Richard Berger again. This is a guy who is always interesting to talk with. This quote is from a later interview: conversations.org/story.php?sid=351 RW: Does it make you uncomfortable—I mean I invoke the phrase religious sensibility—I’m sure you don’t want to be mistaken for someone who is simple-minded or misguided in believing in something… RB: I’m critical. You know? I mean I’m critical. My definition of ignorance is not about being short of certain information that I happen to have. It is about somebody who has the information and ignores it. RW: Ignores it. Yes. RB: I’m not uncomfortable with it. I just think religion is this collective accord that sort of transcends all of the possible executors of that accord. So like you have great ideas in the hands of small people and, of course, things are going to go awry. And it’s very tempting to say the ideas weren’t great after all. RW: Right. RB: But I think greatness in that case can just be described in terms of pervasive recurrence. I mean if you go anywhere in the world, and there’s a guy who is living in a hut made out of sticks there will be some little picture, or decorations on the sticks. There will be some way in which there’s a selective segregation of this world from another world. And there is the acknowledgment of the interface of the two. I think that’s also human nature. And when I hear people like Dawkins, I mean I’m sure he’s a very bright guy, I mean brilliant. He’s totally sincere. It’s kind of flip a button there. But the worst things done by humanity to one another have been executed by the people who are most convinced of their own rectitude. Like they’re really sure these guys are savages and that it makes perfect sense. RW: Right, right. RB: Surgeons in the Civil War were so sure that this idea of microbes and germs was a farce that they would clean their scalpel on their boot before they would operate on somebody. That just happens over and over, you know, that kind of myopic rectitude—and especially of the privileged. Including myself. I think, yeah, I’m so slick. It casts doubt on everything. You know? RW: Right. RB: So that’s in terms of religion. I think religion is the collective—beyond denomination and beyond localization. It’s the way vulnerable creatures attempted to make survival possible and less than a total chore. You know? It’s just sort of a natural thing. And the idea that, like that Lucy Lippard book The Dematerialization of the Art Object. RW: I’ve heard of it. I haven’t read it. RB: Oh, I mean it was a very influential book. And it is actually a great slice of the time, but the revelation that really comes away from that is this kind of certainty. She and Jack Burnham, too, were writing in those times with this great certainty that there was a kind of basically a philosophical and technological triumph of some finality over the realm of superstition and traditional metaphysical systems and that kind of stuff. RW: There’s a deeply ingrained habitual repetition of that tendency, isn’t there? I mean the sense that now we know for sure what it is. And there’s a certainty. It just happens over and over again. RB: Yeah, and nobody ever mediates their situation. - See more at: conversations.org/story.php?sid=351#sthash.ruj59oNt.dpuf
Posted on: Wed, 05 Feb 2014 21:13:30 +0000
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