Navigating Past Nihilism, Or Shipwrecked?

Earlier this month the following article was published in the New York Time's Opinionator: "Navigating Past Nihlism."
What was surprising to me wasn't that such illogic should be found in the NYT opinion page, but the fact that the author of the piece, Sean D. Kelly, is the chair of the Harvard philosophy department(!).

Dr. Kelly proposes to chart a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of "nihilism and fanaticism." Nihilism is the extreme of a materialistic atheism (the position of the author) and 'fanaticism' is the extreme of those who hold religious convictions (though it would appear fanaticism is the only option open to those who sincerely hold to any traditional belief in God).

He begins with the thesis that "God is dead." He attempts something of an argument to support this, but it fails miserably. Ultimately his case degenerates into a vicious circle, turning on the confusion arising over the ambiguity of the term, "God is dead."

Socially speaking, it is true that "the social role that the Judeo-Christian God plays in our culture is radically different from the one he has traditionally played in prior epochs of the West." In this sense, God is dead. However, this is obviously distinct from the ontological question of God's existence. And to conflate the two, as the author plainly does, is a clear instance of the fallacy of equivocation.

To put it another way, modern society's apparent rejection of "the sacred" does not demonstrate that any one religious worldview - and the Christian worldview in particular - is false. To dismiss as "self-deceit" an operative religious perspective within our secular world, without engaging the truthfulness of the relevant beliefs, is obviously not an argument. It is merely an assertion.

Hence when he writes,

"For today’s religious believers feel strong social pressure to admit that someone who doesn’t share their religious belief might nevertheless be living a life worthy of their admiration. That is not to say that every religious believer accepts this constraint. But to the extent that they do not, then society now rightly(!) condemns them as dangerous religious fanatics rather than sanctioning them as scions of the Church or mosque,"

Kelly assumes that (radical) multiculturalism is not only the dominant zeitgeist and ideology of our present society, but that, philosophically speaking, it is the correct position. Interestingly, we might note here, in order to protect and establish his conception of multiculturalism, he encourages the exclusion and marginalization of those who continue to actually take seriously their religious traditions in their contemporary context. So much for multicultralism! (Slovej Zizek has provocatively argued that ideological multiculturalism is simply a postmodern form of xenophobia). At any rate, he assumes that God is indeed dead, and then concludes as a matter of course that continued belief in God as the organizing center of all life must be "self-deceit."

Hence his argument is as follows:

(1) "On this account there really is no agreement in the culture about what constitutes a well-lived life; God is dead in this particular sense."

Granted.

(2) "But many people carry on in God’s shadow nevertheless; they take the life at which they are aiming to be one that is justifiable universally."

Granted. However, the lack of agreement in society on the matter is irrelevent to whether or not a particular religious worldview is "justifiable universally." It might simply be the case with God that, to (mis)quote Mark Twain, "rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated."

(3) "In this case the happiness that Brooks identifies in the suburbs [constituted, in part, by traditional religious belief] is not genuine happiness but self-deceit."

Obviously, this is a non sequitur conclusion (for reasons noted above). It is akin to arguing that the earliest civil rights advocates were self-deceived simply because they lived in a racist society.

In making his arguments against such "fanatics," Dr. Kelly appears cognizant of the implication of a universally valid system of valuation (contra his radical multiculturalism or, as he labels it, "polytheism"), and so ends his paragraph:

"...there are nevertheless many different lives of worth, and there is no single principle or source or meaning in virtue of which one properly admires them all."

First of all, the truth of this statement is questionable (and it continues to beg the question of multiculturalism). Now of course it is true that any one particular 'theism' cannot admire all lives equally as "lives of worth." After all, there's a reason why there's thunder in heaven (and tumults upon the earth): the gods generally don't get along terribly well. But this does not mean no one perspective can "properly admire" many different "lives of worth" - "properly" and "worth" being the operative terms. Secondly, the polytheistic "possibility" presented is admittedly not capable of providing a coherent basis for evaluating "lives of worth," or determining what is "properly" admired. It entails, rather, all sorts of commitments that are mutually incommensurate, without any attempt to integrate or reconcile them. The new possibility posited then is not an actual point of view, but rather a collection of irreconciliable points of view, merely tolerating their differences (for now) - lest we come into "tension with the demand in the culture to recognize that those who don’t share your religious commitments might nevertheless be living admirable lives." And apparently, coming into such tension with our culture is very bad.

So we are presented with an incoherent collocation of various worldviews as itself the solution, held loosely together by a liberal (and, we might add, arbitrary) ethic of tolerance. Kelly earlier states that diverse, incommensurate commitments can nevertheless yield lives "deserving" of admiration. But of course the critical question is, by what measure is it determined that admiration is deserved? On what basis can he even distinguish between what is deserved and what is not? Isn't the very formulation of "deserved" and "properly admired...lives of worth" fundamentally self-defeating for his 'solution'? Dr. Kelly offers us no justification for this language, other than apparently what the culture presently dictates. This is obviously a recipe for titanic disaster.


I find the Christian justification for a multicultural tolerance far more coherent and substantive. Not only is an ethical basis given for evaulation of ourselves and others, but we also find biblical and theological rationale to admire virtue in the lives of those who do not share our religious beliefs (e.g., the 'righteous pagans' of Jonah's narrative). Moreover, the spiritual nature of the Church, both in terms of its constituency and mission (in contradistinction to the ethno-theocratic form of Islam or ancient Israel), demands a true tolerance of other beliefs and practices in the public domain (even while openly preaching against such, and, within the community of faith, having at certain points a 'zero tolerance' policy - see 1Co.5:9-12), and arguably, constitutes the historic ground for our modern inclination toward tolerance and principled pluralism.

Nevertheless, that there is good in all cultures and religious traditions to be admired and commended does not thereby imply that the gospel-command to repent, to change our lives, no longer applies. Despite whatever good is there, there are always also elements present that are not admirable - and not only in the lives of the non-Christian, but of the Christian first and foremost (again, see the book of Jonah). The same gospel demands that both "repent!" and find their identity, meaning, and joy in the One God who has died in Christ, and rose again for the redemption and formation of the multi-ethnic, multicultural people of God.