, enamored with false ideas of scholarly objectivity, stand, in my mind, even if I resort to calling Clines a 5th grader early on.)
The author (David J.A. Clines) seems to have misunderstood postmodern reminders that readings are situated, and has taken that to mean that all situated readings are wrong. Instead of saying that we should consider the situatedness of readings and evaluate them in light of their situation (e.g. my reading of a text will always be a reading by a white American male, who is a confessing Christian, who grew up in the midatlantic, etc), Clines seems to say that if we read anything in a situated way, then, as a 5th grader would tell us, well, we would say that. He doesn't outright condemn situated (read: all) readings, writing the article with the self-stated purpose of pointing out what biblical commentators are doing (in this case, commentators on the book of Amos). But his rhetoric is laden with snide asides and discrediting adjectives.
If you boil down what he's saying, and take out the value judgment from it, his point is: "People who have been commentating the book of Amos tend to be people who end up agreeing with the social and theological thrusts of the book. They also don't state this to the reader. It's possible to disagree with Amos on both points." Well, ok. Sure. People can and will disagree. But I'd like to point out, contrary to his rhetoric (and the explicit statements of others) that there's nothing at all wrong with reading a piece of scripture from the point of view of the believers themselves; if you restrict this, officially or implicitly, you wind up with an artificial gap between faith and reason, created by an attempt not to 'contaminate' reason with faith, which leaves the faithful incapacitated in the scholarly realm and arms the pundits of religion with a way to say that, in the (paraphrased) words of Mark Lilla, 'for religious people, at some point, thinking stops.' Well, that point may exist in some scholarly circles, but it seems to exist because of its being created by those who attack religion in the first place! It would be very helpful for scholars not to use postmodernism as a way of pointing out the situatedness of readings in order to discredit them and thus return to a rigid modernism which attempts to construct a rigid 'objectivity' (more on this in a sec), but instead to recognize the situatedness of every reading, and point us in the direction of accepting, and working within, our situations.
So, let me reuse Lilla's quotation: at some point, thinking stops for all situated people. At some point, people appeal to what they were raised with, or they appeal to what they believe is ethically right, etc. Nobody has fully thought out everything they think in light of all possible contradictions. This doesn't make them wrong. It's worth pointing out that those who espouse an 'objective' scholarship of the bible and such tend to not so much work within a system where the bible might or might not be accurate on its description of miraculous events (their scholarship instead focusing on what can be objectively gleaned), as that they work within a subjective and atheist frame, thus defeating their own aim at objectivity.
Anyway. I need to get back to work.
(N.B. The comment about Clines acting like a 5th grader is really only in response to his actual retort, on a small point, "The commentators think that the phrase 'like David' is an inauthentic addition to the text; but they would say that, wouldn't they, because otherwise it would be altogether too hard to say what was wrong with it." The problems with the return to a modernist view, enamored with false ideas of scholarly objectivity, stand, in my mind, even if I resort to calling Clines a 5th grader early on.)
posted by Anonymous at 13:03
7 Comments:
Ryan, I have the perfect solution!
We don't have to think out all the possible consequences of our thoughts, feelings, and axioms, the cosmologies we live in tacitly. We can just write up everything in terms of 2nd order logic, or even better, a lambda calculus. Then once couched in symbolic form, all ethical deductions and textual interpretation could be automated on a Turing Machine, or some large but finite approximation of one. Then we could get all the benefits of complete rationalism without the work! That is, once we are done writing up everything it, and the program finishes running. Of course, we all know from Quine the translating our beliefs into such a calculus is a straightforward task. We just need to isolate all the propositional meanings of everything, all the individual semantic markers and attach the appropriate value judgements and propositional attitudinative fuctionals.
Further, those who do not use my specific axiomatation and rules of inference are clearly objectively wrong.
Yeah, the attitudinative functionals are key. Without those, chaos.
What???
Oh, you know. The attitudinative functionals! They make function the attitudes.
I'll confess to not having any idea what duff just said and to a more than slight suspicion that he didn't actually say anything at all.
From that "situatedness", it's long been obvious to me that one's perception is always colored by one's personal experience and that bias is inherent, which is the point you make here. Bias does not necessarily invalidate one's views, but pointing it out does assist in the larger issue of understanding context.
As to your point, "At some point, people appeal to what they were raised with, or they appeal to what they believe is ethically right, etc." The point at which people appeal to their up-bringing is when they have no prior personal experience which directly contradicts it. If the summation of one's experience is one's childhood or up-bringing, then that will be the summation of their "situatedness" in all things. This could be termed a "childish" view of a matter, except that, as you point out, anybody who lacks direct first-hand experience with a matter would fall into that category -- a qualification I reject. There is a second-level of bias, directly above the childish view, which is the academic view. This goes beyond the childish view in as much as it seeks to move beyond simply taking another's word on the matter and seeks dissenting views, but still lacks the direct first-hand experience. As an example, one may childishly support or oppose the Iraq War simply because mommy or daddy support or oppose it, or one may support or oppose it based on research one has done on the matter. The third level of situatedness, however, would be one who forms his or her opinion based on having experienced the war first-hand, whether as a U.S. soldier or as an Iraqi. Most people in the U.S. do not have the benefit of that context, however, and must therefore settle for one of the prior two contexts.
However, the academic view relies on those with personal experience to share those experiences to be studied. This goes to the problem with studying religious texts in an "academic" sense: since no one exists who has direct first-hand experience in dealing with deities (and those who claim to are shown due skepticism), there is no way for an academic view on religion to be formed in any meaningful sense. Thus the return to the "childish" view, i.e., appealing to one's up-bringing.
What Duff said is that, given an essentially infinitely powerful machine, you could deterministically answer any theological question from the perspective of whoever's beliefs had been recorded in that machine.
Perhaps this would obsolete religious debate.
BUT ONLY IF WE KNOW THAT THE PROGRAM DOES INDEED STOP! Which we don't know. So yes, Duff's comment was full of sound (lots of it) and fury (not quite as much) and signified pretty much nothing.
Also Duff, you don't need the Turing machine tacked on the end. Church's calculus is functionally equivalent to Turing's machine. I'm sure you can find the proof somewhere online (I'd like to look it up myself sometime).
In terms of the actual post:
"But his rhetoric is laden with snide asides and discrediting adjectives."
This sounds like the exact problem I had with "The Screwtape Letters." I ended up liking the book, but had a rough time getting through the first half where Lewis describes his character's conversion, while trying to discredit everything that was not Christian. That being said, I don't think I can call Lewis a small writer because of that.
As important as it is to realize that all readers are situated, can't we say the same thing about authors? I think this gets into what carbondate was saying in his(?) comment. Also I think it links back to Mia's thread about tolerance on her blog (which I only read this morning, and is still bright in my mind).
Alex--
I agree: I don't think anyone who would claim that readers are all situated would try to claim that authors are not--I'm not sure how that could be maintained.
CarbonDate--
I agree with you, as well, regarding one's situatedness not invalidating but helping to explain context and where someone's coming from--if anything, understanding someone's situatedness gives their reading/writing/ideas more meaning, not less.
As for the rest of your response, it might be worth pointing out that the discussion I entered into here had to do with modern ways of reading the bible, not with modern ways of thinking about religion or religious experiences. (Id also point out that religious experiences can be very easily counted as first-hand experience with deities, but we are here not talking about the anthropology of religion but ways, within faith-based and academic contexts, both, of understanding the text of the bible.) And the academic context can, in fact, study religious texts academically--I refer you to Reading the Old Testament by John Barton as an example of many academic methods for making sense of biblical texts--ranging from an attempt to uncover what the text would have meant to the bible's original audience to the many ways of making sense of the biblical text now, whether rhetorically, literarily, or in dialogue with other texts, etc. And the object of this academic study is the text itself, not the experience that comes from it. Inasmuch as the experience or understanding is the object of study, it's part of the larger academic peer review process, which the author of the article I respond to was becoming a part of. And not all experiences are necessarily academic in nature, to be submitted to this process, and should be worked with by different methods in communities of faith.
As for the childishness in his article, it was directed only at statements like, "you would say that", as though this is a discrediting argument. It's not.
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