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Note: Here's one of those "few scattered new diaries" I told you about.
It's Christmas time, and as befits the season, Ross Douthat has seen the enemy, and just can't wait to tell us. Forget Islam, that's soooo Bush/Cheney! Douthat is all revved up for a war on pantheism:
It's fitting that James Cameron's "Avatar" arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It's at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, "Avatar" is Cameron's long apologia for pantheism -- a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.
Pantheism! It's the perfect target! There are no pantheist churches, and while some might see this as a problem, what with there being no actual enemy and all, those people just don't know their American history. It didn't take any actual witches in Salem, nor were the Bavarian Illuminati any less disbanded in America circa 1800 than they were in France a few years earlier--not to mention that neither France nor America was Bavaria. And, of course, Joe McCarthy's famous list of communists he waved in Wheeling West Virginia at the start of his anti-communist crusade was a blank piece of paper.
You see, this has always been the right's little secret--when there is no enemy, when no one is the enemy, then everyone is equally liable to be suspect. If there were a pantheist church, then one could point to it and say, "There they are, the enemy!" And everyone who wasn't there, inside that church, could breath a sigh of relief. It's much more effective--for the right's purposes, at least, to have an invisible enemy. An enemy that's nowhere, and therefore could be anywhere. But above all, an enemy that can't fight back! What better enemy could the source of all chickenhawks want?
And so Douthat breathlessly continues:
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In Cameron's sci-fi universe, this communion is embodied by the blue-skinned, enviably slender Na'Vi, an alien race whose idyllic existence on the planet Pandora is threatened by rapacious human invaders. The Na'Vi are saved by the movie's hero, a turncoat Marine, but they're also saved by their faith in Eywa, the "All Mother," described variously as a network of energy and the sum total of every living thing.
If this narrative arc sounds familiar, that's because pantheism has been Hollywood's religion of choice for a generation now. It's the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It's the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like "The Lion King" and "Pocahontas." And it's the dogma of George Lucas's Jedi, whose mystical Force "surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together."
No matter, of course, that Hollywood has nary a pantheist fellowship or church. There are a lot more Jews than the right is comfortable with, to be sure. In the good old days, an earlier model Russ Douthat would just come right out and say "It's the Jews! Jews! Jews! JEWS!" No wonder the right always pines for the good old days! But aside from them, it's pretty much Christians of all different sorts, some rather strange, it must be admitted, a large side-dish of Scientologists, and a sprinkling of other major religions, as well some Wiccans whom Douthat might well confuse with pantheists. He's real big on confusion, as you might be starting to imagine.
It might make sense to argue that pantheism was Hollywood's religion of choice, if anyone in Hollywood actually were a pantheist. But calling it not just the "religion of choice" for Hollywood, but "the truth" of Dances with Wolves, "the metaphysic" of Disney cartoons, and "the dogma" of the Jedi warriors shows wanton carelessness right where a serious argument ought to be. The Force is not a dogma. It's something the Jedi feel. If Douthat doesn't know this, he is perhaps the only adult in America who does not, and maybe--just maybe--he shouldn't be writing about it. And if he doesn't know that dogma is the sort of thing that's on the opposite end of the spectrum from sensation, then maybe he shouldn't be writing about dogma, either. The most charitable interpretation was that Douthat was just trying to not repeat himself, so he reached for some handy synonyms, but missed. Some editor somewhere should know better. But if he's confused about synonyms for religion, he hasn't even really tried to define pantheism itself, much less deal with that fact that many different kinds of thinking--including science--involve a view of nature that's not just inter-connected, but also fundamentally bonded in unity.
Taking a step back for a moment, I think it's fitting that Douthat is fretting over something that he can't even properly define, but that has something to do with seeing sacredness in nature--something that orthodox Christianity itself proclaims (though the Gnostic heresy does not)--at the very same time that the reality-based community is rather worried about just the opposite--the potential destruction of much of the planet as a suitable habitat for humanity, due precisely to the failure to recognize the very interdependence of nature and humanity that the movies he notes above heighten into what he rather carelessly identifies as pantheism.
Or, to put it more simply: Douthat is worried about movies while the entire planet is imperiled as a home to humanity. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Douthat is doing one better--he's Nero's fiddle critic. And what bothers him about the movies is the fact that they remind us (or more likely, remind him) that what we do to the planet we do to ourselves.
You don't have to be a pantheist to see this. You have to be an idiot not to. And--unlike Douthat--most people are not idiots, as he himself is quick to remind us, however inadvertently:
Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the "religion and inspiration" section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the "spiritual energy" of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na'Vi.
Now, some of this I'd turn up my nose at too--if it were being peddled as science. But mythos and logos are two different things, as I've written about on more than one occasion. And if your mythos says "everything's connected" that part, at least, is a good thing. People whose mythos doesn't say that are generally bad news. A lot of them are outright psychopaths. Others, economists and Republicans.
Douthat, again:
As usual, Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming. The American belief in the essential unity of all mankind, Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, leads us to collapse distinctions at every level of creation. "Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator," he suggested, democratic man "seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole."
As usual, a conservative pundit hides his ignorance by quoting de Tocqueville. (de Tocqueville, it should be noted, was not a conservative. They just like to pretend he was. He wasn't a radical, either, but conservatives at the time hated democracy [many still do], whereas de Tocqueville was fascinated by it, seeing both benefits and perils.) Quoting de Tocqueville here is a way of avoiding what I've just underscored--that the "pantheism" that has Douthat's panties in a twist is all of piece with common sense. Indeed, the Disney cartoon "Circle of Life" is virtually ubiquitous in all human cultures, which is one of the reasons Disney adopted it in the era of global audiences. It's the exact opposite of the purely American phenomena that quoting de Tocqueville implies. What's more, so far as ordinary folks are concerned, it's pretty much identical with the Great Chain of Being--the traditional Christian cosmology that folks like Douthat are supposedly all in favor of.
Like I said, one seriously confused dude.
I could go on, but something (word count, perhaps?) tells me that I've pretty much reached optimal length for you, dear readers. Still, I can't help commenting on the next paragraph as well, before leaving you adrift to fend for yourselves with the rest of Douthat's drivel, should you choose to read his whole screed. Here is that paragraph:
Today there are other forces that expand pantheism's American appeal. We pine for what we've left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs -- a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of 'thou shalt nots,' and a piping-hot apocalypse.
Having quoted de Tocqueville to prove he's been educated, Douthat now aims to prove he's profound, proving instead he's profoundly stupid. So, "every successful religion" needs "a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of 'thou shalt nots,' and a piping-hot apocalypse"? Oh, really? What exactly is the Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist or Animist apocalypse? And where is their crusading spirit? OTOH, it's not just religions that have lists of dos and don'ts. So does Emily Post.
See. I can cite the classics, too!
p.s. Actually, I am a pantheist. That's how I know we have none of the nefarious power that Douthat imagines. If only!
"The fact that the world exists, that is the mystical." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein |
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