"What the rationalist myth sees in the modern age are the tremendous advances made in curing disease and in increasing agricultural yield, which neither believer nor atheist wants to do without. It views Zyklon-B and the hydrogen bomb as momentary setbacks, if it notices them at all, and it generally avoids comment about the contradictory and confused economic system our allegedly liberal-humanist age has produced. It’s a system...that pretends to be entirely logical but produces a cruel and irrational result: the poor made poorer and the rich much richer. And what are the greenhouse effect and the melting of the glaciers, if not artifacts of the Enlightenment? In fairness, neither Dawkins nor Hitchens has been silent about social and environmental questions, and neither they nor their liberal-humanist-atheist peers are directly to blame for the excesses of capitalism. But where they see an uplifting tale of a self-aware species ascending from the swamp of history into the Apollonian light of reason, throwing off the chains of superstition, Eagleton sees a tragic tale of overweening idealism, of men so blinded by their own arrogance that they’re eager to throw away lessons taught long ago, by Aeschylus and Spinoza and William Blake and, yes, by Jesus Christ."
Posted on: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 22:58:02 +0000
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