Eurozine Review
Pirates, puritans and tragic humanists
New Humanist talks to Terry Eagleton about reason, faith and revolution; Le Monde
diplomatique (Berlin) lambasts bastard Keynesianism; Esprit sails the pirate infested
waters of the Internet; Arche articulates a Belarusian multiculturalism; NZ searches
in vain for the seat of Russian identity; Blätter says the fight over MON 810 is about
more than a few acres of corn; dérive shows the dual function of one−way streets;
Ord&Bild maps the crisis of the "Volvo nation"; and Host finds French eroticism
crueler than Czech.
New Humanist 4/2009
There has always been a Catholic undercurrent in the
thought of Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, but now it
has erupted in an attack on "the new atheists". In the London
Review of Books, Eagleton branded Richard Dawkins as
"theologically illiterate": "What one wonders are Dawkin's
views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas
and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity,
Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?"
Talking to Laurie Taylor about his new book Reason, Faith and Revolution,
Eagleton argues that the new atheists "don't understand that Christianity is not
about how many months you get in purgatory for adultery. It's about a love and
a thirst for justice that will bring you to your death. There's nothing lovely
about it." Indeed, Eagleton turns his Christian socialism against what he sees as
Dawkins' liberal Hegelianism:
Dawkins deeply believes in the flourishing of the free human
spirit, which makes him a liberal humanist rather than a tragic
humanist. He believes that if only those terrible guys out there
would stop stifling and shackling us, then our creative
capacities would flourish. I don't believe that. As a Marxist I
reject that simple liberationism. I'm not against humanism. I'm
for a humanism which recognizes the price of liberation. And
that's what I call tragic humanism.
Moral clarity: The language of morality has been hijacked by the religious
Right, argues