Not our best-written headline ever, but honestly. This is like when morons give the IDF security advice. Slate’s Michael Weiss just posted some condescending, hackneyed, psychoanalytic finger wagging at Jews who repent too much. We tried to avoid theology posts that don’t involve the Pope’s obvious intellectual superiority to almost everyone who condescendingly tries to explain tolerance and Islam to him, but this Weiss piece is a perfect example of how stupid leftist pseudo-sophistication gets dropped in pathetic attempts to mock people who are just not close enough to Williamsburg to know that taking things seriously is unhip:
3,500 years of complicated theological disputation on religious rituals – culminating at one point in Pascal’s famous pseudo-behaviorist “kneel and you will believe” – gets written off because Barnes and Noble says you have to really feel things. Note the “age of telecommunications” macro that gets impulsively inserted whenever a journalist needs to generate interest by pretending that something is unprecedented, but doesn’t have a good reason why. What do new media technologies have to do with genuine contrition? Who knows. But they’re new!
This passage is incoherent on its own – checking the pilot light to prevent an explosion is a supremely rational motive, albeit one that utilizes an unproductive risk calculus. But it’s also a shallow and asinine interpretation of Freud, who concludes in that essay that “an obsessive neurosis presents a travesty, half-comic and half tragic, of a private religion.” The likenesses are all on the surface – the point of the essay is that what’s going on between the two is different.
But it gets better: this shallow reading of Freud is particularly stupid in light of the first breathless lead about telecommunications, and that’s not even the dumbest part of the essay.
The similarity that Freud does identify is that neurotic behavior and religious rituals both work not because they make sense but because just doing them is its own justification. Just performing the ritual has its own effects on the person, regardless of whether it’s “true” or not. That’s why reform Jews are wrong to smirkingly limit Rosh Hashana to one day because “now we know the exact day of the full moon” – the tradition is that Rosh Hashana should last two days, and the tradition persists regardless of whether the original justification is still tenable.
So first of all, Weiss gets Freud exactly backwards. A neurotic’s urge to check the pilot light over and over again has nothing to do with the fear of an explosion (this isn’t surprising, of course, since checking the pilot light is rational and… well…) What causes the neurotic to check the pilot light is a repressed urge that has been displaced and now causes that behavior – that empty behavior – to repeat over and over again.
But even better – if Freud’s definition of ritual is that it is a compulsive ritual, then it makes Weiss’s original breathless link to telecommunications extra stupid. Why are there so many contradictions? Because airs of sophistication are no so dangerous as when one has no idea what one is talking about. Finally:
We award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. Literally.
The irony is that – but for Weiss’s reality-based-community-sophistication tick – the article has some marginal, value. We agree with a good chunk of it, albeit mostly with the banal, uncontroversial parts (wouldn’t it be nice if people were nicer to one another?)
If only we could get the center-left to make arguments instead of trying to sound smart, there might be the possibility of real political dialogue in this country. But on the other hand, then where would we be?
References:
* AP Gives Israel Security Advice, Says Self-Defense is Bad [MR]
* Spray-Fire Atonement [Slate]
Previously:
* Juan Cole Is Enamored With Rank Populist, Borderline Anti-Semite Ron Paul. Of Course He Is.
* The Denial of the Obvious By Reference to the Irrelevant: Center-Left Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics
* Liberal Cause Celebre Collides With Science: Hysterical Claims Of "Biopiracy" Get Renowned Scientist, TIME "Hero For The Planet" 16 Years In Prison
